Art Historian, Debra Brehmer gives great insights to the works of Jason Rohlf for the on-line arts magazine, Susceptible to Images. 9/06
You don't need to spend much time with Jason Rohlf's paintings to know you've encountered something of substance. The beauty of his well-worked surfaces, the interplay of form and the refinement of technique have steadily evolved since he relocated to Brooklyn from Milwaukee a number of years ago.
Rohlf's painterly vocabulary is geometic: riffs on the circle, square, and line fall into textural patterns that develop cadence as he layers and layers the images. He renders texture by collaging some of the lines and circles onto the canvases, but then paints and glazes everything to unify the surfaces. You could say that Rohlf works within the formalist vein of Wassily Kandinsky, who shared an interest in the musical rhythms of color and abstraction.
If all of this sounds just a bit formulaic and cold, what Rohlf brings to the conversation that adds a dash of passion is his color sensibility. Each painting in this large series is anchored by a dominant color, usually established in a background plane. The paintings then grow compositionally from this base. To use a musical analogy, Rohlf applies the background color like a bass guitar, to provide that barely discernible but essential "beat" which the rest of the band moves in and out of. In Whisper, the color is a mawkish black, from which scarred lines and circles emerge. He uses the brightest contrasting cream tone for the thematic thought "bubble" (whisper) in the composition, which dominates the surface. While his range is broad, from pea greens to stark reds, all of his colors fall in the worn, weathered, earthy realm, tempered by what looks like layers of yellowed varnish. Rohlf wants his paintings to appear aged and substantive, to provide the feeling of a long history and weathered countenance. This play between warm, tactile surface character and formal precision helps make the compositions feel alive.
Rohlf also likes to weave in and out of abstraction and explore how form and subject emerge from the non-representational. Just where is the juncture where one reads a form as a subject rather than a shape? Many of the paintings in this series include a simple bird silhouette. With the most minimal line possible, Rohlf makes body and beak and places these shapes within the geometry of his compositions. Sometimes, as in Stranded, a series of five connected panels (10 x 40"), the birds
dominate and the paintings and become very representational. Other times, the birds are simply another motif of pattern within the circles and lines. I prefer Rohlf's more abstract paintings. The birds, to me, feel like an easy resolution to the paintings and when the viewer reads "bird," there isn't as much room to wander intellectually. In his abstract works, we can first revel in the color, texture and skillfully controlled rhythms, and then we can let our own personal references and associations meander into the exchange. We are much more susceptible to Rohlf's gestures and richly worked surfaces when he doesn't impose a representational subject. I also prefer his small-scale works to the larger ones. Perhaps because the paintings suggest history, (bits of old architectural surfaces, wooden splinters), they "read" more directly on an intimate scale and seem to hold more secrets. When they become gallery-sized, they take on a hint of high-art commercialism: They are so adeptly rendered and finely composed that one can't help but imagine them above the secretarial station at the "firm."
Nevertheless, these are the kind of paintings that generate great viewing pleasure. They give and we receive. I like how Rohlf's paintings remind us of the timeworn values of craft and skill -- they seem to emanate the countless hours of labor, looking, thinking, risk and erasure that go into making a piece of art. These are paintings that could not be executed quickly, yet never look labored either. Perhaps they will not jolt us toward revelation, but these paintings will leave us with some kind of reassurance that Kandinsky's dream of how color and form play on the human psyche is still worthy of exploration.
- Debra Brehmer (Debra Brehmer is co-publisher of Susceptible to Images).
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