Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham

English born artist Rackstraw Downes’ meticulous, fussy paintings are, to repurpose a criticism once leveled at Turner, pictures of nothing. Elongated compositions of Manhattan blight and Texas emptiness allows a stubborn plein-air perceptual painting practice to flower through an otherwise off putting pictorial subject matter. Downes fourth solo exhibition at the Betty Cuningham gallery continues his dynamic if off kilter approach to representational painting. Known for long, perspectivally complex paintings of otherwise unlovely plots of land, parking garages, viaducts, air ducts, desert scrub, construction sites and highways, Downes paintings evinces a confidence in their manic ability to revivify the outside world millimeter by painted millimeter. Painting in New York from April through October and in central-Texas from November through April, Downes divides his landscape subject matter between the interiority of New York and the exterior environs of the Texas plains. Downes’ pallette discovers analogies in both locations, reforming mainly in what is being depicted. The drab cement brown of the underside of an uptown New York City highway becomes a bleached beige Texas mesa while the verdant mid-Atlantic pine depicted by Downes is a parched, hardier shrub in Texas. Despite the whizzing cars on the West Side highway, the occasional jogger or bicyclist depicted in the New York paintings or the corrugated fences in the Texas images, each picture in this exhibition searches for a moment of stillness, the moment when all traces of the human presence vanishes. Downes process, hours spent minutely detailing the industrial remnants of our civilization, becomes long distance visualisations of the world without us. Given that Downes paints each painting on site, over many hours and days, the nature of his subject matter would drift towards the monumental and unmoveable. Downes paintings, however, despite the grandeur of vista and mass of buildings, project a vulnerability, a sense of loss, a morning to what has been projected onto the landscape, and what the landscape is slowly reclaiming. Nowhere is this balance better articulated than Downes’ “Remains at the Site of the Old Military Cemetery, Fort D.A. Russell, No. 1″ from 2009. Nearly unfinished towards the bottom, the painting commemorates the burial of our veterans, a place of political and emotional resonance in military heavy Texas. In no other painting is there such a freedom of paint handling that borders on the nearly casual. Approaching the clumsiness of Albert York, Downes painting is hushed in execution and in spirit and details a landscape that eventually reclaims us all.

Rackstraw Downes, “Remains at the Site of the Old Military Cemetery, Fort D.A. Russell, No. 1″ (2009). Oil on canvas, 14 1/2 x 36 7/8 inches


 

Rackstraw Downes, “Outdoor Dance Floor, Presidio, TX, from the Bandstand Looking South” (2009). Oil on canvas, 21 1/8 x 63 1/8 inches

Rackstraw Downes, ”Under an Off-Ramp from the George Washington Bridge” (2011). Oil on canvas, 26 x 56 inches

Rackstraw Downes, “Traffic Under the George Washington Bridge” (2010). Oil on canvas, 21 1/8 x 63 3/8 inches.


 

Rackstraw Downes, “Sand Hills with Cell Tower, Presidio, TX, P.M.”(2010). Oil on canvas, 20 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches.