2024-07-31 17:37:36
Rebecca Kautz’s solo exhibition of paintings at Madison’s Art Lit Lab combines a unique exploration of personal themes buried in a distinct provincialism that appears to be driven by Composed of pictorial expressions – a dissolvable concrete poetry. It is noteworthy how her improvised figures, freed from the imitation fatigue that still persists in the halcyon days of “bad painting”, play catch-up with reproductions in the vast galleries of the “laboratory”.
“Night Train Wakes Up” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24” X 20”
Kautz’s “Night Train Awakening” is a mosaic that has no obvious relationship to its title except for the icy blue nocturne revealed through the half-curtained window. The image depicts an art studio where many natural deaths are rendered on canvas and easels to render the scale. Robin’s egg-blue suit lolled on a hard-backed chair, its wingtips floating in front of a Persian-style rug of pink roses. Two humorous oversized clay sculptures sit atop a bile-colored chest of drawers, which hold stuffed animals, potted plants and other thrift store memorabilia. The artist’s oversized signature acknowledges the foreground corners of polysemous confusion.
“Light as Characteristic” is a more focused image, again at night, but in a softly infatuated dream state. The sleeping artist floats high above the rolling lavender sky above the edge of a small Midwestern town. The only buildings are a pink log cabin and a red brick public building, both of which appear to be made of gingerbread. Just below the horizon is a farm with rows of heather and a sloping cemetery with weathered stuffed toy tombstones. Underscoring everything is an indecipherable rebus – stovepipe, crocodile, tree stump. Filling every possible space with detail is a craft metaphor unique to quilting, but it’s not that far removed from an emphasis on pattern that ensures modern flatness and pattern consistency.
“Light as Feature” 2023-24, acrylic on canvas, 16″ X 20″
Kautz’s low-tech kitsch replaced at least two generations of New Naive artists and decades of pure folk artists popular in the Great Lakes region. Undergraduate study at an art school might explain some of the early steady taste for the late Phyllis Kinder, an artist whose solitude and self-effacement established striking regional and national thematic distinctions. Having been born in Chicago but raised in a small town in northern Illinois, not far from the artist’s home, I can identify with the ill-defined culture of the silo-dotted Burlington Rail Transit economy that woven itself into the consciousness of these pictures. I’ve always been interested in understanding how local representations tasked the national fine arts vocabulary, and how local traditions ironically co-opted coastal studio practices. Kautz took both and incorporated them into performances and installations that are also on display in Madison.
Detail of “Project Shame: People’s Peepholes,” ongoing public performance artefact and painting installation, mixed media on wooden panels, school chairs, high-visibility vests, iron lettering, oilcloth, brackets, wooden dowels, dimensions variable, 2019-2021 /2024
Increasingly, contemporary figurative art feels more relevant to the field of neurology than psychology. The majestic knives of the artist’s uncanny ruralism carry realities of loss and uncertainty within her depictions of place. While it’s tempting to peruse Kautz’s dreamlike imagery of pulsing through crowded spaces, it’s more satisfying to weigh the relationship between surrealist imagery and the neurotransitive ethos that’s been present in American rural art since mid-century grammatical overlap.
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