Comix Semiotix – Robert Reitzfeld’s “Landskapes”
James Kalm
To paraphrase Marshall
McLuhan in “Understanding Media,” mankind, because of electronic media,
like TV and radio, is on the verge of reverting to a preliterate condition. As
the transfer of information takes place in a more and more passive state, people
are losing their ability to glean meaning from the older medium of print, or
literature. Brain functions actually change, and one type of idiomatic fluency
is displaced by another. The recent series of paintings by Robert Reitzfeld present
a challenge to the viewer’s literacy in the semiotics, syntax, and semantics
of comics.
Reitzfeld’s
“Landskape” paintings express his designated intent, albeit in a poetic,
supremely structured, almost Haiku like sense. The paintings derive their relevance
and elegance from their visual brevity. The pictures are of barren “Landskapes”
with no figures present. Several of the paintings picture trees, or more properly,
stumps of trees that have had their tops loped off. What’s left is a squat,
earth hugging, stub, with just enough foliage left to suggest, that just maybe,
there could be a sprout of life hidden inside. This is no doubt a reference to
the proximity of the artist’s studio to ground zero, and his witnessing
the attacks of 911, and the aftermath at close range. In “Untitled”
(Olive Tree Landskape Winter) the foliage of the tree looks like a piece of olive
loaf cut with a chainsaw. The bottom limbs of the tree are elongated across the
horizon as if the painter was trying to stretch them into a smile. Puffy, fluffy
snowflakes tumble down across a cobalt blue sky, some are surrounded by black
outlines that have more mass then the white flakes they delineate. “Untitled”(Desert
Landskape) is a long horizontal with a couple of orange stumps on the left that
look like the baggy knees of an elephant. There’s a squib of green cloud
over a red moon, and a pair of twin buttes that look suspiciously like purple
breasts.
Many of the forms
the artist depicts have an anthropomorphic quality to them. The hills look like
body parts, or pieces of cake that slouch in a kind of casual exhaustion. Trees
seem to flinch in anticipation of some unexpected trauma. The entire countryside
seems sentient and alert, prepared to respond to some action, or the appearance
of a figural presence. The paint handling is intentionally deadpan, a finish
that many young painters now days achieve through the use of silk screen, laser
printing, or masked stencils, but Reitzfeld’s facility allows him to accomplish
it with a brush. The colors are bold and crisp and show a refined sensibility
to the nuanced use of tints and shades that wouldn’t be out of place in
the design world of commercial graphics. The artist stated that “I’m
not schooled in color theory, but I feel fearless when it comes to color.”
The use of a black outline that slithers and juts, thickens and fades has a mitigating
effect on the colors it separates. The madcap comic zaniness that is readily
apparent in these paintings, ironically, carries a heartfelt message of renewal
and healing, and is only made explicit by the artist’s knowledge and fluency
in a very formal vernacular of visual means.
