| Derek Root’s most recent paintings respond to the found abstractions in images he selects from media reportage. He acknowledges that much of his process for these works lies in choosing which of these images to recreate and—when temptation wins out—reconfigure. Seeking images emptied of content and reference, the artist aims to explore their “formal possibilities in an effort to trigger an unexpected pictorial suggestion and open meaning.” | 
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Sarah Dotts on Derek Root
Derek Root’s most recent paintings respond to the found abstractions in images he selects from media reportage. He acknowledges that much of his process for these works lies in choosing which of these images to recreate and—when temptation wins out—reconfigure. Seeking images emptied of content and reference, the artist aims to explore their “formal possibilities in an effort to trigger an unexpected pictorial suggestion and open meaning.” The open admission to a commitment toward abstraction and reduction—while the subjects of these works are derived from originary sources that are pre-conceived, pre-shot, pre-developed photographs—is one of several points of contention in Root’s painting career.
Root produced nearly exclusively abstract paintings between 1998 and 2002. It was a “curious” phase according to the critic Shep Steiner, even in a career lined with an “orderly cataloguing of very diverse styles.” Root called these works color field paintings and developed colorific, atmospheric ambiguities within their frames using an encaustic wax technique. (Someone called a 2002 solo exhibition in Toronto “Shroom Vision Color Fields.”) Root paired “a very private figural dialogue” with his hands-on wax approach and focused on impersonal surfaces to sustain his non-figurative abstraction. The figural dialogues take the form of a series of drawings that, according to his critic-observer Steiner, approach forms of erotica that “forbid discussion.”
Since 2002 Root has sought to reconcile the fundamental disparity between his labored abstractions and the props that continue to materialize between these conflicting extremes. The year following the self-promise for reconciliation saw a reprise of figurative work, with children holding chopsticks, wearing braids, eating, and carrying books in a series of ink drawings that evoke a non-specific time.
In tandem with a commitment to process- and time-sensitive art production, Root is drawn, too, to the immediacies of plein air painting, his series of landscapes from the borderline-industrial Frazer River in Canada were painted from snapshots.
Root extended this conversation between photography and painting further, drawing in questions about celebrity and self-fashioning, in his uncanny black and white paintings of Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan. Von Karajan acquired an impressive portfolio of “snapshots” of himself taken by photographers hired to capture moments of his life—eating, driving racecars, sitting aboard yachts, and renewing wedding vows. Root reworked a number of them, from the mundane to the fabulous. Von Karajan looks earnest and distracted in a white turtleneck in one painting, and sits alone in a carefully composed theater, chandelier overhead, in another. Root’s painterly treatment departs from photography and from the notion of photograph. The tension within any chosen work runs as high as the tensions Root manipulates between media: between photography and painting, and between painting and drawing.
The specifically rendered conductor—with Ray Bans noted and highlights giving dimension to his hairstyle—stands in contrast to the blurred nonentities that have appeared in 2007. The sliding figure in Downhill is no great man; his face, if he has one, is hidden behind brown and gray swipes of color. The simplified face in Hanger cannot lift itself to meet the viewer’s gaze. The photographic sources for these works are more anonymous by nature—they are not history-making images of important, elegant men or megalomaniacs but un-storied illustrations in a voodoo book from Mexico, the news, and old children’s books.
But Root’s costly color fields emerge out of even the most seemingly direct figural works. Three black square fields of color materialize in a video still from the installation Heavy Winter of 2003. The color-blocked video still’s effects are not unlike those of the oil and wax red-infused Appointment with Mars of the same year. The skies and rivers in Root’s landscapes form singular color masses. Painting’s presence is, it seems, as persistent as drama.
