Noam Rappaport
Friday, 30 August 2013
From top to bottom: Installation View at ATM Gallery, NYC (2008), 2×6 and Yellow and Blue (2010), Right Face (2009), Installation View at Ratio 3 San Fransisco (2013)
“Each detail in the eight works on view here—all part of Noam Rappaport’s debut show at James Fuentes—is remarkably self-possessed. By detail, I mean a dash or dab of paint; a single, slender line; a shred of gauzy fabric; or a spare, perfectly formed geometric shape, often cut a half an inch or so into the canvas. Rappaport is economical with such elements—in all the pieces here except one, there are never more than one or two, three at most—an artistic decision that keeps his works subtle and soft. In Greens (all works 2012), a reed painted hot purple swoops over thick swipes of pine and seaweed hues, cuts across a recessed ecru circle, and catapults the piece into an interim space somewhere between sculpture and painting. Likewise, the fulcrum of Untitled is a most lissome line of electric green, dividing fields of mint and cream-colored paint, both neatly tucked into orderly rectilinear forms.
Collection #8 (Victory Cap) is the anomaly, possessing not one but a plethora of details, all tiny objects stodgily tacked to a panel in neat rows—each a speck, a scrap, an abbreviation of some greater whole, a piece of linen, a block of wood, a sheet of paper, a fishing line—that, as abbreviations, teem with a certain confidence: Elision is enough. After all, the dynamism (and beauty) of art like Rappaport’s—and that of the rtistic giants he’s so frequently linked to, such as Richard Tuttle and B. Wurtz—hinge on the smallest of details: that line of bright lime which ever so subtly creeps along those vast plains of cream and mint. All of which makes Collection #8 (Victory Cap) especially revealing among this suspiciously post-Minimalist array of works—and Rappaport’s artistic practice as a whole—as it acts like a sort of treasure chest of suggestions, an archive of potential endings, each particle dangled like precious stock in a market, as if to say “I can complete you.” Whether or not Rappaport is an artist’s artist (and the question is well worth considering), his works gently insist that confidence requires no more than a whisper.”
-Allese Thomson Baker for Art Forum