Suueln Rocca was one of the six original artists who included Hairy Who. The group of artists from Chicago exhibited three times in the city between 1966 and 1968, then, in 1969, Walter Hopps organized the last Hairy Who Show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. Almost six decades later, what continues to impress me about these artists is that they each developed an individual visual language and began to retrace this trajectory at the start of their career. Although they may have shared sources of inspiration, their art was as different from each other as Spanish and Italian.
The 20 paintings, drawings and objects of the exhibition Suellen Rocca: Good things and bad things At Matthew Marks Gallery Span from 1964 to 2014, almost all of her career (she died in 2020), and varied in size by more than six feet high and five feet wide, with paintings on small riders and plastic handbags. In 1964, Rocca had developed its fundamental visual language, which can be described as a kind of “writing images”, in which a simplified graphic image of a narrow bed was used to transmit a kind of meaning. The repeated placement of a hand painted figure with other figures establishes a pictorial field, inviting the spectator to read there. The deciphering of Rocca's works is part of the pleasure of meeting them.
Among the main visual sources of Rocca are advertisements from the middle of the century – these reflections and solutions for the conformist desires of the middle class of the country: marry, buy a diamond ring, raise a family. When Rocca finally dominated on this subject, she added elements surprising to her compositions, such as a palm tree, a sleeping person inside a bubble, both protected and isolated, and two open hands reaching flocks, as if they were inside a headless human body, the latter being one of the most disturbing images of her linear images.
“Unitled” (2020), which presents this image in one of its four attracted panels, pushes us to a more disturbing reading of apparently benign iconography – an empty bed, perched birds or in flight, a pair of legs and a house – transporting us to a speculation area. A titleless watercolor and graphite work (also 2020) composed of four rows of repeated elements disturb the same way as familiar imaging. The three upper rows show a house, a naked woman on a large rock and a hand alternating with a sheet. For the lower row, Rocca gives a melting body on a bed.
In addition to these enigmatic paintings, in which the repetition of images is essential to composition, Rocca has created others which do not integrate into this mold, as “lamp poem” (c. 1969), whose edge is made of pleated fabric. If she had repeated this in several parts, she would have reduced the power of this work. In the shade of a blue lamp in the center, Rocca represented a house with smoke coming from his fireplace. The lines extend outside the house and the lampshade, denoting the light.
In every corner of painting, Rocca wrote “Ohh”, “Ahh” or “Mmm”. What do these charges mean in break? What do the black lines mean that radiate “MMM” and correspond to those of the house and the lamp? What first appears to be a painting of a lamp becomes strange and incongruous, the more we look at it. Are these collective aspirations for domesticity and comfort in the United States?
In the drawing mainly in black and white “hidden danger lady” (1984-2012), Rocca depicts a creature seated the legs crossed, with space made by overlapping legs and oversized pink hands, the only color of the work. The pink differentiates the space established by the legs of the figure of the black and white floor, complicating the reading of this drawing.
In this “lamp poem”, Rocca is expanding his work work and transmits his creative extent and agitation to do something new. If this drawing is an indication of what it can achieve with graphite, an exhibition of drawings by it or all the hairy artists who, for whom drawings form a distinct work corpus, is justified.
In his pictographic works, in particular those with domestic images (for example, beds, houses and diamond rings), Rocca evokes a world in conflict. The successful middle class objects and life they represent are both desired and abdominating. Rocca could see the banality of the American dream.
Suellen Rocca: good things and bad things Continue to Matthew Marks Gallery (523 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
