One Wall, One Work: Mel Bochner

“No beginning. It’s all a continuum.”

—Mel Bochner

Krakow Witkin Gallery announces the presentation of a large watercolor by Mel Bochner as the latest in the ongoing “One Wall, One Work” series. 

In 2001, Bochner began a series of works engaging everyday speech by using synonyms derived from the latest edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. Bochner was inspired by the Thesaurus’s then-new permissiveness to broaden his linguistic references juxtaposing proper with vernacular and formal with vulgar. Twenty-four years later, and still drawn from Roget’s, as well as dictionaries of slang, the language in the recent work can simultaneously be read as defeatist and elated, heartfelt and trite, all while engaging social issues.

To make “Thank You,” the work currently on view, Bochner began by photographing a plexiglass matrix with which he had made prior works. This plexiglass had been engraved with a series of texts consisting of various iterations of the phrase “Thank you.” The imagery photographed shows not only these texts, but the scrapes, chips, and imperfections in the well-worn block. The artist then screenprinted this photographic imagery eight times, building up a thick substrate on which to paint. With a text that reads “Thanks a lot” alongside “I can’t thank you enough,” among other phrases, the work has no one fixed voice and is simultaneously confounding, confusing, dynamic, and humorous. Furthering the physically and conceptually dynamic nature of the work, Bochner applied brightly colored watercolor paint over the oil-based ink of the text/imagery. The oil in the screenprinted elements resisted the water-based paint, causing the color to pool on the printed surface, only soaking into the paper where the ink was absent.

The materials and techniques that Bochner used engage the relationships between textual and non-textual elements, asking questions of what is unified, what is separate, what is on top, and what is behind, engaging the viewer in an exploration of the interplay between different forms of interaction, from viewing, to reading, to deciphering.

Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, “The new Bochners unleash something malicious, sharp, and funny that has always lurked beneath the surface, conveying the rage of life while maintaining the artist’s characteristic surface of elegance, intellect, and formalism. In a sense they are Expressionistic works, filled with pain, and grinning and bearing it.”