Mark Fox @ Shaheen Gallery
Up close, Mark Fox's untitled 2007 cut-paper assemblage reveals the way in which the artist physically combines cutout flat drawings to create complex three-dimensional matrices.
Up close, Mark Fox's untitled 2007 cut-paper assemblage reveals the way in which the artist physically combines cutout flat drawings to create complex three-dimensional matrices.
Artist Mark Fox draws on the accidental to create abstract drawings
By Dan Tranberg
Ohio native Mark Fox is known for his delicate and airy wall-mounted assemblages, made from hundreds of small, quirky cutout drawings that are attached to each other using tiny strips of linen tape.
Like lace, they create playful shadows as light passes through them and dances on the walls beyond.
Examples of these works can be found in the permanent collections of such heavyweight institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
But Fox’s current solo exhibition, titled “If Therefore,” at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland, shows Fox, who now lives and works in New York City, to be exploring another direction.
The show features more than a dozen new drawings on single sheets of paper, which began in Fox’s studio as makeshift dropcloths.
Through his process of making tiny cutout drawings, these sheets of paper, presumably placed on studio tabletops, accumulate a variety of marks: overspill, stray brushstrokes and random doodles. Fox then uses the accidental markings as starting points for new works on paper, which echo some of the qualities of his assemblages.
The exhibit includes two cutout assemblages from 2007, encouraging comparison with the drawings, most of which are from 2009.
As drawings, Fox’s newer works take on a range of issues that are unique to two-dimensional art — and this is where they become interesting.
This detail of Mark Fox's 2008 mixed-media drawing "Ack" demonstrates how the artist groups imagery using a collage-like sensibility, even when working on a single sheet of paper.
While his cutout assemblages rely on the interplay of actual light and shadow within three-dimensional space, his new drawings cannot. As if to compensate for this, he creates bold and dynamic relationships between light and dark shapes in his flat drawings.
In many of them, an accumulation of darker images forms an overall arch shape, which stands in contrast to an equally complex grouping of white and off-white shapes or to relatively large areas of stark white paper.
On the whole, this approach works beautifully.
The flat drawings, all of which are 22 by 30 inches, display a more subtle range of spatial relationships than the cutout works. Moreover, the individual shapes tend to merge together in the drawings, suggesting that the varied assortment of marks is part of a more unified (albeit chaotic) system.
Fox’s assemblages are commonly interpreted as comments on our culture of seemingly boundless accumulation. His drawings are less concrete than that, in part because the things that accumulate in them are mostly abstract shapes.
At times, the open-endedness of the drawings makes them appear like Modernist abstractions. American Modernist painter Stuart Davis comes to mind.
While Davis tended to use dead-flat shapes, his rhythmic abstract compositions often featured a similarly chaotic mix of geometric and biomorphic forms, which he unified, as Fox does, primarily though his use of color.
But Fox’s drawings clearly belong to the present day. The sheer eccentricity of his many various doodle-like marks seems to speak of a pluralistic and multifaceted world in which an overwhelmingly dominant sense of order would feel like a sentimental remnant of the past.
This article appeared in The Plain Dealer, July 12, 2009
© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.
