2.26.25 — The Main Course
Alexis Rockman has returned to nature. He can hardly help it, for he considers it an imperative as an artist, but it will not be easy—not when humanity itself may well be extinct.
It has run what the subtitle of his show, “Naples,” calls its “course of empire,” at Magenta Plains through March 1. Naples itself may be already underwater. Just downstairs, Tseng Stealing sees much the same threat to America, without the halfway comic allegory. Yet his barren landscapes seem no less familiar and true. For an unforeseen context, 
I work this together with a report from nearly twenty years ago on “Monuments for the USA,” of artists obsessed an American Empire and its course as a longer review and my latest upload.
Only a year ago at the same gallery, Alexis Rockman seemed a true Romantic, with a capital R. He turned to bright, true colors on watercolor, a traditional medium for nature studies in close-up—much as for artists from John Constable to Beatrix Potter. Search the Web for the likes of them and you will find images of Italy and, yes, the course of empire. Thomas Cole, a founder of the Hudson River School, made it a five-part allegory for past Europe and an emerging America. He also made it a model for a new American art. Scientists may have made the medium their study, too, but these were the facts of culture, art, and myth.
Cole’s allegory opens with a pastoral ideal and ends in terminal decline. America, he thought, could outlast Europe, but it needed a course correction. The work may reveal its own near-fatal struggles with expansion between banks, railroads, and slavery as well. Rockman, too, is making a course correction. He has once again a dense wall of works on paper, well observed, but in brown like an old photograph, and the brushwork has taken on stippling like an encrusted surface. And that texture carries over into his first large painting, of a whale breaking the surface. It creates roiling, bubbling waters, its nose towering high above.
It also dares you to know what is real, what is human, and just what is going on. A curved band at the bottom in black distances the scene, and, easy to overlook, a yellow-orange palace rests at the right on the sea floor. You will see many more of its like in sunlight as the show continues, but then you may never know for sure what counts as broad daylight. The whale dwarfs the palace entirely, as does the wall behind a second scene, with lampposts, fish swimming past and nosing about in front. Is that a street scene, sunken for good, or are the fish inheriting the air? Is the glimpse of a grand villa behind the wall part of the same scene or not?
It gets either better or worse. Comets dive through the rest of the show, and another fish swims through the sky trailing a shower of gold behind. It could be an advertising banner for empire trailing behind an airplane or a discharge from its rear end. Rockman can overdue it, in his imagery and garish colors, and I hate to start over on him with a second review. Still, he is newly vivid in his return to nineteenth-century Italy and America. He also complements his last show and keeps you guessing what comes next.
Tseng Stealing skips right ahead to American decline, just in time Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration. He may seem, like MAGA, most at home in the debris and the show’s “Mouthful of Dirty Copper.” Environmentalists may cringe at his acres of abandoned trailers and discarded trucks—or at least call for land-use management. Others may claim it as their own. Yet it looks familiar for good reason. It has muter color than Rockman’s, like many ordinary cars, homes, lots, and open sands.
He also uses the density or emptiness of to construct a painting. Objects may spill onto or into one another, while successive plains may continue out into the distance, textured by bare trees, with titles like Open Wound. So much for affordable housing. It may be a map of empire, but try not to panic. America is always building and destroying more. Its very muteness seems true to life and its construction akin to painting.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.