ROD PENNER
ROD PENNER
525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com
ROD PENNER By John Seed
Anyone who has stood in front of one of Rod Penner’s paintings of small-town Texas has likely wondered how he manages to endow them with such a powerful air of haunted clarity. Perhaps the best explanation of the dreamlike intensity that Penner can conjure up is that he is motivated by a profound and genuine sense of American culture and the opportunities that it has offered him. Penner’s vignettes of Texas towns celebrate American virtues, including grit, endurance, and candor. He is a reverent painter who is able to suggest determination and optimism as counterforces to a certain loneliness, even melancholy. Working from a single drawer of carefully organized Liquitex acrylics, Penner is able to summon up the delicate surfaces and distinctive colors of Texas scenery. Penner’s brush—a Winsor & Newton synthetic sable as small as #000—lays out gnarled, naked tree branches with astonishing facility, and he paints cracked asphalt, often interrupted by pools of muddy water, with eye-popping veracity. What about concrete block walls? Burned-out plastic signs? Lines of Botts’ dots (reflective raised pavement markers) curving down a highway? Yes, Penner paints them all with aplomb.
3
After finishing a six-inch square “micro,” Penner sometimes needs a few trips to the chiropractor, a small price to pay for perfection. One location that often inspires such dedication is a town that Penner knows intimately: San Saba, Texas. These paintings are based on iPhone photos he took there after a morning hunt with his sons in late 2014. Why this particular town? As Penner’s former dealer, the late Ivan Karp, once said: “The subject chooses the artist. All art is an emblem of the ‘return of the repressed.’ ” 4
That’s an interesting psychological take, but on a more practical level it seems fair to note that the town has a wealth of abandoned, deserted, and closed buildings, which allow Penner to say something about the human condition without painting actual human beings. When Penner sees a place he wants to paint, a chill goes down his spine: “I get very uncharacteristically excited,” he reports. “Walking through San Saba, I looked for buildings that appeared deserted, empty, closed, and/or abandoned. I’m not interested in any nostalgia associated with these structures, and having grown up in Canada, I’m thankful I don’t have any childhood memories of these small Texas towns that might interfere with my observations.” When he begins a painting, the photo references are his starting point, but over time Penner edits to control the developing mood, often removing figures and distressing
structures to heighten the sense of melancholia and isolation. So it isn’t quite right to peg Penner as a “superrealist”; there is more invention and improvisation in his work than one might imagine. When he is relaxing between shows, Penner likes to travel. While he was in Europe last year, he looked hard at Dutch and Flemish paintings. The trip, along with removing Penner from the intensity of working in his own studio, renewed his interest in working small. The intimacy of his work, which draws in viewers in a way that a Johannes Vermeer painting is admired, is Penner’s protest against the grandiosity of the many large contemporary works that leave him cold. Penner knows how to make you gasp in incredulity and how to shake you with his uncanny vision. Then again, he can lift your mood if you spend enough time with his paintings after you get past the shock of his precision. Each Penner painting has its slivers of hope—bits of blue sky or distant lights—that add a sense of uplift and poetry to offset the rigor and clarify his vision. Penner is an individual—a classic outsider in many ways—who walks his own road and then paints it with astonishing singularity. n John Seed is a professor of art and art history at Mt. San Jacinto College in Southern California. Seed has written about art and artists for art ltd., Arts of Asia, Harvard Magazine, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic.com.
5
6
G & R Grocery, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 5 x 7 1/2 inches 12.7 x 19.1 cm
8
Yard Inflatables, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 6 x 6 inches 15.2 x 15.2 cm
10
Buy Pecans Here, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 5 x 7 1/2 inches 12.7 x 19.1 cm
12
The Studio, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 5 x 7 1/2 inches 12.7 x 19.1 cm
14
Station, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 6 x 6 inches 15.2 x 15.2 cm
16
San Saba Butane, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 6 x 6 inches 15.2 x 15.2 cm
18
Commie’s Tacos, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 5 x 7 1/2 inches 12.7 x 19.1 cm
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
ROD PENNER 27 April – 26 May 2017
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com
20
Publication © 2017 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Essay © John Seed Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9979454-5-4 Cover: San Saba Butane / San Saba, TX (detail), 2015, Private Collection