CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Franklin Evans: The Studio as Episteme

Franklin Evans: fugitivemisreadings, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, 2021

By Raphael Rubinstein

Every artist, every writer, every practitioner in any creative field, assembles a pantheon of predecessors and contemporaries. The art gods that are given a place of honor in such aesthetic temples can be welcome influences or potent adversaries, they can be figures to emulate or foils to rebel against, or they can be all of these things at once. Various models have been theorized to describe how such relationships function. In his influential 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot argued that a poet’s full engagement with literary tradition entailed a process of depersonalization: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” A little more than a half century later, Harold Bloom, in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, depicted the dialogue with one’s predecessors as a Freudian battle for psychic and artistic dominance that often hinges on intentional misreadings. 

The same year that Bloom’s book was published, Philip Guston, by then deep into his late figurative period, created Pantheon, a medium-size oil-on-panel painting of a lightbulb and a tiny canvas on an easel surrounded by the names of the artists who had nourished him: Masaccio, Piero, Giotto, Tiepolo, and de Chirico. Of course, Guston had many more influences, many more inspirations, than these five Italian artists. We know, for instance, that he loved the work of Max Beckmann and that Sung-era Chinese painters were his supreme ideal, but in no other painting is he so explicit about his artistic debts. 

If Eliot portrays tradition as a means of escaping from the self and Bloom argues for influence as a tense struggle, Guston expresses something more like gratitude and love for the artists who inspired him. Franklin Evans, an artist who has long grappled with questions of tradition and influence, avails himself of all these approaches. In his anthological paintings and installations woven from countless art-historical citations, he subsumes his own identity into the visual heritage of the past (and present), confronts questions of originality and innovation and—last but not least—invokes the artists in his own pantheon with an intensity that borders on obsession. 

Like all of us, Evans inhabits a culture increasingly defined by its networks of innumerable, instantly available images. As a painter—that is, as someone who produces unique analog objects that belong to a medium with roots in a pre-digital, pre-Internet, indeed, pre-photographic culture—Evans has a choice of whether to reject or embrace current technological realities. He could become one of those painters who define painting as a mode of resistance to the visual overload of digital media, or he could join the artists who rejoice in painting’s ability to assimilate new visual languages and technologies. In fact, he partakes of both stances: Evans is at once an upholder of painting’s traditions (it’s hard to think of another contemporary as deeply enmeshed in art history) and an innovator guiding (or dragging?) this venerable medium into the 21st century.

As one becomes involved in recognizing (or failing to recognize) the myriad borrowed motifs in one of Evans’s tightly packed compositions, it is easy to miss a crucial point: Evans’s paintings actually look nothing like the work of the artists he is citing. His canvases might be rich with details from Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and other modern masters, and from accomplished contemporaries such as Laura Owens and Kerry James Marshall, but taken as a whole, in what might be an extreme instance of Bloomian “misreading,” the paintings bear little or no resemblance to any of the artists they reference. Instead, they offer patchwork arrangements that often resemble crazy quilts or messy desktops. (The only artist who immediately comes to mind when I look at an Evans composition is Edouardo Paolozzi, whose collage-based screen prints of the 1960s bear an uncanny resemblance to some of Evans’s paintings—I say “uncanny” because until very recently Evans was unaware of Paolozzi’s work.) It is, thus, in the structure of the paintings—and in the organization of Evans’s studio and installation environments—that we encounter the essence of his work.

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As we look at Evans’s paintings, our usual habits of viewing and categorizing can fall short. The paintings are not solely abstract nor are they solely figurative; compositionally, they are not exclusively relational nor are they all-over. Many of them contain more visual information than we can assimilate, more citations than we can trace, more cross-references and juxtapositions than we can keep track of, more stylistic diversity (from geometric abstraction to trompe l’oeil, and everything in between) than we can make sense of. Nor does it help that many of the images are positioned upside down or sideways in kaleidoscopic jumbles. We also have to contend with how Evans embraces what he calls “provisional studio processes” by basing his paintings and installations on the teeming temporary arrangements of taped-together collage material he creates on the walls and floors of his studio. All of this results in a marvelous instability that requires constant adjustment on the part of the viewer.

Rather than trying to parse these works in relation to painting alone, we need to expand our scope to encompass video, film, installations, and the sprawling wilds of social media. In 2014, Evans presented an ambitious well-received exhibition titled “Painting as Supermodel” at Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gallery (now the Miles McEnery Gallery) in New York. While the primary reference for this show was Yve-Alain Bois’s 1986 essay “Painting as Model,” Evans was looking at models outside of the medium of painting. In a 2013 interview in The Brooklyn Rail, Evans mentioned his interest in the speed and “discontinuous focus” of Ryan Trecartin’s mid-2000s work and the “multi-viewed” effect of installations by Jon Kessler and Yayoi Kusama. More recently, he has expressed a strong affinity with the work of Arthur Jafa, specifically his rapid-fire video Apex (2013).  Evans’s willingness to look beyond painting has resulted in a powerful cross-fertilization of mediums.

Different kinds of extra-painting references appear in some of his new paintings in the form of sculptural imagery, chiefly classical busts and pre-Columbian heads. Intentionally or not, the scattered, fragmentary heads evoke the ritualistic practice among the Mixtec and other Mesoamerican peoples of intentionally breaking apart and discarding fired-clay figurines. As well as reminding us of the debt that Western modernism owes to non-Western cultures, and positioning the painting as a kind of archaeological dig, the presence of this Mesoamerican imagery is also a reference to Evans’s own Mexican heritage. 

Further examination uncovers allusions to current politics—for example, an “I Voted” sticker (surrounded by a Kusama Infinity Net painting) just a few inches away from a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. As usual, the paintings are littered with the signatures of other artists. (One could devote an entire essay to how Evans deploys signatures.) Provocatively, Evans pursues autobiographical content via appropriated images. Sometimes this can be a covert operation, as in a recent painting referencing only works from the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, which Evans frequented when he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa. As usual, Evans relishes unexpected juxtapositions, here planting what looks like a ’57 Chevy taken from a painting by a local Iowa artist, John Shepperd, in front of a Matisse detail. Letting no square inch go to waste, he turns to a Fairfield Porter landscape for the path of green lawn just in front of the Chevy-and-Matisse image. A surprising insert in a painting that is otherwise a joyful remix of Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre and a Paul Cézanne landscape is a grid of X’s from a napkin drawing by Tony Feher (1956–2016), whose signature, along with the date, is also visible, albeit upside down. I never would have connected Feher and Matisse, but Evans’s painting makes me aware of their similar love of direct, unadulterated, luminous color. I can also see why Evans would be drawn to Feher, who was known for, among other things, incorporating blue painter’s tape into his work.

Among the new paintings are several that feature more open, non-grid compositions. In one, a ground of large biomorphic shapes from Matisse cutouts is overlaid with elliptical target motifs, green and red apples (from Cézanne and Patrick Caulfield), proliferating copies of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965–66 portrait of art dealer Holly Solomon, that strange child’s head from Matisse’s The Piano Lesson, and other shapes and images (some from California abstractionist Frank Lobdell, with whom Evans studied). There’s a kind of centrifugal energy being unleashed, threatening to send the elements of the painting spinning off into adjacent spaces. 

In other paintings, Evans depicts a work in progress on the floor of his studio, rendering it as we would see it in a close-up photograph where the edges seem to fall away. Here, more pre-Colombian motifs appear, although they are taken from painted codices rather than clay figurines. Intensely patterned, the painting begins to resemble a map. A different kind of distortion is visible in a recent group of watercolors where Evans depicts increasingly pixelated versions of his own paintings.

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Ultimately, painting is not so much Evans’s medium as it is his subject, or one of them. He pays as much attention to the site where his paintings get made—the studio—as he does to the paintings themselves. In 2017, he explained in a statement written for his “paintingpainting” exhibition (also at Ameringer McEnery Yohe) how during the previous decade he had made “the studio in the round” the subject of his paintings. Another way to think of the studio is as one of Evans’s primary tools, along with traditional paints and brushes, and an inkjet printer that he relies on to print out hard copies of his source images.

Because of Evans’s practice of sourcing images online, some might think of him as a “post-studio” artist who needs only a laptop and a highspeed Internet connection, but he is emphatically a studio artist. The conditions of his workspace (its light, its walls, its ceiling, its location, and, perhaps most importantly, its floor) are as crucial to his art as canvas size and type of paint are to his paintings. Another important distinction: Rather than working from digital images, Evans always turns to his printer to make hard copies before painting them. As he succinctly explains, “Everything gets printed, so I can see it.”

For Evans, the studio is the support that receives material and the frame that unites it. As such, it is a contemporary mutation of the “flatbed picture plane” that Leo Steinberg identified in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and other postwar artists. Like the artists Steinberg discussed, Evans alludes to “hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.” (Not surprisingly, Evans is well aware of this affinity: He titled a 2012 show in Milan “flatbedfactum02,” a dual reference to Steinberg and to Rauschenberg.) Significantly, Evans’s “flatbed” material is by no means limited to screen grabs of paintings. Along with his ever-expanding reservoir of painting details, Evans has corralled documents from the day-to-day operations of the art world (like gallery press releases), texts from the domains of literature and art history, photographs of artists, photographs of his own neatly ordered bookshelves, and various accumulations of information and data. He has also incorporated sound into his exhibitions through audio installations of actors reading from texts that have influenced his work. 

Another useful reference is Daniel Buren’s essay “The Function of the Studio.” It is a mark of changing circumstances that while Buren proclaimed in 1971 that all his work proceeded from the “extinction” of the studio, Evans has built a radical painting practice not on the ruins of the studio but from its repurposed survival. For Evans, the studio is like a Foucauldian episteme, less a space than a condition that establishes what it is possible for him to say within his work. 

Clearly there is an archival dimension to Evans’s practice. His thronging compendiums of art history belong to a tradition that encompasses Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, Christian Boltanski’s Lessons of Darkness, Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, to which we could add more recent contributions by Thomas Hirschhorn, Walid Raad, Tacita Dean, Loren Munk, and Arthur Jafa. We might also add André Malraux’s Museum without Walls—nothing is more Evansian than Maurice Jarnoux’s famous photograph of Malraux surrounded by the loose pages of his soon-to-be-published volume of art reproductions, a scene that scholar Walter Grasskamp refers to as “the book on the floor.” Yet even as we note Evans’s fluency in this archival discourse, we need to recognize the subjective, personal aspects of his work. For all their precise visual quotations, Evans’s paintings are not “gallery pictures” in the manner of the 17th century painter David Teniers the Younger, nor are they exercises in “art as critique” in the manner of so many late-20th century artists. Think of them, rather, as citational self-portraits. Evans’s subtle fusion of autobiography and appropriation is yet one more instance of the radically hybrid nature of his project.