"Christopher Wool's Winning Gambit" by Adam Simon

 I’ve known Christopher Wool for a long time, since we were both teenage students at the New York Studio School in the 1970s. Philip Guston made annual visits and I remember his indignation at being asked to look at Christopher’s work. I believe he said that Wool’s all-over paintings should have been shown to someone like Larry Poons, not to him. In retrospect, Guston’s dismay seems to have been prescient and a little ironic. Wool’s breakout text paintings in the 1980s produced a similar response among painters as Guston’s cartoonish figure paintings had a decade earlier. Both overturned current orthodoxies. 

Throughout his career, Wool has made the painterly interesting by bringing it through the back door, like an uninvited guest. Using rollers, stencils, silk screen, spray paint and appropriated text, he has continually surprised viewers with his ability to make the seemingly offhand visually compelling. While the text paintings registered for some as iconic emotional outbursts (“IF YOU CAN’T TAKE A JOKE, YOU CAN GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE”), the emphasis was equally on materiality, just as it had been with earlier work that used pattern-making rollers, which slumlords favored to paint over shoddy plastering jobs. Both series employed wet-on-wet enamel paint. Wool seemed to be seeing how far he could stray from traditional painting without losing the essential juice. He was pushing the parameters in a way that felt knowledgeable, as exploration rather than wholesale disregard or rejection. The text paintings were pictorial in a way that those of Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, or Les Levine never were. 

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