Rodney Carswell
[3] Critics often describe Carswell's work as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate "in-between" spaces and embrace contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front.
[7][1][8] In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernist languages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories with postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and with his process-oriented, "hand-made" surfaces.
[4][5][9] In his essay for Carswell's mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their way into one's consciousness in a "supple, somewhat unsettling manner" that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception.
[3] Largely emerging in a period in which it was commonly held that "painting was dead,"[24][7] Carswell's body of work has been deemed noteworthy for his "unwavering belief in art as an act of individual scrutiny and contemplation,"[13] "remarkable consistency of purpose,"[4] and "relentless pursuit of subtle variation.
"[25] Carswell has said that "reductive abstraction" has been integral to his work dating back to his art education in the late 1960s, when iconic minimalists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman were at their most influential.
[22][26] Ultimately, he felt a greater kinship with artists identified as post-minimalists, such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Graves and Joel Shapiro, preferring their idiosyncratic styles of abstraction and engagement with the body, the hand-crafted and process over minimalism's embrace of non-referentiality and the mechanical.
"[32] Critics, such as Judith Russi Kirshner, have frequently commented on this sense of in-between spaces and paradoxes in Carswell's work of this period, for example, calling it "an ambiguous balance of object and image," or in curator Terrie Sultan's case, identifying a "call-and-response" between accidental painted effects and deliberate, geometric compositional strategies.
"[34] David Pagel concluded that Carswell's "randomly off-balanced and rigorously geometric" configurations were profoundly resistant to rational explanation, calling them "tight organizations that defy logic yet make sense.
"[4] Critic Craig Adcock attributed a sense of "contingency and irresolution" in Carswell's work in his postmodernist recombining of Suprematist and Constructivist vocabularies, which allowed for complex allusions to familiar corporeal and architectural issues, as well as to art historical references, such as da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
[6][8] In his post-2002 paintings, Carswell has sought a greater sense of immediacy, leaving behind the superstructures and scale of past works and taking a speculative and exploratory approach to "incorporate more surprise and imaginative play.
Compositional elements and surface details—pencil lines beneath transparent layers of paint, abandoned stray marks, or edges of color planes peeking out—work like terms in language, cohering with a unique syntax to suggest problems, subjective and idiosyncratic solutions, or narratives that reveal Carswell's hand and mind at work.
At UIC, he joined an ambitious studio arts faculty that included Martin Puryear, Charles Wilson, Julia Fish, Tony Tasset, and Phyllis Bramson.
