|
The late 50's, Southern California, USA: Far from the European influences and bluestocking traditions of the East Coast, a new culture springs to life. Artists feel the pull of Asia, just across the water, and start to explore new materials brought to their attention in the form of cars, surfboards and other industrial products and processes. Enter Ron Cooper, a young teenager fortunate enough to have a best friend whose mother manages Chateau
Marmont, Los Angeles' answer to New York's Chelsea Hotel. The two youngsters hang around the hotel, hobnobbing with the artists who live there, admiring the custom paint jobs on the cars of the rich and famous. Ron's driving ambition, at age 14, is to become the world's greatest car
customizer.
Flash forward ten years: Ron Cooper, after three years as a star student at Chouinard Institute, quits school to protest the increasing commercialization of the institution. He throws out all the work he had done as a student, vowing to do only work which is truly his. He spends 16 hours a day in his studio and begins experimenting with new materials, among them Plexiglas and resin. His new work falls roughly within the confines of the emerging Los Angeles look, but his finishes are less slick and his constructions more
nuanced. His work centers around light and the way it behaves in various situations; the results are intensely beautiful, thought-provoking and entirely new. Some pieces end up in venues such as the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.
On April 6th, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art will open an exhibition of Cooper's Light Traps and Vertical Bars, produced from the mid-60's to the early 80's. The Plexiglas Vertical Bars, seven or eight feet high and 3 5/8" wide and deep, are exactly the width and depth of the so-called 4x4 used almost universally in American construction projects, creating a subconscious familiarity that draws the viewer in. The front of the bar is sprayed with about 30 coats of transparent pigment. Cooper describes the process of applying the paint (horizontally) as "one long breath". The application is perfectly even; the colors are slightly pearlescent shades of soft pink and bright, light orange, among others. The side panels are transparent; light enters the piece from behind and projects forward toward the viewer. The effect varies according to time of day and ambient light. At one time the piece looks like a slit in the wall; at another, it projects forward.
The Light Traps, as their name implies, also use a transparent Plexiglas "frame" to allow light to enter from behind the painting; but the construction is more complex. The first Light Traps, from the late 60's, were large (7'4"sq.); the later ones, from the early 80's, measure 24" sq. and sometimes contain a mirrored back surface which shoots light back out at the viewer (the later Vertical Bars also use this mirror effect). Like the Vertical Bars, they were produced horizontally. Successive layers of resin, sometimes containing pigment and sometimes not, are sprayed onto a clear Plexiglas surface. Texture is influenced by the amount of acetone used in the process of catalyzing the resin, and by a layer of overlapping sections of fiberglass cloth applied between sprayed layers of resin.
Colors range from subtle shades produced by light diffraction through un-pigmented resin (which, interestingly, sometimes produces soft complementary colors as the viewer moves from side to side in front of the piece), to brilliant red or violet.
Ron Cooper's Vertical Bars and Light Traps represent the best work from the so-called Los Angeles School, one of the most vital and influential movements in a seminal period in the history of American art. Always alive to new possibilities and curious about new ways of making art, Cooper has worked in a wide variety of media. The Vertical Bars and Light Traps reflect the essence of his life-long fascination with light and its properties, as well as his ability to translate this interest into objects that combine great beauty and intense emotional expression.
|
