RETROSPECTIVE | Robert Jessel
“Where It All Started” Oil on Canvas, 1973
Bristling with urban attitude, Robert Jessel’s expressivist paintings deploy flowers, apples, trees, cars, buildings and gothamites as occasions for bold composition and exuberant color. In many paintings, Nature stands facing the viewer with her hands on her hips, ready to talk back in an assertive language of shapes. Jessel says “Nature is composed of spheres, cones, rectangles and color”, and indeed these shapes constantly test each other’s edges in his designs whether set in city or country.
The artist comments that his paintings wrestle “with the flat and the round, a perpetual tug of war.” In his many still lifes, color balances form. His still lifes draw attention to form by using simple and familiar elements to highlight changes in scale and implied motion. “Still LIfe with Yellow Bucket,” 1991, arranges three crocks for sculptural effect, playing cylinder against spheres of fruit in a variety of unreal sizes. An avocado dwarves the apple, and the oranges swell to bursting against the azul-teal ground. Flowered wallpaper adds a 19th century feel, although the canvas is intensely modern. In “Lilies,” 2010 calla lilies in a watering can stand out against a violet-pink wallpaper with blue diamonds and squiggles. The white blossoms with seductive orange stamens cavort shamelessly in their vase, daring the viewer to take them as mere flowers, rather than shapely elements of abstraction.
Another flower composition features a sunflower duo swaggering in the center foreground who seem to be asking “Wassup?” Situating the sunflowers on a lime and cerulean checkerboard, with a horse grazing in the corner, the painting suggests a country setting that is anything but pastoral. What might be taken as pasture is a geometric improvisation.
In one of his signature paintings titled “Egypt,” 2019 tiger lilies loom in an art deco array, their serrated edges like a receding row of skyscrapers or perhaps a variation on processional papyrus fronds. Their glowing orange hues make this still life oscillate from abstract to figurative. Jessel studied with Wilbur Niewald at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he learned to love the French modernists that Niewald revered from Monet to Cezanne. “Where it all started,” 1973, his first painting nods to Van Gogh’s chair, but Jessel’s version posits a bright pineapple yellow chair as a humble object, simultaneously inviting and self-possessed. Jessel has said that his heritage is a French modernist palette,” and indeed his colors render objects dynamic.
In “Greene Street,” 1998 four sunflowers at superhero scale dominate a SoHo street that sparkles with life. Cars careen towards the viewer, zig-zagging to follow the line of Jessel’s drunken buildings. Gals on the sidewalk keep on trucking with attitude, as if to tell the dapper gent in sunglasses to get his eyes off their butts. The artist comments “ I enjoy contrasts like the dichotomy of city and sunflowers in Greene Street which takes a grungy SoHo street and puts enlarged, incongruous bright sunflowers up front.”
“Still City,” a cityscape emphasizing vertical rectangles shows the Citicorp building on the skyline looking ready to emit robot commands. Meanwhile a row of fruit is posed like cannon balls on the parapet in the foreground. In his cityscapes Jessel sometimes uses a squeeze play on rectangles to give tall buildings a waist–a wry sign of his rueful familiarity with the city. In another more intimate city scene called “SoHo,” 1998 plate glass windows are envisioned as aquariums with nymphs in bikinis swimming about. A brassy blonde struts in a checked mini dress that looks like it was sewn from a NASCAR flag. This leading figure is Superwoman-sized, towering over cabs and traffic, as well as some sad sack business men. In the right foreground a gal clad in slip and fishnet stockings may be a street walker but she’s also clearly queen of the block, tough as the leather of her purse. Much much more than a streetscape, this fugue features thematic verticals that vigorously intersect with vanishing perspective lines and cross canvas motion. Jessel animates his canvases, confidently navigating the tension between symbolic and figurative to keep the viewer riveted.
Article by Kathleen Hulser
