Laurie Rosenwald is a painter of prodigious generosity, subtlety and wit. Her paintings reaffirm and celebrate the illicit, necessary pleasures of color, surface and visual invention. Using true encaustic (hot wax) or oil and wax with pure pigments, Rosenwald produces an unctuously textured paint surface which seemingly contradicts the (usually) clean lines and self-contained forms of her imagery. Although often based on letterforms, Rosenwald’s work is as engaged with the qualities of paint itself as that of any old-school Abstract Expressionist.
Rosenwald’s subjects fall into several categories: portraits, still lifes, abstractions. A letterform can be all three. Using these as subject matter for paintings, Rosenwald plays on their inherent ambiguity. Words’ meanings and connotations contend with pure image and the physical object of the painting. or the elegant positive-negative interplay of CA use letters as purely abstract shapes. As an experienced graphic designer, Rosenwald paints and transforms her adopted territory. The sublime all-white Akzidenz Grotesk g from 2018 is her Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Moving back to her native New York after graduating from RISD, she found refuge from the emotional weight of painting, as well as a livelihood, in design, where she has attained prominence. As with Warhol’s silkscreen paintings, the essential thing about Rosenwald’s paintings is that they are paintings. With their thick impasto, their reductive formalism, their chunky, holdable scale as objects, they seem very aware of themselves as such. Like letters and words, Rosenwald’s paintings condense meaning, and their modest size belies an expansive ambition. Her overt portraits such as Lasse Persson are condensations of acute observation transmuted by gesture. The abstract How Dare You at 18 x 24 inches, is almost banal in its simplicity, yet unforgettable: an ovoid “target” or a slightly woozy “O” in primary blue and red, with a tab of a neck to turn it into a cyclops; to dot the eye. As though the purism of Myron Stout were combined with the funky surface and extra-terrestrial weirdness of Forrest Bess. The love-hate relationship between fine art and graphic design has been fraught since at least the Bauhaus. Design borrows from painters’ formal discoveries, and vice-versa. Rosenwald’s paintings seem to say “Can’t we all just relax and get along?”
- Nathan Kernan,
President, The Milton Resnick
and Pat Passlof Foundation
New York, New York