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Art News 74 pt 7 Sept '75 50-56 [[image - painting]] James Rosenquist, Off the Continental Divide, 1973-74, lithograph, 42 by 78 inches. James Rosenquist Off the Continental Divide, like most of Rosenquist's work, is a kind of puzzle with no single or complete solution. Images are brought together out of scale, out of context, simply existing, hard and strong, as they are. The continental divide of the title, which is off-center on the geographical continent, is brought out in the print, with the vertical division roughly into two halves but not quite symmetrical. A book is open to a point slightly more than halfway. Four groups of five nails are under the book in the lower right. The stairs give the idea of ascent to or descent from the dividing line, and the car window is that through which Americans see their continental divide. A circle, triangle, and square are under the stairs, implying perhaps in the three universal shapes that nothing is exempt from having to go one way or the other. And yet the title is not straightforward; the word "Off" can imply both that the items came from the dividing line or that they came from somewhere not on the dividing line; it also carries the meaning of "kill." The colors are hard and bright, unexpected - the stairs purple, each nail a different color in shades of yellow, orange, pink, red, blue or green, the colored paper (?) in the left background yellow, red and green - elementary colors, like the everyday objects and elementary shapes that go along with the elementary fact of water flowing down. Documentation: Off the Continental Divide, lithograph, 42 by 78 inches. Edition of 43 on Japan paper. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions, in 1973-74. Russell Drisch Three prints by this artist from Buffalo are fresh and keep on being interesting despite the simplest of subject matter and very limited color. They are greatly enlarged black-and-white photographs, hand-tinted in subtle tones. Untitled I is a pair of feet in leather boots, seen from a steep angle, the bottoms of jeans over the boots, standing on wide floor boards that go diagonally from upper left to lower right. The prevailing color is a pale grayish yellow green. Satchel with Palm Tree is exactly that, a potted palm in an open canvas satchel, with handles hanging down and loose threads escaping from the zipper cloth. Yellow Marbles is a close-up of a mound of marbles piled to above the rim of a transparent glass or vase, visible only at its rim and along a scalloped decoration below the rim. The marbles have slightly yellow edges; the glass is the faintest blue. The appeal of these prints is direct and oddly compelling. Documentation: Yellow Marbles in Blue Container, Positive, hand-tinted photograph, 40 by 28 inches. Edition of 50. Published by the artist, 1973. Satchel with Palm, hand-tinted photograph, 40 by 28 inches. Edition of 23. Published by the artist, 1975. Untitled I, hand-tinted photograph, 28 by 40 inches. Published by the artist, 1975. Available through Knoedler Graphics. SUZANNE BOORSCH Ron Davis Davis' newest print, Vent Beam, is a splendid five-color lithograph in green, red, brown, yellow and blue. The first four color elements were drawn on transfer paper that was subsequently applied to two stones and two plates. The fifth element was drawn directly on the plate. The basic image, a line drawing of a seemingly transparent rectangular box with colored sides, is placed centrally on the page at an off-center angle in the middle of an open, thinly drawn perspectival grid. Against a background of mottled red and green, thin deckled lines pass through the outside corners of the rectangular shape and move toward and beyond a deckled framing edge. All lines intersect in various ways in a play of support and opposition. The right square end of the box is a slanted plane that works equally well as a flat area of color, while the long, yellow horizontal plane on top has the translucent quality of colored glass or plastic [[image - painting]] Ron Davis, Vent Beam, 1975, five-color lithograph, 25 by 36 inches. S.52
