The Brooklyn Rail

Gary Gissler’s exhibition there there amounts to a mini retrospective of his meticulously executed paintings and drawings. His work as a psychoanalyst has given him intimate knowledge of the limits of speech as a medium for interpersonal communication. For the last twenty years, he has combined traditional art materials, such as oils, gesso, and ink, with collage elements like linen and mylar to explore the ways language both conveys and conceals meaning. Onto these grounds he weaves in snippets of written word in many formats: passages from books typed on paper that he cuts up into letters, words, and sentences, or phrases scratched into gesso with graphite, for instance. He also slices out words from the pages of books, subverting their narratives by creating gaps in the sentences. A couple of these tomes are on view, as are Gissler’s drawings from 2023, which he executed while on psychedelics and which query the search for meaning itself. As departures from Gissler’s obsession with language and literature, they challenge expectations about what visual art should communicate.

Mind-boggling in their commitment and craftsmanship, works like fucking asshole (2016), fuck (2000), and doubt (2000) all use a similar format, a nearly 8-inch-square gessoed panel bearing the piece’s title repeated over and over in pencil in Gissler’s minute handwriting. The lines of writing are so small that they read as smudges of metallic shimmer until at close approach the words materialize. Gissler achieves similar visual effects with typewritten text. Examples include the whiteness of the whale (2018) and you don’t know you don’t know you (2016). In the whiteness of the whale, he weaves tiny strips of typewritten lines taken from Moby Dick crosswise into an 18-inch-square lattice, a visual pun on the word “text” which comes from the same root as “textile.” For the 2016 work, he uses a typewriter, overlaying lines of the titular phrase until the lettering blends into a rectangle of ink on the page—a rumination condensed into a column of obsession. Gissler uses subtraction rather than addition to play with the limits of legibility in interpretation of dreams (2016–17). A copy of Freud’s book sits upon a vintage child’s desk, with all adverbs and adjectives excised from every page, leaving them riddled with holes. The gallery allows viewers to touch the books. Moving the fingers across the gaps gives an impression of fragility, a comment perhaps on the fleeting nature of dreams, whose nuances (i.e., the adjectives and adverbs), are so easily lost upon waking.

Gissler’s large works on panel combine delicacy with minimalist formal elegance. Though often, remote, outside, previous (2017) looks like a black grid with irregular white lines from a distance, a closer look shows that the white lines are pieces of typewritten text on paper laid in alternating vertical and horizontal strips about six inches apart. Nearby wall text indicates the words are adjectives cut from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, an inversion of the excised book in Gissler’s interpretation of dreams. The work suggests the act of dreaming itself, the dark ground of sleep interrupted by a parade of fleeting impressions composed of the adjectives carved from Freud’s book. Gissler takes a similar collage approach in how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry (2018), a work that recalls Agnes Martin. Taking the text from the last line of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a prescient story of Vietnam and American naiveté in the 1950s, he embeds the letters between broad white bands of linen that float on a black ground peeking through in jagged horizontal lines.

Gissler’s works on paper from 2023 have no text in them, a divergence that reflects a shift in his psychoanalytic practice, which now combines talk therapy with psychedelics. If he was going to use psychedelics to treat patients, Gissler realized he had an ethical obligation to experience them himself, and in doing so, he encountered a level of experience outside of the search for meaning mediated by language. His 2023 drawings on mylar, C12H17N2O4P #6, C12H17N2O4P #2, C12H17N2O4P #7, C12H17N2O4P #3, and C12H17N2O4P #1, have pale graphite lines that alternately spread out into loops and congeal into knots. These abstracts belong on art’s periphery, high-wire acts that dispense with history, design, and other rubrics for making judgments. Most art made outside of ordinary consciousness results in doodles and doggerel; Gissler’s MDMA drawings exert a fascination that suggests he may be one of the few to stay aloft where others have fallen.