The Brooklyn Rail

Elliott Puckette’s eleventh solo exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, Unfolding, includes two bronze sculptures and eight ink, gesso, and kaolin on wood panel paintings. The latter’s gessoed grounds and ink base layers are applied in marbled monochromatic washes of swirling aniline grey and grisaille silver. Where these iron clouds break, uneven crepuscular cleaves of dusted alabaster light splinter through like lightning. Each work is marked by white razor blade arcs—Puckette’s signature lines. The gyrations of these serpentine, lineal furrows are first etched and then deepened with cross-hatching as Puckette further subtracts the line from the wood panel, the recesses making negative space material. I describe Puckette’s work as "lineal" rather than "linear" intentionally, for where the latter describes something “arranged in lines”, the former has a dual meaning, describing both a formation of lines and a line of descent. “Lineal” at once concerns teleology and organic generation, and it is precisely this sense of the word that Puckette’s wandering lines invoke.

In each work, Puckette’s wandering lines—which swoop and bow, following sinusoidal and ovular gestures—track the artist’s sloping wrist-movements as they incise the board. Movement is here presented in a mode entirely distinct from the action painter’s spills, skeins, and flurries of brushwork. Where the action painter outpours, their performance of paint holding the canvas under feverish duress, Puckette’s lines are much slower. They flow and follow, never unexpectedly cut or tapered, rejecting chance variation and the influence of external forces. They are self-impelled. Unlike Max Ernst’s grattage or Mark Tansey’s pigment removals, Puckette’s studied sgraffito incising is closer to traditional engraving. As the late David Anfam explains in his “Writing is the Painting of the Voice” (2023), “Pollock’s technique was additive … his poured enamels accumulated into strata, palimpsests” that are at diametric odds with Puckette’s work, where “everything is subtractive, incised with an ordinary implement, a razor blade.”

Puckette’s smooth paths suggest a range of associations: raptors circling the sky in pursuit of their prey, lines of ants mechanizing the passage of food, the footpath of a ballerina's manège or arabesque exercises, wilderness trails ploughed into the earth by human steps. It is no accident that these are all organic systems. One of the works on view here, Unfolding (2023), is a tondo, its egg-shaped canvas emphasizing the ovular, organic purposiveness of Puckette’s line. The artist’s approach might be readily termed “vitalist” or “organic” abstraction. Her indented white delineations, almost relief-like, are grooves confidently dug into the support, their vital force accented by the atmosphere that they cut across. These lines suggest the path of an organic form, a flowing force. Puckette’s annular and orbicular disks, slipping and spinning in and out of one another, are uniformly directed. Demarcated and juxtaposed, they encourage optical tracing. Bereft of the labyrinth’s dead-end blocks and stoppages, which would halt the eye’s movement, Puckette’s braided maze is reticulated with intersecting channels, undulating knots, and lemniscate loops. Given Puckette’s preference for pirouettes rather than right angles, hers is a continuous rather than segmented system.

In “The Immediate Wound” (2023), Stephanie Cristello discusses Puckette’s lineal markings in graphological terms, interpreting Puckette’s lines through “mathematic and asemic” notation. In her 2023 interview with Leon Caldwell, Puckette also cites Arabic calligraphy, Henri Michaux, Len Lye’s experimental film Free Radical (1958/1979), and pattern poetry as important influences. Later, in a telling comment, Puckette adds, “I do feel guided by something outside of myself,” likening her “imaginary alphabet” to “Agrippa [who] created a Celestial Alphabet meant to communicate directly with angels.” This “guidance” prefigures Puckette’s construction of three-dimensional wire maquettes, which she then transposes onto the board, homologizing their form. Her remarks, and her attempt to make objective this “guidance” from without, recalls Friedrich Schelling’s remarks on artistic production in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800):

For just as the artist is driven into production involuntarily and even in spite of himself (whence the ancient expressions pati deum, etc., and above all the idea of being inspired by an afflatus from without), so likewise is his production endowed with objectivity as if by no help of his own, that is, itself in a purely objective manner.

Although Michaux and Mirtha Dermisache similarly sought to externalize the unconscious vis-à-vis asemic writing, Puckette licenses this “afflatus” in a self-contained form, without breakages or stops.

Puckette’s lineal motifs construct such a self-contained and self-connected system. Compositionally and thematically, they are reminiscent of Fernand Deligny’s Monoblet tracings from the late 1970s. A mental health worker, filmmaker, and cartographer, Deligny traced the arachnean “wander lines” of the autistic children he worked with on a farm in the hills of Cévennes. In his essay “Les Cartes” (1976), Deligny writes of the children’s paths, describing “where the halts, returns, hesitations and loops respond to invitations at once real and imaginary, decoded, opening into constellations and not fenced into a system.” For Deligny, “The real work of the maps … is to retrace the wander line of a kid and see that it escapes us, that we can’t begin to grasp what this kid’s intention might be—and to realize that the wander lines are magnetized by something.” Where Deligny turns to his peripatetic patients, Puckette turns to what she calls “something outside of myself,” something numinous which cannot be captured in a semiotic system. Instead, her works betray an aesthetic experience that, to paraphrase Deligny, escapes intention, closing off straightforward meaning and sense.