The Brooklyn Rail

Very few live a simple existence. To each life, various efforts to categorize and make sense of experience accrue, serving to structure individuality. Most of these efforts flow continuously and unconsciously, yet poignant attempts are still made to create distinct pauses in that stream of consciousness—proofs of existence. A completist is an aficionado of genres (for example, someone who collects an entire musician’s discography) who attempts to organize those works into a perfect, comprehensive system—a vision of an ideal form. Chuck Webster’s kaleidoscopic imagination contains multitudes of experience sieved through a very specific abstract syntax of colors, forms, gestures and texts toward a grand, totalizing encounter. Curated by Chuck Webster and Michael David of M. David and Co. and hosted in Art Cake’s grand space in Sunset Park, the aggregate effect of Webster’s smaller drawings combined with two monumental works on paper (ranging from 2022-2024) is a vast cosmography of intimately inscribed meditations on art and vernacular culture. Even beyond the self-imposed limits of a completist, Webster's work causes a kind of typological displacement, replacing broad, traditional aesthetic categories with a universe of quirky, niche ”specialties”—a kind of transformation or ”sublation” of the ideal forms those categories once represented.

Entering the main room of the gallery, to the right, one is presented with a salon-style hanging of works on paper, each around 15 by 22 inches in dimension. This totality takes the form of a squashed oval, fitting given the breadth of the artist’s world-making ambition, implying a global meta-content. This allows for a cohesive viewing of the multifarious shape, color and text formats presented in each multi-media works on handmade paper. The artist works with an array of wet and dry media including graphite and colored pencils, watercolor and oil stick. These are materials he carefully collates from a variety of sources including rare or limited availability stock of the sometimes-antique, hand-made paper he favors, so that the “spirit” of his materials evinces a kind of energetic recuperation of subcultures yet fully exhausted. Webster graphically toggles between a painter’s and draughtsman’s lexicon, typically combining broad swaths of intensely pigmented areas counterpoised with intricate inscriptions of appropriated language, often gleaned from pop culture sources such as rap music’s elastic lingo or an inveterate fan’s appreciation of indie-rock trivia. In one composition he notes, in a kind of casual cuneiform font, a list of all the live albums made by rock and pop bands within his realm of experience in a multilayered and colored pictorial pile that recalls Robert Smithson’s Heap of Language (1966). In another he depicts the lyrics of a rap song, done in a variety of different colored pencils, spiraling out from a center point in a hypnotic, centrifugal array. In addition to his graphic skills, Webster is a sophisticated colorist, often enhancing his idiomatic visions with geometric accents in bright primary triads counterpoised within areas of less saturated, analogous hues. His facility with color animates his often text-laden images beyond mere literary description, contributing to the hallucinatory flow experienced when encountering their fragmentary logic.

Pressed into describing the artist’s particular formal vocabulary in an art-historical context, precedents such as Joan Miró and Paul Klee come to mind with their child-like confabs of whimsical geometry and glyph-like inscriptions floating in etheric ensembles. Closer contemporaries would certainly include Bill Jensen’s symbolic quiddities, William T. Wiley’s graphic cosmographies, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painterly and linguistic hieroglyphics. Webster has acknowledged, too, the strong influence of so-called outsider artists such as Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe, and Adolf Wölfli. Like these latter individuals, there’s a sense of obsessiveness in method in Webster’s approach yet combined with a paradoxically unstudied openness of gesture. It’s the open-ended nature of the artist’s investigations that significantly differentiate his work from the self-taught artists that inspire him, a distinction earned by his evident immersion in the elastic materiality of his work and, more importantly, the elasticity of lyrical variation in his thematic range.

A more diminutive and diaristic aspect of Webster’s practice (the largest works are 10 by 14 inches, the smallest between 2 by 3 inches and 4 by 5 inches) is represented on an adjacent wall of the gallery. Here the presentational format goes linear as though tandem running timelines of sticky notes tracking an ongoing forensic investigation. (The smaller works in the linear installation were all done in 2002.) Most images contain what seem like excerpts from the large compositions with relatively more succinct texts such as “cut man”, “directive”, “auxiliary power” and “telos”. This cryptic jumble, on a variety of paper colors and types, is tempting to decipher as a running interior commentary of content/compositional prompts knocking around in the artist’s head while otherwise preoccupied by an exuberant immersion in tactile virtues. One imagines these notes of flow, cobbled on the fly, as snatched moments of immediate inspiration, later archived for future, larger prospects.

The two monumental works included here, Meez and Dragon ZX-9 (both 2024), are created on specialized, hand-cast paper made at Dieu Donné studios in 2008. At almost a quarter-inch thick and 82 by118 inches each, they present as blown-up versions of works in the artist’s 15 by 22 inches format. This scale shift is significant not only for the impressive impact of expansive fields of bright pink, saturated red and deep violet jostling for texts that read “A Response” and “Every Raw Material at Hand,” but also as a conceptual transposition of the artist’s typically insulate musings into an extroverted address. These works embody the same kind of epic extroversion that Cy Twombly’s paintings invoking the Trojan wars do, and with as much gestural brio, yet their lack of specific historical reference frees them from the attendant limits of such a literary confabulation. Webster’s gesture here is more akin to Walt Whitman’s notion of a “barbaric yawp,” as in Dragon ZX-9, where a flickering “tongue” of fiery red emanates from an abstract white “maw.”

An illuminating adjunct to Webster’s display of works is his curation, with artist/gallerist Micheal David of M. David Co., of compositions by self-taught artists such as James Castle, George Widener, and Thornton Dial together with kindred spirits of his generation including Chris Martin and Steve DiBenedetto. Castle is a significant inclusion here for the intimate nature his works share with Webster’s. Similarly, Widener’s obsessive methodologies which include collaged images and text echo Webster’s own deployment of such. Martin is known for monumental paintings that nevertheless feel as though they were torn from smaller scrapbook musings, with a few symbolic fragments visible in the three drawings on display here. DiBenedetto’s array of dense compositions are Klee-like in the matrices he weaves that appear to arise from a manic compulsion born of horror vacui. Seen as a Greek chorus offering context to Webster’s main act, this mini-exhibit serves as a key to understanding his approach, where the boundary between the self-taught and the professionally trained, the savant and the seasoned journeyman, is so thin and permeable that it practically disappears.

What’s remarkable about Webster’s work is that, despite his evident erudition in parsing “high” and “low” culture—thoughtfully mixing aspects of both, much like a painter blends colors with intuition and experience—his approach avoids reducing the work to an intellectual performance. Webster seems focused on fostering an active dialogue between his carefully chosen materials and their ability to express a free exchange of vital energies, in both abstract forms and common language—unmediated, ironically, by the very categories and distinctions that typically structure its conceptual framework. Ultimately, these works resonate through the dissonance they create between their immediate emotional impact and intellectual depth.