Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Elaine Rexdale
American; 21st-century
Bloomington, IL: Cometogetherspace
65%
Barber Shop (from the series The Industries). c2018. Oil on canvas
Rexdale's some Sunday painter from non-Chicago Illinois. It's clear from its cartoonishness and lack of focus that this painting of hers is no masterwork. But the piece contains more than enough strokes of smart design to make it worth lingering upon; it's got rare bounce and jubilation. Its most salient feature is its gauche blue ground that's sprinkled with those nondiegetic uppercase orange SNIP's — a color combination and a conceptual, compositional ingenuousness that are tough to imagine coming from some more serious painter. And it works like hell. Namely, those letters manage to justify how overbusy Rexdale's scene is, and to tee off the full frontal flatness of every one of its figures. If these characters were as superficially rendered as they are but set against some candid plane of blue without the letters, they'd bunch up, the lines that comprise them would lose their isolating snap, and the arrangement wouldn't be able to manage its serious lack of direction. Other features that add some aesthetic substance to this painting's whimsy: the streaky application of the white paint in the barber bibs; the rhythm of the alternating directions of the car pictures on the wall; the way the patron's newspaper in the picture's lower right corner turns out towards the viewer. (2025)