Somewhere in my winter depression that began an entire spring before: I dreampt of a dark
maroon room, in which a young troubadour held up a needle-punched tapestry that read, in
cursive brown lettering “ENNUI.” On an ecru background with a thin border, the word was
elegant but also a little funny because of the bathmat texture.
I didn’t know Zachary Rawe was working on his new panels of text-based paintings then,
turning on tragi-comedic words and half-spoken poems dissolved by loss and longing. But I
thought of his earlier text works and also of one of his influences, the Philadelphia artist Ree
Morton. Like the dream, and a bit like the feeling of ennui itself, Rawe’s work has a way of
bringing language into physicality that dislodges it from a clean relationship with thought.
Instead, words become not-quite words that well up in the mouth (throat) with latency.
For me, it’s the search for a language of intimacy that invites spilling prose—though the
paintings themselves feel more suggestive than explicit about their ongoing relation to words;
a state of wanting without the fantasy or drive of want; of longing that remains tangled with its
object and the surround. Like a smell, it coats the nose, the inside of the face, the gums, the
teeth: remember, repeat, remember.
Morton’s journals 1975-76:
“I start with the fact that from an individual’s particular point of view, while one thing
may momentarily appear to be what is really going on, in fact what is actually
happening is plainly a joke, a dream, accident, or mistake, a misunderstanding, or a
deception or theatrical performance . . .”
I perform language the way I perform desire, as stand-ins for the inner romance.
I visit the boxes of remembrances of an imprecise not-quite-nothingness: the top shelf of my
mother’s closet housing her stash of Tussy and balled up pantyhose, the feeling of baring my
chest in a swamp at the cool edge of autumn, watching a lover eat cashews in the kitchen late
at night.
These lapses are more felt image than event, moments of neutrality more than of love—their
charge comes from a lack of narrative positioning in a world of hyper-speed production. They
tempt a feeling of sorrow, embarrassment, or even secret delight at the thought of an
observation that could be held outside commitments to production.
This is how I approach grey: sideways, with a certain veil of discretion.
To write grey requires frequent pockets late at night or in the early morning, to look at the alley
thicket outside my bedroom and to mill around my apartment without the lights on. Night
brings the gradual settling into grayscale when the world turns living photograph, softened,
silvery. It startles me a little, how much moonlight reaches Germantown, even though it’s part
of the city. The ocular greying is prior to my ability to think grey-ly, in all its subtle, proliferating
moments of tenderness and refusal.
Grey is as much substance as it is color when tethered to material like concrete, mineral, or
stone. This is when grey behaves within grammatical convention, when its definition is
inseparable from its being: dreary, aged, depressed, dull. To stop at these surface meanings
misses the billowing possibility of grey and its attendants.
Grey’s weirder quality is its accumulation and arrival within the intangible: the way it leaves
itself on things like the accretion of grey on sheets that have been slept in; grey as weather and
overcast; grey as dust, how all the dust in the world amounts to composite greyness.
Grey disagrees with itself often, ignoring material and behaving like atmosphere. It is almost
hydrophilic, a kind of oiliness seems to follow, a coating, or a slinking along the physical world
with the dance of shadow.
Rawe’s newest paintings dip into a grey center and perform small autonomies of language and
feeling therein. Culling from many referents—other artists, friends, self-elected
constraints—Rawe’s work is structured by repetition and rigor as much as open-sourced
dialogue. All the paintings have borders and words, sometimes lifted from another context like
the phrase ‘of previous dissipations,’ which comes from a 1974 Ree Morton piece of the same
title.
The word dissipation performs its close relation dissipate each time it is read, referring to the
dissolving past indulgences and the lovers, habits, and pleasures they contain. A companion to
ennui, dissipations are erotic in form rather than any content, their transience becoming
fragmentary memory that extends and repeats, changing from its original meaning, re-centering
around new dissipating cores.
In his studio, Rawe and I talk about Josef Albers as a practitioner of color, as someone trying to
figure out what color does within an ever-shifting set of formulas. The grouping of panels
hanging in front of us vary in temperature and saturation across a close range of supple greys.
Blueness in one seems bracing against the warmer putties and fawns but were it to hang alone,
it would look neutral. I think of Albers’ exercises as preoccupations with what Eva Hesse wrote
about repetition, that it’s endlessness “can be considered erotic.”
I recently heard Jamieson Webster read from her new book Disorganization and Sex, from a
chapter that recounts a ’72 clinical study by Selma Fraiberg into the characteristics of genital
arousal/pre-pubescent orgasm in girls. Webster writes that the masturbation was under-girded
by a certain “kind of turning away from the peaks of excitement and experiences of pleasure
that feel unending.” The child in the case provides the example of singing “My country, ‘tis of
thee” but only the refrain “My country ‘tis… my country ‘tis… my country ‘tis…” until she goes
to sleep.
This auto-mechanism of self-pleasure as plateau without horizon stretches out and retracts
with intent but not destination. Language made grey, painted into atmosphere or mark, traffics
between and around thought without landing on it directly: look at Rawe’s floating letters as
acts of poetics, inscribed with a quality of precision without prediction of outcome or
expectation of arrival.
The surface of Rawe’s paintings have a gentle tactility that feels attuned to paint as an elastic
medium, appealing to the play between paint’s wet and dry qualities. Certain glimpses of drier
passages at the edges of letters or the decorative borders window into hints of purple, yellow.
But the greys feel like wetness that has been cured rather than dried.
This is not to say that painting is in possession of a sacred quality or set apartness from the
timbre of the real, but that it shares a working against or across categorical designation.
Basically: if I want to have the feeling of a cry without it breaking through (in gratitude or
bewilderment) I look at the perfect frame of the ceramic dish where a worn bar of soap rests.
The accumulation of waxy, hardened fat on the finger depth ridges, the white glaze gone blue
at the corners. The hardness of tile against the soap, melted by the body. The feeling of
slipping. The designation of a border.
Or if I want to remember what it is to feel contained: I think of the soap before it’s separated
into nice thick blocks (yellow, white, maybe blue), or of pigment before its ground smooth and
mixed with oil, or the raw emollience of pastes, balms, creams.
I hold these as properties of painting and of language: a wetness that refuses finality, a
plasticity that is embedded within movement on the molecular level.
A meaning that shifts, and then shifts again—or like Rawe describing his own process of text
selection—taking a long time to get to the words, and then mostly forgetting about them.