Michele Sudduth: Abstracting the Puzzle
by Mark Dean Johnson
Michele Sudduth has steadily pursued her painting practice in San Francisco’s Mission District for more than twenty years. I greatly admire her work for several reasons. These include the rich, formal sophistication of her ambitious abstractions and the multiple ways in which her work dialogs with modernist art history.
In his thirty-five ”Sentences on Conceptual Art,” artist Sol LeWitt wrote: “There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.” Sudduth’s most obvious and thus important element is a formal vocabulary of idiosyncratic hard-edge abstraction that employs repeated and often mirrored curvilinear forms. This compositional language harkens back to the 1960s painters associated with Op art, such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and especially Bridget Riley, but it also operates in visual conversation with contemporary Bay Area artists such as Amy Ellingson—who is in fact a good friend and former studio neighbor of Sudduth’s.
For the last decade, Sudduth has based her compositions on a specific found form: a single piece from a jigsaw puzzle. This reference conveys a hint of narrative content, as if the artist were using this familiar image to probe meaning and find her place in the larger puzzle of life. In the new body of work being showcased at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Sudduth has accentuated the human-head-like appearance of one of the puzzle piece’s bulging protuberances. This expands the work’s potential to provoke narrative readings. Viewers might find crowd scenes in these images, and conversations or confrontations between groups of figures that are derived from repeating and overlaying the puzzle shapes and forms.
However, the humanoid heads look more robotic than human, a little like C-3PO from Star Wars, and less like any inherently asymmetrically unique person. This places Sudduth’s work in different art historical contexts, including the highly specific contemporary Bay Area corporate landscape of film and gaming technology. But earlier epochs of modernism are also evoked, especially the 1920s geometric figures and faces created by artists such as Oskar Schlemmer and Alexej von Jawlensky—and even filmmaker Fritz Lang—who similarly envisioned a composite of man and machine as emblematic of our futuristic moment in time.
I further appreciate Sudduth’s work in relation to the great serialist composer from the same early modern period, Arnold Schoenberg. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed a twelve-tone compositional system, where a musical score of melodic lines and harmonies was largely constructed by manipulating motifs through the inversion, mirroring, and mirrored inversion of a specific sequence of notes. This structuralist approach to music, which invents unexpected symmetries through reversal and mirrored reflection, seems closely related to Sudduth’s approach to composing repeated forms in her own visual imagery.
Yet just as Schoenberg used a more personalized approach to rhythm to harness his atonal counterpoint and elicit psychological responses from his audience, so too does Sudduth employ chromatic harmonies and contrasts to spark emotional responses to her work. Sometimes the emotional responses that are triggered have an electric charge. Examples of this include her 2010 painting Explosion Fixe, which explodes with shattered orange light, and her 2014 London Bus, a centerpiece of the current exhibition. The latter work’s high-octane reds push forward into the space of the viewer like Matisse’s Red Studio, giving this work an immediacy of the now. In other works from this series of frieze-like compositions, the colors are softened with blended whites or complementary hues, and these mixed colors produce a tertiary space of tints and shades. This gives those works a quieter impact, although Sudduth’s masterful and subtle use of diagonal angles manages to imbue them with movement and speed. To my eye, these paintings are effective more because of Sudduth’s dynamic use of color and form than for their poetic probing of puzzles and human forms.
Early reviews of the 2014 Whitney Biennial have noted the exhibition’s important inclusion of several female contemporary abstract painters, including Marin County’s Etel Adnan. This current exhibition of new paintings by San Franciscan Michele Sudduth reminds us that Northern California has a rich and historically significant tradition of abstract painting by artists such as Jay DeFeo, Sylvia Lark, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Irène Pijoan—and that one distinctive hallmark of their achievement has been a constructed tension between nonobjectivity and an inspiration drawn from unexpected shapes found in the visual culture of our contemporary world.
Mark Dean Johnson
May 2014
Mark Dean Johnson is professor of art and gallery director, San Francisco Sate University