NYAB Event - Robert Lazzarini "Friendly-Hostile-Friendly"

Robert Lazzarini "Friendly-Hostile-Friendly"

Paul Kasmin Gallery

This event has ended.

friendly-hostile-friendly takes as its point of departure the actual photo-based, realistic-situation shooting targets that are used in law-enforcement training and are comprised of both “friendly” and “hostile” figures. Mounted on various substrates, such as cardboard boxes, pieces of scrap lauan, and Styrofoam, the works on display are composed of distortions of these shooting targets after they have been shot with various caliber guns. Contrary to their intended training purposes, the targets in friendly-hostile-friendly display a violence that is indiscriminate. Whether armed or un-armed, everyone has been shot.

The distorted targets present the bullet hole as gestural mark, connecting two manners in which the hand leaves a trace of dynamic action. Twelve-gauge shotguns and .44 magnum, .38 caliber and 9mm handguns become tools of artistic production inextricably linked to one’s grasp, both manual and intentional. In this, the targets issue from Lazzarini’s earlier explorations of the phenomenology of perception, in which mathematical distortions based upon similarly pre-existing objects appeared to collapse three-dimensional and two-dimensional space. By beginning with a more two-dimensional object, Lazzarini’s targets continue to limn this narrow space—the shot-up substrates add a sculptural dimension to the otherwise flat targets, as do the bullet holes that puncture both the target and it's backing —while simultaneously opening up new ones that touch on the problem—and violence—of abstraction.

friendly-hostile-friendly revisits the American mythology of crime and violence. The monochromatic screen prints of the targets recall the implicit violence of Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964) and his gun-brandishing Silver Elvis (1963), while the deformations recall the early shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. Lazzarini's distortions suggest a different heritage for modernism’s well-disciplined punctual gaze: the panic of a violent moment, the adrenaline rush, the experience of anxiety, stress, fear—and the illusory sensation of time slowed down.