Christopher Wool’s images are harsh as the dry heat in Texas

Psychosculptures, is what Christopher Wool calls some of his works in the Brussels Xavier Hufkens Gallery. World famous for his paintings, the American artist here mainly shows photos and sculptures he made in Texas – whimsical wire plastics as if tumbleweeds have blown over from the barren heat to these art galleries. The exhibited sculptures range from actually found metal wire and rusty nails, objets trouvésto stylized enlargements of it, with as piece de resistance a three meter high wire plastic in the gallery garden. Intersecting lines propel the bronze loops upwards. “At home I make them much bigger, five or almost six meters,” says Wool there, a man in a checkered lumberjack shirt and a gray ponytail. “Those images are from the last eight or ten years. It’s because of Marfa, where I partly live, that I started making these. It makes sense, it’s right there, it’s because of what can be seen.”

Indeed, his sculptures resemble dry undergrowth or barbed wire from Marfa, where Wool went to photograph such unruly. Black and white images of such a tumbleweed, boulders, car tires, building blocks, remnants of what must have been a shed. His images started with that, he explains. „Psychosculptures, after Kippenberger who talked about psychobuildings. They are potential sculptures, of which Marfa is very rich, there is a lot of rubbish and rubbish to see, also because there are hardly any walls around properties. I thought it was a funny idea that something like that could be a work of art.”

‘Bad rabbit’

His photo series hang on the gallery walls and can be seen in photo albums, with titles such as westtexaspsychosculpture† swamp or bad rabbit† “Because there are a lot of rabbits around us, around those sculptures. Then I heard the term “bad rabbit” on the news. A code name for I believe a CIA investigation, I don’t know but it stuck. One of my text paintings was called bad dog† It’s just a name. A good name in my opinion.” He broke through the last century with those cryptic text paintings, every major museum worldwide has them, at auctions they go for millions. They are white surfaces with black stenciled letters that have a hardness that you now see in his sculptures. †tough”, he calls the images, harsh as the dry heat in Texas.

But that environment is gone here in Brussels, what does that mean for his work? “That works well because it takes on a different scale and meaning. That three-meter statue seems very small outside in Texas, but here in the garden it takes on a different presence.” That presence has to do with scale: its metals objets trouvés also figure in photos of which you do not understand whether you are looking at something very small or just meters in size. They are photos without anything to hold on to. The wire plastics resemble spatial drawings, which in turn provide inspiration for his paintings. The images show traces of casting seams from the manufacturing process that he deliberately leaves behind, which resemble thorns or barbed wire prickles. “I wanted to show the development process, how I have shifted painting to three-dimensional work. When I make a drawing, and it looks like an image, something else arises from it. As long as you keep an open mind.”

For example, the whimsical shapes in an exhibition echo with a Texan desolation. Much of the work dates from during the pandemic when Wool was barely able to travel, let alone exhibit. This is the first time these works are on display together – even for him. „the copper one coating suddenly looks like the pink of the paintings, I only notice that now”, he says somewhat surprised, and then explains that outsourcing always causes some “accidents”.

Although he doesn’t sound very enthusiastic about these accidents, mistakes are traditionally part of his work process: he makes scans and photocopies of his paintings, including the grids and image noise that arise mechanically. He paints on that, erases it again, and that is why he is regarded as a post-conceptual painter: it is more about painting than painting himself. In fact, the giant canvases now in Brussels are not painted, but are screen-printed and photoshopped variations on smaller paintings.

„Between my wife [kunstenaar Charline von Heyl] and I think it’s a kind of running gag that if you feel in the evening that it’s been a good day in the studio, the next morning you see that you performed poorly. And vice versa too.” So art is a struggle? Wool, who prefers to keep the conversation short because he still has some emails to send, now looks pained. “Yeah, it’s frustrating when it doesn’t work out. When I was young I found that really hard, now I am at an age where failures no longer affect me. That is why I also work in different media at the same time. If a sculpture makes me depressed, I take pictures. I switch when it’s too difficult, but also when it’s too easy. If you don’t experience frustration, you don’t get satisfaction.”