Derrick Buish’s ‘Remarks in Color’ at Tory Folliard

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Visual Arts

I finally made it in to see a show of paintings by Derrick Buisch at Tory Folliard this week (up through May 27) and it caught me off guard a little. Not because his exhibition “Remarks in Color” is mind-bendingly beyond what I expected from him; but rather because it was exactly what I expected, in just the right way, like seeing an old friend. 

I’ve known Buisch’s work for a long time, and he’s one of the few artists I can honestly say gets me incrementally closer to possessing a complete understanding of his point-of-view with each painting I see. Each piece builds not on the last, but towards an entire perspective. Like how a conversation with someone evolves slowly over time, revealing detail after detail about the underlying character of the person across from you. It doesn’t matter where it goes, because it’s all revealing an indirect portrait of an entire multi-dimensional human personality. This show didn’t just do that, it revealed the nature “that” in general. 

When one first encounters Buisch’s pared down graphic forms, often set against a monochromatic background, they can’t be blamed for wondering what the storyline is. His works are almost always spare and economical. Bluespikesspring for instance isn’t going to blow your mind with an epic yarn, but it’ll give you plenty of threads to follow through his work. The 24 x 24-inch spiky, powder-blue form against a tangerine background tells you just a few things about what he’s on about. But you only learn this as you keep on rapping with it. Color Cat Chart #4 offers another enclosed shape of a thick impasto line. One starts to infer that the subjects are meant to live in an intentional purgatory between shape and figure, between abstract and concrete, and between graphics and rendered form. 

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Primary Colors

His use of color and pattern ply similarly ambiguous territory. In the case of Bluespikesspring and Color Cat Chart #4, each employs an almost academically referential scheme. The former a complementary, optical tension, and the latter a primary color chart. As for pattern and surface, the former uses a from-the-tube-impasto line on a flat field and the latter a messy-but-regular benday pattern on a clean unmodulated background. 

The conversation continues to move. Creature Weather Head, another marginal lifeform, lies on a bed of the dense, matte primary-red that sent me back to the tangerine background in Bluespikesspring, and made me reconsider its nature. Like I might’ve a remark in a good verbal exchange, I recalled something in the past and folded it back into the moment. It’s a dynamic, reciprocal, and always unfolding story. And this is true of Buisch’s work beyond the canvas, from his record collection, to the ‘zines he’s produced, to the ephemera he collects, to the photographic observations about improbable color moments he takes. Not everyone is privy to this comprehensive bag of things, but it’s not important because the paintings get there in good time. 

Buisch’s work made me think about how every artist I know has an at-the-ready way of addressing gimmicky art contrivances; the kind fathers-in-law and first year art students trot out as “really amazing!!!” I for instance tell my students that most artists realize that the opportunity to make a photorealistic portrait of Marilyn Monroe out of Gummi Bears is always available, it’s just not taken. A friend once told me he simply calls such things “Mad Libs Art.” It’s probably the same with any creative pursuit. I’m sure Max Richter or Wynton Marsalis both know that a chestnut like “California Gurls” by Katy Perry is always out there, but they choose to go in another direction, in pursuit of open waters and their own unique intercourse with the world. I reminded myself as I left Tory Folliard and Derrick Buisch’s latest paintings that it’s the journey, not the destination, the conversation not the consummation.