JAMES SIENA: TYPEWRITER DRAWINGS

UNTITLED-CAPITALS-RED (ROME, TO YOU LOVE WILL COME, WITH SUDDEN PASSION), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (ROTOR, ROTATOR, REIFIER), 2014INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (0-9, TEN, EIGHT, SIX, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE), 2014INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (IS IT I? IT IS I), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (LEFT AND RIGHT PARENTHESES, OPPOSING), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (0 THROUGH 9, ASCENDING, DESCENDING, CONCENTRICALLY), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (THREES, TEN TO ONE), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (DEVIL NEVER EVEN LIVED), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (CROSSES), WITH GLITCHES, 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (ROTOR DOUBLE GRID), 2014INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (ROMA, TIBI...), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

UNTITLED (GOD LIVED AS A DEVIL DOG), 2013INK ON PAPER

11 x 8 1/2

JAMES SIENA: TYPEWRITER DRAWINGS 12 September – 31 October, 2015

James Siena Strikes Again By Robin Cembalest

Though the exquisite drawings in this show were created with a typewriter, they share fundamental qualities with the hand-drawn abstractions for which James Siena is best known. Modest in scale—a standard 8½ by 11 inches—they’re crafted according to the predetermined series of steps the artist calls “visual algorithms.” Also, they’re influenced along the way by experiment and chance.

Begun as a kind of therapy for an injured wrist, these machine-made drawings let Siena flex different mus-cles, and not just in his hands. They allow him to channel his identities as a natural-born tinkerer, who built a bike from parts as a teen, and a self-taught expert in the history and mechanics of typewriters, who has long collected historical models (and still types envelopes on an IBM Selectric). The machines also unleash his powers as an arch wordsmith and conceptual trickster, whose usually oblique and allusive titles manifest themselves here in entirely new ways.

Individually, the works are nonnarrative. Together, their story is riveting. One of the pleasures of this show is how clearly it charts Siena’s process as he explores the potential of an anachronistic relic as a machine for making art.

He made the first of these drawings in 2013, during his residency at the American Academy in Rome. Working on an old Olivetti, he started exercising his wrist by typing reiterating characters. These turned into drawings where parentheses, circumflexes, and other assorted marks were liberated from their syntactical roles, becoming cascading waves and gently vibrating fields. He next experimented with digits, devising pat-terns in which numbers symmetrically alternate in ascending and descending order. These reminded him of the back-and-forth structure of palindromes, and language found its way into the drawings. With the touch and precision of a concert pianist, Siena laid down intricate, oscillating compositions of palindromes, in Latin (such as Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit amor) and English (like God lived as a devil dog).

The next step came when he played with crossing the words rotor and rotator, and discovered that he could orient them perpendicularly in propeller shapes. The trick was irresistible. He added the word reifier to the mix, creating a super-self-referential, palindrome-filled visual pun; a reifier, like the drawing itself, is some-thing that gives an abstract idea a concrete form.

The multiple-entendre motifs are even harder to make than they seem, Siena says. He works by memory, painstakingly counting out sequences and spaces as he types. No wonder the usually chatty artist, who often takes phone calls or listens to books on tape while he’s working, needs complete silence to draw on the typewriter.

Even as words replicate themselves on the page, the artist continues to classify these works as drawings—not as writing, or poetry, or even typing. But it’s clear that the machines are helping the veteran abstraction-ist succumb to the pleasures of text.

Siena hasn’t written his own palindromes yet, but he expects he will. By now, he says, they are rolling around in his head.

HIRAM BUTLER GALLERY 4520 BLOSSOM STREET HOUSTON TEXAS 77007 713.863.7097 HIRAMBUTLER.COM