Robert Rauschenberg, Nightshades and Phantoms @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Robert Rauschenberg, Purr (Night Shade), 1991

Robert Rauschenberg did a lot of experimenting with metal the 1990s. The works currently on exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, Night Shades and Phantoms, are among the most haunting made in this time, perhaps because of the predominance of black, white and grey. Their bringing together of industrial materials, painting and intellectual issues that preoccupied artists at this time, also make them of their era. That said, there is nothing outdated about Night Shades and Phantoms, and neither are they any less mesmerizing than they were in the 1990s. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Marsh Haven (Phantom), 1991

Robert Rauschenberg, Office Break (Phantom), 1991

In many of the works, Rauschenberg brings together two or three photographs screen printed onto the metal supports, creating surfaces filled with a multiplication of bifurcations and trifurcations. Beyond the surface, there is tension between the metal and the image printed and/or painted on its surface, often of nature or cloth blowing int he wind. The transience of the fabric, animals and plants is always in tension with the apparent industrial intransigence of metal. In the images of the Phantom series, doors and windows, shadows and trees float over the surface of the mirrored aluminium, appearing and disappearing, depending on where we stand. There are also tensions and conflicts between the layers they create, layers of images jostling on and as the surface. Indeed, the works are all about surface. They are about the properties and fabric of aluminium put to an unusual use, as support for images that are filled with walls, windows, curtains, doorways, and signage. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Bounders (Phantom), 1991

Rauschenberg's process creates more conflicts and clashes. Photographs printed or screened onto metal supports produce a merging of multiple mass produced images into a one of a kind. Rauschenberg took the photographs with a Polaroid camera driving across the US, and thus, ended up with single images without negatives taken in places on his trail. Reproduction of any kind was out of the question. The hand made, carefully crafted images often have a stroke of paint on their surface, a brush of tarnish on aluminium, the single artistic gesture to seal their uniqueness. The transience of the process is likewise repeated in the appearance of "phantoms"; the ink can be so faint that the images begin to look like pictures pulled away from the surface, leaving the outline of an object such as a fire hydrant or an animal wandering across an open window.

Robert Rauschenberg, Driveway Detour (Night Shade), 1991

I also kept hearing the images. The sounds of aluminium are always loud, and wandering through the exhibition, the clanking of machines, cranking of mechanisms, the movement of pistons in Nightshades in particular consume the gallery spaces. In this they reminded me of Bruce Baillie's Castro Street. The Phantom images, on the other hand, whisper. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Drums (Night Shade), 1991

Indeed, the multi-sensory evocations of Rasuchenberg's work are what ensure that they are not outdated; the images are so much more than representative of a moment in history when the industrial and the natural did battle over the same environment without consciousness. Rauschenberg's ability to make metal so eloquent and nuanced is another among the many reasons for the works' ongoing potency.