“Roll,’’ as it’s called, is a big painting, and it’s perfectly square: 30 inches by 30 inches. The toilet roll in question rests on top of a metal toilet roll holder, to which the cardboard cylinder from the previous roll is still attached. There’s nothing else in the picture. What we see is essentially just a blue cylindrical shape casting a shadow against a light-orange ground.
Those colors, blue on apricot, may not suggest the best of taste in interior decorating terms, but they sure do zing. That’s part of the pleasure. But so is the positioning of the roll on top of the holder .
It’s odd, isn’t it? After all, a robustly proportioned and well-executed painting like this should surely, if it’s of a thing, be of an important thing . But this thing, besides being a humble toilet roll, suggests states of mind that seem at odds with propriety, deliberation, and other correlatives of “importance.’’ Whoever put it there (cue huffing and puffing) was clearly too lazy or absent-minded to remove the old, empty tube and put the new roll in its proper place.
How we think of such everyday failures, and how we reconcile them with the kind of refined aesthetic pleasure afforded by Kizik’s humming colors and deft paint handling, is up to us. But Kizik has - with a levity, skill, and conviction it’s hard not to admire - at least put the question before us. I like him for it.
The rest of this rollicking, rambunctious show, which covers almost 40 years of Kizik’s art-making, veers between representational imagery and abstraction, but never loses its sense of humor.
I didn’t like all of it. In fact, if I’m honest, I liked about half of it. When Kizik dabbles in abstraction, the results tend to be frictionless. There’s a lot of nifty technique at work, but the result is too often just a barrage of patterns, more or less successfully made to cohere. That said, his large 1978 painting “Release’’ is as ambitious, as wild, and yet as satisfyingly coherent as any abstract painting I’ve seen in years.
