French artist Martial Raysse is shown at the Dwan Gallery. Raysse is an exponent of the Pop art vocabulary, not as we have come to think of it but transposed into a quintessential French idiom. Stepping into the gallery from the insolent, high-pitched commercial atmosphere of Los Angeles, one is stimulated to a fascinating sequence of speculation about the culture just outside in contrast with the distilled view of popular French culture within.
The striking distinction is between Raysse’s febrile, exacerbated ultra-preciosity and the American Pop culture’s untrammeled innocence in vulgarity. The ascendant example is Made in Japan (1964) in which a poisonous green Ingres nude languishes upon variously colored cushions, holding a fan made of real peacock feathers. The technique is a combination of collage and a sort of photo-serigraphic method which Raysse uses repeatedly. The colors have that special hideousness which is singular to cheap color reproduction.
Supermarket (1961) is a white compartmented display case surmounted by a slanted mirror. Each niche contains some antiseptic little cosmetic appurtenance or cheerfully colored dime-store notion—cotton balls, artificial flowers, plastic tubes of shampoo, lipsticks, etc. Even this array of familiar objects has a specifically continental character, and not simply because the labels are in French. The work is a deliciously smug tribute to a society obsessed by appearances.
One work in this selection, Transfusion, (1960) transcends national boundaries (though it is akin to the original Dada gestures). It is made of tangled plastic tubing encased in a wall-mounted plastic globe; the ends of the tube hang down on either side, dangling plastic bottles half-filled with red fluid. There are two neon flower pots, one posed against a white canvas (Tri-Colore Moderne Painting, 1964) and the other free-standing (The Pot and the Flower, 1964). These speak as symbols of an over-civilized return to vacuous frivolity, but in neutral terms. Puerto Rico Eyes Neon Style (1967) and Kristin (1962) induce a much sharper pang of horror at the lengths to which cheap sensibility has carried us. The former is a patent-leather, black plastic panel with curving shapes sliced away to expose under-surfaces of pink, purple and blue. Kristin is a collage on mirror: the profile face of a long-lashed fashion model wears a real ostrich feather wig. Out of her mouth like punctuation marks come a fluorescent orange arrow, a blotted imprint of petulant lips and an upright tube of lipstick in a plastic case.
Raysse uses fashion-model images in various contexts (Sur La Plage-Titre Intelligent, 1962; Girl on the Beach, 1965). They have in common a slick stereotyped boredom, frozen into vivacious attitudes against extravagant holiday settings or simply smiling vacantly in fluorescent isolation.
—Jane Livingston
