STEPHEN ROSENTHAL

P420 is pleased to announce the opening on Saturday 6 May, at 3PM, of two solo exhibitions by Irma Blank (Celle, 1934 – Milan, 2023) and Stephen Rosenthal (Washington D.C., 1935), with the most recent works of both artists. The exhibitions, organized separately in the two rooms of the gallery, share this fact of featuring the latest production – which also becomes the last, in the case of Irma Blank, due to her recent passing – of both artists: the cycle titled Gehen, second life by Irma Blank, then interpreted in very recent period in the version Ways, also included in the show, and the canvases and works on paper of the series Notations by Stephen Rosenthal, made from 2019 to 2022.

Active since the late 1960s, after almost five decades of research on painting, during the course of the 2000s Stephen Rosenthal has created a series of works generically presented under the heading Constellations. These pieces were already shown in the solo exhibition Islands, Archipelagoes, Constellations held by P420 with the American artist in 2018. The act of painting is simply the first phase in the making of these works. Using rags and solvents, at a slow, meditative pace, Rosenthal removes his own brushstrokes and erases any recognizability of the canvas. He erases but does not eliminate everything. The artist’s touch allows hints of color to survive, clusters of paint rounded by the repeated passage of the rag. These are only marks, faded memories. The work is thus produced by a process of successive, gradual and inexorable loss. Nevertheless, over the last few years something else has happened in his paintings. After the process of destruction, Rosenthal has begun to develop a new phase of reconstruction. His brush begins to make trails, his pencil writes, and one has the clear sensation that something is again being generated, to the point of balancing and perhaps even overwhelming the remaining traces of the previous phase.

The works on paper and paintings in the exhibition, produced over the last 3-4 years, establish a forceful dialogue between the memory of what has been and the present life of what takes place. Riccardo Venturi, whose critical essay accompanies the exhibition, goes back to Ad Reinhardt for a few but incisive words with which to describe Rosenthal’s paintings: More & more about less & less. A phrase without a verb, a sort of bare-bones manifesto, which in spite of its Beckett-like terseness says more than many critical writings. For Rosenthal, “making painting – Venturi continues – is simply a way of thinking, even when it pushes into a liminal territory, where addition (more & more) meets subtraction (less & less).”