Perennial Landscapes: Rackstraw Downes at Texas Gallery, Houston

Things that come alive in Rackstraw Downes’s paintings include: razor wire fences, landfills, oil fields, scrap metal plants, rainwater ditches, untenanted space, metal AC ductwork, beehive yards, farm buildings, horse racing tracks, underpasses, overpasses, apartment interiors, studio spaces, vent towers, salt sheds, outdoor dance floors, 4-megawatt battery systems, and bridges. 

In Texas Gallery’s exhibition, Rackstraw Downes: Paintings & Studies from Maine-New York-Texas, an indefatigable joie de vivre radiates through meticulous paintings the artist crafted between 1975 and 2017. Downes’s ebullience manifests as an active appreciation of the places he depicts; the images are made from life, and his subjects range from the ignored to the eyesore. The works are not ironic, indiscriminate, or impish, but instead implore the viewer to just look at that! His life between New York and the West Texas town of Presidio has provided the contradictory subjects of the dense, unorganized city and open, sweeping skies.

No matter a painter’s chosen subject, and whether deliberate or not, their intentionality often seeps into their finished product. Seventeenth-century paintings aim to convey a mythological ideal of the pastoral; 18th-century Rococo works make pleasurous delights accessible; Downes’s paintings radiate an intense feeling of the collapsing of time, that of inserting oneself repeatedly into a landscape to observe, meditate, and experience. In the exhibition’s ten pieces, many of which are studies and all of which were painted in multiple sessions on site, landscape escapes its historical stodginess and becomes new and personal. 

Perhaps the most accurate way to describe the works is considered — they make clear the appreciation Downes has for his subjects. The unpeopled paintings care for their vistas and seek to communicate the ineffable somethingness — is it beauty? fascination? ugliness? utility? all? — that permeates their scenes. 

Standing in Downes’s exhibition, I felt an uncanniness at being thrust into so many places with which he felt an intimate connection. And though the works’ titles situate them specifically in the world, their panoramas are ubiquitous enough to be places I think I’ve visited before, but can’t remember. The paintings’ physical tactility contributes to this; a work depicting a drainage ditch is made of up one long swath of canvas (sweeping horizontality is a Downes signature) whose side and bottom have been added on to. These supplemental canvas strips bear staple wounds — the residue of Downes’s plein air process, during which he found the composition as he went along, adapting to the site rather than expecting it to bend to him. The canvas’ tooth is pronounced, just as big a player in creating the scene as the paint itself, giving the picture the hazy feel of a memory. 

Another work — a large painting depicting the Chinati Foundation’s Arena in Marfa — is a masterclass in light and composition. For a painting illustrating such a luminous, hanger-like space, it feels immensely heavy; the vanishing point is in the upper right quadrant, giving it a sideways tilt that becomes more pronounced the longer you look. Raking light streaming in from the space’s upper windows is the composition’s saving grace, offering a respite from the building’s intense slant. This warping of space mirrors some of Downes’s outdoor horizon lines, which inexplicably curve up — perhaps a result of his 180-plus-degree views. The Chinati Arena piece has bumped around Texas Gallery’s backroom for years and has long been on my mind. It is a probe into art, space, and architecture, making it a quintessential West Texas piece by an artist who excels at West Texas pieces. 

Downes does us a great service: he looks at the world and cherrypicks the things he thinks we should be considering. A surveyor of places most people wouldn’t think of going, he shows a real world that is habitually overlooked, but which offers its own version of perennial beauty.

 

Rackstraw Downes: Paintings & Studies from Maine-New York-Texas is on view at Texas Gallery in Houston through September 28, 2024.