the walker’s path. That the inside/outside shift of this project also occurs in the paintings is related to Wool’s turn from an interest in effaced interior abstractions—as characterized by the mid- to late-nineties rollover and graffiti canvases that used readymade wallpaper applications and other decorative insignia as a basis—to a renewed engagement with modes of the urban exterior. The challenge of how such forlorn, baleful tracings might be transposed to the studio work takes prominence in all of the subsequent work. As Benjamin Buchloh has written in relation to the work of Simon Hantaï and Jacques Villeglé, the “dialectics of paintings’ dispersal” 7 —a fairly apt description of Wool’s ongoing formal concerns—has repeatedly sought to transfer street encounters into abstract procedures that might counter insistence upon the authentic mark as inherent and ultimately definitive of painting. 8

How Wool’s paintings take advantage of an in-between position in the remarkably self-conscious history of abstract painting has been repeatedly observed, between immediate gesture and mediated remove, between Pollock and Warhol, between a retinal quiver and allover legibility of process, between paroxysm and cool. But to follow this condition in his newer work is to take note of the increased temporality that occurs in Wool’s presentation of a series—the rapid jump now encouraged between large canvases to the punctuated skip of a framed silkscreen, back to attempts at reading sequence, the inevitable falter that ensues, and so into the specific incidents of a given canvas. These are surfaces where intrusion and retreat interrupt the trajectory of each spray painted mark. Taking place at different times in the enamel’s

That Wool’s painting style has long owed something to the dispersed style of the urban passerby is readily acknowledged by the artist’s own in-the-street anecdote of “sex” and “luv” appearing before him in black spray paint on a white van, the

attempt to set, the solvent-laden rubbing varies in intensity from the grey smear of immediate erasure to the recalcitrant rubbing out of a long-standing line that thereafter bears trace of its absence, losing enamel but maintaining a ghosted outline within the composition. Links between works are further complicated by rotating the canvases—as evinced by the up, down, and side to side direction of the drip down—indicating a session-like approach of attending to more than one painting at a time in order to further elaborate serial yet conjunctive relationships.

These “tiny deportations” result in an experience of time rather than depth as an index emerges from the mix of clouded gesture and lacerated crossings, one that makes a positive of cancel and activates Wool’s propulsive vision of null and void further into the frame with each pass. For, even as illusionistic space seems to break through, the afterwards of erasure always intercedes, rendering such traditional notions as pentimenti largely performative.9 And while the hand remains conspicuously removed by spray paint and rag, a re-assertion of expressive gesture—though impoverished and reputed—is increasingly prominent. This move toward what was previously disallowed is familiar as Wool often overturns his process: whether reversing painting procedures in his silkscreen enlargements—where a splotch, drip, spiral, or wash of paint is often zoomed in on to give a molecular, microscopic feel of immediacy—or by foregoing the hit-record status of the text paintings, Wool has repeatedly moved away from hallmarks. As he has said, “You take color out, you take gesture out—and then later you can put them in.” 10

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