One wall of Paul Rusconi’s cavernous downtown studio is dominated by a massive mixed-media double image of American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert. The sky-lit space, a converted warehouse which sits amid food distributors and garment companies in an industrial area southeast of downtown, is filled with other immediately recognizable subjects’Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Kate Moss, Rupert Murdoch. Others, like skateboard legend Tony Alva or art giant Simon de Pury, are revered within their own world of expertise. Rusconi’s own photographs or images sourced from pop culture, like magazine covers or paparazzi shots, are the foundation for his work. His art is about ‘documenting what’s happening in the moment.’ Rusconi says he ‘loves the idea of repetition”of recycling or repackaging imagery. His appropriation of pop culture icons might leave him open to criticism that the work is too commercial, but the artist says he’s deliberately working to test the boundary between art and advertising. ’The line that gets drawn between artists and commercialism today is fascinating to me,’ says Rusconi, whose work will be exhibited at Gallery 169 on West Channel Road in Santa Monica Canyon beginning Saturday. In summer 2009, Rusconi created a series based on a close-up shot of Mary-Kate Olsen using a Chanel compact case, and embellished the images with the words ‘Coco Baby’ in Chanel nail enamel. When he propped the pieces in front of the Chanel boutique on Robertson Boulevard, the artist ended up fielding threats of arrest from the retailer; trying to talk security out of tossing the work into a nearby dumpster; and contending with women upset that he had bought out all the available stock of a limited edition nail color, ‘L.A. Sunset.’ ’It wasn’t to be provocative, it wasn’t to anger people,’ Rusconi says. He wanted passersby to ask, ‘Is that art or is that just an ad for Chanel?’ He mentions Takashi Murakami’s design work for Louis Vuitton and New York artist Tom Sach’s work with merchandising icons like McDonald’s as examples of work that challenge that dichotomy. Rusconi, 45, has taken an unorthodox path, beginning as an independent dealer of postwar and contemporary art in 1987. ‘I never wanted to be an artist,’ says Rusconi, who lives in Malibu. ‘Being a dealer for all those years was my school.’ Rusconi’s process is far more technical than it appears. He digitally screens electronically charged ink onto magnetized plexiglass. The plexiglass is then mounted floating above a layer of white substrate. Both the ink on the glass and the shadow of the ink as it falls on the layer below combine to form the image. Then the artist typically adds other elements, using unusual materials like nail polish or automotive paint. For his color pieces, Rusconi starts with a black-and-white photograph, then breaks the image into four separate layers of color (magenta, cyan, yellow and black), precisely screening the pixels of color onto the plexiglass. Up close, the pixelated dots form circular patterns; from afar, the image looks, once again, black and white, but with a dimensionality that didn’t exist in the original, almost vibrating with the pulse of repetitive pattern. Gallery 169 will present Rusconi’s ‘Ship Talk,’ an exhibition of mixed-media works that begin with the image of a square-rigged ship at full sail on a dark sea, a reference from an Ed Ruscha painting of the same title. Rusconi’s text seems projected from the iconic ship and offers commentary and contrast. He intends the work as homage to an artist he has long admired and calls an ‘incredible innovator.’ As a dealer, Rusconi once sold the Ruscha painting, one of a series the artist completed in the mid-1980s. ’It slipped through my hands because I couldn’t afford to buy it at the time,’ Rusconi says, adding that the piece haunted him for years. When asked how he thinks Ruscha would react to his own iteration, Rusconi responds that he has called the artist and his brother to invite them to the show and hopes that they are able to come. Rusconi’s work can be found in numerous private homes and public art institutions, including The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Batonga Foundation in Washington, D.C.; the Castilla Foundation, Madrid; Twentieth Century Fox; and the Interface Foundation.
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