Ross Simonini was telling me about a visit he’d taken to the podiatrist. He’d been engaged in a series of long walks — from Brooklyn up to the Cloisters, for instance — and was having some knee pain. The doctor lectured him on the importance of regular foot exercise. Simonini, being an artist with a characteristically restless curiosity, soon grew tired of the typically prescribed regimen — a lot of lifting-of-things-with-the-feet, basically — and began to wonder: What would it be like to pick up a brush with the toes, to make paintings or drawings with an appendage far more unwieldy than the hand? “Your big toe, you can control very well,” he explained. “With your pinky toe... whatever happens, happens.”
The resulting “Podiatric” works express a holistic body-consciousness that is an important facet of the artist’s practice. Simonini makes drawings and paintings that derive from psychological stress, dietary habits, and anatomical limits. In his two-person show with Matthew Samolewicz, at Blackston Gallery in New York through July 6, he’s showing a collection of assorted drawings — many of which express a clear affection for Carroll Dunham and Philip Guston — as well as two distinct sets of work made with the hands, not the feet: A series of jittery, very-mixed-media drawings on restaurant napkins, and three larger “Itinerant Canvases.” The former, dubbed “Anxiety Napkins,” are created during his day-to-day wanderings; the latter are produced on longer excursions, camping trips, and the like. They’re all the result of Simonini’s thinking about how to collapse various factors — his physical surroundings, what he’s eating and drinking, how he’s feeling — into a single, largely abstract object.
Both series are made outside of the studio: in the woods, on the beach, or while riding the subway. Simonini, who is also a musician and member of the band NewVillager, had found himself spending a great deal of time touring the country; this type of work grew out of a desire to be productive while on the road. For the “Anxiety Napkins,” Simonini first starts with the blank canvas of a restaurant napkin. “I was originally stealing them,” he admitted. “I liked the idea that you’re building anxiety into the actual material — there’s an anxiety of thievery — but recently I’ve started asking if I could take them.” He then totes the napkin around with him, gradually building up a field of marks. He takes the napkin to other restaurants with him, he said, and uses it to clean his face or wipe up spills. Stains accrue, and influence the outgrowth of later marks. There are four “Anxiety Napkins” at Blackston. Simonini made one of them, which hangs over the front desk, during the course of an eight-hour marathon conversation with Richard Tuttle. (Simonini is an editor at The Believer.) “We started at a restaurant, and I took the napkin from there,” Simonini recalled. “I was taking notes on it.” Tuttle didn’t have to inquire why his interviewer was simultaneously making an artwork while they talked: “I don’t know if he’s the kind of guy you’d have to explain that to,” Simonini said. “It all made sense to him.” Generally, the napkins don’t have such a striking genesis story — they’re the result of everyday wanderings, everyday anxieties. “I’ll fold them up into a size I can put on my knee, and mark on them in a way that sort of feels like a massage, making a movement that somehow both alleviates and addresses anxiety,” he said. (While the basic process has something in common with work like William Anastasti’s “Subway Drawings,” Simonini’s napkins have far more figurative substance, even if some of that is accidental or unintentional.)
Simonini in his studio
The “Itinerant Canvases” on view at Blackston are far more primitive looking — a little bit Joe Bradley, a little bit cave-paintings-at-Lascaux. One was made during a three-week honeymoon camping trip up the west coast. A basic set of working parameters gives “a framework for abstraction,” which can often seem intimidatingly open-ended, he said. Simonini brings nothing but a furled piece of raw canvas — no brushes, pigments, or other equipment — and relies on his immediate location for both the media he’ll apply and the tools he’ll use to apply it. In the case of the honeymoon painting, that meant conjuring a green mass of color using coffee mixed with crushed pine needles, and adding further adornment with black smudges from burnt firewood. Another work, made in Florida, appears to be an orderly arrangement of small icons; it was made by smearing and pressing flowers and grasses directly onto the canvas. “Flowers are one of the most common subjects in all of art history. This is another way of approaching landscape, or flowers, or still life, but not optically,” he said. Instead of a representation of a flower, the painting of the thing is derived from the thing itself.
Recently, in the studio, Simonini has been utilizing methods that explore the potentials and limits of his body: hands, feet, and even his mouth, on occasion. He’ll stand at one point in front of a large canvas and apply pigments (and foodstuffs), exploiting the full range of motion of each limb. He’s quick to distance the exercise from the body prints of someone like Yves Klein or David Hammons, though, since the resulting image isn’t an expression of the body itself, per se, but rather a document of what that body can do. In all cases — the napkins, the canvases carried on camping trips, the multi-appendage mark-making — the specific subject of the work is less important than the questions and issues that arise through the process. “What happens when you’re left to your own devices, and all you can use are the materials from your surroundings?” he wondered. “What do you paint with your feet? What kind of things emerge?”
