“Pictorial communication — signs, symbols, images and colors on a flat surface — is one of the oldest and richest of human inventions, like writing or music,” Roberta Smith wrote recently in The New York Times. Combining both abstract and figurative motives in his paintings, Derrick Buisch creates dynamic canvases which revel in real-world signifiers reduced and modified for the white canvas tableau.For this painting, Buisch divided the canvas into three main sections. In the bottom right hand corner, there are the letters OR painted neatly in grey with a red outline. In the upper left hand corner there are the letters ON, painted in grey with an orange-red outline. According to the artist, these letters are a play on the name of the Texas artist Vernon Fisher, who was popular in the 1990s for his unconventional use of materials. In five different places in the painting, in all three sections, Buisch has appropriated depictions of the ocean from various contexts. For example, toward the center of the bottom section, the artist—inspired by an illustration from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—painted a hatched rendition of the ocean. Likewise, in the upper right hand corner, there is a colorful depiction of waves from another painting the artist made in the 1990s. In the middle section of the painting, there are four concave arrows, taken from a found weather map. They are adjacent to a wave-like pattern derived from a Native American folklore text.
For years, Buisch’s work has been about signs and signifiers. In other words, the visual stuff of everyday life that he has adopted, cropped, reduced, repainted, spliced, and massaged to create layered complex canvases that revel in literary and painterly references. This painting, I Am the Sea (Ocean Chart), shows the myriad ways Buisch encounters meaning in the world and how he translates those signifiers onto the painted canvas. For the Triennial, his work also includes various smaller canvases which pick out and therefore magnify the individual units of his larger painting. Installed in a non-grid like fashion on the wall, they dismantle one of the age-old tropes of western painting.
In the center of the painting, the hatching pattern Buisch depicts came from an older edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Identifying the novel’s narrator, the book begins with the phrase “Call me Ishmael.” In biblical terms, Ishmael represents the illegitimate first child of Moses, who is known to represent non-traditional or fractious sects of Judaism. Like Ishamel, Buisch presents a radical version of abstract painting—layered, complex, and drawn from a multitude of sources.
