Rocca’s drawings evidence an interior gaze and the working out of psychological states.
Nicole Rudick
Nicole Rudick is the Managing Editor of The Paris Review. She has contributed essays to a number of books, including What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (RISD Museum of Art), Ben Jones: Men’s Group: The Video (PictureBox), and Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973–1977 (PictureBox). Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Bookforum, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere.
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The Power and Complexity of Children’s Art: An Interview with Brian Belott
Children’s scribbles may appear random but they often repeat shapes, like the mandala or the Greek cross, that suggest the beginning of language.
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Lines of Thought: An Interview with Ben Jones
Last month, Ben Jones exhibited a new body of work at The Hole gallery on the Lower East Side. The gallery’s walls and floor are painted a bright, startling white; Jones’s artwork, usually drenched in hot hues, here consists only of graphite-colored oil-stick line drawings.
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An Endless Succession of Roles: Joan Brown’s Self-Portraits
When Joan Brown began attending the California School of Fine Arts in 1955, she was immediately dissatisfied with her classes and the structure of art education in general.
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Transfigured: An Interview with Karl Wirsum
It’s tempting to characterize Karl Wirsum’s recent spate of exhibitions in the city as his New York moment.
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Making Muses: Dorothy Iannone’s Erotic Art Was Inspired by Dieter Roth
Dorothy Iannone describes her trip to Reykjavík in 1967 as the “journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” It was there she met the artist Dieter Roth, with whom she swiftly fell in love and for whom she left her husband and a comfortable life in the United States.
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The Function of Forms: Matthew Palladino’s Object Lessons
Matthew Palladino’s gallerist calls his new works paintings, but one wonders whether that label is given partly for simplicity’s sake: They are paintings but also sculptural reliefs. They are illusionistic but also real.
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Art of Darkness: Matt Kish Illustrates Conrad’s Classic
What’s stunning about Matt Kish’s illustrations for Heart of Darkness — one for every page of Joseph Conrad’s text — is how sunny they are. His modest palette comprises yellow, green, black, and white, with the occasional hit of red, orange, or blue. The novel, on the other hand, is tonally dark: sepulchral and miasmic.
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Comic Twist: The New Kramers Ergot Reveals a Turn toward Genre
In July 2004, The New York Times Magazine signaled the advent of the “literary” comic book and described how a significant group of cartoonists — including Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Seth and Marjane Satrapi — had popularized these “comics with a brain.”