Chris Natrop: Drawing With A Knife

Jamey Hacht

“I have come to cut paper,
rather than draw in the traditional way, because I find that creating imagery
from hard-edged silhouettes satisfies my desire to maintain a steadiness within
line and form.”

–Chris Natrop


At its most austere, neo-classical
art consists only of outline with no modeling or spatial depth; even in more
fully modeled paintings and friezes the action is contained within a narrow shelf-like
space. Movement is clearly articulated across the surface plane, diametrically
opposed to the spatial complexities in depth of the baroque.

–David Irwin, article on Neo Classicism in Dictionary of the History of
Ideas.


 Long ago, D. H. Lawrence wrote a book about
Etruscan art in which he claimed that the salient difference between those surviving
works and many other ancient pictures was the Etruscan use of outlines instead
of volumetric modeling. An efflorescence of interest in this art shaped the neoClassical
stuff churned out in the late 18th Century, and a hundred years later, Gauguin’s
cloisonée paintings brought the issue of outlining back into public discourse
about art. In this age of defaced Goya prints, formaldehyde sharks and beefsteaks
nailed to the gallery wall, a formal issue like contour drawing can still make
an important statement, provided it’s made through some kind of innovation
in an artist’s process.


 Chris Natrop has done it: drawing with
a knife is the contemporary response to an ancient question about representation.
This is a biomorphic art, midway between lacemaking and landscape. Seven-foot
sheets of white paper are reticulated with thousands of blank holes comprising
a natural thicket of lilies and climbers and vines. Whereas drawing is an additive
process in which an artist makes the marks that build an eventual image, Natrop’s
work is as subtractive as sculpture; it creates by taking away from an initial
wholeness until something strange is left. So it isn’t modeling — but
it isn’t carving either, since it doesn’t start with a shapeless mass
of stone or marble. It starts with a giant roll of paper, which is an industrially
manufactured object, and goes through the artist’s individual bourgeois
labor, to emerge as an imitation of nature. Very good: a common story that applies
to most of the art produced since people stopped mixing their own paint. But
in Natrop, there’s nothing but some paper and a lot of nothingness. As drawing,
it’s nothing: there are no marks on the paper. As sculpture, couldn’t
be more minimal since it’s two-dimensional; view it edge-on, and it becomes
one-dimensional. What have we here?


 The works recall Art Nouveau products,
like William Morris’ sinuous wallpaper designs or the illustrations of Aubrey
Beardsley. But those belonged on a wall, either framed in glass or pasted onto
plaster; or they served handsomely as the endpapers of books (e.g., Van de Velde’s
1908 edition of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo). Natrop’s giant knife-drawings,
by contrast, are positioned in front of monochrome background screens onto which
they cast shadows that repeat the cut-out paper form. In the white version at
the front, the image is formed by the absence of paper in the negative space;
in the black version at the screen behind it, the image is formed by the absence
of light in the positive space. Where there was paper in front, there’s
darkness on the screen; where there was nothing in front, there’s light
on the screen. I won’t go so far out as to claim that all this evokes the
slit-plate “interference pattern” set-ups that figure so prominently
in experimental demonstrations of quantum mechanical paradoxes. That sounds way
too spooky and remote. But it seems pretty certain that Natrop is talking about
existence and nothingness. Emptiness and shadow are most of what’s here,
and what’s solid is an incredibly fragile, uniquely complex, blank remainder
of cut paper.


 What an art critic should do, I think,
is describe the work, then say what it reminds him of, then take a bow and go
away. Take a look at these lines from Keats’ “Ode On A Grecian Urn”:


 Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed


 Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

(ll.21, 22)


 When old age shall this generation waste,


 Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

 Than ours, a friend to man… (11.46-48)


 Now look again at the impossible vulnerability
of Eddy Grub Burst and Lily Swell Machine. This is a paper-sculpture more perishable
than the leaves it depicts. What will become of it?