A rose is a rose is a rose. Rose Wylie at David Zwirner, When Found becomes Given (2025)

Rose Wylie’s exhibition When Found Becomes Given at David Zwirner presents new and recent paintings that link personal, linguistic, and cinematic narratives across multiple panels. The works feature thick, textured paint that share the space with text that seems at once excessive and explanatory, functioning as a tautological closure upon the image. This overlap between image and text opens the space for event-like mental curation through which viewers map their own imagined forms upon what is given. There are horses, cats and birds.

Writings of Rose Wylie often lead with journalists who find themselves in her garden, followed by a declaration of the beauty of that garden. Though I have not seen the garden myself, I will not deprive my reader of that knowledge.

Rose Wylie is on show at David Zwirner. This is an exhibition with fat, liquescent drips of paint, so thick it is as if the eye is eating camembert.

The faces have the plastic placidity of a phlegmatic pigeon. There is a certain dissociation from the weight of living, one that exacts on that of a bird that finds a pebble with the promise of an insect, bopping its head blithely in anticipatory gustatory pleasure. Bop, bop.

bop

Rose Wylie and birds

Rose Wylie speaks, unwillingly or not, in correspondence to the Aristotelian ideal in rhetoric, admixing the plain with the pedantic. One never knows if when asked about the intricacies of her oeuvre she will talk about the birds that fly around her yard or interlude with the subject of pataphysics or ekphrasis. The bird she likes the most is the duck because her "legs are short and near the ground", more "complete and a better colour" than the peacock, and in painting "elegance is at the opposite spectrum from the primitive", which, like the duck, "is very short and very real" (Wylie 2021, 209). And I praise her for opening up her work to the ornithological hermeneutic, and as I always say, more artists should be clear on their bird of choice.

She refers to ekphrasis in her work, which is the act of actualising the perceptual experience one has with a medium into another medium, translating, in her case, a film into a painting, a private temperament into a purple iris (Wylie 2021, 206). What distinguishes this from simple description is that ekphrasis, at its most vital, seeks to approach the threshold of lived experience the author had with the source material. (This article aims to be a form of ekphrasis too.) The tangibility of ekphrasis in any work is hard to measure, but at the end of the day it is certainly a nice word to use in conversation.

Rose Wylie, Classical Painting, 2024

On the Repetition of Visual Facts in Contemporary Art

Upon a beige-ivorine pancake, lay two plums pressed against each other with botanical chastity. Their incipient budding is haloed by concentric foliated green, and you know that the brush glided well because roundness clings well to the wrist. The presence of the plum, in both form and text, asks whether the repetition of visual fact deepens or wears its credibility thin, maturation versus tautology.

There are those who find comfort in the credible, warm coaxing; repetition not as excess but reassurance. To say "two plums" three times with slight variation is not to belabour but to settle the matter, to make it true: yes, they are here, ever here. Then there are those who find deceit in the excess of confirmation; repetition is the thinning of truth, to say plum twice is to expose a fear that the plums are not really there. The manner one reads these plums inscribes whether one pours milk directly into their coffee or poured it already today, or maybe yesterday, walks with a straight spine or slouches so slightly.

Rose Wylie, Dinner Outside, 2024

The Role of Text in Rose Wylie’s Paintings Explained, Viewer Engagement

The artist said that she paints letters for the simple fact "a 'G' is easier to draw than a face" (Wylie 2021, 205) and sometimes she doesn't feel like drawing a face. In "Dinner Outside" (2004), this makes more sense than in the case of the plums because the text does not link to a concrete referent. The text "dinner table" and "distant trees" is approximated by some vague crayonations, shapeless enough to allow the mind's eye to apply itself upon them and add the table and three tree it finds apt. This ties with Adorno’s observation that an excess of the particular leads into the general, and so Wylie's oeuvre protects the plasticity of the scene through soft prompts that embed the work with slipfolds that are to be populated by the viewer's mental lingerings.

It makes one think about the fine minds that haven't been able to watch a film for about five, but really seven, years now because they feel their visual agency debased by the film's claim to settle the table for them, and to settle the wrong cup on the wrong table spoils the plot too. Upon this Rose Wylie painting, it is an objective fact that the table must be a Sapo Dining Table by Sergio and Giorgio Saporiti, Italy (1970), and the water served from a Morandiana bottle with stopper by Gio Ponti, and it is good that the text permits for that allowance. And to resolute the predicament, more films should be informed by this visual structure, and placate the text "dinner table" where the ikea table is, not all but some.

Sapo Dining Table by Sergio and Giorgio Saporiti, Italy, 1970s

Morandiana bottle with stopper by Gio Ponti

Rose Wylie, Shop and Garden Flowers (2021)

The Role of Text in Rose Wylie’s Paintings Explained, Words as Painterly Limit

Rose Wylie says: "I like painting letters, they have all the options of other thing you paint, but in a way are easier. They can be used to unify a painting, like Leger's use of black outline and used to oppose presuppositions" (Wallis 2019, 90). And so the words in her painting not only act as tapping points for viewer interventions, but also as modalities to settle the visual content that might otherwise remain ambiguous or unresolved.

For example, in Shop and Garden Flowers (2021). This drawing could easily be that of a fish, but the crayonations that sit alongside the words 'green', 'stems' and 'buds' suggests that it is fact the representation of a high-density interconnector circuit board.

1. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954), Book III, 1407a:

“The best style is one that is clear without being vulgar. The clearest style is one that uses only common words, but that is vulgar, as the poetry of Cleophon and Sthenelus demonstrate. On the other hand, the use of exotic expressions—foreign words, metaphor, lengthening, and anything else out of the ordinary—makes a style solemn and elevated beyond the norm. But if you compose entirely in this style, the result will be either paradox or gibberish—paradox if made up entirely of metaphor, gibberish if made up of foreign words. […] A great contribution to a style that is both clear and elevated is made by lengthenings, shortenings, and modifications. By its unfamiliarity the variation from common usage will elevate the style, but the features shared with everyday speech will preserve clarity.”

2. Rose Wylie, interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews Volume 2, ed. by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Milan: Charta, 2010), 206–9:

“I used to try to put the excitement of the image from the film into the drawing. I did that a lot. Also, it helped me to remember the film. It was respectful of the filmmaker, which I like because it's another art form. The translation from one art form to another is an interesting idea. Transposition—we’ve all done it. But if you do it from a different art form, I recently heard it’s called ‘ekphrasis.’ It sounds like a fancy, smart word, but it’s respectful of film. I love images, and film is images. I try to make an equivalent image with a measure of the same excitement that I felt when I saw the original. It could just fall short and turn into something completely different, but I make drawings and then turn them into paintings.”