Rob Hitzig has an equal opportunity palette. “I have a few biases I’ve been trying to work on,” he said in a recent interview, “but I want to use all the colors.” A good chunk of the spectrum is visible in “Chasing a Feeling,” his solo show at Axel’s Gallery in Waterbury.
The Montpelier artist’s intense hues take form in stripes, grids and geometrically shaped panels that are both orderly and expressive. But what really shines here — literally and figuratively — are Hitzig’s smooth, shellacked surfaces. They’re softer and less reflective than glass and deeper than varnish. Creating the surfaces, through hours of manual wet-sanding, polishing, shellacking and repeating, is the most important part of Hitzig’s process and what drew him to art making in the first place.
Hitzig started out crafting furniture at a community-based woodworking shop in Washington, D.C. He became enamored of the French polish finishing technique, which uses shellac, a natural resin, to give Victorian mahogany its luster. Time-consuming and requiring more than a little elbow grease, it has largely been replaced by lacquers and polyurethanes. Pretty soon, Hitzig wanted to focus only on the surfaces rather than the structures of his tables and chairs.
At first glance, his work seems aligned with minimalists’. The concentric stripey triangles in “Deep Dive” bring to mind the abstractions of the recently deceased Frank Stella; the glossy surfaces have an affinity with John McCracken’s polished planks. But where those artists distilled things down, seeking purity, Hitzig revels in the messiness of experimentation. He layers colors, then sands them to see how the elements interact.
“I’m trying to surprise myself,” he said, “and I’m trying to be fearless about it.”
In “Raining on the Moon,” a seven-sided panel, that fearlessness shines through. Half of the almost 30-by-30-inch painting is a scraped-looking expanse of blues and oranges; the other half, vibrant teals, purples and hints of yellow. From a distance or in a photo, it looks like a thermal image, a record of intensity. Up close, the care apparent in its finish and in the perfect joins between the painting’s two halves plays against the crazy colors to create tension and balance.
In “Yearbook,” a 19-by-23-inch horizontal panel, Hitzig focuses on the individuality of each color combination. Like photos on yearbook pages, deliberate brushstrokes appear in a grid format, some in loudly contrasting layers, others more subdued. Each color seems to have its own personality. In the polishing process, Hitzig carries residual color onto the white gessoed borders of the painting, leaving ghostly impressions. These convey an extra dimension of time and labor.
“Noringatt,” one of Hitzig’s concentric pieces, communicates time and tension via underpainting. The six-sided, 48-by-58-inch panel started with free-flowing, abstract-expressionist painting, visible between bold, concentric stripes in the forefront. The contrast builds visual interest without detracting from the hypnotic march of the stripes. According to Hitzig, the pieces in this series reflect lifetimes or experiences, like the growth rings of a tree. When making them, he said, “I would see them as actual beings.”
Overall, Hitzig wants viewers to feel the same sense of emotional connection — surprise and recognition — that he gains while making his work. “How do you get to that point where you feel what your eye sees?” he asks. “There’s no good reason to do what I do — none, zero — except that feeling.”
“Chasing a Feeling” by Rob Hitzig is on view through August 3 at Axel’s Gallery in Waterbury. axelsgallery.com
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
