Rosenquist was there at its beginning. He came to New York in 1955 from Minneapolis, where he had studied art and worked as a sign and billboard painter. In New York he met other young artists, among them Lee Bontecou, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jack Youngerman, Agnes Martin, and Claus Oldenburg, all of whom were endeavoring to overcome the conventions and constrictions of Abstract Expressionism. Rosenquist supported himself by working during the day painting billboards and window displays, and at night he shared in the coffee-house social life of fellow artists, shaping the ideas and techniques that would affect his art.

Pop, with its images of consumer products and celebrity portraits, brought modern art back up to the surface of broad public consciousness, if not appeal. Here was an art that everyone could grasp, even if their grip held only that fragment with which they had become familiar via trips to the market, browsing magazines, or watching TV. Many, in fact, had their first glimpse of Pop Art on the television news: a fact that attests to Pop's having found the right vernacular for its time, and to TV's intuition about what makes news. Today, even with hundreds of cable channels to choose from, it would be rare to find a producer unconcerned enough with ratings to risk featuring an emerging contemporary art trend. Indeed the art of the 1970s and 1980s made every attempt to be as conspicuous as Pop but experienced virtual neglect by all but a wafer thin slice of the populace. Contemporary art just isn't the stuff of mass media, but Pop was, and that fact illuminated its gestalt while also obscuring its subtleties. Rosenquist, Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, were audacious in borrowing unashamedly from popular culture. This engagement with imagery charged by the latent energy of advertising was what united these artists under the banner of Pop and made them appear to be tuned to the same emotional and intellectual pitch.

In retrospect, however, their differences and individual concerns have become evident. Rosenquist seems as much indebted to surrealism as to pop culture by virtue of having positioned disparate objects in a single pictorial space, thus privileging irrational juxtapositions with the appearance of rationality in much the same way that Rene Magritte or Salvadore Dali did in the 1930s. Unlike Warhol's soup cans, which stood as a kind of absurd symbol of consumer idolatry in which the object reflected upon its own iconic status and taunted established artistic and social values, Rosenquist's early paintings of gigantic automobiles floating in space alongside pieces of food, huge pencils, or fragmented faces led the spectator into a myriad of speculative relationships and meanings, triggering subconscious murmurs and dreamlike associations. Rosenquist was thus less dependent than Warhol upon the initial shock of seeing such commonplace subject matter in a "serious" painting. It was the surreal narrative of his work that he continued to develop after the clamor over Pop died down.

A glance back at the very early paintings of 1960-61 reveals that while Rosenquist naturally applied the techniques and subject matter of commercial billboard art to the making of fine art, he struggled formally with just how to introduce this fertile new idea. Painted images were often presented singly or in combination with found-object assemblage. When multiple images inhabited a single painting, they were isolated from one another, each complete in its own section of the canvas, and offered to the spectator for side-by-side comparison. These paintings were much more involved in the conceptual posturing of Pop than later ones in which images were cut loose from their pictorial moorings and roamed freely and poetically about the canvas. While Rosenquist will always be discussed within the context of a movement that was very much a product of its cultural moment, time has shown his work to have different concerns and more distant historical alignments.

Surveying the paintings in this exhibition, all dating from 1988 to 1992, there is little evidence of the banal commercial subjects of the 1960s, but there are unmistakable connections as well, in particular the continuing reconciliation of Cubist construction with deep pictorial space. Additionally, Rosenquist's work brings to mind the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, and Carlo Carra, and the approach of Pittura Metafisica (metaphysical painting), a forerunner of Surrealism that attempted around 1917 to express the deeper, mysterious significance of things. De Chirico understood that isolating and dislocating an object can give it an entirely new psychology. From the time when he found his stride, in 1963-64, Rosenquist's work has consisted largely of painted montages wherein objects are lifted from their natural environment and juxtaposed, taking advantage of the dissonance that occurs when seemingly unrelated images share a common space. By the end of the 1970s, a more poetic realism emerged in his paintings, revealing Rosenquist's interest in ecology and the interconnections between humanity and its environment. While he continued to use ordinary commercial images, they began to lose the aggressive self-conscoiousness that made Pop Art so caustic to prevailing standards.

In a painting such as Television or the Cat's Cradle Supports the Electronic Picture (1988-89), deep space is literalized as a cosmic panorama that forms the backdrop for floating flowers, a painted grid, and a series of fleshy ribbons that expose the anatomy of a fragmented female face. The tensions created by these juxtapositions are not unlike those in his Pop paintings, but the subjects have evolved away from consumer products into elemental aspects of nature: fire, star clusters and galaxies, flowers, plants, and, almost always, the mysterious, quizzical gaze of a female face. Rosenquist's current micro/macrocosmic interests might border on new-age prosaics were it not for the unsettling effect of his use of disparate images. The disquieting, dogmatically pretty female face, fragmented and rendered in a bland, dehumanized style, seems to suggest a quality of artificial or barren seduction, perhaps a symbol of overcommercialization. Superimposed as it is in Passion Flowers (1990) and other paintings against a lush and fertile background, one has the sense of being cautioned against the prospect of a paradise in danger of being lost.