Collaged Drawings that Zig Zag

By Mark Jenkins, Washington Post

Color is important in Alan Steele’s collaged drawings, but line is essential. The artist’s “Symmetry and Stillness,” at Adah Rose Gallery, features intricate hand-rendered patterns of parallel and interlocking strokes. At first, the maze-like figures seem mechanical, but despite their herringbone crispness they’re too idiosyncratic to have been generated automatically. Steele also incorporates bits of text and blocks of color, either atop the drawn motifs or adjacent to them. Some of the color fields are actually rectangles of corrugated cardboard, scored with regular indentations that are also lines of a sort.

If Steele’s art looks like no one else’s, many of its ingredients are familiar. These modestly scaled works conjure the graphic design of those early-20th-century art publications that first broke free of purely typographic elements. They also resemble flags, whether the pop-art ones of Jasper Johns (a few of whose words are shuffled in one Steele assemblage) or authentic national banners. The latter likeness is sometimes intended: “Manhattan Native” includes the yellow, blue and red bars of the flag of Venezuela, the longtime New Yorker’s birthplace.

There’s a defiantly pre-Photoshop feel to Steele’s art, and not just because he pays explicit homage to Johns and another pioneering modernist, Marcel Duchamp. The way Steele cuts and pastes sections of his own line work, disrupting the patterns, is distinctive. But the pieces that cut together simple shapes and primary colors recall Matisse, Picasso and the African artifacts that influenced them. (Steele is himself a dealer in South American tribal art.)

Not all of the show’s ingredients invoke the same era; one of these pieces incorporates a snippet of a 19th-century Japanese painting. Wherever and whenever the artist appropriates, though, the takings are stitched together deftly. Steele’s style isn’t symmetrical at all, but neither does it betray any loose ends. Alan Steele: Symmetry and Stillness On view through Nov. 9 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington, MD

October 31, 2014