Darryl Pottorf

Darryl Pottorf was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1952. At 14 years of age, he moved to Fort Myers, where his father became one of the most influential building contractors. In the summer of 1972, he travelled to Europe for the first time, staying mainly in Florence, a city he returned to four years later, but this time as part of a special study programme organised by Florida State University. He used the libraries of Harvard and Stanford universities in Florence to study the history of architecture in the Etruscan ruins, travelling frequently to other parts of Old Europe, accumulating a cultural baggage and a repertoire of forms that were the start of his own personal iconography. He was assistant to Dr Fred Licht, a prestigious art historian who was working on his book Goya: the Origins of the Modern Temper at that time. In 1978, back in Florida, he found work as a set designer for a group called Theater Associates, at the Arcade Theater in Fort Myers. His first commission was a production of Kurt Weill’s musical Lady in the Dark. Impressed with his work, the theatre took him on as a set designer. In 1980 he took a course in engraving and printing at Edison Community College. One of his teachers, Bob Petersen, had been Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant for ten years. At that time, Rauschenberg was working on an edition of engravings with the writer William Burroughs, American Pewter with Burroughs, at the studio in Edison Community College. Petersen asked Pottorf to help them, and from that time forward a process of exchange of ideas and a collaboration between the two artists started and lasted for years. In speaking of Rauschenberg’s influence, Pottorf says “Rauschenberg opens the windows of the world… the friendship, the travel, the exposure enriched my art and life. The years have been a great interchange of ideas. I was grateful to receive the same interchange as some of the most talented artists such as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden and Dorthea Rockburn.” Initially, Pottorf made enormous compositions in which he introduced colour and collage of different materials, which he called simply Constructions. In 1982 he held his first exhibition at an artists’ cooperative, Pottorf and Vitkosky, New Paintings and Drawings, in a rented studio over an old bread shop, Mason’s Bakery, in Fort Myers. In the eighties, Rauschenberg directed a mission to share the contemporary art world with artists and craftsmen from developing or totalitarian countries in the hope that the communication among artists might contribute to world peace. As assistant to Rauschenberg in the ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange) project, Darryl travelled a great deal, taking pictures with his camera, enriching his cultural equipment by coming into contact with other societies and exploring new media. In 1995, he started out on his own career, although always linked to Rauschenberg, as director of Untitled Press and the Rauschenberg Foundation. At this period, he developed the Eclipse series, made up of minimalist works made with marine enamel, a “boat paint” that shines when applied to metal surfaces. Later Pottorf experimented with black and white photographs, which he began to transfer on to Lexan, a thick, transparent plastic similar to Plexiglas, on the back of which he used polished aluminium with large areas painted using white pearlescent acrylic creating a dramatic contrast with the black transferred images. With this process he achieved the ambiguity he sought, but it was so toxic that he was obliged to stop making these monumental paintings the size of a theatre backdrop and start to do research in another direction. Thus he began to experiment with vegetable pigments and transfer his photographs and colour prints to paper with water. The series that he created was Sirens, in 1998, so called after one of the famous stops in the mythical voyage of the Odyssey. The most important image of Sirens was a majestic column he had photographed at the ruins of Ephesus in Turkey. Two years later, he started the series he called Foresights, works made of four differently shaped wooden panels, to which he added printed pieces in the manner of large jigsaw puzzles. The great advance was a hole in the centre, a little square window, through which the spectator could see the future. He also made a series in collaboration with Rauschenberg known by the name Quattro Mani. The paintings are a blending of Rauschenberg’s brilliant color photographs taken in Venice and Pottorf’s bold black Venetian images on Lexan. This collaboration gave rise to a printed edition in Gemini G.E.L. from Los Angeles, printed at the same time as Rauschberg’s series, L. A. Uncovered, with shots taken by both painters. Following the concept of movement, trend, a shift forward, Pottorf has developed in recent times a series called Experiments in Consequence, making reference to the artist’s attempt to create a sequence of related pieces and conceive them as a single work based on the concept of movement that Étienne-Jules Marey captured in his photographs, which had such a great influence on both Duchamp and the Futurists. The idea that every action gives rise to a series of subsequent acts attracted him because it reminded him of his own tireless activity and the fact that actions always have consequences. Pottorf uses his everyday experiences in his work. He was recently in Spain, first in Valencia and then in Madrid, and these cities were incorporated into his sign vocabulary and form part of the series whose title is used for his exhibition at the IVAM.