JIM ISERMANN | ARTILLERY

As with any Moscoso poster, the “meaning” in Isermann’s work is inseparable from its function in an implied context in which an old hierarchy of values is gently dismantled.  The hierarchy Isermann takes apart is that which holds the “decorative arts” like patterned wallpaper to be, by definition, secondary to the more “substantive arts” like landscape or portraiture. The decorative is domestic, home-bound, and of limited interest, operating as it does outside the pale of art history; one becomes used to reading the adverb “merely” before it. The decorative is implicitly feminine or “queer” if a man does it. It represents a withdrawal from the existential battle for self-expression central to modern sensibility.

After spending even fifteen minutes inside “Wrapture,” it’s simply impossible to take that hierarchy seriously. The McEnery Gallery gets some credit for that, having arranged for Isermann’s work to take up two whole floors and the staircase between them. At the desk, one is startled by the sheer size of the patterns (decals painstakingly applied to the walls), and their monumentality immediately cancels any associations with domesticity.

One climbs the stairs and gapes. Again, the walls themselves have gotten the full Isermann treatment: one is mirror-silver with big white dots, the others brightly patterned (decals again). Wallpaper? Maybe. What’s the opposite of “merely”? Isermann’s sheer joy in color and bravado in design please the eye like Hockney’s blue pools and green gardens do.