Sister Shrieks 1989

James Rosenquist made this ‘Sister Shrieks’ thing, and right away, I'm into the way the colours jab at each other, all reds and greens, and that white slicing through. There’s this feeling, like the whole thing's been built up layer by layer, kinda reckless but also precise, you know? It’s like he’s screen-printing images, and then attacking them with erasures and squiggles, letting the rawness show. Look at those ribbon-like strands of grey-ish white, how they loop and dive around. It's almost like he's scribbling in three-dimensional space. The energy is chaotic, but it’s controlled chaos. Rosenquist reminds me a lot of Picabia who was always pushing boundaries in his own painting, messing with representation and abstraction. 'Sister Shrieks' feels like that, a challenge, and an invitation to keep our eyes and our minds wide open.