There is a moment, if memory serves, about halfway through Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, where his camera is following Belmondo and Karina as they scarper across the cliffs overlooking some gorgeous Mediterranean inlet. They are on the lam; someone is dead, killed. I do not recall if they are being chased, probably. Tension mounts, (that is, as much as either the viewer or the director of a Godard film will be invested in narrative tension) and, without cue, without warning, Godard stops following them. He allows the camera to track back, slightly retracing the ground it has already covered. He brings the camera to rest, to pause, overlooking the land and seascape. In the rush of narrative, we lost this moment of plenary bliss; the aesthetics of nature, coded by culture to be sure, are summoned to stall our pell-mell forward rush through narrative. For a short while we gaze, with Godard, upon resplendent beauty. There is a clue hiding in here about to how to think through Greg Drasler’s new series of paintings, titled External Drive, currently at Betty Cunningham.
Drasler has, for a while now, as a painter visited the road. The road’s idiosyncratic byway architecture, its signage, rest stops, bus stops, its broad vistas and, above all, the automobiles that ride you past all of the above have been the iconographic mainstay of his work. These cars of Drasler’s, that hold the center of his paintings, they are not exactly fetishized but they nonetheless present with a curiously, ambivalent demeanor. Appearing somewhat disassembled they often convey a sense of stage sets or exploded diagrams of cars. Mostly they are models that predate the artist. They are elaborate ornaments from a mythological automotive past, objects of spellbinding elegance beamed in from 1940s or 50s Detroit, where they were voluptuously overdesigned. Typically, the car’s windshield or windows will operate as a framing device within a given painting. As such they situate a point of view, locate an actual or implied horizon, and give us a point from which the rendered scene is observed. Thus, a viewing subject, correlate to the viewer of the painting is inscribed within the landscape.