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John Otte’s Zen Dixie, a Playful Bridge Between Atlanta and New Orleans
Burnaway.org
July 14, 2014
By Caroline Huftalen
After walking through the Driver Phillips Studio to see Zen Dixie and talking with John Otte, the curator, I gained a sense of what he was trying to emphasize in the art world: play and wonder. The exhibition offers a collection of talented and mesmerizing works without the pretentiousness that often surrounds visual art, giving artists and art lovers alike the chance to have a little bit of fun. Read More.
April 2008
ARTFORUM Magazine
By Philip Auslander
John Otte is given not to grand gestures but rather to quietly commanding ones, as this selection of thirty-fi ve works produced between 1982 and 2007 showed. His is an art of precisely composed images and finely wrought textures. Most of Otte’s works are intimate in scale, but even the larger ones express a sensibility attuned to the intimate, rewarding close scrutiny and familiarity with the art-historical and cultural references he invokes.
The earliest works in the exhibition, four pastel drawings on paper from 1982, create spatial paradoxes. In each, a black rectangle seems to float slightly above the center of a gray-white background. The figureground relationship is destabilized by the fact that the white, irregular shapes enclosed by the black rectangle also, at their bases, bleed into the rectangle’s white surround. All called Untitled (Newmanesque), these drawings do indeed evoke Barnett Newman, particularly his 1963 series of lithographs “18 Cantos” (Otte’s pastels are even of roughly the same proportions as the Newman prints, though a little
larger). The homage is playful, as each of Otte’s images suggests one of the “Canto” prints superimposed on a Newman monochrome painting from the 1950s—Newman on Newman. But the real pleasure of these works resides in their facture as much as in their sly referentiality, in the hand-rubbed, palimpsestic look of white areas that aren’t really white and the carefully retained ruled lines that mark the corners of the black rectangles.
The art historical references in Otte’s subsequent work occur more at the level of borrowed detail than wholesale evocation of another artist’s style. A silk-screened design in Untitled (Garden State), 1988, derives from the fi fteenth-century Italian painter Masolino da Panicale, who reveled in the ornamentation on rich brocades. Otte isolates the linear decoration and presents it on a worn-looking piece of newsprint against a bright stain of red and yellow inks. In emphasizing it thus, he invites us to appreciate the pattern for itself more directly than Masolino was able to do, but also presents it as an artifact—as if this stained, wrinkled bit of paper were a precious remnant found on the floor of the Renaissance artist’s studio.
While Otte’s reference to Newman is lighthearted, there is something elegiac about this fragment from Masolino, and an elegiac impulse has become more explicit generally in Otte’s recent work. In Untitled (World Without End), 2006, a photocopy (with touches of iridescent silver acrylic) of a George N. Bernard photograph from 1865 depicting a desolate rail yard at the Atlanta Rolling Mill is affixed to a surface whose patina resembles that of a rusted oil drum, evoking the ghosts of antebellum Southern industry. Looking at Untitled (I Walk on Gilded Splinters—Je suis un grand Zombie remix), 2005–2007, I associate the whitewashed panel—which also supports a framed image (a small landscapelike abstraction, in fact a photocopy of an Ellsworth Kelly drawing) and an artificial flower hung upside down—with New Orleans, another devastated Southern locale. And this is even without taking note of the title’s reference to a haunting song by Dr. John.
Looking again at those early pastel abstractions, they started to seem a bit less like playful formal exercises and a young artist’s Oedipal jests, and a bit more like doors with dirty glass windows through which one might glimpse the indistinct shadow of another time.
John Otte’s Top Five
Atlanta curator
December 06, 2006
By Felicia Feaster
Multitalented John Otte most recently curated Exquisite Abstraction, a group show at Whitespace Gallery through Jan. 13.
1) The Bywater neighborhood, New Orleans (www.bywater.org): “New growth in the midst of so much devastation.”
2) The Guggenheim Museum, summer 2006: “The whole place with its exterior paint all stripped down to a raw, lead-like concrete state, featuring the nearly gravity-defying work of architect Zaha Hadid, the entropic drawings of Jackson Pollock, and some of the earliest abstract works by Kandinsky and Malevich.”
3) Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil by Caetano Veloso, Barbara Einzig (De Capo Press): “An amazing account of the late ’60s/early ’70s tropicalia movement where there was seemingly no division between art, poetry, culture and politics.”
4) “Vrioon” by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto (Import, Raster Noton): “A masterpiece of post-techno electronica, yet very human.”
5) Music of every sort: “It’s just about the only thing I can count on — New Orleans music, ambient, Brazilian, noise, aleatoric, Daniel Lanois, Flaming Lips, John Cage, Jobim, Timewriter, Luaka Bop Remix.”
Fourth Ward house abstract canvas
February 19, 2008
The AJC
By Kirsten Tagami
Like many artists, John Otte has painted houses for extra cash. But never before has he been asked to paint the outside of the house as if it were one of his abstract canvases.
Otte is putting the finishing touches on the exterior of a new, contemporary home in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. In recent weeks, he has splashed unmixed black latex house paint against the side of the house, slathered iridescent acrylic paint, splattered brown and black paint and added texture by pressing bubble wrap into the thick layers. He created streaks that look like rain.
“I’ve even painted shadows onto the house,” said Otte, an Atlanta-based artist who also is well-known as a private DJ.
From a distance, the effect is subtle. Architects David Yocum and Brian Bell are admirers of Otte’s artwork and asked him to create a rich, dark patina on all of the home’s exterior cement-board panels.
“We were interested in the house absorbing the colors and the dirt and grime around it —- a visual sponge, if you will,” Yocum said. “From the beginning, the clients were interested in the idea of a darker house.”
“We think of it as a ‘blackwash’ instead of a whitewash,” said Bell.
The 2,300-square-foot home is on a tiny lot on Corley Street, around the corner from the Highland Bakery on North Highland Avenue, in one of Atlanta’s oldest neighborhoods. The area was ravaged by the Great Fire of 1917 —- another source of inspiration for the black exterior, according to Yocum.
Calvin Florian, who is building the house with girlfriend Kelly Hart, said the two love contemporary architecture, “but we didn’t want one of those modern, striking-white houses. We wanted it to blend in with the environment a little bit more.”
Florian, a producer at Cartoon Network, also took a cue from work when thinking about the exterior finish. “If you look at the backgrounds in cartoons, they usually have a nice texture. You might see brush strokes,” he said.
The couple, who plans to move in about three weeks, also likes the idea that the home’s large windows will glow at night against the home’s receding black exterior.
Florian has lived in the neighborhood for nine years and has heard mixed reactions from neighbors. “There are a few people in the neighborhood who don’t like it,” he said. But he noted that theirs is by no means the only contemporary home in the area, which lies between the MLK Historic District and a swath of intense development in Inman Park.
One of the few comments made by passers-by was a spray-painted message on a Dumpster: “This house rocks.” Florian thinks that may have been one of his friends.
Florian, who played and toured the country with Dropsonic and other rock bands before taking the Cartoon Network job, said he knew of Otte both as an artist and a DJ. Hart, a former bartender, met the artist while they were both working at The Point, a now-defunct bar in Little Five Points.
Otte’s original work on the house was a bit bolder —- with more dramatic colors and textures —- than the owners felt comfortable with, Florian said. One day, Otte really went too far and spray painted “Finger Lickin’ Good” on the side of the house. Not wanting their home to become a target for graffiti artists, the couple asked him to paint over it.
“We were a little more conservative than he would probably like,” Florian said. “We asked that it be a little more subdued.”