Many of James Rosenquist’s ideas for canvases were stimulated by his early experiences as a billboard painter, working up close on enormous advertising images executed in a slick commercial illustration style. Like the sign painter who can see only one section, one enormous detail at a time, Rosenquist juxtaposes intuitively selected fragments of reality in startling new relationships. These magnified details of images from consumer culture, usually executed in a personal paraphrase of the styles of commercial advertising illustration, are often magnified to the point that they are not immediately recognizable in their new context.
Rosenquist’s prints are often creative variations on his paintings or details from them. The recent lithograph Chambers (like the painting of the same title) refers to his move to a new studio on Chambers Street in New York. The print’s private metaphors appear to revolve around a sense of new beginnings, of doors opening. In the upper left corner, an asbestos- gloved hand holds a panel with a soot painting in progress — a pearly image made with acetylene torch or candle flame. To the right of center is an outsize razor blade; the act of shaving is the beginning of the artist’ day. The partially transparent blade — non-threateningly frontal rather than edge to — has a gleaming doorknob that invites us to open it and see what lies beyond. Its shape is echoed by another rectangle suggesting a falling door panel seen in perspective.
The classical columns at the center suggest the architecture of the courthouse on Chambers Street. Knowledge of the artist's private associations with the imagery should not, however, limit the viewer's imagination; an air of mystery or enigma, of a poetic image half- grasped, is an important aspect of the lithograph’s mood.
Chambers was printed at ULAE, where Rosenquist first began working in lithography in 1964 and 1965. Like many of his color lithographs, it is executed, in part, with the spatter technique employed by the painters and poster artists Jules Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec in their lithographs from the late nineteenth century. Rosenquist used not only the traditional spatter technique with a stiff bristled brush but the compressed air spray of the modern airbrush. Both methods transfer the lithographic wash to the surface of stones or plates in open clouds of atom-like flecks of pigment. The sleek continuous gradations of tone thus produced evoke the continuous tones of photography or of advertising art made with an airbrush.
Nancy Spector, The Modern Art of the Print, p. 100