Whereas the earlier pieces used stencils and pre-made printing rollers to create text and patterns set upon a white ground, Untitled pulls from Wool’s own history while perplexingly separating the painter from himself. Although they might at first resemble gestural spatters of paint or errant droplets across a blank page, Untitled creates a disconnect between the depicted forms and their connection to chance happenings in the studio.

Playfully deceiving the spectator, Wool extracted the forms from an almost encyclopedic compendium of abstract motifs from his own paintings. One notes throughout the crisp cut of a straight edge that denotes the end of the screen. These flat borders create a counterbalance to the compositionally loose action of the brush inherent to these types of marks.

By leveraging mechanical processes, Wool takes the artist’s mark as a symbol of action or spontaneity that can be reproduced while retaining the connections to vigor and movement so key to the Abstract Expressionists that came before.
Indeed, Untitled’s debt to art history is evident to see. The explosive splashes and splatters of paint are immediately redolent of the Abstract Expressionist paradigm of Jackson Pollock, while Wool’s insistence on a palette restricted to black and white
instantly recalls the chromatic polarity of the best of Franz Kline’s paintings. Meanwhile Wool’s approach to media, his recapitulation of found imagery, his repetition and re-appropriation of his own works, forges a strong parity with Pop masterworks by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Slick, bold, and completely of its time, Untitled is Wool at his conceptual finest.