John Russett has always been a builder, whatever the material. He began by making things out of dirt and lumber: raw, structural installations that took apart the systems holding a building or a city together, less art-about-construction than construction-as-art. It was an attempt to understand infrastructure from the inside, by making some. When he moved from earth to canvas, the instinct came with him: take a system apart to see how it actually thinks.
That system, in the paintings, is the mind itself. Russett belongs to a small, deliberate strain of contemporary Surrealism, grouped by one critic, James Scarborough, alongside painters Peter Zokosky and Jorge Sicre, as heirs to Breton who argue with him as much as they follow him. Where Breton's Surrealism was romantic and spiritual, Russett's is biological and mechanical: less about the unconscious as mystery, more about the brain as an instrument that takes fragments (a face, a bone, an artifact, as in his own painting Nefertiti's Song) and can't help assembling them into pattern and story. His images juxtapose the disparate the way a mind actually does: not randomly, but according to a logic supplied after the fact, the same associative reflex that turns a Rorschach blot into a butterfly.
What's real, what's merely photographic, and what the eye and mind do to the gap between them: that question has stayed the engine of the work throughout, and it hasn't loosened its grip. Russett doesn't paint dreams so much as the machinery that produces them: the same curiosity that once had him digging trenches to understand infrastructure now has him picking apart the infrastructure of perception itself. It's a body of work less interested in what you see than in catching you in the act of seeing it, and, from what those who know him can attest, an eye that has never once stopped looking.
James Scarborough is a critic who has written on Russett's work since 1987, when his essay "Les Paysans de Long Beach: Surrealism Resurgent in the South Bay" (Visions Magazine) first grouped him with Zokosky and Sicre.
