In its spiky avidity, «Wheel House» might even read as a rejoinder to the edge - to - edge lyricism of Brice Marden's loopy abstractions, though Arnoldi's picture clearly grew out of his own earlier work such as the 1986 example here - an actual thicket of
painted sticks attached to painted plywood.
The enigmatic title refers to the painter's «crown,» a heroic accessory evoked in Aldrich's «Figure with Cape,» (2008) a shakily
painted outline of a caped matador with three wooden
sticks attached to the canvas surface.