BEFORE EVEN looking at the actual works by some of the 81 artists in ART NOW Vol:2 , two aspects of the majority of these works must be mentioned:
(1)    All of the artists’ works are about their own present reactions to the world and its history, their consciousness of the advances of science, technology, sociology, psychology, race relations, sexuality, and all sorts of learning.
The artists are not acting on behalf of, or representing political, or nationalist powers, though many of the artists certainly may have political views, and are proud to come from the nations of their birth. This point may be particularly applicable to those of the 81 artists who come from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, India, Panama, South Korea, and those artists of African descent born in Britain and the USA.
(2)    The works of the artists are mostly either emotional statements of a figurative expressionist nature, or highly finished methods of technique. In other words, there is little evidence here of art made from an emphasis on the artists’ (and therefore the viewer’s) exploration of the creative unknown as it presents itself as the artist works.
But amusingly, the one lone artist, an abstract painter (there are only 26 painters in the book; a minority), who faces this important value of creation both literally and metaphorically, without rigid guidelines, happens to come at the end of the alphabetically arranged book, and is Christopher Wool, born 1955 in Chicago and now living in New York.
It may be significant for me to begin discussing ART NOW. Vol: 2 from the back, or rather from its final artist presented, since Wool’s work bears a vital uniqueness which sticks out admirably from the other artists’ apparent rigid use of techniques.

Earlier works

Around the 1990s, Wool’s paintings were hard-edged block letters or words painted in dark colours down and across large white canvases. The effect was interesting and attractive, because the shapes of the letters vertically and horizontally on top of each other created random geometric spaces.
Such an effect achieved by what is unconcerned with duplicating typical natural realities, but rather evoking thoughts and shapes by the structural arrangement of letters and words was Wool’s way of showing how the most individual approach to making art can still provide pleasure and meaning for others.
This, then, is a demonstration of art that is not decided by anyone other than the artist, and yet it can make sense and communicate. Free societies permit it to do so.
Wool’s resume shows the cities where such works of his have appeared at art gallery group and solo shows; cities like New York, Munich, Basle, Geneva, Vienna, among others.
In fact, I first saw Wool’s excellent word paintings in Turin, the Italian big-city overlooking the French and Italian Riviera towns. This is a city noted for its interest in unusual avant-garde paintings and literature, and Wool’s gallery was two flights up in a sprawling architectural range typical of Italy’s civic beauty, overlooking a large outdoor café on the sidewalk below.
Wool’s paintings are not the same today, as can be seen from his works in ART NOW: Vol: 2, but there is a brilliant continuity in its significant theme of lines and lineage taking on suggestive human meaning.
Letters and words make sentences, which make lines, but Wool’s current paintings present another sort of line, which is drawing, and they are only in two or three basic tones: Black, white, or red.
They are totally informal and seemingly random, like large meandering doodles in enamel paint and printers ink on large stretched linen surfaces. The effect is mysteriously meaningful, as I will prove, but first we see why Wool’s paintings are unique in ART NOW: Vol: 2, because its anti-technical style is rooted in human intuition, hesitancy, erasure and doubt, rather than a rigid absolute expression of craft, or technical precision.
It is not art as physical expertise, like the way machines are made, but the invisible and therefore ever-fresh conception of art born from its free manual root, which manifests itself in imaginative lines and paint application. This is the primary reason why his paintings are both mysteriously beautiful and suggestively meaningful.

Close comparison

The major older contemporary painter which Wool’s work is related to is the fabulous fellow American painter, Cy Twombly, who, since the 1950s, has been an expatriate in Italy. Not surprisingly, perhaps because Twombly is a highly literate painter concerned with ancient Roman poets like Vergil, Horace, etc, classical architecture, classical graffiti, a theme much more refined and culturally referential than North America’s urban industrial and societal toughness would make popular.
Twombly delightfully and unquestionably showed that painting is not defined by some demonstration of difficult applied skill, but an object of magical marks, writing, scribbles, games, naughty childish drawings, numbers, erasures, hand-smeared spots (yes, like a monkey) etc, done in pencil and coloured crayon, and painted spots almost the same as overall cream or white canvases about 3 feet by 5 feet.
The viewer now can no longer sit back and be entertained from a distance by a recognized visual reality, but has to pay very close attention to decipher and appreciate the quietly amusing variety of clumsy notations on what seems to be blank paintings that have revolutionized the convention of composition with their individual re-invention of art-making.
Such deceptive simplicity seems as if it could be done by anyone, but the difference between Twombly and ‘anyone’ is that ‘anyone’ may be able to physically do what he does on canvas, but perhaps not CONCEIVE of it as Art first, in all serious educated creative consciousness, before doing it.
Though Christopher Wool is certainly a protégé of Twombly, consciously or not, he brought his own powerful social suggestiveness to his recent paintings of black and white lines like superimposed, smudged, baroque loops or doodles.

Chicagoan influence

These works are so full of social and biological resonance that we have to consider the artist’s North American nationality as an influence. Wool was born and grew up in Chicago, a city noted for its black Blues and Jazz musicians, with a huge white fan culture.
It is also a city whose artistic tastes are quite advanced and tolerant of experimentation. Its visual art museums like The Art Institute of Chicago can boast of having some of the best innovative modern paintings by outstanding 20th Century modernist masters such as Picasso, Pollock, De Kooning, Wifredo Lam, Hans Hoffman, Georges Mathieu, David Smith, etc, all artists with a tendency to evoke Man’s primal and amorphous biological identity.
Chicago is also the home of perhaps America’s most prestigious monthly Poetry periodical, POETRY, founded by Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound since 1912.
The combined influences of all these aspects of Chicago culture must have rubbed off on Wool’s development as a certain type of painter, whose minimal use of black and white reflects a subtle yet earnest concern with one of North America’s major obsessions: Racial identity linked to definitions of racial purity.
These black/white/grey paintings are fabulous, thoughtful examples of visual art, which pin down truthful equations of important human history, such as the historical and individual/personal relations between black and white, between the dark and the light coloured, or between different ethnicities in general across the world.
Wool’s carefree  loping blend of narrow black lines, over which fatter white lines are superimposed, smudging, smearing, soaking, blurring the relations of both colours which never completely overcome or erase each other, yet often become grey by their fusion, suggest white and non-white, both co-existing as themselves, yet also as mixed extensions of themselves.

Suggestive dialogue

This suggestive dialogue between visual artistic line and metaphorical human lineage in Christopher Wool’s recent paintings, take on social and civilized value from the context of North America’s strange historical racism, where until the 1960s in many States, the law forbade black and white to marry, or sit together in cinemas, hence the continued importance of cinemas, especially in countries still plagued by bigotry between different races.
Such  racism led to inhibited embarrassment and self-consciousness among many citizens of mixed black/white parentage, who could only be counted as black, as though their white (or black) ancestry did not exist, or could not be acknowledged or loved, and was a mistake that should never have occurred.
Born in 1955, Wool would have been a child when in the early 1960s drastic changes to such inhumane restrictions were set in motion by Bobby Kennedy’s ability to make State Governors change segregation laws on cinema attendance. Which makes me think how different one’s art might be if such abnormal circumstances had not registered on one’s national consciousness.
For instance, I remember an unforgettable experience of attending a cinema on Avenida Gran Via in Madrid, where I had been living for a while in 1990, and upon entering the cinema with my ticket, was escorted by a well-dressed white male usher to a prominent centre row and seated by him next to two or three very white Spanish young ladies, all elegant and sexy in their tight satin dresses, gorgeous fragrances just right, and their fans open.
Before the film began, I was flanked by another beautiful Spanish girl who encouraged me to speak from time to time. Incidentally, the film we were watching was popular Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci’s  THE SHELTERING SKY, filmed beautifully in the African Sahara, and in which outstanding American actress Debra Winger becomes one of the wives (the white one) of a black African Bedouin tribesman.
You can imagine how sensitive and nervous I felt during the whole experience! The abominable history of the world, and its antagonistic racial relations, already shown countless times in history books, novels, poetry, films, plays, songs, paintings, sculptures etc (hence the importance of consuming international culture, or becoming truly cultured) demands a fresh new creative approach by today’s artists, who can put such travesties and their biased restrictions behind them, and us.
Christopher Wool’s black/white/grey recent paintings are a radical accomplished offering of such a welcome direction, which significantly concludes Tashen’s ART NOW: Vol: 2.