Billy Sullivan
Still, Looking
Works 1969–2016
Despite its landscape format, large size and hardcover with a dust jacket, this first monograph on the 70-year-old New York artist Billy Sullivan is relatively easy to handle. All the illustrations - mostly one but up to a maximum of four per page - are with only two exceptions centred vertically, with varying white borders depending on the format. The linear arrangement makes for a perfect interplay with the dazzling selection and arrangement of the images, with the photographs, paintings and drawings from almost five decades grouped loosely by motif without regard for technique, genre or chronology. Since Sullivan sometimes depicted the same person or similar situations more than once and occasionally made drawings or paintings from photographs, leafing through the book offers diverse moments of déjà vu and time loops. At the same time, established hierarchies between painting and photography, and between original and copy, are undermined. The strikingly strong colours in many of the drawings and paintings were generated using Maximage/ECAL's ‘Color Library' colour separation tool.
