During my visit, the studio is also home to a half dozen or so of the new paintings destined for the artist’s show at Acquavella (he joined the gallery in 2003, following a stint at Gagosian)—big, dynamic, boldly colored pictures that immediately announce themselves as “Rosenquists.” With titles like The Infinite Sweep of the Minute Hand, The Hole in the Center of the Clock and Time Blades—Learning Curves (looming more than 8 by 21 feet), they all feature timepieces—melting, distorted, reflected—layered within meticulously rendered webs of something recalling both digital cable and bodily ligaments and surrounded by vectors of energy extending out into space. “I’m getting old,” Rosenquist explains as he shows the works to me. But as we talk, it becomes clear that they are less melancholy meditations on aging than investigations into the relationship of time to space and experience, an attempt to pull together some kind of unified field theory of life devised by one who has, by all accounts, lived it fully.

As we talk about the nuts and bolts of painting—about Rosenquist’s conviction that even the greatest paintings are just “made of minerals mixed in oil, smeared on a piece of cloth with the hair from the back of a pig’s ear”—I recall a moment from the evening before, as we lounged in his living room discussing art history. “Here’s something I think about,” Rosenquist said, gazing off into the distance before fixing his eyes back on me and giving the arm of his chair a slap. “During the Renaissance, if I lived then, would I have been good enough to be a background painter for some of those masters? Why? Because I painted mural after mural—battle scenes and the Vikings for the movies and a bing and a bang and a bing bang boom!” he continued, deploying a favored onomatopoeic exclamation to describe life on the scaffolds of Times Square, before lowering his voice and turning to look out at the Gulf sunset. “I’d like to think that maybe I could have been an apprentice for some Old Master. You know, one wonders how up to snuff you are. That’s the long view.”

"James Rosenquist" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents.