Welcome to the Water Planet 1987

This is James Rosenquist's ‘Welcome to the Water Planet’, painted with oils, and what strikes me is that it feels both incredibly precise and somehow totally psychedelic. Rosenquist has this collage-like approach, where he brings together images that don't normally hang out, and then blows them up to a crazy scale. It’s a real process of combination, collage, and overlay. I’m drawn to how the flower and the face are rendered with such smooth, blended surfaces, like a billboard. They are set against the backdrop of dark greens and blues, punctuated by sharp diagonals above. There’s a tension between the flatness of the surface and the illusion of depth, which adds to the dreamlike quality. Rosenquist reminds me a little bit of Sigmar Polke, another artist who loved to play with image appropriation and layering, but in a much more grungy, process-heavy way. Both artists invite us to see the world as a jumble of images, and find some kind of beauty and poetry in the chaos.