January 7 to February 5, 2012
165 Orchard Street, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (917) 721 4539

Installation shot of the exhibition under review with House, foreground, and detail of Wall. Courtesy of Y Gallery

Leor Grady’s solo exhibition at Y Gallery’s intimate Project Room features sculpture, painting, and 2-dimensional works on fabric and paper. Titled “Objects of Affection,” the installation moves between metaphor and symbolism in tones of white and gold. All works were made by hand, a point that underscores the meditative quality of Grady’s practice.

In one key piece, the famous phrase of Hillel’s, “If I’m not for myself, who will be?”  is embroidered in Hebrew characters on a man’s handkerchief. Their spacing is such that the quote might also read as “Without a mother, who will be for me?”.

The single painting in the show is dominated by an amorphous pool of gold enamel that signifies, for the artist, the shimmering surface of the Sea of Galilee. The painting’s motif resonates with an out-sized, gold-painted paper boat nearby, positioned so as to list downward on the gallery’s blind stair. Sagging under its own weight, imperfections at the structural folds add to its poignant condition.

Leor Grady, Untitled (handkerchief), 2008, detail. Thread on cotton, 17 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

By contrast, the geometry of a concrete “house” on wheels is authoritatively correct. A dense cube topped by a separately cast triangular solid, its diminutive size and reductive form initially suggest the fantasy of stability and safety that a house represents. But inevitably, this work takes on a more specific allusion to the dilemma of settlements on land disputed by Palestine and Israel, partly through the work’s implacable yet moveable aspect, but also because of its proximity to Grady’s embroidered maps of the Dead Sea. In these works on paper, mirrored forms face each other with lashed and dangling threads, knots, and needle-holes. Endlessly combative, warlike and intimate, this is embroidery as existentialism. “If I am not for myself….”

Meanwhile, pillows stacked within a gallery niche simultaneously contrast with the concrete house and connect with the wilting boat. Creating a wall, they block the Project Space’s street entrance and instigate richly contradictory references – to sand bags, bedding, dreams, sexual innuendo. If a military theme lurks within this show, the pillows complicate matters in concert with other works’ allusions to deep time and questions of selfhood.

Grady, who was born in Israel to Yemeni parents, has been New York-based since 1996. As this solo installation and his participation in recent group shows suggests, his approach to conceptual art relates to that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, and Barbara Bloom. Respecting the differences between these artists, a common thread grounds their emphasis on the personal and the political, which unmistakably relates to social activism, yet leaves the viewer utterly free of didacticism.

Grady’s practice also resonates with Gedi Sibony’s in its subtlety and veiled political content. But whereas Sibony is ingeniously subversive, Grady is emotionally engaging, even endearing. One of the most interesting things about “Objects of Affection” is the way Grady’s installation gains momentum toward collective meaning, delivering a velvet punch that is simultaneously forthright and poetically confrontational.

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Glenn Brown, Oscillate Wildly (after 'Autumnal Cannibalism' by Salvador Dalí), 1999. Oil on linen, 64 x 154 inches. Courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan

On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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December 9, 2011 – January 25, 2012
530 West 22 Street at 10^th avenue
New York, (212) 929 2262

Trisha Brown, Untitled (London), 2003. Charcoal and oil pastel on paper, 107 x 126 inches. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Trisha Brown’s long, illustrious career as a choreographer and dancer has won her many awards and much recognition. Now age 75, her early work was colored by friendships with Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Rauschenberg, the later artist with whom she collaborated. Her choreography, featured in a video in the gallery shot by Brown herself, is athletic and gently humorous, gaining her an international reputation as an artist of supreme skill and subtlety. She is perhaps not so well known for her performative drawings—works on paper, placed on the floor, that are accomplished while Brown dances with pastels or charcoal in hands or feet, recording her movements on stage. The exhibition consists of these large sheets of paper, shown vertically on the gallery walls, recording Brown’s motions and appearing, rather oddly, like the traces of atomic movement. Relating to the abstract expressionist movement, the works on paper, part of the “It’s a Draw” series, are easily compared to the abstract, richly evocative spectrum of marks and scribbles achieved by Cy Twombly.

It is important to remember, however, that Brown’s drawings reflect a physical activity: the dance performance. While there is a direct correlation between Brown’s dances and the marks she makes on paper, the relations between the two are resolutely abstract—we cannot reconstruct the dance from the marks alone. This uncertainty actually becomes an advantage in Brown’s hands, in large part because the drawings belong to the idiom of the New York School, which gives the artist a context in addition to the defining but invisible circumstances to which the marks refer. The result is a marvelous tension between the drawings’ origins and the way they are actually seen: the works quite literally mark actions occurring over time, so that there is a fourth dimension to what Brown is doing. Like many successful ideas in art, the concept of registering motion is simple but generates an esthetic of considerable complexity. The drawings therefore may be said to possess two lives—one as a record of dancing, a different artistic activity; and another as a sequence of independent drawings belonging to the tradition of the New York School.

Most of the drawings in the show are remarkably large, with their squiggles, smudges, and blotches pinning down the memory of actual movement occurring in real time. Oddly, but beautifully, there is a moment when the memory of the dance performance and the performance of the drawing merge in an action-based insight of which the visionary John Cage would have entirely approved. Viewers must remember that Brown’s career as a dancer spans more than just one generation and argues for a tradition of alternative art; this small but genuine history gives Brown the context she needs, while the drawings themselves build whimsical structures that actually refer to the dancer’s body and its expressiveness. In the first work of the suite Untitled (London), 2003, most of the linear activity is occurring in the lower half of the composition, with the scrawls building some sort of structure.

The intelligence of the work is not to be denied and can even suggest a certain curiousness, in the sense that Brown was not thinking at all when she made her marks. But even so, it can be acknowledged that the body has its own perceptions, sometimes of acute insight. Untitled (Montpellier), 2002 consists of a suite of the large drawings and there is little stylistic difference between the two groups of works. Despite the visual muttering evident in Brown’s art, the drawings’ integrity wins out because their origins belong to another field. Brown is thus triumphant not in one but in two modes of expression, leading us toward the understanding that complexity can be both personal and publicly compelling when handled intelligently.

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September 16, 2011 to January 8, 2012
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000

During the past decade, Eva Hesse (1936-1970) has finally begun to find the institutional attention she deserves. This resurgence was sparked by the traveling retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2002, whose success soon prompted several specialized exhibitions such as those focused on Hesse’s drawings (Drawing Center and Menil Collection, 2006) and even her improvisational studioworks (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010, and Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 2011). It seemed like most chapters of Hesse’s brief career had been tackled, but  for a few early paintings the artist made in her mid-twenties. By featuring nineteen of these, Eva Hesse: Spectres 1960 manages to examine yet another nuance of this stunning oeuvre.

Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches. Collection of Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, Chicago

While the spectres do not compare in sophistication or innovation to Hesse’s mature work, they still reveal the searching spirit of an exceptional talent. Hesse had originally set out to become a painter, studying at Cooper Union and Yale University. It was not until after her graduation in 1964, when she and her husband at the time, the sculptor Tom Doyle, were invited by the textile manufacturer and collector F. Arnhard Scheidt to create works in his German factory, that her focus shifted towards wall-constructions and sculpture. While she continued to work on paper until the end of her life, she promptly turned away from traditional oil painting.

Keeping this in mind, one has to view the spectres as what they are: experimentations of a young artist. While not studies as such, they reflect Hesse’s struggles to formulate a language of her own. And yet, the paintings reveal an intriguing sensibility for composition. Though abstraction was favored during the time of their origin (Hesse studied with Josef Albers at Yale), the spectres are somewhat radical in that they incorporate figurative elements. By fusing representational with abstract forms, Hesse signals an aim to break with both the past and the currently fashionable. In the years to come, even her most minimal, truly abstract works would retain associations with the human body and its rhythms.

Despite their stylistic and material dissimilarities, the spectres’ use of palette already hints at Hesse’s most mature work. Overall de-saturation with occasional accentuation of primary color allows these paintings to seem subdued and yet to also glow. Their radiance emerges from the subtle contrasts of grays, creams and red, for example, in CITE WORK AND DATE, and provides them with a mysterious aura. At the Brooklyn Museum, the installation consciously enhances this attribute by veiling the works in dimmed, warm light.

E. Luanne McKinnon, director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, who organized the exhibition, is responsible for the term “spectre” , referring to an “image or apparition” in this body of work. While these paintings are far from minimalist, they are reductive. The suggestions of figures and human outlines partially dissolve into oceans of color. Overall, one can distinguish two general tendencies within this body of work: intimately scaled and loosely brushed paintings and larger canvases that feature a sole subject . In the first group, despite their spatial relationships the figures appear disconnected from each other. One of these compositions depicts a faceless bride in the background while a grey ghostlike creature hovers in the foreground to the left. Is this a Munchian rendition of the same individual, depicted through various stages of time? These compositions are dreamlike, half here and also nowhere. They do not render concrete scenarios, but capture a psychologically charged undercurrent.

Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches. The Rachofsky Collection

In contrast, the larger paintings might be self-portraits or perhaps renditions of the interior life of fictitious female protagonists. As the shape of a sole figure dominates the plane our perception shifts towards the individual. Anonymous and yet with a clear sense of presence, they seem to embody Hesse’s attempt to turn the inward outward and to give shape to something as ethereal and abstract as human emotions. It is this inherent notion of humanity that makes Hesse’s work, no matter how abstract, deeply personal. Hesse was not simply a minimalist; she was a distiller, able to filter out anything unnecessary that could distract from the essence of form, movement and spatial relatonship. In her early and later works alike, there is nothing too much or too loud. Her abiding ambition to achieve self-contained harmony can be traced to the spectres. Here, she is beginning to articulate the concerns that would characterize gestures to come.

October 20 – December 17, 2011
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

The discrepancy between technique and expression is one of the fascinating paradoxes of art. Who would think that Ingres’ corseted technique could lead to such expansive descriptions? (Or, that Seurat’s careful building of tones would culminate in such gutsy massings of form, or Soutine’s thrashings—which stylistically seem to say, “Take me anywhere but here”—bring his subjects closer to the viewer?) Ingres’ obsessive details and distortions are an entertaining symptom of his loving Raphael not wisely but too well, and we may find ourselves in the peculiar position of admiring him despite his intentions.

Brett Bigbee, Abby, 2005 – 2010. Oil on linen, 70-1/32 x 53-7/8 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

Like Ingres, Brett Bigbee brings formidable rendering skills to idiosyncratic figure paintings. Nearly 20 drawings and paintings by the artist, who was born in 1954, recently graced the walls at Alexandre Gallery. Producing only one or two paintings a year, the artist has perfected a singular style that seems to combine the iconic reserve of American colonial portraiture and the descriptive effulgence of French academic painting. His precise modeling imparts to his figure and still life paintings both a glowing intricacy and a slightly surreal exactitude. Bigbee’s attentions are actually quite selective: he invariably renders reflections on the irises of eyes, but no eyelashes to speak of; their whites always include that tiny fold of flesh at the inner corner, but nary a vein. One might expect to find a vulnerability in his portraits, given his painstaking method and the fact that all are members his family, but, if anything, they seem inoculated by their brilliant rendering. They have a porcelain opacity that triggers, for me, an “Ingres reflex”: an admiration for the work at odds with its intentions.

The forms in the seven graphite drawings in the exhibition feel as much incised as drawn. In several portraits, the exquisite detail—the finely cracked lips, the darkly opalescent pools of eyes—impart an Ingres-like effect of self-generated organisms. Study for James (2000) is typical in that all forms become more diffuse as one proceeds away from the riveting eyes, until one arrives at a uniform tone at the sheet’s perimeter, the hair melting into an enclosing vapor. In this respect, Bigbee’s approach is distinctly unclassical; great traditional artists such as Ingres would locate a necessary role for each element, from encircling jawline to embellishments of hair, in characterizing the whole of a face.

Like George Tooker or William Bailey, Bigbee appears to approach drawing as an additive modeling process. Neighboring adjustments of tone actively create sensations of volumes, which accrue, in rather passive rhythms, to fill the surface. Opposite to this “from-the-inside-out” approach is the “outside-in” process of Matisse or Ingres, who, though fully capable of shading, start by locating and relating points across the paper, and building through the tensions of intervals. This is an approach based in composing, and it makes for different expression: the singularity of an arm extending through space as opposed to forms emerging evocatively from the depths. (In truth, great artists from Watteau to Degas had a foot in both camps, pacing their rich, modeled tones with vigorous intervals. But I’ll admit I’m keener on outside-in composing. Modeling without composing takes you to light-weight seductions—to Greuze and Bougereau—while composing without any tonal modeling at all can take you to such extraordinary places as Picasso’s line drawings or Rembrandt’s pen-and-ink sketches.)

Consequently Bigbee’s drawing is indeed muscular in its modeling, but not in the quantifying of human gesture. His infinitely patient approach to all parts of bodies produces some intriguing effects. For instance, the younger boy’s head and left arm pop out disconcertingly in the five-foot-tall drawing Joe and James (2001-2003), while both bodies seem to drop from the heads, rather than grow from the support of earth, imparting to them something of the aspect of pinned specimens.

But might this be the result of a conscious decision? Consider the small, remarkable drawing titled Abby (2004) Here, the slight pursing of lips, the shading about the eye sockets, and shadows about the base of the nose, eloquently lead from one to the other as asymmetrical pressures, all within the tangible embrace of a head. Honoring the mobility of features, the artist turns the subject’s eyes, wondrously, into the summation of a vulnerable entity.

Brett Bigbee, Abby, 2004. Graphite on paper, 11-1/2 x 8 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

In fact, lingering a while in the exhibition at Alexandre, one may sense in many of the works a particular kind of magic.  Academic artists are frequently strong, if conventional, draftsmen and less than active colorists. Their hues tend to fill rather than direct, adding simply an evocative sheen to what’s already there. Bigbee, however, appears to be the rare painter whose expression is more coherently expansive in color than in drawing. Indeed, his color sometimes weights elements left at loose ends by his iron-willed drawing.

In James (1999-2001), a portrait of a mother and her baby, the face of the baby is a marvel of modeling, and not just tonally, but with colors eliciting the movement between lit and softly shadowed areas. It represents what must be an extraordinary amount of work, yet it feels limber. Bigbee deftly catches even the curiosity in the baby’s gaze. Colors lend tangible weight to certain other sequences, too: there’s a luxurious depth in the movements between the baby’s shadowed ear, the deep absorbent red of his mother’s dress, and the pure blue of sky visible in the window—all coexisting within an inch of canvas space.  But such are the peculiarities of Bigbee’s attack that the entire remainders of the figures’ bodies have less sculptural presence. One recognizes strategies in the drawing; the baby’s curling fingers just broach the encompassing contour of his mother’s shoulder, while his other hand, resting atop her wrist, launches the larger echo of her fingers. But the drawing fails to build to such affecting events, and in this case even Bigbee’s empathetic color can’t enliven them rhythmically.

The exhibition includes five still life paintings, and here Bigbee’s precise descriptions avoid of the surreal overtones of some of the figural work. He also brings to them the stronger aspects of the portrait paintings, with simpler compositions again showing more momentum of rhythm. The six fruit in Quince (2000-01) vividly capture the orbiting energy of orange spheres in a leafy world. Dark Earth (2010-11) catches the singularity of a bright clover blossom arcing from a darkened patch of soil; behind it, the division of a glowing rock, by two blades of grass, sounds a telling response.

Dominating the exhibition, however, is Abby (2005-10), a portrait of young girl standing alone in a field. One imagines that Bigbee summoned his full powers for this six-foot-tall canvas, and in technical terms it’s a tour de force. Yet it impresses also as pictorial expression. Bigbee’s colors impart to the figure a palpable presence, as if she had precipitated out the scene’s thick, darkish air. Though the face and hands still flirt with that porcelain inertia, her vertical form holds powerfully in space against the taut horizontals of distant water and the rocks at her feet. Far-away treetops connect in an uneven wave that buoys the pale shoulders of the girl, who stands awkwardly, as if she wasn’t quite sure how she got there. The artist clearly knows, though—at least on some intuitive level—having conjured it through some remarkable chemistry of color.

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A.A. Rucci: Tondo
October 25 to November 26, 2011
Coleman Burke Gallery
649 West 27^th Street
917-677-7825

All Systems Go!
November 10 to December 23, 2011
C24 Gallery
514 West 24^th Street
646-416-6300

A.A. Rucci, Jelly Belly Racer, 2011. Acrylic on linen over panel, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Coleman Burke Gallery

Tondos are famously difficult to compose. In his Painting Techniques of the Masters (1972) Hereward Lester Cooke, a former Curator of Painting at the National Gallery of Art, commented on the tondo, in relation to Raphael’s Alba Madonna, in terms that would be of interest to practicing artists:

One of the most difficult problems for a painter is to design figures within a round format. If the balance is not correct, the picture will seem to roll like a wheel. If the design is too rigid, it will not harmonize with the circular format.

Coleman Burke Gallery showed a suite of tondos painted by Brooklyn-based artist A.A. Rucci. Rucci is an idiosyncratic painter, so the additional complication of a canvas that threatens to spin if it’s not skillfully employed suits him well.

The tondos spanned two decades. I remember the earlier ones from when we were both based in South Florida. In them headless bodies cavorted and posed in front of schematic architecture and filled-in landscapes. Their palette was often distinctly Floridian. Aldo’s perfect peanut-butter sandwich was just the prelude to a spectacular afternoon (2006) positions one of his headless avatars on top of the facade of a house in front of a sky as pink as a sunburn. Their headlessness was initially off-putting, not because of the implied violence – their body language betrays no torment – but because of their dishabille. Initially, it looked like a run-of-the-mill comment on the objectification of women.

But in the context of South Florida, it made sense. South Florida is not an intellectual place. Half-dressed, headless cavorting is simply what one does there. Facades are often the most interesting component of both buildings and persons. And in an artistic environment in which people were constantly putting on weird displays as a tactic to grab attention, Rucci managed to produce something in which the weirdness was intrinsic, even structural.

He could have stayed put and had a decent run as a Miami artist with a recognizable gimmick, but removing himself to New York turned out well for him. The headless figures went on their way to the place where symbols go once they’ve served their purpose. Rucci began working in a style informed by hard-edge abstraction in which Odili Donald Odita is an affinity, except Rucci painted some of the planes using a faux-finish technique for rendering wood grain. These textures showed up in colors that never grew out of the earth: aqua, storm cloud, alizarin.

And occasionally, as in Conquistador (2009), a parrot would appear.

Conversations with the artist revealed a thought process behind the work that is too multi-layered to summarize. Mentioned were romantic quantum entanglement, nostalgia-free history painting, the Northern Renaissance, fall foliage and its discontents, and the way one scans the urban environment while walking a dog. These last two items figure into The Fall (2008), a twelve-foot, life-size stretch of sidewalk with a single, cracked chestnut pod on it, executed in acrylic on cast porcelain, pewter, and wood. It appeared as the centerpiece of “All Systems Go!”, a group exhibition curated by Suzanne Carte for C24 Gallery that also includes Tilo Schulz,  Diego Toledo, Brendan Earley, and the ensemble of Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins.

Works by A.A. Rucci: installation shot of All Systems Go! curated by Suzanne Carte. Courtesy of C24 Gallery, New York

While not described by the gallery so plainly, “All Systems Go!” basically had an architecture theme. Schulz strung cord about the exhibition space and hung felt from it. Toledo built model towers from pine and rendered perspectives of construction framing in MDF and Formica. Earley drew futuristic buildings in felt-tip and tape. Marman & Borins presented convoluted riffs on Josef Albers in the form of Bauhaus-like furniture and grid paintings.

Not only did Rucci upstage his colleagues, but his paintings upstaged The Fall, and the smaller, simpler paintings surpassed the larger, more complicated ones. Everyone involved was working assiduously on some low-yield artistic problem. The results didn’t feel created so much as solved. And there was a dourness about the effort that makes one reluctant to criticize the labor but unable to enjoy the product.

Some of this was creeping onto Rucci’s more elaborately assembled paintings, with raised areas in the manner of Ellsworth Kelly and schematic application of color and texture reminiscent of Peter Halley. At ten feet wide, Brooklyn Heights Elementary (2008) pushed the viewer back too far for the textures — his strongest technical aspect — to scan.

He seemed to realize this, and works from 2010 to the present in both exhibitions show him painting in a more straightforward manner and a smaller scale with greater success. OnceUponATimeInAmerica (2010) at C24 is a jaunty composition of wood grain, tortoise shell, onyx, and slices of sky blue and crimson. Jelly Belly Racer (2011) back at Coleman Burke sandwiches three hard edge arrangements between brightly painted wood textures that look like they were pulled off of an old Mexican shed. The mental associations and accumulated sensations that brought this disparity of parts together are unknowable, but evidently rich and heartfelt.  And despite that disparity, the paintings come into a stable harmony.

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November 18 to December 18, 2011
205 Norman Avenue at Humboldt Street
Brooklyn, (718) 383-9380

Craig Olson, a painter of bright lyrical abstractions, has brought together artists spanning several generations for the group exhibition he has curated at Janet Kurnatowski’s, Idiot’s Delight, from recent MFA grads to established mid-career artists.  His people are unafraid to experiment, remaining equally unfettered by tradition or trend.Where there is humor in this show it is in the service of engagement with something of substance. Katherine Bradford’s Invisible Underpants, with its coarsely-hewn superhero figure and bold palette, is worked in the artist’s familiar conciseness, in what is currently called a “provisional” technique, accomplishing a lot with a little. The see-through underpants reveal the weave of raw canvas, and it splits and dissolves our super hero into figure and ground, analogy and smears of paints. It’s a fragile balance but the risks pay off.

Elisa Soliven, Untitled Portrait, 2011. Plaster, burlap, rice, wood, acrylic & leaves, 58 x 18 x 18 inches. Courtesy of Janet Kurnatowski

Chris Martin uses the opposite approach with his For the Protection of Amy Winehouse, piling paint can lid-sized circles of dried paint onto a thick impasto ground to create a mausoleum with quarter-sized plastic gemstones, paper towel, an image of Winehouse and innumerable other detritus. Dated 2007- 2010, one can’t help but see the morbid failure implicit in the title in the crowded surface of the painting.

In Peter Acheson’s small, untitledpiece the entry point is the painted text “Hawk Feather” on an upside down newspaper clipping. This starts a cascade of memory and association, which further opens the reading of the painting as an experience and the record of an experience.

A funny remark overheard at the opening  rang true: the work here is “retinal non-retinal.”  The reference, of course, is to Duchamp’s call for non-retinal conceptualism. Olson includes works by pseudonymous artists S.H. and Ishmael Bubble: a candle wax and dried tea rose combine, and a signed UTZ red hot potato chips bag, adding to the sense of Duchampian mischief.

EJ Hauser’s subverted portrait Paul, a gestural and muddy bust traversed by red green and yellow horizontal lines, both engages and obstructs the gaze charging the piece with a winning punk energy, while Deirdre Sword’s rich umber and orange painting, Untitled (Holly Fool’s Sceptre), hovers between an Abstract Expressionist field and a palimpsest of script. Like oil soaked mud, the painting is both beautiful and foreboding.

J.J. Manford’s One Can’t Think of One’s Soul While Eating feels like two paintings clinging to each other and vying for their attention. The uneasy tension created at the sharp borders between color plains shakes the stability of the composition to near breaking point. But like the other work in the show, Manford manages to keep the counterpoints from vibrating the painting apart.

Ben La Rocco’s Voodoo’s Kustoms exhibits an understated modernism with playfully irreverent marks dispersed on the surface that look like hand drawn maps or bar napkin doodles. Paired with Portal, a bright green drawer face with the broken text “tradition” and scores reminiscent of the marks made to pass the days in solitary confinement, he hints at the idea of art both liberated from and indebted to history.  Tamara Gonzales displays similar ambivalence towards the past in Mariastein with its layered bright spray paint using lace as its stencil.

There is a nice dialogue between the two large sculptures in the show and the remaining small paintings by Linnea Paskow and Thomas Micchellii. Elisa Soliven’s Untitled Portrait is a charismatic bust reminiscent both of Picasso’s Head of Marie Therese and a Huma Bhabha sculpture. The white plaster used to form the head echoes Micchellii’s small work Thrice, with its three-quarter profile of a face painted red on white. James Clark’s Thermal Specialist is a construction blending the textures of found surfaces and applied marks into a figure that isn’t quite organic or robotic. Formal elements in the sculpture, including a long rectangular box lit from within and a green wooden ball, compliment the palette and circular shape in Paskow’s Red Ball, exuding the satisfying freedom found elsewhere in Idiot’s Delight.

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Nov. 3, 2011 to January 14, 2012 (now by appointment only)
19 East 70 Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, (212) 794-0550

Charles Simonds, Mental Earth, 2002. Metal, polyurethane, paper and clay, 72 x 126 x 89 inches. Courtesy of Knoedler & Company

The elusive Little People who notionally build the tiny dwellings and inhabit the miniature landscapes made by Charles Simonds have had to endure everything from heedless vehicles to curious children demolishing their abodes in broken curbs and abandoned buildings in the forty-some years since the artist began to “follow” their migration through SoHo and the Lower East Side. Recently they faced a new challenge uptown, in the sudden collapse of the 165-year-old Knoedler & Company, where Simonds’s most recent work was shown, just a month after the show opened.

The exhibition was organized mainly in two galleries. In the smaller one were two porcelain sculptures, technical tours de force made nearly twenty years apart at the Manufacture Nationale de Céramique, Sèvres, that are striking departures for Simonds. Tumbleweed (1993) is a realistic, impossibly intricate rendering of the plant that detaches itself from its root when it is mature and dry, rendered ghostlike here in the porcelain’s pure white unreflective finish. Unlike Tumbleweed, stubbornly turned in on itself, ready at any moment to roll away to parts unknown, Life, with Thorns, completed in 2011, reaches outward threateningly with its spiked stems, commanding the space around it. The earlier work, emblematic of rootlessness and desolation, and the later one, recalling traditional depictions of the Crown of Thorns, are like a two-sided portrait of the artist as existential prophet: rootless, peripatetic, and yet in the end defiantly messianic and even darkly judgmental.

Charles Simonds, Life, With Thorns, 2011. Porcelain, 13 x 21 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches. Courtesy of Knoedler & Company

Despite the fantasy and miniature scale of Simonds’s work, the messages they convey are far from comforting or child-friendly, as shown by two new tabletop pieces in this gallery, which recall his earliest work. Ruined Blossoms (2011) displays three plantlike miniature brick structures, seemingly in successive stages of growth. The smaller “juvenile” brick plants seem to have been aborted in some way—dead of thirst perhaps or crushed by an outside force. A third “mature” brick plant apparently has survived: two tower-stalks remain erect, though the remaining ones wilt or are prone on the desert-like surface of the piece. Growing morphs into building—a basic paradigm of Simonds’s work—in Grown Walls (2011), which relates as well to the cycle of life in depicting an androgynous male-female form in the middle of a landscape that grows outward in successive rings, initially circular but becoming rectilinear as they approach the limits of their compact clay realm.

The larger rear gallery was devoted to flying, twisting landscapes, hanging from the ceiling or projecting from walls, that embody the twin themes of building and growing—male and female principles, respectively, that in some works can be teased apart, but in others are folded or collapsed onto each other. In addition there were a pair of wall-mounted “smears,” excretory swipes of hardened clay that speak to “body function issues,” as Simonds delicately put it. Each is a captured primal gesture in his primary medium, clay. More than a medium, clay has, as Arthur Danto points out in a thoughtful catalogue essay for this show, a “primordial nature,” and one has long noticed a Golem-like aspect to Simonds’s work, a conjuring of larger-than-life beings out of base clay. The question becomes, as Simonds put it in an email message that informed the venerable philosopher’s essay, “Where do ‘will’ and imagination meet material (material reality, meant physically and ‘philosophically’)?”

As if in response, an expressionistically rendered hanging sculpture, Mental Earth (2002), captures the collision of psychic experience and actuality at the core of the art and, one imagines, the psyche of this son of a couple who were Vienna-trained doctors and psychoanalysts. The ambitious, “post-analytic,” tortured figure, a “smear” more than ten feet across, looks to this viewer like an inside-out rendering of the self, flayed and monumentalized. A serpentlike “head” at one end (or so one imagines it) and a coiling tail with shit-brown coloring at its other end—and less extravagant extrusions also projecting from the core of twisty rock supporting the work—appear to represent a kind of roiling id, whose miniature brick structures twist and curl in sync with the spiraling, seething rock to which they cling.

Charles Simonds, Grown Walls, 2011, detail. Wood, plaster and clay, 9 x 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Knoedler & Company

Four works flanked Mental Earth like courtiers, providing the best viewpoints of the large piece. Moving around them, one felt like a visitor in a virtual helicopter, cruising past impossibly lofty and inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Two Streams (2011) is a wall-mounted piece mostly made from squared-up granitic forms on which are perched seemingly abandoned miniature dwellings, reminiscent of ancient ruins like those in the American Southwest. The streams of the title are tongue-like forms snaking across and beyond the site, implying an extensive unseen landscape.

Arabesque and Twist, both 2011, are more fantastic pieces, both projecting from the wall in alternating clays of gray and orange (roughly the color of burnt sienna pigment), which are Simonds’s basic palette. Arabesque terminates in a set of towers, torquing wildly, as if seen through a distorting lens. In Twist, the most overtly phallic of the wall-mounted pieces, an erect projection grows from a cracked, clifflike “parent,” smooth orange forms developing brick-textured “skin,” maturing into gray, and terminating in a wizened but still vital tip.

The projecting and hanging rock formations, partly body, partly landscape, bring to mind venerable traditions of Chinese art: landscape painting, certainly, with rocky heights floating among clouds, seemingly disconnected from the earth, but more specifically the miniature rock formations that became popular during the T’ang Dynasty.

“Orphanness” is the term Simonds himself has used to describe his existential stance, while “finding his way home” is the impulse that drives him and, presumably, the restless, elusive Little People. A tale has survived of a Taoist at court in the ninth century who longed to go home but the Emperor would not allow it. In the palace there was a miniature landscape, representing the three mountains on the sea. “Unless one is immortal, one could never enter that region,” said the Emperor, pointing.

“The mountains are only a foot high,” laughed the Taoist. “I am weak but I will try to inspect it for Your Majesty.” * At that, he leaped into the air, became smaller and smaller, and disappeared into the little world, never to be seen again.

* Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 p. 85)

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November 3 to December 10, 2011
558 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  917.226.3851

Arizona-raised Charles Andresen – who has been painting under the radar in New York City for the last 20 years – has been given the inaugural show at Guided by Invoices, a new gallery in Chelsea.  The exhibition demonstrates just how deep New York’s abstract painting talent pool is.  Densely packed, colorful, and rhythmic, Andresen’s acrylic blobs jostle for position within each composition of these eight modestly sized paintings.   Including paintings from 2001 to the present, curator Chris Byrne has indexed Andresen’s aesthetic from the raucous to the sublime.

Charles Andresen, Gelb, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 38 x 33 inches. Courtesy of Guided by Invoices

These are tirelessly jubilant gestural abstract paintings.  The excessive pile-ups of thrown paint splats yield so many successful accidents they seem to rewrite the unwritten laws of action painting.  Andresen’s quirky, mediated process can be likened to making an omelet – the base, pigmented gel, is poured on a smooth surface to receive the fixins: streams of colored lines and dots.  But instead of folding the omelet, it is scooped open-face by spatula and flung, creating striking effects and patterns upon impact with the canvas.  Andresen prohibits himself from any further manipulations on the canvas support.  He calls these gooey paint assemblages “Throw Paintings.”

In the Baroque composition Gelb (2007), Andresen’s finely tuned, in-the–moment paint decisions make for an effortless viewing pleasure.  Our eye just keeps sailing in and out of this marbled, greenish yellow surface with blue veining and Polke-esque orange dots.  And Andresen easily demonstrates how gestural surface activity can produce sudden illusions of depth.  David Reed wrote that Dave Hickey told him “Liquidity is the new depth.”  For Andresen, liquefied chaos coagulates to serve an emergent lyrical narrative, within the structure of an allover field.   And in light of the current de Kooning retrospective at MOMA, Andresen’s paintings underscore the ongoing significance of those incisive 1948 black and white enamels, languid paint gushes of the 60 and 70’s, and soaring white cut pastel ribbons from 1981-85.

Andresen also adulterates the material excesses associated with Larry Poons, the bizarrely underappreciated Stanley Boxer and Jules Olitski, particularly his iridescent, taste-bending, luxuriant lathers circa 1990.  In Densities of Intensities (2009), Andresen’s distanced hand and insistently impure process serve to heighten the phantasmagorical nature of this image and deepen space.  Using the weighty physicality of adjacently layered paint blobs to create color contrast, Andresen builds a web that both frames and connects multifocal events.  Peppered throughout, Cheshire stripes and toadstool dots stretch and shrink gesture and space like mirages on a desert highway.  Striated ribboning characteristic of Murano glass pulses through the acrylic paint, injecting velocity, directionality and warped perspective into the forms. Glassy greens glisten, and an enamel-like powder blue punches holes into the sky.   This dense assembly of raucous color, texture and evocative form would make a sympathetic pairing with Daniel Weiner’s riveting polymorphous sculptures were reviewed  here at artcritical recently.

Drenched in rich browns, the tonality of O’odham Rhythm (2001) is a welcome respite from the abundance of color in the rest of the exhibition.  Like a box of assorted chocolates, a brocade of caramel toffees, mochas and swirling dark and milk concoctions spins out from the opulent bilateral draping top and center.  And Bear Dance (2010), likely influenced by the Native American ceremonial dances that Andresen observes regularly, is a vibrant relief of concretions that provide hall-of-mirror distortions and melted glyphs.  That Andresen creates eye candy is undeniable.  In Frozen Jesters (2011) twisting lanes of candy cane stripes that allude to brushstrokes appear to converge with accumulations of gum-splatted, swirling peppermint rounds.

Some of these surfaces seem to want to jump the canvas for a larger one.  I for one hope Andresen finds a way to “throw” a few big ones up as well next time around.

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