“Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades” is a show that includes the retrospective aspect to which it title alludes in one room and a display of new works, in the other, made since the artist moved upstate following the disastrous flood that claimed his downtown Manhattan studio of as many decades and damaged his archives. Any transition between the restored or spared earlier canvases and his fresh new efforts is seamless to this viewer’s eye. As I wrote of his show at Stephen Haller Gallery (before the merger of Stux and Haller) in 2011, submitting to an urge to pun on his surname, “here is a painter who reinvigorates the tradition of post-painterly New York School abstraction by making explicit what were –despite partisanship for non-objectivity, or at least non-representation, at its historical outset – irrepressible references and sly allusions to landscape. Landfield puts the field back into Color Field Painting.”
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