The Art Fairs This Week: A Cheat Sheet from the Editors of THE LIST » trosch

It’s a good year for texture. Well, so is any year probably, and a good year for anything else if all you want to do is scatter evidence for some such glib hunch amidst the labyrinth that is the city’s biggest art fair, conceptual bread crumbs, so to speak, to trace your way back to the front door. But as the first piece to grab my eye was a fabric work by Jayson Musson at Philadelphia’s Fleisher-Ollman texture became my trail. Next stop, a cunningly camp “salon” for Florine Stettheimer, presented by Jeffrey Deitch, showing latter-day acolytes of the society heiress pioneer of the American avant garde where a 1990s shlock horror wedding cake of impasto by the unjustly forgotten Thomas Trosch abstractly emulated Florine’s Harlem beach scene that presides over the display. From there it was texture everywhere, whether the geological encrustations of Bosco Sodi, preponderant in the fair and to be seen, for instance, at Galeria Hilario Galguera of Mexico City, Blain Southern and Paul Kasmin; the very 1950s-looking sculpted netted grids of Michelle Grabner at James Cohan; or the painterly reliefs of Miguel Barcelo at Thaddeus Ropac. The tactility can even manifest vicariously, as in the Vik Muniz Isis print of a strangely mottled version of Picasso’s The Dreamer, at Edwin Houk. Haptic experiences grounded the gaze amidst the accelerating flow of spectacle. DAVID COHEN Thomas Trosch, One Day in the Life of Lovely Mars, 2008, Oil and encaustic on canvas on wood panel, 44 × 50 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Fredericks & Freiser, NY

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