Like the fabled American nineteenth-century artist Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Lees often works on his paintings for years, even decades, overlaying the canvases with what the French call “couches” of pigment (a word relating to “couch” in English—to lay down on). And he modifies, eliminates, paints over, peers at, thinks about, thinks more about, changes again, scrapes, puts aside (facing the wall), looks at yet again, adds more paint to, further edits, revises, and so encrusts the surfaces in a richly heavy and sometimes bumpy or gravelly, sometimes willfully crude, scumbled textures that may glow with colors both luxuriant and subtle from beneath. So these paintings age with him. For drawings he may add panels as he scours and redraws and radically changes compositions. Lees’s canvases and worked over drawings literally partake in and show the vicissitudes of the passage of time. With their fresco-like effects many seem to be artifacts from antiquitythat have marvelously, even heroically, endured.

Whether a landscape, a picture of a dour old man, buildings, or the title of an old movie writ large, each work, in part through the accretion of paint and its own range of tonalities, emits its own special aura. One repeated motif in the current exhibition is that of a bald old man, Lees’s father, an ever so slightly comic but melancholic figure, a sort of cartoonish stumblebum seated in an unprepossessing easy chair in a dark, somewhat airless interior. With superb visual intelligence, Lees invokes his own personal mythologies, the figures with which he grew up: he pays heartfelt tribute to Porky Pig, from animation; or the naïve and awkward boy puppet Dilly Dally, with whom he identified (from the popular Howdy Doody show, 1947-60). His celebratory images are often very American in their references: the strains of mellow jazz from a sax, cartoons, Hollywood films. But however varied the subject, these paintings are deeply considered, the antipodes of glib. Through the density of their presentation they become meditative, contemplative, themselves iconic.

At a recent public lecture at the New York Studio School (where we both teach), the self-deprecating Lees spoke with winning familiarity, simply and marvelously informatively as well as eloquently of his background in art and of his methods.

Early on he was taken by the work of Georges Rouault, the seriousness and density of that of Milton Resnick, the work of Chaim Soutine. He also gave a spirited description of his experiments with technique including flicking gobs of paint on canvas, on furniture (yes, an arm chair such as he has had his father inhabit and the subject of other paintings by him), and a rug; and painting thickly enough to enable him to excavate forms—a fish—on the worked up surface. All this described with a gentle, sweetly comic and endearing humor. After he came to live where the landscape was important, he made that the subject of his work, having carefully looked at Chinese landscape painting. And it shows.

With all but offhanded seeming charm and lack of pomp, John Lees manages to establish strong presences and worth in the most unassuming and unexpected images. He pays tribute to the least presumptuous or ladida and renders them for the ages. He knows how to create even via the most transient of subjects, a sense of wonder, the transcendent, and gravitas.

Exhibition continues through November 28, 2015 at 15 Rivington Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Street, New York City, 212 242 2772

The post Howdy Doody Gravitas: A John Lees Double Bill appeared first on artcritical.

December 12, 2014 to February 28, 2015
322 Grand Street, between Orchard and Ludlow streets
New York City, 212-375-1375

With visual wit, mastery of a broad range of painting techniques, a sharp sense of evocative color – now upbeat, now poignant -and ingenuity as to where to use what to optimum effect, Kenny Rivero introduces the viewer to the New York of his Dominican-American childhood. Intimations of personal and familial history are the starting points of fantasy and imagination. In his depictions of the neighborhood there are the lingering presences of former tenants, past lives, people departed. A compendium of paintings and drawings are displayed in a vivid and lovingly achieved installation devised to recall the actual rooms he grew up in, with patches of linoleum, peeling wall paper and shards of glass atop dividing walls (to prevent intruders). Extending the dialogue of framed works and their installation, some of his paintings have objects attached to them or else use ad hoc materials: a piece of felt, a metal number, machine-embroidered curtain.

In richly inventive, often beautiful, sometimes quirky imagery, Rivero presents us with a gamut of sites from the Washington Heights neighborhood where he grew up. Mysterious, enchanting, or threatening, it is a place of vacant streets or else streets packed with vignettes of the city’s hustle and rush of energetic doings, its fleeting images, glimpsed curiosities.   A mischievous verve and disarming sly humor propel a number of the largest paintings, the commotion of figures and burst of objects set against sophisticated constructs of sharply formed, angular planes of flat, saturated color.   The denizens of these very urban scenes may be charmingly appealing—cartoonish characters that are slightly askew—managing to transmit, at the same time, and with aesthetic sophistication, an endearing, guileless innocence.   With a Klee-like, -seeming naif’s first time view, the vision is one of wonder. At the same time, it is somewhat scary, in the way a child might encounter people or glanced odd parts of them: disembodied running legs, feet, a suspended head, or even the shadow of a figure without a person in sight.

I Can Love You Better, the exhibition’s title, is from a 1997 Mary J. Blige record, but, no longer addressed to a sweetheart, is a loving, if sometimes raucous tribute to the neighborhood of his youth.   A grand but derelict building in the ‘Heights is reimagined as the entrance to a baseball stadium. The Church is Empty (all works, 2014) is a moving tribute to a deserted church at night, illumined from within, its colored windows aglow.   Ubiquitous walls are neither monotonous nor undecorative as the patiently delineated small bricks become a pattern of reassuring regularity, rather than dismal or dreary. In Kitchen Shadow interiors with nicely even square-tiled floors form wonderfully dependable and satisfying grids.   Indeed, there is an appealing if tamped down and canny decorative element throughout this show which makes the presentation of difficult subject matter by turns tender or wryly sardonic and certainly more palatable. Rivero makes reference to violence in images of empty sidewalks, an ominous alley, the silhouette of a friend who died.

Upside-down heads and dislodged floating objects signal upheaval, but with a whimsy and playfulness that is the artist’s own. Baseball, another recurrent motif, comes to the fore as an important part of Rivero’s dual history as a Dominican-. American, as the sport is appreciated in both countries. It is also a passion he shared with his father.

Hovering numbers and letters make cryptic if fond allusions to family and friends: 55, for instance, is the number of his boyhood apartment, while there are references to girlfriends and comrades (Louis, Manuel). Enigmatic digits turn out to be local area codes.   Near a fallen figure are the “EEES” of fright (It Happened on the Corner). Decorative balconies refer to architecture both in New York and the Dominican Republic (where he spent summers).   There are also small, knowing, but not necessarily readily recognizable citations of other artists from the well-schooled (Yale MFA) Rivero, subtle, unobtrusive salutes to the likes of Stuart Davis, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns. These notations enrich the composition with their multiple associations, humor, and art historical homages.

Sharply delineated yet delicate, careful pencil drawings on salvaged or reused paper and pieces of card riff on his own imaginative life. These include coming of age self-portraits in various tragi-comic guises.   In one he gets bigger and stronger, his mother at his side, while in another he is essentialized to his running legs, a flashlight at the ready to, as he puts it, escape. Several drawings originate in childhood heroes like the wealthy Bruce Wayne / Batman with his special powers to help the poor. There is a boy in a hapless batman costume, who is nonetheless transformed. Hair and short filaments come into play in one group of drawings, for barber shops are another locus through which Rivero came to understand his identity and aspirations. His father took him to a Dominican barbershop; in New Haven and Spain barbers were puzzled as to how to approach his hair.   Rivero employs a variety of drawing techniques: there are endearing childlike drawings of cars and comic characters like Cuco Dancing, but there are also romantic drawings of fine, somewhat spindly ink lines, seemingly quick, impromptu, direct, yet bracingly erotic. Defenders of the Universe, for instance, presents an amorous, slightly ungainly, but no less happily triumphant couple in which the sweet young thing is embraced by a fellow who fingers her breast.

Rivero, who wears his great skills and tender paeans to place offhandedly, is a consummate storyteller, at ease with poetic invention.   His imagery is particular but not at all insular. As with all the best art, through command of his expressive vehicle he is able to give his world tremendous immediacy, and to make it generously open to all.

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May 9 to June 15, 2013
520 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-966-6676

“Glorious” was a word heard frequently at Robert Zakanitch’s opening in response to his unexpectedly large (eight by five feet) gouaches on paper hangings that suit his imagery so magnificently: great expanses of often small budding blossoms, curtains of pale wisterias in full bloom, bittersweet, and glowing dandelion puffs–or maybe fireflies, willfully indeterminate in bursts of light.  If Beauty (with an upper case `B’) has gone out of style, no one told this artist, a longtime proponent of such traditionally and immediately appealing subjects — lace, jewels, cherubs, sunset landscapes, and now gardens — bypassed, if not scoffed at, in recent decades. But John DeFazio, in a fine catalogue essay, actually thanks Zakanitch for “daring” to be gentle, sweet, and pretty.   Perhaps we’ve come around to understanding that beauty is no longer déclassé.

The series, named after the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, wonder of the Ancient World, exudes a mythic quality in the evocative and irreal proliferation of plants removed from materiality by his blanched colors, flattening of form, and wonderfully rhythmic and decorative flowery festoons.  The delicacy of his petalled plants answer to the matte, chalky colors that serve them.  Their fragility is enhanced by the painting technique and the medium itself, with luminosity glanced in the interstices among the abundant blooms.  While entirely authentic and superbly observed, not for a moment are these florid items realistic.

These exhilarating compositions are often topped by decorative grids or by ornamental arabesques of bordering trellises, with the lower portions left contrastingly unfinished.  Drips of paint accentuate the lusciousness of these images.  Though the artist is in absolute command of his medium, there is an insistent lack of pretentiousness, most obvious, perhaps, in the almost offhand, contour-lined lattices or the occasional bit of writing, as in his simple, slanting signature.  That the viewer is allowed to see the transformation as strokes and dribbles of paint metamorphose into ravishing flora imagery seems like one more gift from this generous artist.

The overall rhythmic patterns of the lush carpets of flowers give way to enormous variety when further examined.  Buds are at different stages of opening, their sizes and tonalities varying.  Some petals are flush with pale pinks or lilacs while others are awash with transparency.  One flower droops or is somewhat turned, clusters are more or less tight. Zakanitch was one of the founders of Pattern and Decoration in the 1970s which accounts perhaps  for the importance of repeated flat design to his work.  But P&D is a reductive and therefore not very astute term in relation to Zakanitch, failing to take into account just how painterly his surfaces are, and never simply homogenized.  The tender, sometimes impish wit presented in his variations recall Dutch seventeenth-century still life painting: careful looking is rewarded by the discovery that the cascades of flowers are very much alive, abuzz with small insects, tiny lady bugs among them.  Meanwhile there may be a silhouetted misty bird hovering nearby. The work holds attention and is sumptuously satisfying at differing viewing distances.  This is true, as well, of the small gouaches also included in the show that yield their own extravagant pleasure.   Happily, the commendable exhibition catalogue acknowledges the importance of seeing works both as a whole and in detail by reproducing close-ups at several different degrees.

Robert Zakanitch, without pretentiousness or folderol, truly goes to bat for beauty.

The post Daring to be Beautiful: Robert Zakanitch at Nancy Hoffman appeared first on artcritical.

May 10 to June 22, 2012
511 West 25th Street, Suite  307, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-343-2468

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Leo Rabkin’s enchanting retrospective, spanning five of his nine decades (he was born in 1919),  includes a range of  work, although the vision is all of a piece.  What he demonstrates – something too rarely seen – is the ingenious, thoughtful, even tender transformation of ordinary materials into marvelous inventions. And marvel the viewer does.  Rabkin’s often modestly-scaled assemblages (there are exquisite works as small as 3¾ by 5¾ inches) comprise reliefs, boxes, works on paper, and collages.  They combine all manner of media: threads, metal, string, cords, beads, buttons, tiny nacre seashells, canvas, and myriad papers.  His papers are stained, inked, plaited, folded, frayed, suspended, and flocked.   Captivating and elegant, produced with the simplest, readily available materials, his works are undergirded by a refined structural sensibility, an acute but never insistent sense of measure, proportion, and color.  Strong organizing principles notwithstanding, the magic (an overused but apt term here) of these works may have something to do with a seeming offhandedness in their ad hoc presentation.  Onlookers are also transformed as we are made to consider or reconsider what we may routinely overlook—how shapes vary; elemental differences among materials, their properties and surfaces; and the possibilities of making whole fascinating little worlds by attentively concocting, composing, and (a great American tradition) tinkering with them..

In this last respect, Rabkin’s inventive assemblages recall Alexander Calder’s objects.  They too defy conventional terms like sculpture—their ingenuity bolstered by their unpretentiousness.  Rabkin’s works are visual poems: succinct and subtle.. Part of their appeal is surely the unprepossessing nature of his chosen materials, which are neither costly nor complicated.  He reinstates what may be deemed déclassé materials—rhinestones, goggle eyes, and flocking—and excites a reappraisal and appreciation for their glitter and curiosity.  We are drawn to appreciate the stitched dashes of silken red thread on fragile, slightly yellowed paper, or, in an untitled work from around 2011, the minuscule hairy filaments of flocking, used to achieve delicately lush, textured surfaces. A series of small white tissue-thin squares of fine folded paper, dated from around 2005, float on tiny tightropes through space, and are mirrored.  Once again, the simplest of objects are artfully made, leaving the viewer to wonder at just how stupendous light, air, weightlessness, and reflections can be.

Rabkin’s works share an affinity with the American folk and outsider art that he and his late wife long collected and which captivates him still.  Like them, the objects and images demonstrate how, with unremitting resourcefulness, immensity can result from little.  Whirligigs, weather vanes, game boards, postal sorting cubbies, whittled and painted figures, and a host of other doodads demonstrate how with unremitting resourcefulness, immensity can result from little.  That is a quality that he continues to develop.  Whether reflected in things he makes or collected, Rabkin stands in opposition to the slick, highly professionalized and manufactured aesthetic that has come to appeal to the mega pocketbooks of the art world today.

Rabkin makes frequent use of small boxes.  These boxed enclosures have a family resemblance to those of Joseph Cornell–though Rabkin’s small worlds are not hermetically sealed.  Like Cornell, Rabkin, with his lyrical imagination, creates intimate cosmologies.  His quiet little treasure chests (many found and recycled), like gifts or offerings, present the prospect of discovery, surprise, and wonder.  Plain on the outside, sometimes stenciled or finished with combed or delicately striated surfaces, even mysterious when closed, these containers may be opened to display a small theater of unexpected elements.  Part of their appeal is the special aura they emit through the carefully constructed transmogrification of materials: so beads strung in channels are mimicked and continued in drawn lines and glittery small beads glued against a dark panel become a celestial firmament Their order reminds us of Georges Santayana’s ruminations about the organization of the stars in the nighttime sky.

Rabkin studied art at New York University under Tony Smith, but his training did not channel his work into a self-consciously high art mode. The Luise Ross Gallery, where he buoyantly received admirers at his opening,  had its foundations in representing artists not formally trained—Bill Traylor for example (an artist whom Rabkin collected).  For many years he taught disturbed adolescents in the New York city schools, and devoted himself to his art only in the last several decades.  It may not, however, be a stretch to understand his unremitting glorification of the most elemental objects as part of a more general appreciation of what is there, good, and not to be taken for granted.

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