Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch at Maccarone
April 25 to June 6, 2015
630 Greenwich Street (at Morton Street)
New York, 212 431 4977

There are two great exhibitions of painting on view at Maccarone Gallery; one bucks a characteristic trend of its creator and the other is just plain bucking. Cecily Brown’s show, “The English Garden,” is a rarity for the intimate scale of the work. For an artist who generally puts up enormous canvases that dominate entire rooms, it is something special to see almost 30 paintings that could each be carried under arm. More so because these small paintings seem to casually maintain the artist’s robust visual swagger. Nearby, Rosy Keyser’s “The Hell Bitch” approximates in 13 new pieces what profane sanctification might look like. It is thrilling and violent, truly sublime in the most classical sense.

Both shows have a totally different genesis, though in a sense the works themselves share a process-oriented methodology. Brown’s show includes paintings made over a span of years — 2005 to 2014 — that were brought together thanks to the suggestion of Jim Lewis, an acclaimed writer and friend of the artist. By contrast, almost all of the works in “The Hell Bitch” were created in 2015, and in that sense represent a consciously developed body of work. The synchronicity is in the visual vocabulary of two artists who do not know when they begin a painting what it will come to be when it’s finished. Each uses her tools to greatly different ends, though both imbue their work with a sparky primal energy that could light up a forge.

Brown is a British artist, so it’s fair to assume she knows a thing or two about English gardens. The gallery’s take is that if her big paintings are considered landscapes, then these smaller works are gardens. It’s a nice analogy but it falls apart when we consider that English gardens are essentially idealized landscapes. But what’s impressive is the work, which is lush, busy, burning with kind of anti-gravity. The wonderful gestural quality of Brown’s characteristic full-body brushstrokes is carried out here with flicks of the wrist. Occasionally a figure or a face will emerge from the zippy mix — in one work there is a teepee — but more often the paintings hew to a firmer abstraction.

This is the case in two paintings I thought particularly good, Land of the Free, (2008) and Oh I do like to be beside the seaside (2014). Both seem to have been drawn from inside the eye of a tempest, with the paint laid out in a slashing multi-directional bend. The colors are many but the chromatic range is tight. A black-hole kind of density is established, as if the thin layers of oil paint were formerly room size and have been condensed to fit the diminutive frame. They seem at once very serious and utterly reckless, which is exactly how great art looks: daring and effortless, though we know implicitly that this is the illusion of a master.

“The Hell Bitch” is equally forceful and certainly more visceral than “The English Garden.” If Brown’s aesthetic calls to mind a raging storm, Keyser’s brave paintings suggest frozen moments of collision. Any given work might include many materials: rope, tarp, cork, fur, sand, twisted metal, gobs of sawdust, paint applied like handfuls of cement, and, of course, canvas on a wooden stretcher. As the gallery explains, all 13 paintings are born from the hell bitch Keyser keeps in her studio, a “living palate” that the artist uses to test out different ideas.

One may surmise that three basic formats are derived from this unseen matriarch. The first, and most exciting, are those in which the canvas is utterly torn and shredded, appearing to hang onto the stretcher bars like half-flayed skin. In a second range of works the canvas is less distressed, though Keyser’s boisterous brushwork gives the impression of a vehement visual outcry. The third format is a smart juxtaposition: angled metal welded into rectilinear designs and powder-coated in muted monotones. These pieces provide moments of comparative rest. They look like the framework for something, but what that might be is ungraspable. Stitched and stuffed plastic tarp bags dangle from these metal works and lend their otherwise machined aesthetic an organic quality.

Music for a Drowned World (2015) displays the finest qualities of the first format, which include an incredibly savvy manner of blending materials to transform a single gesture. From the upper right corner, out of a busy nest of black paint, a dark line jettisons. It starts out as paint and becomes a bar of bent and painted aluminum. The materials merge at a distance and one only sees the composition, which suggests a spider-webbed windshield.

The way these paintings change given one’s physical proximity is remarkable. Distance flattens depth, but up close is like having your head neck deep in a dangerous tangle. This is less true with the two metal pieces, Between the Hips and Between the Knees (both 2015), though a relation to one’s physical body remains. Somehow these works seem rigorously formal and yet surprisingly sexual. There is dualism between the right angles of the cleanly cut metal and the dangling roundness of loose sacks filled with sand and seed hulls.

Bird of Paradise (2015) is a good example of the third format Keyser is working with. Here the canvas is left almost entirely intact, punctured only by a plate-sized cork. Blue and black paint ferociously mix and smear from top to bottom, as if clawed by an agitated animal. Bird of Paradise might just as easily be a reproduction of one square inch of a de Kooning woman, scaled up. However one interprets it, there is no denying its raw, primal quality.

Now here’s the question: are these feminist paintings? I wouldn’t have thought to wonder were it not for a panel hosted at Maccarone on the topic of Feminism and Painting with Brown and Keyser sitting alongside Joan Semmel and the distinguished curator Alison Gingeras. The house was packed, suggesting the question might be more urgent than I realized. And the conclusion was more curious than I expected. Neither Brown nor Keyser claimed to make conscious artistic decisions based on their gender or politics; a simpler adherence to aesthetics drives their decisions. It slowly emerged that what the women of Semmel’s generation fought so hard for was being taken for granted by a younger generation, who were privileged enough to have been taught as children that women could do and be anything. I don’t think of these paintings as feminist, but I do think these are two tremendous painters who could one day be great artists.

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Nathan Lyons’s exhibition, “Return Your Mind to Its Upright Position,” is thoughtfully curated and immaculately precise. It features a selection of photographic diptychs from his newest book (of the same name) as well as a section dedicated to his earlier work, which functions like a miniature retrospective and serves to more than adequately contextualize the photographer and his vision. What one learns, almost immediately, is that Lyons’ genius for establishing relationships between images is as strong as his ability to produce beautiful photographs.

Lyons shoots with a 35mm camera and makes five-by-seven-inch gelatin silver prints, which he mounts in pairs. In the last four decades he has not altered his presentation or methodology; nor has he greatly changed his subject matter. Through billboards, storefronts, graffiti, murals, memorials, placards and posters, his photographs speak to our collective desires, fears, anxieties, and ambitions. He may be the ultimate chronicler of our semiotic landscape, which has only grown increasingly manic.

Return Your Mind is Lyons’ fourth book and the images it contains date between 1998 and 2014. Politics, race, war, death, loss, love — these are the themes that thread through the book and exhibition, creating a narrative that sprawls as it unfolds. The state of one’s mind space seems to be Lyons’ overarching concern. His title phrase, Return Your Mind to Its Upright Position, which is drawn from an photograph of an Amtrak billboard, suggests that our brains have been in recline and that it’s time to wake them up, to ready them for some type of arrival. Closing out the series is a picture of a wall full of weathered posters, two of which read “Your Remedy…In Your Head.” Lyons is not making a diagnosis of mental illness; he’s appealing to our faculties of reason, imagination, and consideration.

There are rarely people in Lyons’ photographs, but there are often pictures of people. One particularly devastating instance pairs a Reebok advertisement of the rapper 50 Cent with a Crime Stoppers billboard of a 14-year-old boy sporting cornrows. In a huge font across the billboard, “who killed me?” This is placed in conjunction with a quote by the rapper, which is superimposed over a police fingerprint record, “Where I am from there is no Plan B. So, take advantage of today because tomorrow is not promised.” Lyons doesn’t get didactic; he doesn’t need too. The message is clear: the promise of tomorrow didn’t hold out for the murdered boy and Reebok will use cases like his to authenticate the messages it employs to sell product. Lyons’s pairing adds a poignant racial addendum; the teen and the rapper are both unsmiling African-Americans. Their plight is being turned into an advertising strategy.

When one becomes adept at perceiving degrees of interconnectedness, instances of serendipity occur with increasing frequency. The image that starts the book (and opens the exhibition) is of an open hand with the phrase, “Don’t Believe Your Eyes” printed over the palm in capital letters. It rubs up against an axiom of an earlier photographic era when images were understood to contain certain degrees of truthfulness. But it also addresses Lyons’s larger concern about one’s mind space. How and why we are inclined towards belief or disbelief has much to do with the condition of our minds. When the appearance of an evident truth is ruptured, it destabilizes the seesaw of trust and doubt, of illusion and reality. On an individual level, this can be severely distressing; expanded to a social phenomenon, it can be all together dangerous because the systems and processes that hold a society together end up woefully undermined.

Lyon’s seems to have seen this situation coming. The themes he’s followed over the last 16 years reached a breaking point during the run of his show a commonly accepted belief in the truth-value of images was irrevocably overthrown on national media. Millions watched a video that showed a man named Eric Garner being choked to death by police officers, none of whom were indicted for any wrongdoing. The discrepancy between what a society saw, and what the society believed became too great. Protesters all over the country took to the streets calling for fundamental changes to the justice system. One of the key methods for making their message known was to create signs. When the news cameras zoomed in on the protestors’ cardboard placards, the television screen momentarily looked like an image by Lyons. In the instant that life seemed to mimic art, reality appeared to swell with the danger inherent in Lyons’s vision: that images are interactive, their messages are malleable, and what they mean can be determined by how they are presented.

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