I met Wolf Kahn in 2011, when beginning a catalog essay for a show of his work. It was the among the first essays I had ever been asked to write. I was apprehensive – particularly as to whether I would be able to add much to the conversation surrounding such a well-known, and for so many viewers across the country, beloved painter of iconic American scenes.

Needless to say for anyone who knew the artist personally, he was warm, gracious and entirely generous with this unknown writer throughout the process. Talkative and funny, he was also gentlemanly, and would pause often to ask and listen. He had that remarkably bright-eyed expression I have come to recognize in artists of all kinds who have spent their life involved in pursuit of an all-engaging and totally vitality-giving subject. The years Kahn had invested in thoughtful observation and creation had lent to his natural gaze a quality of wise attention, suggestive of a rich history of looking and thinking shaping each of his works. The short essay I wrote was very much influenced by this singular impression of an artist who will be sorely missed. CHRISTINA KEE

Wolf Kahn’s recent paintings are celebratory scenes of a familiar outdoor America: quiet Maine coves, dense Vermont forests, rural views marked by wooden barns and slowly moving rivers. They are powerful statements of light and color, in which pale birch trees are made to stand out, white-hot, against flame-crimson grounds, and ponds’ still surfaces reflect the evening sky in deep lavender tones. Kahn has been a prolific painter for over 60 years, and his works collectively convey a particular vision of a countryside in countless modes: quiet, stormy, mysterious and dazzling. The appeal of Kahn’s work is far-reaching and often immediate, so directly do his approachable scenes and deft color combinations lend themselves to recognition, contemplation and straightforward optical pleasure.

The undeniably “lovely” quality of Kahn’s paintings is real and intrinsic to the works’ subject matter. One senses, however, that the translation of nature’s beauty is not the only aim of these paintings, and prolonged viewing reveals that it is certainly not the central effect. It can be easy to forget, when viewing Kahn’s convincingly vivid hues, that the world does not naturally present itself in bands of vermillion and scumbles of silvery gray — that his paintings are the result of countless pictorial decisions, some lithely intuitive, others fought for and deliberate. Central to Kahn’s work is the process of perception and invention, the slow conversion of sight and thought, in color and form, through time. An equally important aspect of Kahn’s paintings is that the density of experience they convey has itself been visibly shaped by practical engagement with one of the most active periods in American painting. Just as abbreviations are linked to larger place names and single words are inseparable from their definitions, the aesthetic of Kahn’s work is bound to a uniquely individual response to the last half-century conversation about the nature, problems and possibilities of the painted form. The new paintings gathered here continue to address elemental questions of space, shape and color with rigor and understated sophistication. They are at once ambitious, compelling and complex.

This past year, Kahn has worked primarily from landscapes in the Vermont area, and this show gathers works of four distinct views: a forest, a grove, a shed in the woods and a pond surrounded by reeds and hills. From these few motifs, Kahn has created a spectacular range of variation, in which each painting stands out in striking contrast to the next. The formal diversity generated from the economy of subjects makes it clear that, beyond the pleasing quality of the scenes, the real drama here is, at root, pictorial. Several of the new works depict, for example, a grouping of spring-leaved trees at the edge of a forest. In Pink, Yellow, Green (2010), the bright new foliage appears to play and shift against an improbable, but inviting, depth of soft alizarin. In Light Green Landscape (2009), the same figure-like trees are stacked in tones modulating from green to gray in a composition that appears congregational, even, it might be said, ascensional in nature, with one glittering shade leading upward to the next. It is a pattern that echoes the growth of trees themselves, silently stretching toward sunlight. Throughout this new body of work, we see similar elegant transformations of the subject – intimations of movement and metaphor made through seemingly simple means – in what are perhaps among the artist’s most successful paintings to date. They mark a significant achievement in what has been a truly remarkable career.

Having arrived in America in 1940 at the age of 13 from war-struck Germany, Kahn spent his teenage years in New Jersey and New York. He painted at 19 as a student at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art. Kahn’s work gained early critical attention – he was included in New Provincetown ’47, curated by Clement Greenberg, then an emerging voice, and his first solo show in 1953 was reviewed by both Dore Ashton and Fairfield Porter. His friends, peers and teachers over the next formative decades included Larry Rivers, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Louis Finkelstein, Milton Avery and the renowned art historian Meyer Schapiro. One need only review a few dates to envision the cultural milieu in which Kahn was becoming a serious painter: In 1950, Pollock had just completed his major drip works, and de Kooning was beginning his Women series; in 1952 Harold Rosenberg published his essay “The American Action Painters,” and Greenberg’s “American-Type Painting” came out in 1955. At the risk of nostalgic simplification, it can be imagined that during these crucial years artists’ everyday conversations would turn to key questions of surface and depth, formalism vs. expressionism, and the on-again/off-again relationship of figuration to abstraction.

Wolf Kahn’s responses to these questions, as expressed in his own writings and interviews, suggest those of a veteran of countless debates: one who has, after a long intellectual trajectory, allowed himself to quietly arrive at some conclusions. One is struck, when meeting the artist, by a certain cadence of clarity that informs his speech. Despite the casual, often funny, tone of Kahn’s conversation, his words are chosen with uncommon care, and key issues are often ingeniously illustrated with anecdote. In a travel memoir, Kahn writes of an exchange that once took place when he watched Fairfield Porter painting a landscape in Penobscot Bay:

“I was watching him paint a view of the Island’s “little harbor” – just a dock sticking out into deep water. He had indicated the farther islands, the water, the sky and the dock. In the foreground he painted a small gas tank and the pipes leading to it. “Fairfield,” I said, “why don’t you leave out the tank and the plumbing?” He turned to me angrily, “You don’t understand what I do at all when you speak like that. I’m not some esthetician who censors the landscape – I’m painting my field of vision. How do I know whether the stuff you don’t like isn’t what holds the whole thing together?” I respect this attitude, and to a point I share it, but it seems too rigid to apply consistently. I certainly would have kept the gas tank out.”[1] Aside from the admittedly delightful image of Kahn and Porter’s dockside bickering, the question the story raises is an important one: In the three-part relationship of subject/artist/painting, what are the artist’s obligations to the scene represented? Kahn’s conclusion is also distinctly characteristic of his approach – namely, that beyond all theory, the demands of the painting are paramount.It is an approach that, in Kahn’s case, can be traced to some of his earliest formal training as a student in the Hans Hofmann School. Much has been written about Kahn’s relationship to Hans Hofmann, in part because his respected teacher’s approach to painting offers a key to understanding some of the most elusive – and one could say most intrinsic – qualities of Kahn’s work. In his teaching and writing, Hofmann set out a philosophy for the appreciation and creation of the plastic arts based on a clear distinction between physical and pictorial realities, delving into the mysterious nature of the latter. Among the key tenets of Hofmann’s teaching is that the two-dimensional surface of the painting or drawing is governed by a system of forces that are purely visual in nature, and which can, given the intention of the artist, be sparked into a state of pictorial dynamism. Hofmann lays out the idea as follows: “Space must be vital and active – a force-impelled pictorial space, presented as a spiritual and unified entity, with a life of its own.”[2] The authentic painting, then, in Hofmann’s view, is nothing less than “living,” and it is by this criterion that Kahn’s work is perhaps most successful.

Among the most important elements in the construction of Kahn’s vital compositions is the artist’s palpable engagement with the spatial possibilities of the painted surface. In these new works, we get a clear sense of the artist’s seasoned awareness of just how expansive the world of the canvas can be. It is useful to remember that Kahn would have been taught that the relevant space of a painting is neither actual in the sense of the measurable surface area, nor illusory, referring to a perspectival appearance of depth, but rather plastic, meaning that it is able, through elements such as line, shape color and proportion, to convey a specific spatial scenario through perceptions sparked in viewing.

Destroyed Woodland (2009) is a remarkable image of a forest’s visual patterns caught in a state of rhythmic disarray, and it offers a clue to Kahn’s spatial approach. Central to the canvas is a tangle of forms blocked in a succession of live-wire brush strokes that depicts a mass of damaged trees. The broken verticals of the fallen trunks become strong diagonals in an otherwise tectonic environment, pressing firmly against the top and sides of the rectangle, leading the eye in a fast-paced track around the canvas. One trunk extends from the bottom left of the painting, starting against the picture plane, then traveling toward the upper right of the canvas and into the recessive plane of soft pink sky. Another trunk forms a hard-angled dash through the deep center of the image, finishing in delicate strokes at the periphery. A third smaller diagonal line anchors the right of the canvas, setting up countless “V” formations in relation to the other trees. The linear components of this work, initially almost graphic in appearance, open through the process of viewing to a deep space where the viewer’s gaze might linger indefinitely.

Above all, Kahn’s works operate dynamically through a highly original use of color. Working from pastel drawings done on-site, Kahn translates the natural palette of a given scene into highly charged counterparts of hue and tone. Kahn intuitively creates powerful color combinations that are, almost uncannily, evocative of specific times, places and moods. It is difficult to say, for example, why the violet expanse of Upper Potomac (2011), an extreme form of purple by any chromatic standard, so convincingly conveys the density of forested distance. It is here set off in opposition to a clump of grass in the lower-right and a mildly outrageous bit of lemon yellow on the left. It is through color that Kahn takes his greatest risks as a painter, creates his strongest points of visual tension and conjures his greatest rewards. Kahn’s relationship to color, even to the pigments themselves, is an intimate one – so directly does he identify with their specific suggestive powers. “Yellow,” he has said, “is the color of buttercups — and of warning signals,” tidily summing up the spectrum of emotional associations possible within variations of one hue.

Kahn’s use of color is always evolving. He noted, for example, during a recent studio visit that he had only recently begun to understand new potential in the use of black. This development is evidenced in Clearing on the West (2010), which, with its hulking and ominous forms, is a refutation of the misguided impression that Kahn’s work is always bucolic in feel. The use of black is bolder still in Order in Disorder (2010), in which the pale presence of a single trunk stands out in soft radiance against the inky darks of the undergrowth shadow. In a masterful transition from light to dark, Kahn here counterintuitively balances the prominence of the white tree in the midground with a recessive shadow in the foreground, setting up the sense of ebb and flow of sunlight and shade within an always regenerating forest.

Given the strengths of the abstract means used in Kahn’s work, one may ask why the artist chose not to follow the logic of this pictorial approach through to a conclusion of total abstraction. Kahn’s against-the-grain decision to work from the landscape is reminiscent of decisions of other artists who eschewed abstraction – Picasso’s insistence on retaining a figurative reference throughout his experimentation comes to mind, for example. In Kahn’s case, however, the decision has been one of faithfulness not just to representation, but to perception. Along with a handful of peers who felt that “the fun was in taking an object in nature and trying to make a painting out of it,”[3] Kahn’s aim was to realize works in direct connection to the world. Just as the wider cultural move toward abstraction was associated with systems of philosophical and even spiritual beliefs, Kahn’s commitment to perception arises from similar concerns, arriving, however, at different answers to similar questions.

Louis Finkelstein notes the role of landscape as Kahn’s subject of choice at that time: “As Kahn and his colleagues looked for an art grounded in direct experience, landscape beckoned on two counts. First, it represented a common experience that needed no explanation, and secondly, it is inherently accommodating to a free, spontaneous development.”[4]

The element of shared experience is central to Kahn’s work. He expresses wariness about the conception of a painting as representing sort of a grand, expressive gesture of the artist’s internal state. This hesitation makes sense in relation to his own work, which acts more as a meeting point between the real world and his own subjective experience. During a recent lecture, when a questioner asked why Kahn had not once mentioned his work in relation to his “self,” he replied simply, after some reflection, that in his opinion, “‘self’ is a dingy word.” A word inadequate, perhaps, to Kahn’s notion of human experience as encompassing a great deal of that which is “not-I” in addition to the “I.”

Kahn’s recent paintings serve as valuable reminders of one of Hofmann’s more optimistic phrases: “Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.” The new works are valuable as exuberant records of a painter’s curiosity, humility and wonder in the face of the natural world. They serve also as a hard-won, perennially relevant model of perceptual painting – one engaged both with the inner workings of the painted form, and the beauty and interest of our common experience.

1. Kahn, Wolf. Wolf Kahn’s America. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003) 50.

2. Hofmann, Hans. “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts”, taken here from Hans Hofmann. ed. James Yohe. (New York: Rizzoli, 2002) 46.

3. Finkelstein, Louis. “The Development of Wolf Kahn’s Painting Language”. Taken here from Wolf Kahn, ed. Justin Spring. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1996) 101.
4. Ibid., 100.

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May 24 to June 30, 2018
530 West 24th Street, between Tenth and Elventh avenues
New York City, berrycampbell.com

Talk of “purity” is usually best resisted in relation to works of visual art. What sort of uninflected content or form can really ever be referred to by it, after all? Jill Nathanson’s structured pourings of clear and vivid color, however, suggest the creator’s affinity with the powers of her painted medium in their most abstract sense. Beyond the transparency of the paint itself, which leads the viewer into impressions of these paintings as something aquatically pristine, there is an overall attitude of clarity and resolution in these strong and searching works. In contrast to much contemporary abstraction, Nathanson’s paintings have more to do with elucidation than complication, and seem distilled from deeply thought-through relationships of light, space, color and gravity.

Like music – which is alluded to in the titles of this show and many works in it — the effect of Nathanson’s abstraction is built through processes of nuance and variation. In her case, the paintings expand thematically from a dominant motif of large translucent shapes that gather, overlap and appear suspended within the canvas. The edges of the forms echo both the blooming motion of a horizontal pour-and-tilt of paint, and the constraint of a taped limitation. These shape-edges generate a quiet dynamism, wandering whip-like through the radial forms of Evening Pinwheel (2017) or gracefully falling in parabolic arcs in larger works like Chant (2018) and Holding Summer (2017). Depending on the configuration, Nathanson’s forms may slowly lead the eye into what may feel like a vast space, or appear to veil some kind of more intimate enclosure. This conjuring of scale seems deliberate and controlled – and the effect, in each painting, is of a world contained and complete.

Color has been the central subject and shaping force in Nathanson ’s works for several years. While the odd moments of chromatic dissonance make it clear that her paintings are not trying too hard to please, they are often their best when channeling the most vivid brilliance and the softest, most inviting tints. Bold petal-pinks and out-and-out corals come as a genuine surprise, as do purples and crimsons that slip in a single gaze between warm and cool effect. The real uniqueness of Nathanson’s use of color comes, however, from the hard-won translucency of her medium that allows for the development of richly complex transitions and passages. The play of color in Leitmotif (2018), for example, from burnished orange to cool violet and unplaceable shades of sienna, sets up a wildly active picture plane. Individual areas of color advance and recede in varying degrees as the eye ascends and descends the ladder-like composition, here perhaps most directly recalling a melody assembled from disparate pitches and intensities.

In other works, such as Morning’s Address (2017), indirect associations with color transitions in the natural world might be permitted: the delicate difference in the shade of a rock above and below the water’s surface; the landscape beneath the shadow of a quickly scudding cloud; two overlapping leaves. This particular composition culminates in a kind of crescendo of bright white at the bottom of the canvas, as if marking the exact moment that the morning’s first rays appear. Despite their overtly non-referential aspect, Nathanson’s colors feel harvested from sensations of all that is sunlit.

Nathanson originally came to making these works through experimental small collages made from colored gel lenses used for theatrical lighting. The gels, which allow for color to be mixed as light, are an important reminder of the life of color in its fullest sense, for the paint pigment is only a conduit for a spectrum of energy. The “purity” initially intuited in Nathanson’s paintings might in fact be more akin to “immateriality,” as the works seem to suggest a departure from color as a physically grounded phenomenon towards a powerful, though weightless, force acting upon us.

The most exciting works in Cadence are also the most ambitious. Key of Be (2016) hints at risks taken in its mirror-and–tunnel like composition, resulting in refracted pairings of turquoises and oranges. In Thoroughfare (2017), an improbably assertive lavender sail shape brings angular energy into the more regular undulations of Nathanson’s forms. Both works point towards further possibilities for the striking approach so clearly established in these paintings, and suggest that Nathanson’s abstraction will avoid the danger of becoming set or static, and instead remain fluid, vital and entirely compelling.

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October 9, 2014 to January 10, 2015
1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street
New York City, 212.831.7272

The New York showing of this traveling retrospective, curated by Marina Pacini of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, is enjoying its last few days at el Museo del Barrio. Just down Fifth Avenue, in conjunction with the show, the Metropolitan Museum offers a special room display of her monumental Self–Portrait Looking at The Last Supper, 1982–84. And Marisol’s LBJ, 1967 can be seen in the permanent display at MoMA in their gallery devoted to Pop Art.

Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper states as its aim the re-establishment of this artist as a major figure of post-war American art. This unapologetic mission makes sense for Marisol who enjoyed near-celebrity status amongst previous generations while remaining virtually unknown to more recent followers of contemporary art. The eclecticism of her work – visible in its spirit, intention, materials and subject-matter – have always made for an uneasy fit alongside the monolithic careers of many of her famed peers of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Range and diversity are, however, qualities far more likely to be viewed positively through the lens of the present day, and for the viewer willing to forego the culminating arc normally anticipated from a retrospective, there is much among this collection of works to treasure.

Born in 1930 in Paris to parents of Venezuelan descent, Marisol Escobar moved to New York in the 1950’s where she studied with Hans Hofmann and associated with the Abstract expressionists. She attracted critical acclaim a decade or so later, when her work became linked to the nascent pop movement of the 1960s, a context in which her work is still often placed. The exhibition makes explicit, however, the error of so limited a reading of Marisol’s work, showing that on the contrary her influences were far-removed from, even contrary to, the object/image gestures of her Pop contemporaries. Figuration, expressionism, appropriation and the influence of folk art and of Latin American art are all strains that run through Marisol’s diverse oeuvre, which comprises single and multi-figure sculptures, portraiture in two- and three- dimensions, and fantastical drawings of all sizes.

This show makes clear just how powerful, hands-on a sculptor Marisol is, able to wrestle dynamism and uncanny presence from inert form. Wood sculptures like Queen (1957) or Boy with Empty Bowl (1987) retain reference to the block-like origin of their initial material, and are especially reminiscent of a kind of folk influence in which compact bodies and rough-hewn faces emerge forcefully from the planes of their substance. In her Artists series, Picasso (1977) conveys through carved hands and heavy features his legendary stare and authoritative posture, while Magritte (1998) depicts that artist’s sly gaze in a sort of inverted low-relief beneath the simple silhouette of a bowler hat. Elements of these works might even bring to mind William Edmondson, the tombstone carver-turned-visionary sculptor, whose dense stone effigies exude a peculiar grace.

Marisol is, of course, far from being self-taught. In several mixed-media figurative sculptures she frequently plays organic off of geometric forms – affixing modeled arms, feet and faces to rectangular “torsos” – in a combination that alludes to iconic pop motifs, not to mention minimal art. This hybrid sensibility points to what is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects Marisol’s work, namely her ability to employ the “cool” means and materials associated with dominant art movements of her age to engage with the largely un-ironic depiction of living human beings.

There is a poignant sense that the physical making of Marisol’s figurative works is fuelled by a desire to attain further, or special, knowledge of the subject depicted, or at least to address to what extent knowledge of other people is in fact possible. The interchange of essential, aloof, platonic forms (cubes and rectangles) with closely observed attributes (carefully carved hand and feet, for example) effectively captures the flux of sensation felt when assessing the presence of other people. Women Sitting on a Mirror (1965) evokes the casual and impersonal sense of recognition felt towards groups of strangers, here of-a-type- beachgoers, unspecified but unmistakable in dappled-disk hats. Mi Mama y Yo (1968) conveys, through a claustrophobically close arrangement of cubes, hands, colors, smiles and frowns, the fraught relations immediately apparent in a scene of the artist’s own mother and herself as a young girl.

In a more naturalistic strain of figuration, the show includes a wonderful early sculpture of George Washington (1958). He is here presented recognizably – upright, stately and steadfast, but entirely nude, corpulent and vaguely feminine in softly glowing alabaster. It was as though the artist were aiming to pay tribute to the subject, in the tradition of commemorative statuary, while satisfying an artistic need to address the actual bodily presence beneath the historic legend.

Marisol’s lack of self-consciousness in relation to her human subjects allows naturally for access to more psychologically complex subjects such as family, historic narrative or modern myth. This is a tangible artistic contribution, and valuable reminder to contemporary viewers of just how wide and rich visual content can be. It might well prove that hard-to-define artists like Marisol who engage with very broad subject matter (R.B Kitaj comes to mind as a kind of counterpart) could act as more relevant touchstones for many of today’s artists than their canonical contemporaries.

Occasionally, however, the impossibility of being both diffuse and focused comes across in work that seems deliberately digressive or overly self-referential. The large works on paper, for example, which treat highly internal, possibly erotic sensations and states of mind, tend to reduce somewhat predictable body-based imagery into monotonous rhythmic colored pencil strokes. They seem a little flat from an artist so clearly capable of emotional impact on a large scale.

Deeply affective work, for instance, like The Funeral (1996). This multi-figured work depicts John Kennedy Jr. as a four year old saluting the coffin of his assassinated father, carried within a toy-scaled procession at the colossal boy’s feet. It is a heart-wrenching image of a boy, seemingly conscious of public eyes, caught in a moment of baffling grief. Possible charges of sentimentality are outweighed by the effectiveness with which this public image of real, lived, history retains both intensely personal and mythopoeic force – a remarkable example of art used to amplify shared human experience.

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July 13 to August 30, 2012
56 Bogart Street, Unit 005
Brooklyn, 212 967 9818
Thursday to Saturday, 12-6pm

Claudia Chaseling’s small but ambitious show consists of a video, a handful of canvasses and a large, vaguely squid-shaped wall painting that appears to be divulging, or perhaps digesting, a number of discrete miniature paintings from within its unruly parameters. Strong looping forms, deadpan-color contrasts and decisive execution formally define an exhibition that initially seems engaged in a playful riff on contemporary abstraction. The more slowly absorbed narrative and imagistic elements of the show point, however, to an unexpected cluster of concerns: chance, anomaly, violence and the imaginings of post-apocalyptic experience.

Infiltration is one of those rare cases where a show consisting primarily of two-dimensional works is enriched by the addition of a video – a curatorial gesture that can often feel like an eager-to-please nod to newer media.  In the video, Murphy the Mutant, the hands of the artist turn the pages of a picture book of her own making. The book recounts the story of a gentle, genetically aberrant multi-legged creature, Murphy, born of normal parents into a Middle-Eastern, war-torn setting. Murphy is, in a matter of a couple of page-turns, projected through escalating global violence off the earth’s surface and into an interplanetary voyage. His physical journey is, as is suggested by the straightforward prose of the narration, accompanied by a parallel emotional exploration into extremes of loneliness and isolation.

The video is a poignant, if peculiar, piece on its own. In the context of the show it serves additionally as a key to accessing the two-dimensional pieces. Chaseling’s paintings and drawings, some of which are on rounded supports, simultaneously invite readings of purely abstract shape scenarios as well as of landscape, usually that of a craggy, volcanic or other-worldly sort. Fluorescent colors and jagged edges dominate, and liberal use is made of strips, stripes and bold outlines. Chaseling’s fast and loose play of planes often alludes to recessive space, but her forms more often than not (and usually at their best) push urgently against the picture plane, articulated by  brushstrokes which vibrate and appear almost to jump away from the very shapes they are meant to delineate. This restless instinct is fully vented in works like High Plane Escape (2011) and Virtual Escape (2012) where solid black forms extend from the canvas outwards onto the wall and daringly onto the unvarnished wood of the gallery floor. It’s hard not to think, when viewing these outward-bound shapes, projecting from the painting’s like emissaries or orange-pips, of poor little Murphy’s skyward trajectory.

There is of course a tradition of “painting away from the canvas”, from the playful off-frame whimsies of the baroque and mannerist artists through to Fontana to Stella. More recent variations of the approach tend to draw from a modernist challenge of the conventions of the form, often powerfully – and cerebrally – questioning expectations of illusionism and representation. Chaseling, by contrast, seems to be working from a less self-conscious motivation. Her hors-piste maneuvers refreshingly appear to spring from a spontaneous, if anxious, impulse to shift the impact of the painting beyond the restrictions of the canvas’s home base.

One possible interpretation of Infiltration is as a subtle expression, through stories and paint, of the once-romantic notion of the isolated journey – the sublime and terrifying experience of traveling beyond all knowns. Collectively the works in the show seem evocative of utopian and dystopian worlds, alternately inviting and threatening, as well as of the possibility, or necessity, of physical movement between them. It might be noted that the inventive thematic Chaseling here presents might have been strengthened by greater attention to pictorial variety and formal sensitivity – for all of their voltage the colors and shapes of the works sometimes cancel each other out to dulling effect. Taken as the unified entity Infiltration seems intended to be, however, the show leaves a powerful impression of an artist addressing difficult issues in a process of piecing together and striking out.

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The soft glowing orange of Lindquist’s first wall painting in You are Nature appears to take its slanted oblong shape from a sunbeam, one which must at a particular time of day stretch across the white of one of the gallery’s pillars. Standing marker-like amid the paintings on canvas which make up the better part of the show, the wall-work signals what is for this artist a new and successful engagement with color: evident everywhere in distinctive greens, yellows, turquoises and vermillion. The wall piece is equally emblematic, however, of a pervasive restlessness that runs like a current through the exhibition. Lindquist’s works often suggest origins in a questioning, even uneasy, relationship to the conventions of painting and sometimes even a paradoxical desire to take the traditional attributes of the form somewhere outside the constraints of the canvas altogether. The resulting works feel like active meditations on the nature of the pictorial surface, played out through layered depictions of earth-sites, still-lifes, water-scapes and screens.

Accompanying the new spectrum of color in these works is a broader range of subject matter, and a more varied approach to painterly execution. Lindquist’s previous work has most often addressed the life-cycles of the urban landscape, the processes of construction and decay visible in the landmarks and anonymous buildings of our human environment. Past imagery has focused on factories in ruin, such as those found along the Brooklyn waterfront, depicted with clarity in photo-silhouette,usually from the easily-read perspective of an earth-bound passer-by.

The current exhibition takes the project past the city limits and what feels like off the ground through several outdoor scenarios and underwater vistas. What Lies Beneath (The Galaxy of Space and Time), (2012) is among the most striking works in the show. It depicts, in an almost apocalyptic color scheme (from rusts to day-glo orange) Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. While the iconic forms of the earthwork are unmistakably articulated in the midground of the painting, they are partially obscured by a tempest of brushstrokes in the foreground, and then again towards the top of the canvas in an inexplicable burst of bright – as suggestive of an atomic bomb as the sun – which is left to drip pure whiteness straight down the otherwise recessive space. Two outer asymmetrical bands running alongside the canvas suggest a view from a window, its slanting angle playing against the picture plane. The viewpoint from which this scene is drawn is otherwise uncertain. The scale and proximity to the subject is oddly ambiguous despite a striving for representational rigor and, as in the case of many paintings here, almost disembodiesthe vantage point.

Central to the strength of these works is their painterly experimentation. By this I don’t simply mean a more physical sense of the medium, but more specifically a resonant relationship built between color, application and subject matter – a rapprochement of form to content. The grayscale precision of Lindquist’s earlier work is now, for example, translated into color. This tone-by-tone chromatic amplification yields powerful imagistic presence, as with the mass of coral-yellow in Phosphorescent Cloud (2012) which seems to be actively emerging from a depth of ocean turquoise. Particularly effective is the way Lindquist constructs form through staggered layers of color, as in Meditation/ Mediation (2012), where an entity of unknown identity, perhaps an old wood piling or a geyser seen from above, is built-up from crisply-outlined modulations of the same silhouette. Time Has Fallen Asleep (2012) is a poetic image of a plant in its vertical and reverse form; its delicate branches touching, hiding and interrupting each other in glazes of yellow and purple transparency. This superimposition effect visually references stencil or silkscreen techniques. It brings to mind a step-by-step process of image making, and by extension serves as a reminder of the selective and successive properties of perception. The two paintings of actual screens which appear in the show – one of an iPhone, the other of an airplane TV monitor – figure in this context not as the odd-ones-out in a slate of landscape paintings, but as further exploration into the mediated, even pixilated, nature of so much contemporary visual experience.

A key concern for Lindquist seems to be the expression of a kind of “substance” of depicted space. Light, distance, water and atmosphere are given special care, often felt out in fine spackles which form a pigmented fog. The technique is in itself beautiful, and indicates a draftsman’s concerns with the pictorial expansiveness possible within illusionistic parameters. It can also, however, on occasion lend a sort of “faux-finish” quality to the work, like a polishing touch used to complete a painting. Coming from a skilled, thoughtful painter, this veneer-like aspect in some of the works reveals a sense of vulnerability, a lack of faith in the communicative power of the image prior to its blurring finish.

The various framing devices seen in many of the works – nearly all of which are inventive and formally successful – similarly suggest apprehension about the emotionally direct implications of the face-on picture plane. In Apnea (2012) the mythical image of a free-diver immersed in blue is offset by a darkened half-border, suggestive of a screen-shot or underwater frame. Although the finished work is evocative and resolved, the image unfettered by device might have been more to the point. The cerebral, even aloof, quality of much of Lindquist’s work is alternately distancing and intriguing, as it seems to be indicative of a skepticism of the form built-in to its own execution. It’s a crucial issue for a dedicated painter to address, and the strength and charge evident in the current show suggests very good things will come from its resolution.

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This sampling of contemporary incarnations of abstract painting by eight artists, all of whom are women, evokes a wide range of painterly associations. Strikingly, however, almost all of the works forego the traditional (for abstraction) flat treatment of the picture plane in favor of the kinds of depth inherent to illusionistic space – implying, whether tacitly or overtly, an engagement with depiction.

In the warp-and-woof play of Canan Tolan’s work, for example, a plaid pattern is destabilized by contrasting surface yellows and recessive darks. Carrie Yamaoka’s resin-slick surface of even deeper blues and blacks is alternately inky, cosmic and oceanic in effect. Amy Ellingson and Lisa Corinne Davis employ diagrammatic sensitivity in their constructions of geometric forms. Dannielle Tegeder’s fresh take on Suprematist forms has them ascending towards the extended field of a secondary canvas while Rebecca Smith’s metal wall sculptures suggest forms slipping off the grid in an almost liquid gesture of melting and submersion.

The chaotic underpinnings of abstract process are visible in the wrestling-with-formlessness evident in both Andrea Belag’s big-stroke chromatic transitions and Catherine Howe’s deliciously sloppy tableau of ill-contained areas of color and bursts of materiality.

The exhibition remains on view through Friday, July 29.  There is a closing reception for the show as part of Chelsea Art Walk 2011 on Thursday, July 28, 5-8 PM

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The leading Puvis scholar discusses her 40 years’ work on the French master culminating in the publication of a long-awaited catalogue raisonné. Interview by CHRISTINA KEE

You write in the introduction that your research on Puvis began–  close to 40 years ago–  with the image of The Poor Fisherman. How did this catalogue raisonné come to be?
I was interested in tracking down this odd painting because it didn’t fit in with anything else I really knew in 19th-century painting. It was just curiosity to begin with – Puvis’ name cropped up everywhere, so I started to try and find out who had anything to say, and would it help me figure out this painting? And in fact it became more elusive, because there was too much said but not enough that was really explained. Had I known this at the outset, I might have said “Ok, your curiosity won’t be sated…” and then proceeded a bit differently.At that time, however, I applied for and got a Fulbright to study Puvis and I simply started figuring out what works I could find – without a set idea of what I was going to write about. During that first year, when I was very energetic, I was actually looking in the phone books in Paris, and seeing if there were any Puvis family. I found some, and I started writing very polite French letters of inquiry. Basically at a point I just struck it rich. Many of the Puvis relatives were curious about why I would be interested; this was in the mid sixties, no one had ever approached them. They were sort of intrigued by me, I think, and would say “cousin so-and-so” might have something, so I just began to take inventories of various holdings. At the time I didn’t have enough money to even photograph all the pictures, I made little drawings, so as not to waste film.

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What it Is – the title of Medrie MacPhee’s recent show at Von Lintel – was fitting for an artist with a career-long preoccupation with the slippery identities of painted forms. Over the past years MacPhee has exhibited abstract paintings that are nonetheless evocative of some specific, if indeterminate, time and place.  Forms feel rendered rather than invented in her work, and distinct spaces are suggested by horizon-like lines.

The dense, challenging paintings that comprise the new show mark a dramatic departure. In these mostly larger-scale canvasses the separate shapes, or “futuristic species”, as the artist has playfully described them, of earlier pictures have been brought together en masse to collide, overlap and interact in scenes of barely controlled abundance. The approach builds forcefully from the abstract/figurative tensions established in the previous works, and the multiple forms are more engaging than the solitary ones to an almost proportionate degree.

The works in this show differ in character, effect and intention, while united in their elusiveness. In Big Bang (2010) jagged shapes press uncomfortably past the picture plane, right-angled items stack and teeter to a compositional point of near-breakdown. Float (2009) similarly depicts a collection of forms either emerging or being submerged amidst piles of wreckage. Further comparison to anything architectural falls short, however: the configurations of parts depicted in these paintings are in no way earthbound or materially stable. Not only has gravity given way to a point where questions of support and suspension are non-applicable, but the very planes of the matter depicted often give way to contrasting underpainting of atmospheric blues and grays, to disorienting effect. Strong dramatic light unexpectedly strikes some forms and softly passes through others.

But rather than allowing us to get lost in the rich ambiguities these elaborate set ups offer, MacPhee seems insistent questioning just what is being looked at in these pictures? The response is rich in adjectives and short on nouns. The seemingly discrete parts that make up these works have clear and specific characteristics–hard, transparent, soft, columnar, etc. – and yet remain unidentifiable as any known object outside their painted world. As viewers we have the distinct sense of looking at real, raw materials in a pre-named state. Surveying these paintings recalls the tasks of early philosophy, laboriously weighing questions of attribute against those of essence. MacPhee’s unusual, even jarring, palette becomes significant in this context – purples, acidic greens and reds are laid on, label-like, to objects that still stubbornly resist definition. The world presented by the artist is one keenly, even threateningly, felt – if not necessarily comprehended.

It was instructive to learn from the artist that this recent series was sparked in part by time spent in Berlin, where the marks of a complex history are materially palpable. Without being too literal about it, the influence of the city supports the impression that the laboratory-like experimentation of the earlier works has given way to a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum and collapse.  Also cited was a growing concern with the “hard-core unreality” of the current news media, in which the facts surrounding oil spills and economic recoveries are altered wildly on a daily basis, and where the exact point of crisis is always uncertain. In MacPhee’s new paintings there is a distinct sensation of being up against a reality that we cannot name. These remarkable works stand out as a brave response to locating subject matter in a world where the simplest “is” can be difficult to grasp

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Deitch Studios, the waterfront second-space of Deitch Projects, succeeds in practice where many other galleries do in name only as a true “project room”;  a kind of well-funded playhouse where shows are chosen with an eye towards bold moves, experimentation, and flirtation with possible failure. The current exhibition Josh Smith: On the Water—youthfully energetic and built up from a premise akin to a dare—neatly fits the bill.

The show is comprised of forty-seven five-by-four feet paintings executed in measured intervals directly on the gallery wall.  Even without the press release telling us that the paintings were done in what must have been a hectic three and a half days, we can sense the tension between the demands of a challenge—producing a certain amount of paintings in a given time—and its material outcome.  Speed is as much an ingredient in the resulting works as paint and drywall, and the forty-seven paintings evidence their hasty coming-to-be in swingy strokes, easy one-form motifs, and unfussy transparent washes that glow with the white beneath.  The artist has continued his practice of working with simple and central images, and the paintings present variations on three basic motifs; a fish, a leaf, and the artist’s own child-like signature. The latter is often riffed to a point of pure abstraction, producing, quite winningly, works that look like perfect symbols of “painting”—like objects that might be the subject of wry commentary from gallery-going characters in New Yorkercartoons.

The best works are vibrant and fun, and show the chops of a painter who takes delight in straightforward, rambunctious picture making. (The direct application of paint-on-wall viscerally recalls the childhood sensation of dragging a crayon off-limit onto forbidden surfaces). Exuberance happily trumps strategy, and in its strongest moments the exhibition suggests the workings of a mischievous sprite from a rowdy night before.  The constraints of the chosen rectangular format and the placement of these paintings also work to activate the imagination, as the loopy strokes of the works pressing tensely up against their “frame” remind us that the only thing containing these paintings are spiderweb-thin pencil lines.  There is the hint that the images could, if released, extend indefinitely onto whatever two-dimensional opportunity might present itself.

But Smith doesn’t reach the high-mark of producing a knock-out show of one-session paintings. The risky premise certainly adds energy to the enterprise, but not an exemption from the basic rule that weaker paintings will bring down stronger ones, whatever good/bad painting criteria one might be using. A few of the paintings succumb to repetition and fatigue, begging the question of whether the artist might have arranged it to have a little less painting and a little more time to tip the scales in his favour.  There is a pervasive sense of arbitrariness throughout On the Water. Questions of “why three and half days?” or “why 47 paintings?” appear to have no better answer than “why not?” The strict use of three unrelated motifs also seems ill-considered, given that the more complex forms clearly yield more interesting results, as with the sinuous catfish subjects delineated in slithers of electric pinks and greens.  The “signature” paintings, basic doodles of “Josh Smith,” are simply weak unless pushed to abstraction: egocentric without being individually expressive, devoid of content without being formally interesting.  Even a slight departure from this system of rather dull personal symbols could have provided a range of armatures strong enough to support this artist’s impressive energies and considerable talents.

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Ruthless in Chalk Farm, Allison Katz’s solo exhibition at Battat Contemporary, is a collection of handmade pieces – a yellow wooden snake, a wheat-sheaf-laden funeral cloth, a still-life executed in sand – and several exceptional paintings. With a strength of execution that overpowers any complaint of arbitrariness, Katz conjures forms and images that are at once beautiful and funny, familiar and strange. In the context of this show they possess a sadness as well, as it is quietly communicated that the Ruth in the show’s title is the artist’s late grandmother. Although this exhibition consists of a wide range of works done over the past two years it is purely, and unapologetically, commemorative in spirit.

Katz’s paintings often puzzle before they reward. With daunting diversity her works range from still-lifes to abstractions to ambitious tableaux that take their compositional cue from collage.Cactus is a simple potted plant, beefed-up with impasto brushwork; Chalk Farm poetically depicts, in what might be called a folk-cubist manner, a sprite-like character awash in his pastel-block surroundings. This variety would be an obstacle to consistency, were it not that all of the works display a uniform clarity, conviction, and uncanny presence often disproportionate to their scale.

Egypt’s Grapes, one of Katz’s strongest paintings, consists of an outlined female form poised on the edge of a crimson canvas, one leg playfully, longingly, extended towards a doubly-rendered moon. Oddly reminiscent of both Pompeii and Picasso, this compelling drama of figure and ground formally plays out the actions of a heroine literally embodying the substance of her surroundings, defining the center of her own specific universe.

Painting, for this artist, is not a rarefied act of translation, but a continuous process of engagement with the material world. This workmanlike approach, which has little use for hierarchy, allows her, without fuss or pretense, to introduce three-dimensional elements into the gallery space. A replica of Yves-St-Laurent’s funeral cloth, for example, golden and strewn with green wheat-sheaves, gently allows melancholy associations to infuse the plant imagery that crops up in a number of other works in the show.

With the logic of a synaesthete, for whom numbers, names and concepts can be equated with distinct sensations of color or sound, Katz displays a fascination with the impact of charged pairings of painterly parts. The curious dark fruits – think Roman Mosaic or late Derain –  that figure in several graphic still-life works are a simple combination of “black” and “pears”, yet operate as dense, if indirect, symbols of sensual vitality, loss and death. It is oddly helpful when viewing Katz’s work simply to name and list the visible configurations that occur: plant/ pattern; pears made in paint /pears made in sand; black fruit/ black silhouette; head in profile/ swimming swans;  yellow snake/ yellow stripe, and so on. It is an impressive culmination of motifs, bringing to light in a pictorial stream-of-consciousness connections and sensations that would otherwise be lost. In Katz’s profusion of images it is the black border, the dark fruit, the shadowed field and the space of the tomb that sustain a quiet note of mourning throughout. Katz never seems to forget that hers is a medium inextricably linked to conjuring that which no longer is, and in Ruthless in Chalk Farm she has established a vital and inspiring memorial.

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