September 6 – November 2, 2019
22 Cortland Alley, between White and Walker streets
New York City, andrewkreps.com

The Roe Ethridge exhibition, Sanctuary 2, that inaugurates Andrew Kreps new Tribeca gallery space sent me right back to that creepy, troubling feeling of nearly 20 years ago when I first experienced a photograph by this artist.

It was in 2000 at PS1’s Greater New York survey exhibition. The medium-sized, close-cropped color portrait of an attractive smiling young woman seemed initially unremarkable. But what was this lone photo doing in the context of such provocative young art? With her flawless skin, perfect hair and make-up, she could possibly be a model. Indeed, the photograph’s title was Ford Model Kathryn Neal (1999). Was it appropriation art, or a found rejected headshot? It was puzzling because although it seemed slickly banal like a commercial photo, there was something weird about it. Her expertly painted meticulously lipsticked crimson mouth was outsized, completely taking over the lower half of her face. There were dull reflections on her pupils that gave her eyes an unfocused quality, and the otherwise perfection of her look made her frozen smile seem increasingly, hideously, grimace-like, as if she had been produced in an android factory. What was the point here? And failing to be able to reach a conclusion, was that the point? Though we probably encounter hundreds of photographs per day, so few of them make us question their very purpose. I had never heard of the artist, but I remembered his fish eggs first name.

A challenging sense of disorientation links his uncanny disparate seeming photographs across years and motifs. Sanctuary 2 is a large show, extending to the scale of the works within it: Some of the 17 dye sublimation prints on aluminum extend six feet. So the fact that Ethridge has no signature style can be daunting. Even though the artist is a straight white, cis-male, these photographic works are genre fluid. It isn’t simply that Ethridge blurs the lines between art, fashion, and editorial but that he questions what constitutes the boundaries between those categories in the first place. There is, however, a precise subversion of the way we are accustomed to responding to photography.

Verrazano Bridge (2019), typically doesn’t seem particularly special at first, except for one detail that grows increasingly startling. In this almost, but not quite colorless, large photo (there is a little patch of green grass on the left and a small blue sign on the right), the bridge arcs distantly in from the left past a London plane tree, whose trunk and network of bare branches frame the picture. Every detail seems precisely, formally placed, from the way the end of the bridge disappears into a line of fog just past the midpoint, to the way the rectangle and arched hole of one of its towers is located almost in the center of the picture. Our view is from a sidewalk, separated from the water of the Narrows Strait by a parallel fence decorated with metal cutouts of sea creatures. The manufactured regularity of the fence bars stands in contrast to the organic expansion of tree branches at the top.

All this ordinarily might make for a nice but unremarkable picture, but right smack between branches and water, exactly even with the tower of the bridge, is a little dark pigeon in midflight. Not blurred but highly defined, it is so disconcerting because of its perfection and stillness both in clarity and placement. The picture is so formally calibrated it seems staged, or photoshopped. But no, the gallery informs us Ethridge simply waited, taking hundreds of photos, until that particular breathtakingly banal moment occurred.

In contrast to the too perfect natural moment photos (like the almost six-by-four foot White Duck (2014), whose titular occupant floats in a pond with exactingly even wavelets interrupting its reflection), are the ‘flawed beauty’ pieces such as Oslo Grace at Willets Point (2019). What appears to be an attractive young woman with a long dark braid wearing either a pink flight attendant’s uniform and hat or a high fashion outfit, poses on an orange plastic tarp next to a still life of fruits and a soda can, right in the muddiest possible rutted parking lot leading to CitiField, its bullpen gate in the background. There are large pools of stagnant water, parked cars, and a random guy in a red hat walking away in the distance.

Gender and racial subtexts abound in Ethridge works. The name Oslo Grace may be familiar as the famous trans, non-binary model, which makes the gender of the person posing suddenly an additional ambiguity. One of their hands is buried in the still life and the other seems to be holding a wineglass filled with, of course, rosé, adding to the litany of red accents in the photo. Everything except Oslo Grace is relentlessly squalid, and yet there they sit protected from the mud on this orange tarp in their pristine outfit sipping wine. Though Grace is the ostensible subject of the photo they are rather dwarfed by the landscape. Is this an outtake from a bizarre fashion or ad shoot? Despite the strangeness of the scene, what is disconcerting is our inability to classify the function of the photograph.

Or you could simply think of these disconnects as dryly humorous. There is the picture of detritus, wilted flower petals, a tennis ball and cigarette stub, which may for some recall Irving Penn’s still lives, and sure enough, from the brand emblazoned on the tennis ball, the title is, Penn and Wet Butt (2019). Or the one-liner of a photo of a half empty ketchup bottle, which at quick glance seems to have strands of French fries shooting in from the side, a view belied by the title, White Asparagus and Ketchup (2019).

There is almost always a telling detail, which serves to derail the meaning train of the photos. The almost six-foot-long Nathalie with Hot Dog and Flag, 2014, while straight out surreal (she is wearing a pea coat sitting on a pale, (Caucasian) flesh-colored personified hot dog squirting ketchup and mustard on its head in front of an American flag), really goes off the tracks when you notice the bruise on one of Nathalie’s alabaster naked legs. Chin resting on fist, wearing a crystal necklace, red hair flowing like the flag stripes, coat buttons echoing flag stars, Nathalie dangles her left hand strangely provocatively between her parted legs. The gallery informs us that, five years later, Nathalie is now Nathan, for whatever that tells us.

And when you see a photograph like Mehdi on a Motorcycle (2019), that is entirely shades of white, silver, and gray from the fresh-off-the-assembly-line motorcycle to the futuristic, blindingly white sneakers worn by the male model with long wavy hair, whose smooth brownish skin becomes the only thing of color in the photo, is there a racial subtext or is that just in my white head? Probably that deadpan ambiguity, like in most Ethridge photos, is exactly the idea.

What artworks have to say about the nature of artistic control and how that control can be used to affect a viewer’s perception, and how that relationship between control and perception creates the idea of representation seems to be Ethridge’s purpose. In art, representation becomes the way an artist can play with an unacknowledged series of viewer assumptions, and when viewers are forced to confront the unstable nature of their assumptions, as in Ethridge’s photographs, reality begins to come undone. Or just enough to get you to see with more sophisticated eyes.

The post The Function of a Photograph: The Disconcerting world of Roe Ethridge appeared first on artcritical.

Mark Greenwold: And Now What?!

May 30 to July 12, 2019
545 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, garthgreenan.com

Melodramatic and unhinged though they may at first appear, Mark Greenwold’s paintings frequently depict sexual and violent acts without actually being erotic or horrifying. Teasing the boundary between attraction and repulsion, his works are a litmus test of what you value in art. But if you allow yourself to be distracted by the grotesquery on display in this exhibition, And Now What?!, you might miss an important new direction his work has taken.

His often-naked figures are depicted with a fanatical photographic facticity that emphasizes the imperfect, aging, human body, if anything in a way that makes them even more abject than they might be in actuality. The women are often topless while Greenwold depicts himself, when not nude, clad in a negligee, or dead. It used to be not uncommon to see an ex-wife’s head grafted on a dog’s body, and seemingly none too happy about it, with the dog half getting better treatment. Most of the figures are friends and family, and though it is normally a proud distinction to be depicted in a work of art, in Greenwold’s case, be careful what you wish for.

A Magic Summer, (2017) depicts the well-known artist, James Siena, twice, once wielding a cleaver, and again prostrate in green underpants being stabbed in the heart with long pointed scissors by his topless wife, Katia Santibañez. But those are only three of the seven figures occupying a cramped seaside room, or nine if you include the dog and the disembodied head of Chuck Close floating at the window.

But something else seems to be going on at Greenan. Ostensibly presented as a mini-retrospective, this show really serves to demonstrate how the roots of Greenwold’s most recent paintings can be seen in the radical paintings he was doing while he was just in his early 20s. The four here are a revelation. They are all large (around four by five feet), energetically painted in acrylic, and though packed with figures, animals, and insects, and employing windows to exterior spaces, everything seems invented rather than sourced from photos. Christmas Painting, (1964), The Car & the Bed,” (1964), and Untitled (Lady Bug/Batman), (1965), all employ flat, colored (often brick red) planes to give the paintings the spatial flatness of Matisse’s 1911 Red Studio. Done in the mid 1960s, they were not very hip at a time when minimalist monochrome reigned but seem daring and original today. Though the talented 22-year-old Greenwold was clearly influenced by Francis Bacon, both existentially and stylistically, these paintings have a crazy energy all their own. By 1966-7, in Barbara (Grasshopper), a complexity of pattern and design, with areas requiring meticulous rendering, had already started to dominate. Then four years later, he shifted into more direct photo representational territory.

It is easy to trace the bulk of Greenwold’s mature paintings as deriving from two large works shown here that he did in his 30s: Spanish Mediterranean Bedroom, (1971), and Bright Promise (for Simon), (1971–1975). They both have scrupulously detailed, class-conscious interiors whose figures seem to be collaged into the painting space in a way that reveals the influence of Photorealism, the dominant, au courant representational mode of the early ‘70s. The obvious contrivance of the collaged space can be attributed at once to modernist privileging of artifice and a young painter’s inexperience with constructing congruent space from unrelated photographic sources. Greenwold’s figures in later paintings, while still having an obvious collage construction, are more seamlessly integrated into the space of the paintings even when wildly out of scale with one another.

But several years ago, incongruous clouds of randomly colored wacky biomorphic shapes began to appear above the heads of the people in his paintings. Initially it was hard to tell Greenwold’s purpose other than to introduce an element of abstraction, with the effect of creating unintelligible thought balloons that could further fuck with a viewer’s attempts at comprehension. After seeming to have been subsequently abandoned, recently these areas have reappeared and metastasized into full-blown expressionist tumors across the surface of the paintings. They signal a major evolutionary change in Greenwold’s purpose.

Up until now, mostly what occurs in Greenwold’s mature paintings have been depictions, and the purpose of his finicky small marks has been to render a vivid description of real surfaces and create interiors with furniture, objects, people, and animals that have a smirking sarcastic presence. But suddenly Greenwold uses these strokes to disintegrate objects and people and make the figures and their relationships even more ambiguous. And while writers lately have seen in the mottled, wrinkled, and flaccid flesh of Greenwold’s photorealistic characters a heroic confrontation with aging and death, this new approach is a philosophical shift, an infectious disintegration that doesn’t depict feeling but enacts it. Distasteful rendering of aging and death can be dismissed with an “ugh.” And though a scrupulously delineated surface can pull one in, it can also be tiring to contemplate all that labor. But the surfaces of these new paintings, such as Diaper, (2017) for instance, or Pink Bedroom, (2018) where the brushstrokes have started to come unmoored from their depictions, are energized with possibility. Images lose definition and force viewers to come to grips with the anxious loss of control of their own hermeneutic abilities. As the internal formal gyroscopes of the paintings break down, they hark back to Greenwold in his 20s, with their disrupted surfaces and invented figures.

Diaper, the most unnerving of his recent paintings, seems painted with wild abandon. The ghost of Picasso in his tighty whities, macho posing with his dog, mockingly haunts this painting. The main figure, recognizable as the artist himself, clad only in a yellow-stained adult diaper and knee brace, raises his hands in horror, his mouth open in a howl that would unnerve Munch. Even though he manages to delineate every yellowed tooth, we are easily distracted by his connection to a urine-filled catheter bag lying like a dead fish on a coffee table. Meanwhile, a dog is happily panting behind to the right, which is just below a man hung naked from the ceiling whose bulging eyes ogle a nude woman crouched ass-backwards on a chair below right. With a body that gives new meaning to the term contrapposto, her face has exploded into a cubist pile of expressionist brush strokes, though we can make out eyes, nose, open mouth, and ear, as well her two breasts that have also entered the cubist scrum. There also seems to be a little flying penis squirting cum into her mouth, a detail that requires close attention. Though the small object-packed interiors of his other paintings can seem (intentionally) claustrophobic, air wafts easily through these open brushstrokes affording room for chairs, tables, lamps, fireplace, mirror, and portrait hanging on the wall without feeling confining. A duck head also pops out of a metal vase in the foreground, and a partially formed disembodied head seems about to materialize in the air next to the hanged man.

The angst-ridden, post-adolescent confrontation, in the paint itself, with impending adulthood of Greenwold in his 20s has re-emerged in his late 70s as an emotionally comparable confrontation, with impending old age, disintegration, and death. Insanity in painting is a freedom of sorts, a letting go of one’s conventional attitudes, even if those attitudes might seem unconventional to everyone else. Beneath Greenwold’s work has lurked a secret hopeless desire to be accepted by a culture whose values he categorically rejects. That dynamic has played out using deliberately outrageous subject matter, softened by a studiously labor-intensive execution. But in art, as often in life, letting go of all calculation, even if already an outlier, often leads to becoming a true culture hero. In his latest paintings Greenwold is achieving the precise depth of emotion he has often only depicted—yielding to feeling, he is starting to lose his mind.

The post Careful What You Wish For: Mark Greenwold at Garth Greenan appeared first on artcritical.

February 9 to April 6, 2019
522 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, matthewmarks.com

What do we expect from the late work of great painters? If you are a Romantic, your proof of greatness might be evinced by a final letting go——a pure abandonment to the id, a total acceptance of the painter’s deepest urges. No second guesses, no capitulation to analytical thinking, no recycling of past successes; just allowing the body, with its supposedly pure inner wisdom, to do what it needs to do. A Romantic might appreciate the arid grace of dementia-afflicted late de Kooning, or the brazen “blend of slapstick idiocy and gallantry,” as the painter Carroll Dunham once wrote of libidinous late Picasso. For a Romantic, this might seem the heroic response to the knowledge that one’s time is about up.

But are we getting something different from the late work of Jasper Johns? Johns has never been a Romantic. Don’t expect to find a “rage against the dying of the light.” Which is not to say there is no passion in these paintings, it’s just that his relentless denials have conditioned us to be circumspect about making any claims about them at all. So how do we react to Johns’s late work? Despite the startling complex simplicity of his initial paintings of flags and targets, he has gradually developed a quality of rigorous self-examination and reflection on the processes through which he has created his work.

Alexi Worth, in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, discusses what he terms as Johns’s “scrupulousness”: writes of how

Johns seems to be allergic to the nervous approximations that characterize much art talk — not to mention ordinary conversation. He would rather say nothing than assent to a banality; would rather deconstruct a question than accept a false premise. The more one talks with him, the more his scrupulousness seems distinctively extreme: not just a mannerism, but a deeply ingrained reservoir of feeling.

Looking at these latest works, Johns’ scrupulousness seems to have intensified rather than been left behind. You can almost hear him ask himself, “What am I doing today?” or “Now what happens if I do it this way?” As the artist approaches 90, these questions take on poignant urgency. Though each image might address a new subject, every piece here is filled with references to images, marks, and tropes from earlier work. Even without the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons that peak out of many of these works, it is almost impossible to look at them and not think that here is a person patiently and systematically facing the prospect of death: The completion of the content of his artistic life.

A whole series of work in this show centers on an image of grief. The words “Farley Breaks Down After Larry Burrows,” stenciled on each of the untitled canvases and drawings and prints in this group, refer to an image in a famous LIFE magazine photo essay by Larry Burrows of Farley, a mission leader during Vietnam. Johns has chosen the particular photo of Farley burying his sobbing face in his arms after a battle where comrades were killed and wounded. But curiously, the original title of the Burrows photo was “Farley Gives Way,” not breaks down. What we see in these paintings, drawings, and prints is a literal breaking down of the image’s surface; not just an emotional breakdown but an actual disintegration of the image into marks and puddles of paint, and sometimes, silkscreened cartoons and play money.

Understanding this photographic moment of grief is not only about the grief, but the effect of death on the living. Each image can be seen as a completed text which — like a life itself — is unified, but composed of many small, seemingly random experiences whose relationships to each other, upon examination, become infinitely complex.

Other references to his own earlier works abound: For instance, the vase/silhouettes figure/ground optical illusion image. Do you see two symmetrical facing profiles, or the vase that exists as the negative space between them? Johns favors optical illusions that, depending on one’s attention, flip between two images such as a vase or a pair of silhouettes, or a duck and a rabbit, or (but not here) a young woman and an old crone. In the context of these paintings, the conundrum of contemplating these dualities of image from a single point of view could be a metaphor for one’s inability to imagine the disintegration of one’s own consciousness. We can grieve for the dead, we can know that we will die, but we can’t imagine being dead. It’s reminiscent of the title of Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

Not only do we have this examination of a man burying his face in his arms in the “Farley Breaks Down” paintings (ironically, the photographer himself later died in a helicopter crash), but there is also a series of works based on John Deakin’s photograph of a young Lucian Freud on a bed, with his face held in his right hand. The photo, which had belonged to Francis Bacon, is paint-spattered, creased, folded and torn. Johns already used this photo for a series of paintings titled “Regrets” that were shown at MoMA a few years ago. In it are newspapers on the floor, and a diamond patterned quilt on the bed. You can see why it spoke to Johns——it has so many iconographic elements that he already uses. The folds, patterns, newsprint, and splotches create a very Johnsian, mark-abstracting surface. Curiously, the resulting images in both these series reminded me of the way Bonnard broke down his painting surfaces into a series of abstract shapes and marks, which adds the possibility of another layer of meaning, as Bonnard’s paintings, though in a different way, also explored quotidian daily life. By horizontally mirroring the image of the torn photo, Johns further abstracts it and turns a part of a white wall into a shape that becomes a skull.

The ideas of mirroring and reflection have occupied Johns’s process for a long time. In treating an area as a mirror, he turns the formal idea of flatness into a more sophisticated and useful concept that the surface of the canvas is a field, with properties that the painter assigns to it. Mirroring might have to do with his long involvement with printmaking but it is worth remarking upon because it seems to be another way of breaking down an image, making forms abstract, and destabilizing a single reading.

Despite flashes of mordant humor – a whole series of dancing skeletons, for instance – we don’t have the pleasure in this late work of the lush encaustic surfaces familiar in early Johns, or the startlingly opaque conundrum of a simple, ubiquitous pop image to offset the lugubrious tone. Some of these paintings even have dispiriting harsh acrylic texture, and if you didn’t know the photographic references some were based on, you might not have a clue of what you were looking at.

Deconstructing these images is an endless task,  and trying to find the Easter eggs of hidden references and relationships keeps a viewer in a submissive, student-like relationship to the artist. For instance, Johns constantly references Picasso. The double silhouettes could be Picasso profiles, or Johns’ own profile, or both. There is a series that uses a Picasso figure with a hand to its mouth. Is the point to identify his artistic stature as equal to that of Picasso, or does he have other motives?

In place of solipsistic questions like, “Do those ASL hand signs of letters stand for significant initials?” or “What image did those stick figures holding torches or brushes come from?” we are better off asking “What do I feel when looking at this and why am I feeling that way?”

Conversely, we could also use these paintings to consider the nature of grief and mortality. What is a life? What is regret?  What is it that we grieve? Perhaps the feelings we are left with mirror our struggles with our own mortality. The paintings are the intense crackling evidences of a lively mind, pushing and probing and asking uncomfortable questions about what it feels like to be alive and continue to relentlessly produce, after having lived so long.

The post Uncomfortable Questions: Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

February 14 to March 16, 2019
535 W. 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, ppowgallery.com

Despite Judith Linares’ exhibition having opened on Saint Valentine’s Day, its title, Hearts on Fire, doesn’t refer to the heat of ardor but is actually a term for a particular cut of diamond. Rather than burning with expressionist passion, we find canvases that sparkle with a brilliant light finely honed by technical rigor. This disjunctive bait and switch is subtle, but pervades all her paintings. Her strange vignettes, executed with energetic but measured brushstrokes, elicit feelings that could be described as ecstatic uneasiness pervading a slightly seedy arcadia.

Linhares has been showing in New York since moving to the city from the Bay Area over twenty years ago. Now in her late 70s, she has recently started to receive the kind of public recognition she deserves. But because recognition tends to overpower the subtlety of all the disruptions that might have prevented acceptance to begin with, it is particularly important now to pay attention to the ambivalent feelings her work can engender.

The first large painting we encounter, Dawn, 2017, depicts a self-satisfied, naked woman, glowing crystalline emerald, riding in on a blanketed blue-grey donkey. She faces a cosmic sunrise, but we don’t see the sun. The sky, replete with orbs and stars is streaked not with the normal warm spectrum of sunrise color but with cobalt, ochre, rust, and violet umber as well as a few streaks of azure and lemon. The exploding heavens illuminate a desert landscape of brilliant citron contrasted with the shaded trail of olive and dark mahogany trodden by the donkey and its nude rider. But there’s something unsettling.

It’s that naked green rider. The image is disturbing because for all its dazzling light, the nude equestrian is no sexy Lady Godiva, nor is her steed a white stallion, but a humble donkey. Coming across initially as ugly, glaucous, and misshapen, she represents someone who has ridden all night to triumphantly make it to sunrise, and her indomitability should compensate for any shallow judgments on her physiognomy. Perhaps this is a metaphor for a female artist’s long journey out of obscurity as the world finally sheds its light on her work. It is notable that while Linhares populates her paintings with female nudes, they are never presented as erotic objects, and while their bodies vary pointedly from the ideal, they always appear completely unselfconscious and comfortable in their skin and shape.

But even though the rider’s viridescence comes from being in shadow, she still seems unnaturally green for a human, and the donkey’s expression of annoyed exasperation with its burden elicits our sympathy, making that initial body judgment a little less embarrassing. A key part of thinking about Linhares’ work involves a constant questioning of our own ambivalent reactions both to her figures and the ambiguities in the paintings.

Linhares employs her brushstrokes like letters, and groups of them become words in sentences. Her insistence on the integrity of each piece of her painted language creates a jumbly visual ride. There is little smoothness in a Judith Linhares painting, and there is an awareness of how everything is assembled in a way that is not planned, but is, nevertheless, spontaneously deliberate. As much as she uses light to create a coherent image, she also fractures attention by the awareness of how abstractly everything is put together one stroke at a time. Her consciousness always feels omnipresent through the visibility of her decisions.

Linhares creates her light by color contrasts among brushstrokes. Each stroke is either close in tone to its neighbor but a different hue, or wildly contrasting. And for every high key pigment like lemon, cyan, vermilion or chartreuse there always corresponds a darker ochre, ultramarine, walnut, or ivy. She combines these brushstrokes into her two major tropes: striations and radiating spokes. The striations become sky, flesh, or stone while the spokes become stars, suns, flowers, or quilts.

There are two main genres represented by the 17 paintings here, playing off each other in significant ways. Besides the attention-getting large paintings, whose one or two naked figures in barren landscapes are dramatically illuminated by sunrise or sunset, several small paintings of flowers in glass vases punctuate this show.

These are not the beautiful flowers procured at an expensive florist, but rather the cheap daisies, poppies, and hydrangeas from the corner deli. This ironic dichotomy of class produced by plebeian flowers and fashionable high art paintings is a typical Linhares twist. The subjects and colors may refer to common taste but they are executed with startling sophistication. Though it’s tempting to think of these paintings simply as virtuosic formal exercises, Linhares mines them fully, and they are microcosms of issues that animate her larger canvases. The radiating spokes of the daisy petals, and the striped patterns of the backgrounds are Linhares’ primary modules, as are the structural building blocks of form in all the other paintings. Moreover, unlike the bigger canvases that seem lit from the skies, there are no illuminators in the flower paintings. These paintings show us how Linhares builds the suffusing light with a purely abstract construction of color juxtaposition.

Each of the five flower paintings consists of flowers in a glass vase on a table with striated backgrounds. Sometimes the flowers resemble exploding fireworks as in Autumn Joy, (2018), and sometimes they are like a sad group of children in detention after school, such as the wilted blooms in Spring Break, (2017). These seemingly simple paintings are a catalogue of formal ideas culminating in the way the glass vase in every painting, painted as thickly and opaquely as every other part, is transformed into a transparent lens that diffracts stems, background, and table and becomes a metaphor for the painting itself as a distorting lens through which to view human consciousness.

All of these paintings challenge assumptions about taste, art history, narrative, skill, sexuality, and beauty.  The large paintings are replete with references to the primitivism of Henri Rousseau, as well as the abstract formalism of Matisse. Linhares wants us to understand that art history is not a linear progression, and insists on going back to the early years of modernism to revitalize painting. These paintings may seem like stories, but their ambiguity undermines our ability to attach narratives that make sense. The bodies of her characters are sexualized, but not in a way that seduces a viewer. Her paintings may seem eccentrically awkward, but a close examination reveals a sophisticated understanding of pictorial construction. Yet these provocations occur on so many contradictory levels, and are held together by such masterful structures of color and light that we can become as sun-dazed as the figures in Beach, painted this year.

Beach is occupied by a long naked couple reclining front to back on a glowing starburst-patterned quilt. The man sports a Mennonite beard and lies behind the woman and caresses her hip. With the sun at their backs and their feet entangled, they stare raptly into the sky possibly waiting to be beamed aboard an unseen mother ship. The amazing green skull nestled in front of the pair, looks like it had belonged to someone who died waiting for the same rapture. Or maybe it is the remains of dinner eaten by the same lion that stands transfixed on a dune nearby. Animals in Linhares paintings exhibit the impatience of jaded observers.

Like cut gems, Linhares’ paintings are hard and sparkly, translucent but impenetrable. They are replete with parables of indomitability and struggle, but also speak of surrender—whether to intoxicating urges (as in Revel, 2017, which depicts a naked blond swigging wine), decay, or the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

The post Trouble in Paradise: Judith Linhares at P.P.O.W. appeared first on artcritical.

September 14 to October 21, 2018
333 Broome Street, between Chrystie Street and Bowery
New York City, canadanewyork.com

At first glance, Katherine Bradford doesn’t seem eager to get too specific. Her figures often have no faces nor even much by way of hands. Gender and race feel indicated without necessarily being perfectly legible. And though maybe she is ingenuously concealing a lack of facility, it is more likely that it is precisely in that twilight between the apparent arbitrariness of a brush stroke and the haptic perception of a particular feeling that Bradford has staked her territory. Ambiguity plays a special role in complicating the tension between the ideas of painting and the way Bradford uses them to define sexuality, gender and race, and how that might influence the way we intuitively observe human relationships.

While this new show at Canada, Friends and Strangers, is not exactly a departure from the greater arc of her work, one thing that stands out is that she no longer feels the need to use overt themes like ships, superheroes, or bathers to unify a body of work. The eleven paintings here were done this year and range in size from 4 x 5 feet, to 6½ x 11 feet. They all contain at least one figure and up to around 13 (if you count fragments). But these paintings are not only large in size: The figures that inhabit them are also large-scale, and all the while Bradford paints them in a way that retains a genetic memory of color field abstraction.

Most of the paintings here employ abstract painting ideas to produce fantastic kinds of subject matter, where a figure may levitate, or levitate and squirt milk not just from her breasts, but also from the whole length of her body. Or sit on a giant firearm gathering snowball ammunition. Or drip heads from beneath a skirt. They just cry out for interpretation. But even the most simple and direct of the images here, a painting titled Couple No Shirts, demonstrates what might be at stake in the kinds of ambiguities Bradford constructs.

Nothing surreal is happening, just two people, sitting and facing out. Though for faces there are only large mauve brush strokes where eyes and mouths would be. At five feet, the height of the painting makes them slightly larger than their viewers.

The right sitter has arms folded over straight legs, and the other sits crossed-legged, with her left hand resting on the shoulder of the other figure. Though I am using the female pronoun, that assumption is just one of several that might end up a bit awkward, especially with these paintings. And especially right now in a cultural moment where categories that used to be quite clearly defined, like gender, sexuality, race, etc., are now much more fluid. We can’t be really certain whether this couple is two women, two men, or mixed. But our brains nevertheless seem compelled to leap to quick categorizations, which in Bradford’s pictorial reality become suspect upon scrutiny. Bradford seems to exploit this by getting fuzzy just at the instant where we make those assumptions.

“Couple No Shirts”: There is an implication of semi-nudity, relationship and sexuality in that title. But you can’t rely too much on the title because, despite the “no shirts” stipulation, one of the figures seems to sport an ultramarine one (or is it a jacket?) that is open in front. Exposed female breasts in paintings might be conventionally titillating, but the right figure’s shoulders are broad, hair short, and because the revealed breasts are also small, they could be male breasts.

And yet Bradford is really subtle about this ambiguity. That chest is a painted cloud of about three overlapping wan colors close in tone. There is a slightly darker brush stroke that runs just under the nipples which perhaps defines the shape of the breasts as female, but it is so matter-of-factly brushed that one may feel a little pervy for needing to look that closely.

The couple does sport the same milky blue hair color, though Left’s hairstyle is slightly longer and on a man would look like a Prince Valiant cut. Right is wearing pants that aren’t as tight as Left’s red pants that cling to her thin calves. Because of this fashion choice, the delicate, bare feet, and slightness of the upper torso (Bradford really outdoes herself in the economical painting of that slightly curved belly) I have already unconsciously registered Left as female. Though to further challenge masculine/feminine convention, if you examine Left’s lower calf, Bradford has painted a thin wash over tiny short dark marks to indicate hair.

Bradford continually lets us believe she is casually doing hardly anything when she is in fact subtly constructing significance through weight and volume. Looking closely at the way she paints the hand resting on the companion’s shoulder, even though the fingers are barely indicated, it is impossible not to feel tenderness in the way it rests so caressingly.

But who are these people and what is their relationship, and why is Bradford presenting them to us so anonymously yet so insistently? In my mind this is a lesbian couple. Further I conjecture it is a self-portrait of Bradford and her long time partner, Jane O’Wyatt, though I’m aware I have possibly gone way too far in making this hypothesis. Bradford, by coyly scattering conflicting signifiers wants viewers to question assumptions of gender, age, and relationship precisely such as this one. This constant questioning and recalibration process is the experience not only of looking at any Bradford painting, it also goes to the heart of how one forms attitudes and fantasies about other people in the world.

Bradford expresses her ambition not only through scale, but also through a desire for universality, to illuminate what it might be like to be alive at this moment. We want good art to feel universal, yet if we look around us these days just crossing the street, everyone we encounter projects signifiers of their own strange particularities, not just of socioeconomic status but of personal history, interests, attitudes, proclivities, pains, fears, desires. And body types to satisfy those desires of which universal norms no longer apply. To attend to the conversations of strangers might lead one to believe we could be living among aliens. So painting specific people to represent humanity can end up being unrelatable for large groups of people, and yet generalized depictions risk becoming boringly generic.

This is Katherine Bradford’s predicament. She confronts it with thoughtfulness, diligence, and humor. Her approach here seems threefold. Some of her paintings like Water Lady or Yellow Dress construct metaphors for private psychological states, which might not be specifically familiar, but are legible as the kind of specifically interior feelings we all have. And some of her paintings like Wedding Circle, Lunch Painting and Waiting Room, depict group experiences that in their anonymity could be familiarly alienating for everyone. But in a few of her paintings like One Man’s Tub, where a wide-eyed man in underpants lies stretched out beside his coffin-like bathtub, and Couple No Shirts, it feels like in their ordinariness there is a tacit acknowledgement, whether alone or as a couple, of what we all eventually must face.

The post Subtle Ambiguities: Katherine Bradford at CANADA appeared first on artcritical.

January 29 to March 4, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

Let’s blame it on the constant digital barrage. Lately, news about artists has threatened to distract us from actually examining their art. Some of the most captivating stories are about artists tagged as outlier, outsider, or self-taught—stories of, say, an eccentric mystic creating prescient abstract paintings; of a reclusive janitor secretly making comic strips of gender ambiguous children. And then there’s James Castle.

Who can look at his eked out dark little interiors without wanting to learn Castle’s story? Born profoundly deaf, mute and dirt poor in Idaho in 1899, his desire to make art was so urgent that he drew using soot scraped from a wood stove, moistened with saliva and applied with sharpened sticks on discarded scrap paper or unfolded cardboard containers. But let’s put aside the story and look intently at his work. James Castle: People Places & Things, curated by Karen Wilkin at the New York Studio School, gives us a new opportunity to reassess what really makes his work so fascinating.

Although it may seem incredible, when we look closely it becomes apparent that in these drawings we see a mind making a systematic inquiry into the expressive and formal possibilities of representation. Meaning that we see someone, though unschooled, not just dutifully trying to replicate his surroundings in a drawing, but doing it with an awareness of just how he is structurally recreating his world and endowing it with feeling. What he chooses to depict and with how much detail indicates where his attention was fixed. His ubiquitous rectangles, for example, not only serve as building blocks of figuration, but are meaning-filled vessels: Pictures, doorways, windows and the drawing itself exist on an equivalent level with other rectangular objects. Tabletops are rectangles strewn with marks representing objects.

In series of works in this exhibition Castle is seen building his understanding of pictorial structure. Several drawings of the same scene change his point of view: more to the right side, or from a slightly lower vantage point. These shifts affect the representations in the picture. A window seen from the side can go from a dark rectangle in one drawing to open up to the landscape in another. A strange face haunting a little interior turns out to be a doorway containing a sliver of patterned wall hung with eye-like pictures.

From an early age he intently, privately, and with no knowledge of art or how it is made, produced hundreds of small works. A former chicken coop and then a trailer became his studio on his parents’ small subsistence farm in Idaho. After they died, it was willed to his sister and he lived there with her family his entire adult life. But we shouldn’t overly romanticize this vision of a little deaf mute boy spitting into soot, and scratching out drawings on materials he scavenged from the trash. It’s not as if they were so poor they couldn’t afford pencils and paper. In fact he was eventually supplied with oil sticks and watercolors. The way he used materials indicated something much deeper than mere penurious ingenuity.

The use of found materials was a way to own his surroundings. He could barely communicate beyond basic gestures and he refused to do farm chores, but the alchemical transformation of the byproducts of his immediate environment into depictions of it, became a way of understanding and laying possession to surroundings to which he probably felt excluded.

He attended a school for the deaf for five years when he was ten, and what occurred there is a mystery. He left at what must have been the middle of puberty, but sexualized bodies do not make an appearance in his work, and because he was not able to use what he learned to communicate beyond basic signing, the possibilities of human relationships seem to have been limited. Instead, like many artists, he used drawing to understand his relationship to his world. Though interiorized in feeling, his work was not about a rich fantasy life like many outliers, and unlike most mainstream artists, his explorations were of necessity more urgent. Looking closely one can see that through his work he began to study how his physical reality was put together.

Nothing is dated here and any ideas of chronology can only be speculative. Nevertheless it is not hard to sense a progression from detailed drawings of his immediate environment—a kitchen, a bedroom, the side of a house, or a view of a field—to a more sophisticated deconstruction of pictures, where abstract form is understood as meaning. Several drawings are devoted to iconic house forms that register as ambiguous symbols.

One of the great strengths of Wilkin’s exhibit is how the drawings are often augmented with James Castle’s source material, which he had carefully preserved. Castle drew inspiration from sources that at first seem so random that it is only when we look to their transformation that we see what might have attracted him. It is usually a fascination with the way a form conveys feeling.

A panel from the comic strip “Henry“ is transformed from a silly scene of the dopy overgrown boy. He has fallen asleep as he digs a pitchfork into a garden plot, a trail of Z’s rising from his head as his perturbed mother looks out at him through a window. Castle turns this, like much of his work, into a dark existential moment. The Z’s are gone, but the strings connecting the stakes demarcating the garden plot are carefully reproduced, as is the side of the house with the window and a shrub in the background. But his mother is barely limned in the window, and Henry becomes a misshapen homunculus with a pitchfork. The shrub in the background goes from a cheery bush to a harbinger of something gray and ominous. Is Castle’s Henry digging his own grave? While the white picket fence in the background is preserved as merely a white shape, Castle amusingly reproduces an anomaly in the newsprint as a strange ellipse. Castle very diligently constructed the black outline that frames the original panel, thus emphasizing the successive rectangles of garden plot, house, and window.

At what point Castle starts to recreate actual objects from the world is unknown, but it seems to come from a more confident and sophisticated understanding of representation. Pieced together drawings are constructed into simulacra of articles of clothing. Or a drawing of a typographic word like “plays” will become the subject of an entire piece. The font is carefully delineated, but the letters become individual calligraphic personae, each serif endowed with unique expressive qualities. He may have been unable to read, but it seems deliberate to represent that word “plays” so evocatively.

He had also created whole hand-bound volumes of images. Apparently one of the few things he did learn at the school for the deaf was how to bind sheets of paper into books. The books are strange amalgams of pages of little rectangles, sometimes twelve to a page, mostly containing portraits, but some are strange symbols or objects, and the images are surrounded by scribbly lines to indicate print. They resemble high school yearbooks or product catalogues. It is this eerie cataloguing aspect that exemplifies the systematic quality of Castle’s work. Having lived until the late 70s, he must have encountered television, and it is notable that some of the portraits look as if their heads are TV sets with faces appearing on screen.

While Castle’s story is compelling, unlike many outliers he was acknowledged as an artist during his life. When he was fifty, Castle’s nephew attending art school in Portland, Oregon brought a few of his drawings to the attention of a professor and his talent was immediately recognized. For the next 20 years until his death in 1977 he became celebrated in the Pacific Northwest with eight one man shows, only to lapse back into obscurity until 1998, when twenty years after his death, his family finally allowed access to the work. Its appearance at New York’s Outsider Art Fair reignited national interest, followed by a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008, museum accessions, and a presence at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Examining the pictorial thinking of “outsiders” often takes a back seat to the thrill of rescuing overlooked objects from the trash bin of history. An excitement that is fueled by a perhaps unconscious nostalgia for artistic sincerity is elicited by work that often bears a coincidental visual relationship to modernism but is untainted by modernism’s worldly ambition. This is not really the case with James Castle. The correspondence to mainstream art in Castle’s work, while unwitting, is not superficial. Though it appeared he was indifferent to his “success,” the diligence and concentration that he brought to his work are qualities of many mainstream artists, and tells us a lot about what it means to be an artist. As an artist, he exists on a twentieth century continuum somewhere between Albert Pinkham Ryder and Agnes Martin. And though isolated, James Castle lived in our time and was certainly touched by it. Art has historically been forged in solitude, and though it is tempting to romanticize it, his solitude, while deeper than that of most artists, fueled a quiet passion that is evident in the mood and intensity of the work.

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October 29 to December 21, 2017
33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, galeriezurcher.com

Chardin, Morandi, Hopper. If there’s a genre in the history of painting that teases Zen drama from the mundane details of daily existence, Matt Bollinger must be its new master. While his work doesn’t fit into conventional categories like animation or conceptual art (though it partakes of both), I consider Bollinger a Proustian painter, constantly in search of the lost fourth dimension, the one to which painting alludes but cannot really express; to answer the question, “Where has time gone?”

Between the Days is a stop motion animation that is also the title piece in Bollinger’s fifth New York show at Zürcher. Shyly located behind a curtain off to the side of the gallery, the projected video is the conceptual center of this exhibition of 13 dark, moody paintings of suburban middle class life. Between the Days is but the latest step in Bollinger’s gradually evolving investigation of how painting can bridge the divide between the representation of static moments and the passage of time.

Search in vain for bravura passages of gooey oil paint: his flat, dry surfaces are made with acrylic and Flashe. Although there is a great moment when in the animation of a moving assembly line, the paint suddenly grows thick and clotted as the machinery comes to an abrupt halt. Bollinger paints in an economical straightforward manner that he is nevertheless able to leverage poetically to convey changing moments in the animation. For instance, a dancing mandala on the wall, created with successively rendered patterns of the light shifting through a leaded glass door, is used to illustrate the waning of the day. And then when Bollinger makes humans move, their successive silhouettes accordion out as a wormhole to the next pause between movements.

But actually, humans are somewhat interlopers in both the animation and the paintings. The interiors Bollinger depicts in his paintings are the real stars here. Bollinger uses them to stage eccentrically detailed still lifes and lighting changes. A sports trophy, a bust of Jesus, a photograph of a soldier posed against a flag, an inspirational poster of a buff torso next to cinder blocks and bleach bottles in the weight room, or a cigarette burning in an ashtray, all convey reams of cultural and class information about the intermittent occupants, reinforcing moods of tedium and loneliness.

This focus on interiors and the abstract language that Bollinger has developed in the service of representation inevitably invites ambiguity. Having viewed the video online before the exhibition, I was slightly mortified, upon reading descriptions of it, to realize that I had mistaken the two separate mother and son protagonists for a single person. But upon viewing it several more times to understand how I could have been so embarrassingly unobservant, a few things became obvious.

Though apparently mother and son, the two characters appear serially, never together. The mother’s hair is as short as her son’s and the clothes she wears on her chunky, middle-aged body are genderless. A person wakes up at 5:45 to a clock radio, and has a cigarette, and we then see a young man cleaning up the empty beer cans and emptying ashtrays from the night before. But is it the same person? He then gets into a car, and is held up by a passing train trundling across his view. But the person getting out of a car at a factory in the very next frame turns out to be Carolyn, the mother. I thought we were still with James. (We only know their names from painting titles and their relationship is never stated). The video follows Carolyn through her workday and into the evening. James doesn’t appear again until late at night after Carolyn has consumed several beers and an episode of Law and Order. When it finally becomes obvious that James is the one returning later to pump iron in his weight room, one wonders where James has been all day, anyway? Understanding that there are two separate people does clarify the dramatic implication of a son cleaning up for his indifferent mother who is never actually with him. It makes the utter painful loneliness of the video even more poignant. But for esthetic purposes this knowledge doesn’t really change the mood of quiet desperation Bollinger portrays.

Though Between the Days is centered on the idea of narrative, nothing much ever happens, except to paint the aloneness that fills most of our solitary moments, and is at the center of an artist’s creative existence. We see light change from night to morning to dark again, sunbeams project onto walls from windows, shadows lengthen, screens glow, and passing headlights momentarily illuminate interiors. But a story-like plot, in the conventional sense, neither powers the paintings nor the video. A cigarette is smoked, a phone is answered, a post-it note is posted. On Law and Order, the TV show that fills the screen as Carolyn watches, people have emotions. Bollinger even shows us an eye welling up and a tear that trickles down a cheek, but Bollinger’s protagonists are always impassive. The dramatic climax comes as James’s late night weightlifting results in a painful grimace as he struggles to hoist the barbells off his chest, and then, to our relief, is freed by tipping the weights off to the floor.

While Bollinger employs his paintings to animate his video, the paintings are not mere artifacts of the animation process, as he also uses the video to intensify the emotional charge of the paintings, adding a memory of time that has elapsed without producing any real change in the situations that the paintings represent. Each painting, while related to the others, conveys a separate experience.

The mournful solitude of Living Room, Night, 2017, with it’s greenish glowing TV eye (depicting a tearful one) and illuminating a still life of empty beer cans and cigarettes while echoing a little orange rectangle of a neighbor’s window, contrasts sharply with the bustle of Carolyn’s Office, illuminated this time by a computer screen and filled with disembodied hands performing various tasks. These hands were added after the fact, and were not a part of the video that depicts Carolyn in her office. They are reminiscent of the disembodied hands in Fra Angelico’s Taunting of Christ in the San Marco monastery, Florence.

Bollinger links these two paintings with a detail that is so subtle it easily escapes notice, and is representative of the complex emotional visual structure he has built. Barely visible in the darkness of a shelf in the left side of Living Room, Night is a lightly nuanced praying-hands sculpture. It’s a nice little touch, especially as it rhymes with the rounded arm of the couch as it catches the glimmer of the TV. While scanning the clutter of Carolyn’s Office, however, perhaps drawn there by the diagonal series of rectangles that moves from computer to chair back to the surface of the filing cabinet in the lower left, one might notice there, along with a KU mascot decal and a Garfield postcard, another praying hands, this time as a refrigerator magnet. I like to think it expresses Bollinger’s faith that his work will endure.

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If it has been Kerry James Marshall’s mission to correctively normalize the presence of black people in the high art canon, might David Humphrey’s emotionally complex painting, The Swimmer, be seen as a white painter’s deliberate gesture of solidarity in achieving that equilibrium? In Humphrey’s current show “I’m Glad We Had That Conversation” at Fredericks and Freiser, The Swimmer, stands out by eschewing his usual abstract trope of large energetic brush marks for a deceptively simple confrontation between a shirtless tall young white guy seen from behind, and a laughing curvaceous black woman. Humphrey emphasizes his formal abstraction in the shapes and colors of a wobbly grey auto fragment, green shrub and red brick hedge in the foreground, and to the colors of the bodies, and sky blue negative spaces they create. Then he provocatively sexualizes the interaction by having the guy defensively self-embrace his naked white torso in low-slung butt-revealing blue trunks, while a white bikini emphasizes the luscious brownness of the woman’s half-nude body. But finally Humphrey complicates it all by allowing the expression made by her closed eyes and wide-open pink lips and white teeth, the ambiguity of flirtatious laughter or derisive mockery.

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October 14 to November 13, 2016
56 Bogart Street (at Grattan)
Brooklyn, NY 718 852 4396

The six large paintings, all done this year, in Suzanne Joelson’s show at Studio 10 evince the ecstasy of first love. The paintings are notably suffused with crazy feeling, ranging from the erotic cropping of an image of eggs in carton, the sensuous rhyming of paint strokes and chicken skin, or the fierce splintering of a wood paneled surface. Known as an incredibly smart artist, voracious reader of complex theory, and an enthusiastic educator willing to consider all possibilities of making art, it seems that in this latest body of work she has thrown caution to the wind and followed her heart.

The trigger for this lust resulted from coming across discarded vinyl supermarket banners while on a jog with her husband. The possibilities inherent in the over-sized, groomed advertising images of grocery staples — eggs, kale, chicken — hit her like a lightning bolt. Sliced up, the banners were immediately employed as collage elements in her paintings. The results are startling, certainly due to the punch of their visual effects as paintings, but also because of the way the pieces of banners have inspired her to paint with a newly discovered sophistication that leaps beyond intellectual propriety.

All the rational formal decisions Joelson used to make are still there, but have become subordinated to the emotional impact the banner images bring. These collaged images have brought a delirious scale to Joelson’s work and every painted moment now occupies a dual identity as pure abstract paint as well as a reference to the fragments of large-scale depictions of food.

Massaging Kale, has a passage of striated green, black, and white paint in the middle panel of three that reads as a motion-blurred image of the vinyl vegetables depicted on the side panels. Joelson might have previously used a similar paint facture before, but the transformation of the paint into a representational analog is new here, and an elevation in understanding of the possibilities of the dual nature of paint itself as both material and signifier.

Joelson loves the play of language both visual and verbal, and Crack, Rake, Crate has both. Metaphorical transformations abound from painted green stripes, green and white striped cloth, and the green tines of an old rake that hangs Rauschenberg-style off the surface of the painting. The “old rake” may be a pun because it challenges the power of what seem to be large naked brown thighs. But those inviting thighs are just the cropped image of two giant eggs astride a pudendal gray triangle of egg carton. The fracturing of the painting by the alternating horizontal/vertical arrangement of four rectangular wood panels to produce an empty white square in the middle echoes the tongue-twisting title.

The eggs in crate/thighs in panties recur in Egg Game, (another punning title as a post-modern rebuke to the idea of endgame abstraction). But even when she becomes more abstract, as in the paintings, As It Happened and Where it Went, which introduces the show, and Grasping the Center, near the end, Joelson still produces an emotional impact. In As It Happened Joelson uses the ideas inherent in the wood panels of its construction, playing with the scale of the dark grey enlarged wood grain found on the vinyl banners, or shattering the surface to show the wooden structure underneath. The violent splintering contrasts with the rational construction of echoing shapes and negative spaces. While Grasping is composed entirely of sky blue vinyl fragments and white paint, the way the central white image is patched together from the fragments is almost Frankenstein-like.

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined first-rate intelligence as the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still be able to function. But contemporary painting contains so many conflicting ideas that trying to reconcile all of them can produce arid results. Joelson masters the impossible complexity of modern thought, not through rationality but through feeling.

The post Lusting for Kale: Suzanne Joelson in Bushwick appeared first on artcritical.

May 19 to June 25, 2016
532 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 367 9663

The sudden embrace of Nicole Eisenman as culture hero should come as no surprise. She’s a prolific painter whose unleashed imagination and hungry heart have produced memorable and disturbing works of art. She also happens to hit the diversity buttons of underappreciated woman, queer, and gender fluidity that animate current cultural discourse. And of course the trifecta of MacArthur Fellowship grant, survey exhibition at the New Museum, and concurrent first solo show at Anton Kern gallery, has obviously made her the focus of attention. But what makes Eisenman important, rather than merely au courant, is her approach to ambiguity.

Something significant has happened to Eisenman’s paintings since the work shown in “Al-ugh-gories” at the New Museum. Much of “Al-ugh-gories,” though compelling, is fairly easily parsed, and critical interpretations seem remarkably consistent.

At Anton Kern, the truly subversive nature of Eisenman’s vision flowers when she focuses on “normal” everyday life. Her new focus recalls a passage from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange; that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it; that no one set of practices or relations has a monopoly on the so-called radical or the so called normative. 

The more one gazes into the mechanisms of these paintings, the more it is apparent that ambiguity has become the medium with which she now paints. In so many different ways, ambiguity animates every new Eisenman painting. If it isn’t the uncertain gender of her figures, it’s a subway train’s direction of travel in a station, the era in which a party occurs, whether a shooter is gangster or cop, or the nature of the figure/ground relationship.

The tour de force Grand Guignol here is Another Green World (2015), which is also the title of the Brian Eno album the central character is examining. A huge 128-by-106-inch party scene that is inhabited by 28 figures (by my count, if you don’t include Grace Jones on an album cover) of indeterminate gender and sexuality who are making out, doing drugs, listening to music, eating, drinking, dancing, conversing, smoking, moon-gazing, or passed out under the coats on the bed. Oh yeah, and despite the ‘70s disco ball, vintage turntable with vinyl LPs, and lines of coke, there is a figure raptly gazing at a cell phone, which throws the whole era of the party into question. The binaries of male/female and gay/straight and past/present quickly break down, as we try to assign gender to all but a few obviously female figures. It is interesting how reflexively we desire to do this in order to navigate our social world. But here it doesn’t matter; it’s a party, everyone’s welcome.

In Another Green World Eisenman also successfully confronts the figure/ground problem that has increasingly challenged her as a painter. Eisenman has great skill as a draughtsman, but her talent lies in expressively depicting people. Against the blank paper, there is no problem, but in her paintings she has to invent the environment in which they occur. The details of background have evidently always been less compelling to her, and might have seemed like tiresome labor. With scaled up canvases, the figure/ground dilemma has become more urgent: how to animate every inch of the canvas while preserving the hierarchies of attention needed to construct emotional legibility. It has been interesting to watch Eisenman tackle this as an idea she seems to have realized that she needed to address.

Part of her solution has been to increase the number of figures so that sometimes much of the background is now other figures. But more interestingly is the way she now considers paintings as a jigsaw puzzle of shapes. And whether they are the positive shapes of feet, hands, faces, clothing, and objects, or instances of negative space revealing surfaces of carpet, furniture, table, or landscape, Eisenman treats each shape as an arena of painterly invention of differing facture, not letting big expanses of emptiness dominate. What keeps it together is her masterful drawing, creating space through exaggerated changes in scale, juxtaposing oblique surfaces coexisting in impossible perspective, and establishing different points of focus using her sharp tonal color sense.

Despite the cacophony of Another Green World, Eisenman gets the whole drama to revolve around the brightly lit woman at the center raptly studying the eponymous album, and rubbing her nose in reaction to the bump of coke she has probably just snorted. Our attention rotates to the lower left to the kissing couple, a topless woman sprawled upside down on the couch in the embrace of an impossibly blue figure of indeterminate gender, though perhaps the stubble on her legs indicates female–but that’s how closely you have to look.

There are many compelling paintings in this show, which also invite rigorous analysis particularly Weeks on the Train (2015). Despite focusing on a central young person slouched in a window seat working a laptop, whose cat in carrier occupies the aisle seat, Eisenman pulls off the neat trick of rotating the windows 90º to fit parallel with the side of the vertical canvas. This pushes the viewer’s perspective high above the painting. From this point of view, our focus is pulled to the cartoonish Guston-like head ensconced by big red headphones, with a single, large bulging eye in the bottom foreground staring out the window. At the level of this eye, the view out of the window becomes thick with impastoed booger-like flowers.

Though more emotionally subtle, another focal point of this show is the tenderly haunting Morning Studio (2016). Here Eisenman eschews the butch/femme brazenness of her two pre- or post-coital chapeau’d women in Night Studio (2009) at the New Museum and replaced them with two embracing figures whose erotics are more maternally consoling than flatly conversational. In Morning Studio, the faces are painted with different levels of specificity but it is the boyish person with ochre skin who fixes the viewer with a wary stare, and who is comforted by a more generically represented topless woman who is also simultaneously reaching a hand beneath her jeans. Eisenman then explodes this intensely personal moment with references to the world out a window and the universe via a large spiraling galaxy computer screen, which watches impassively over the scene. This is where we see Eisenman striving for an emotional complexity that she achieves specifically in her recent paintings.

The measured construction of her paintings provides a pointed contrast with the still wonderful drawings in the second, back room of the show. They demonstrate how Eisenman’s work has previously been driven by her drawings, which are fairly direct depictions of any idea that crosses her mind, no matter how silly, heretical, or gross. Her drawings are pure id, she doesn’t seem to judge or censor, and they have a spontaneity and freshness that has always been thrilling and noteworthy.

But this show seems to indicate that Eisenman’s present ambition, her desire for significance, now lies in her paintings. Earlier paintings seemed often like large elaborations of various ideas originating in drawings and fleshed out with details in paint. Now the paintings seem to develop on their own terms, with the ambiguities and complexities that the act of painting promulgates seizing control over the content. Drawings are direct and fast and in the present, while paintings are slower, much more calculated, and connected to a history that is mostly white and male. In her new paintings, we see Eisenman sublimating the immediacy of her drawing talent and examining historically established protocols that she either honors, flouts, or fucks with. It is now in these mature paintings, that Nicole Eisenman is finally confronting her artistic superego.

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