February 5th to 28th, 2016
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison and Grattan streets,
Brooklyn, NY, (718) 852-4396

After sleepwalking through an afternoon of painting exhibitions stocked with retreads of Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch, I was awakened, ironically, by a show entitled Crypto–Somatic Incantation.  If painting is a form of dreaming in an active state, Charles Yuen has achieved it.

Yuen’s antennae are unusually sensitive. As long as thirty years ago, he was a progenitor of the expressionist painting aesthetic influenced by late-Guston that has since gained currency.  Today, one branch of this style often mixes self-deprecating, deskilled technique with cloyingly decorative color.  This faux-naive painting style is often described as quirky and charming.  Yuen choose a different path. Though he occasionally injects humor into his work, it is of the existential variety.  Yuen’s paintings provide evidence that there is unfinished business regarding the spiritual in art, and he negotiates the territory with the wisdom of a seeker’s experience.

There are many fine paintings on display.  In Umpf, a familiar Boschian Everyman, burdened by his own ungainly limbs, traverses a landscape. We feel pity and apprehension on his behalf as he drags the specter of death (a skull), along with the sustenance of life (fruit).  The figure moves, embodied in an energetic cloud, as Yuen weaves a transparent envelope out of scratched curved lines that intersect and frame the event.  At the edge of the image, Yuen has deftly slashed out a few gestural strokes, staging a deep space that appears suddenly to come into focus.

Almost every painting in the show is embedded with a version of repeating, freehand, curved lines that ripple across the field, (sometimes intersecting with another such group of lines). Somehow Yuen avoids the usual pitfalls of cheap op-effect or puerile affect.

Scarlet Prayer resonates even from across the room.  The gently waving vertical pattern imbues the field with increasing depth, though it sits emphatically on the surface.  Flickers of cobalt blue skip across the image, vibrating from the red field and adding another level of tactility.  Five small ovoids containing praying hands float, randomly scattered.  An outline of a proto-archaic figure stands facing the viewer in acknowledgement. A small pile of rubble appears on the lower right, perhaps symbolizing the eternal cycle of life, a recurring theme in Yuen’s work. It’s a difficult challenge to make a large red painting and have it meet expectation.  Matisse did it with Red Studio, and Yuen does it here. This painting beckons, stares the viewer down, then opens up and becomes a place of contemplation.

In Man With Tubers, Yuen continues the theme of connectedness and renewal.  The composition echoes the romantic landscape tradition.  Two stacked horizontal blocks dominate, each comprising approximately half of the field, with a intermediate band of soft blur wedged between.  Man With Tubers bears a striking similarity to Marine of 1907 by Ryder, currently on view at the National Academy Museum. Rothko, of course, used similar proportions in organizing his color forms. Both Ryder and Rothko set a high bar, but Yuen adds an extra and decisive element here: an evenly looping green line, slowly and loosely coiled,that  floats over the proceedings from bottom to top, creating a kind of circuit. On the blur of the horizon, the green line assumes the shape of a figure in corpse pose. The figure embodies and stretches the full length of the horizon in this strikingly wide format.  The supine figure mediates the symbolic transition between the upper realm of the composition, a steely blue-grey sky, and the lower realm, a dark, subterranean area, where tubers attach to the figure. Echoing the shape of the body, Yuen incorporates an elongated white cloud within one of the looping green coils in the upper half of the composition. The fresh, direct, and seemingly unmediated painting process displayed here leaves one marveling at just how tapped into the intuitive Yuen is. He is not just adopting style or referencing sources, as many do when Ryder or Guston come to mind, but instead seems, convincingly, to be sharing similar sources of inspiration and experience. Yuen’s paintings have wings not because he is symbolically mapping space, but because he can locate and imbed consciousness in the image and surface. Visages and persona show up, colors move, and the floor shifts: a rare feat indeed.

The post The Somnambulist: Charles Yuen’s Painterly Waking Dreams appeared first on artcritical.

May 7 to June 13, 2015
724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City, 212 262 5050

Tom Burckhardt’s recent paintings are very aware of their own provenance. They can be described as a manifestation of a particular strain of locally sourced New York abstract painting. From the 1913 Armory Show to the advent of Abstract Expressionism, American painting was boisterous, mixed and visually complex. Burckhardt gets that, knows the territory, and plunders the treasure. He emerged as a painter in the waning shadow of what had been posited as the death of painting (he graduated SUNY Purchase and Skowhegan in 1986) and in a knowing nod in the direction of painterly doubt, employs cast plastic as a surface support for the smaller paintings here. Previously, his interest in painting as a humorous sculptural object resulted in a delightful “ruckus” of installations informed by life in the studio. His current paintings hang on the wall and seem to say to the viewer, “I know you know I know about doubt, so I’m just gonna keep painting,” which he does with wit, intelligence, and kid-in-the-candy-store joy.

Burckhardt runs an idiosyncratic gamut of biomorphic and cubist geometries, breathing new life into these historic idioms. Incognito is a punchy mash-up of grid and pattern. Burckhardt juggles raucous white, purple and green tones as he flattens, twists and then gives volume to shape into a game of spatial hide-and-seek. As compositional elements of design flip, slide and exchange negative and positive values, our eye is ushered from one unique passage to another. It is as if he is making the case that spatial ambiguity is a kind of gateway drug to new conceptual openings in painting.

Avid Antics looks like Burckhardt flattened a carburetor and proceeded to paint the resulting form. Filling larger forms with incremental detail, he teases out totemic personas reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest Native imagery popular with painters of 1930s and ’40s New York. His mediating line is always live; it carries direction and various potential legibilities that can morph into a descriptive shape or gesture, or empty into a plane. In this case, his design suggests a totemic mask that contains spatially recessive Ben-Day dots that contrast against a uniformly dotted background. Burckhardt’s crisply cut, curvilinear lines, share common cause with those employed by contemporaries Joanna Pousette-Dart and Elliot Green, and extend a New York School tradition. De Kooning’s own late-career summations reconsolidated his precisely cut line and curve, traces of which have rubbed off in a painting here titled Bourgeois Melodies. One can only imagine how Gorky might also have reprised such line had he lived another few decades and created a Summation II.

Tangential Meditation, Burckhardt’s showstopper, seems to pulse to the rhythms of New York City’s physicality. If one were to update Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis for 2015 this would be the result. Burckhardt overlaid an arterial network that stretches edge to edge on the forefront of the picture plane and functions as a framing device. As in a multi-pictured postcard in a souvenir shop, several portals are revealed that showcase different abstract industrial silhouettes in shades of both dawn’s and dusk’s most arresting colors. Roof vents, air ducts, chimneys are nearly identifiable. The central hub functions as a circuit or axis from which branching arms extend and frame the proceedings, exerting surface tension, syncopation and dynamic spin. A group of smaller shapes that look like migrating stretcher bar keys circulates, punctuating the movement of the viewer’s eye across the surface.

The dominant form in The Incredible Think is a bit like something from a Rorschach test. It could be a geometric cyborg animal in mid-stride, or perhaps a version of Stan Lee’s The Thing caged by the support edge. Consisting of thickly outlined green, yellow and ochre blocks, the viewer is reminded of the boldness of Jonathan Lasker or Nicholas Krushenick. It also makes a timely comparison with Nozkowski’s Untitled (9-34), exhibited last month at Pace Gallery. Neither painter shrinks from agitating Neo-plasticism’s essentials. Nozkowski’s delicately hewn surfaces evoke the careful consideration given to each step of the delicate arrangement of composition, and then genteelly sweep up after themselves. In contrast, Burckhardt explores and builds additional possibilities while letting us in on his process. Burckhardt’s humorous, Gustonian inclusion of a red stretcher bar in the top third of the canvas suggests the back of another painting in the studio. Additionally a smaller painting seems tacked to the top of the stretcher bar and just hangs there, presumably because that sometimes happens in the studio, too. This device welcomes us into the creative world of studio activity beyond “practice.” His painterly versatility and sculptural incursions have expanded the territory of painting.

The post Kid in a Candy Store: Tom Burckhardt and the Provenance of Style appeared first on artcritical.

May 4 to June 1, 2014
139 Norfolk Street, between Stanton and Rivington streets
New York City, 212 228 8045

The title of Stuart Elster’s suite of paintings at Junior Projectsmight sound like a theme park, but this modestly sized, chromatically-charged series actually references the British practice of ship camouflage during World War I known as Dazzle.   By adapting the geometric compositions of Vorticist painting in order to distort the appearance of British warships, the Brits hoped to limit damage from German U boats.  (Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth was a member of the Dazzle project.)  The idea was to disrupt the German targeting assessment of the orientation, speed and mass of the British boats. The results were inconclusive.

The WWI Dazzle Camouflage project sought to reorder the visual composition of the boats by actually painting abstract shapes onto the boats’ outer surfaces. In his paintings, Elster inversely constructs boatness from the abstract camouflage patterns of Dazzle.  Elster’s glyphic facture of criss-crossing planes is nuanced, precise, and assuredly swift. He really slathers on the paint.  With a palette knife or similar tool, he presses, glides, incises and sculpts the paint into a sumptuous relief of precise textural delight.  Imagine Wayne Thiebaud painting a Charles Sheeler.

Titled according to color, each painting is a unique confection. In Dazzle Pink, the saccharine peppermint candy intonations viscerally attract and repulse.  The candy-striped bulkhead and prow of the ship command the painting’s foreground.  Above, a skyscape of mast and line intersect in a cubist cacophony of staccato and rhythm. Elster is squeezing high formalist modernism into a maritime art tradition that was intended to project imperial power and naval audacity. In the most chromatically evocative painting of the series, In Dazzle Blue, the thick, blue layer of paint in the upper horizontal of sky is cut by a deep, vertical score, creating the momentary illusion of a diptych.  Similar breaks in the field of In Dazzle Green affirm Elster’s acknowledgement of Minimalist composition in these technically impressive paintings.  In In Dazzle Brown, Elster’s velvety chocolate simulacrum activates the salivary glands. In Dazzle Silver presents a marked contrast to this unctuous richness, as the silver-grey ship seems to emerge like a fossil from dry sedimentary rock.  As one spends time looking, the image also unfolds as a ghostly apparition shrouded in atmospheric fog, not unlike Whistler’s Nocturne In Blue and Silver.

By selecting an episode in which military power dovetails with modern painting invention, Elster points out the complex and fraught relationship between artistic modernism and the state.   From the utilization of Constructivist agit-prop in rallying support for the Red Army against the White Russians, to our own State Department’s use of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as a soft power tool of statecraft during the Cold War, the nature of representation, distortion and abstraction remains a vital interest.  And stagecraft as statecraft persists, as when President Bush donned a flight suit in front of the Mission Accomplished banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.  Although the efficacy of the military Dazzle project may have been less than desired for the British, the success of Elster’s project to recover, reclaim, and reassess the episode within the context of contemporary painting is a daring coup.  This show truly packs a wallop.

The post Constructing “Boatness” from the Abstraction of Camouflage: Stuart Elster at Junior Projects appeared first on artcritical.

November 8 – December 21, 2013
20 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212.737.2060

Walking into Salle’s Ghost Painting show late last year, one might have expected to see Salle’s multi-layered, lateral dislocations of image and subject played out across the surface.  Instead, one was transfixed by beautiful color, translucence and internal depth. There is also directness, singularity, and an emphasis on centrality in this series from the early 1990s. The tough simplicity of the Ghost Paintings is a clear pivot from Salle’s better-known work.

I immediately thought of a comment the painter and critic Sidney Tillim had made to me twenty years ago. Tillim had stated with certitude that David Salle is an exceptionally fine colorist.  I hadn’t thought of Salle in these terms before, but Sidney’s comment stuck with me.  I have always considered Salle’s main achievement to be his inventive use of inserts and filigrees in energetic compositions.  Initially informed by John Baldessari at Cal Arts in the early seventies, Salle’s probing imagination eventually found common cause with the flurried compositions of Francis Picabia, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist toward the end of that decade. But Salle’s longstanding, unwavering ability to communicate how much he loves the act of painting was a thorny proposition for an artist who ascended with “Pictures Generation.” Salle’s signature trajectory, an imagistic slot-machine surrealism, barrels on, as recently evidenced in New York solo exhibitions at Lever House and Mary Boone gallery in 2012 and 2011 respectively.

So much is captivating here.  Bold simplicity reigns as big fields of color dominate these large paintings. The color schemes range from melancholic to a brightness that is reminiscent of Warhol’s swan song Daimler-Benz car series.  And if you’ve ever wondered what single representation Salle would settle on if he had to downshift from his effusive progression of racing representations, here it is – a photo image staged by Salle himself, of a mysterious shrouded figure, drapery cascading that is timeless and elegiac.  Anonymous yet theatrical, the figure’s absence of identity actually increases its presence. It’s as if Salle is asking, if I cover it over, does it really have less impact? It is an act of negation that begets pictorial possibilities.

The presence of a shrouded figure, eerie and beautiful, carries centuries of history.   When Salle elects not to use color, as in Ghost 12, associations of grisaille painting, haunting fragments of classical sculpture, and the gloomy tonalities of early photography spill forth.  Salle’s drapery configurations bear resemblance to the backdrops in Victorian photos of children, a portrait style in which mothers actually hid under fabric drapery while supporting their toddlers for the camera.  That Salle has titled his series Ghost Paintings underscores the images’ spectral, shape-shifting quality, which also echoes turn-of-the-century interest in spiritualism and supernal apparitions.  And Salle’s softly contoured drapery can also suggest feminine interiority. The florals of Ghost 9 and Ghost 11 recall Fragonard’s young women swathed in pinks, yellows and blues.

Salle’s rolling concavities of cloth and color also recall the paintings of Andrea Del Sarto, as in Ghost 10, for instance, where architectonic drapery reinforces compositional centrality, leading us deeper into the psychic space of the scene.   When Salle amplifies the color, in half of the works on display, his neon combinations revisit the fully mannered color displays of Del Sarto’s younger colleagues, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.  Both Salle’s Ghost 6 and his Ghost 14, which reveals the tilted face of his female model, have characteristics of the swooning madonnas in Pontormo’s Deposition and Fiorentino’s Lamentation.  When the suggestive folds of drapery are plied to enhance mourning or passion, the sacred and profane often spring from the same source.

Salle’s solitary shrouded figures conjure a compendium of associations.  Ghost 1 seems like a mountain, while Ghost 5 looks like one of Zubaran’s monks or Guston’s Klansmen.  The photo image in Ghost 3, (shrunk and recycled by Salle in Picture Builder one year later), now seems prescient.  With a discernibly forlorn posture and outstretched arms, the figure is now disturbingly familiar in the form of the infamous, harrowing image of a shrouded Iraqi prisoner under torture.

Focusing on one large-scale image per work, Salle taxed the image with successive acts of negation and dissociation.  He cut it, visibly re-stitched it, and inked it.  The image was horizontally trisected on photosensitive linen, and rejoined with two visibly sewn seams.  Here, Salle looked past the variations of the modernist grid relied upon by fellow postmodernists. Instead, he proportioned his images classically, into approximate thirds.  The narrative-driven formats used by Salle’s Picture Generation peers promoted sequential arrangements that mimicked authoritarian modes of instruction and control.  Ideally suited to enshrine critique, ideology, and promote a return to the aesthetics of puritan severity, such formats lacked the flexibility to accommodate Salle’s less orthodox visual interests.  In contrast, Salle’s single image doesn’t settle into a read. However, in a tacit nod to Minimalist iconoclasm, each horizontal section in the Ghost Paintings is identified with a distinct color, giving each painting the look of a tri-colored flag.  But Salle adroitly inks the surfaces with intense hues that increase depth of field, light, and illusion. The effect is not dissimilar to David Reed’s drapery-inspired abstractions of the period.  Employing a breezy imperfect haste, Salle’s occasional traces of wide brushstrokes reveal how the thin translucent veils of color were pushed around. Both the color applications and the photo images have been treated nonchalantly.  Spots, scratches and other photo imperfections appear like eye floaters, baring all against the draped figure. Absorbing these stresses, the shrouded figure gains poetic strength while the Rothko-esque proportions and emphasis on color field allow the viewer to hang back and bask in sensation.

The post Shape Shifters: David Salle Ghost Paintings appeared first on artcritical.

March 20 to April 26, 2014
522 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-647-9111

Gary Stephan’s new paintings exude matter-of-factness about their own making that perfectly embodies the often overused term “practice”.  Stephan toys with expectations of how foreground and background are supposed to function, slyly inserting illusionistic references that undermine the order and certainty of hard edge formalist abstraction.

Untitled (2013) offers a straightforwardly bold execution of a clearly conceived idea. In the center of the composition, the watery paint application of Stephan’s swirling strokes leaves a mercurial and ghostly impression upon the canvas.  After this opening salvo, Stephan counters by introducing a row of weighty, opaque, pale blue vertical bars. This oppositional contrast provides the tension that is Stephan’s wheelhouse.  He looks to exploit the ambiguities between negative and positive space. In this case he reanimates the ghostly ground, sprouting an illusionistic snake-like form that slithers through the vertical blue bars on the surface. This slide area of contingency is where Stephan teases out unexpected possibility.

Although operating within an extremely shallow pictorial space, Stephan transforms spatial relationships from a set of circumstances into a metaphysical event.  In the Small Mental Furniture paintings, we see how the purity of classical essentialism stands on the shoulders of an untidy world.  Using a minimal, non-objective abstraction as his ground, Stephan overlays this with a compelling architectural motif of interwoven bands whose resolute order begins to waver in the lower strata of the design. The foundational bracing anchors the larger structure to a proto-terrestrial foreground. But this base seems prone to destabilization: the whole enterprise may just sink into the sand or collapse like a house of cards. In the meantime, the iconic design, the shifting spatial relationships, the translucent paint handling, and the lush greens and deep blues satisfy.

Stephan considers how we visually perceive and conceptually locate our occupation of and relationship with architectural space. Stephan’s regard for cubist facture recalls Markus Lupertz’s Tent paintings of 1965 and the recent paintings of Thomas Scheibitz. Untitled (2014) looks vaguely like a window blind, or more specifically, like a window blind with a retinal after-image of a window or old format TV screen floating in front of it.  A square frame hovers in front of the larger, slatted structure behind. Gradations of a creamy hue border the central slatted shape, and indications suggest that shadow and light seem strictly observed and abstracted.  But are they?  Is this a window motif, or are we just projecting the expectation of a specific form into a realm of shadows?

Although we may not know what exactly is being depicted in this exhibition, in most of the paintings the viewer can unpack the steps involved in how each painting is constructed. We can follow the process almost as easily as we can follow the step-by-step execution of a portrait or a figure in a landscape by Alex Katz.  Though Stephan may paint an area and then paint over it, he does not obfuscate his moves or cover his tracks much. One small painting seems to retain paint impressions of kitchen cabinet hardware, removed and repainted. These still visible traces of underpainting are an essential part of what Stephan communicates – reconsideration and adjustment during the process.

At a moment in which market abstraction is being defined by such monikers as “raggedy AbEx” and  “zombie formalism,” Stephan is uninterested in a summary affirmation or a “look” that neatly ties-up his choices. He points out smaller questions that are as resonant as they are elusive. Where so many others are going through the motions he keeps moving on.

The post The Slide Area of Abstraction: Gary Stephan at Susan Inglett appeared first on artcritical.

January 12 to February 9, 2013
536 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-627-1018

Italian Pictures, Lawrence Beck’s exhibition of landscape photography fills Sonnebend’s cavernous galleries.  Beck has familial ties and childhood memories of Italy, and his images of gardens, villas and monuments, both privileged and public environments, constitute a kind of 21st-century Grand Tour: we gaze upon the views and imagine we are there.

Like stable mates Bernd and Hilda Becher, Beck makes large photographs.  Using an 8 x 10 field camera, they invite us to observe and scrutinize hard facts. But the artist captures mood as well.   The sheer size of these images, nearly six feet, coupled with a high clarity of detail, serve to draw the viewer in.

Beck is at ease with a historical landscape tradition that dates back to Giorgione’s moody Tempesta.  Ninfa V, a complex landscape composition, beckons entry into its intimate architectural ruins. Beck also demonstrates sensitivity to shadow play and tonal gradation, particularly when capturing the hypnotic effects of reflective light on water in images such as Marlia I, Villa Borghese I and Caserta I.

Beck addresses the relationship of architecture within landscape, of both the tension and harmony of artifice and entropy.  The botanical garden and water lily series of the last fifteen years has sometimes included genus identification tags within lush compositions, mediating beauty with indexation. Today Beck reassesses the stagecraft associated with the classical virtues of balance and frontality. But how does one approach the grand symmetry of a villa or opulent garden that has for centuries signified cultivated beauty and established viewpoint?  Conventional perspective – whether in Anselm Kiefer’s interiors and landscapes or Julie Mehretu’s stadiums – amounts, in these examples, to an effective use of symmetry in painting and graphic collage respectively.  In straight photography, symmetry is a tougher proposition.  In darkened theatre interiors, Hiroshi Sugimoto has mastered it.  Even Atget found the idea challenging at Versailles and Luxembourg Gardens.

Beck’s approach can seem disarmingly neutral, as in Villa Pisani II.   Here, seemingly deadpan frontality suggests a ready-made portrait with its symmetry, timeless beauty and cultivation.  By including unexpected detail and establishing warmth and subtle value, Beck negotiates the pitfalls of calculated classicism.  In Villa Della Porta Bozzolo I, the spatial recession of richly textured vessels is bathed in subtly scraping sunlight. Golden tones emerge from stonework and foliage alike. Beck’s real power lies in the aesthetic choices he makes about detail. His subjects are obviously robust, but content resides in the soft power of subtle formal decisions.  Resistance is futile, our buttons have been pushed, the image is simply, undeniably present. We can try to look away but can’t shake the expectation and desire of experiencing the scene.

Beck’s weirdly captivating Roman aqueduct images document a still fading classical past.   Once essential to a functioning Roman infrastructure, the successive arches and flat planes of these monumental structures appear to have been put out to pasture in an arid no-man’s land.  His seemingly standard frontal point of view is anything but.  He is not documenting but reassessing and reframing the subject.  In Roman Aqueduct II, the stark simplicity is surreal, bringing to mind the landscapes of Yves Tanguy and the exaggerated scale of Magritte. Through Beck’s astute cropping and iconic frontality, these Stonehenge-like monumental ruins dance like calligraphy across a page.  As our eye weaves and darts in, out and around the openings of the aqueducts, the fundamental elements of contemporary visual imagery stare back at us.  Our contemporary lens senses repetition, seriality, decoration and void.  Beck also ekes out incongruities as close inspection reveals soft inclusions and traces of contemporary life.  The small dome of a twentieth century church peeks out over the horizon line on the far left. Through an arch in both Aqueduct I and Parco Degli Acquedoti I, appears a seemingly anachronistic horizontal sliver of recent housing construction nearly indistinguishable from the bushy landscape of the horizon.

These details don’t announce themselves but are given to the attentive viewer. The assertion is that at some point, the newest entries in the landscape will be long gone while the Roman ruins remain.  That fatalistic yet romantic notion connects Beck’s images to Andre Giroux’s painting of the Claudian Aqueduct (1826) to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition, Path of Nature – French Paintings 1785-1850.   Giroux’s romantic notion of the grand tour is barely operational for a contemporary audience.  But it’s important to note that Giroux himself took up landscape photography shortly after making this painting, pointing the way for an artist like Beck to re-imagine the subject once again.

The post Wish We Were Here: Lawrence Beck and the Grand Tour appeared first on artcritical.

November 3 to December 10, 2011
558 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  917.226.3851

Arizona-raised Charles Andresen – who has been painting under the radar in New York City for the last 20 years – has been given the inaugural show at Guided by Invoices, a new gallery in Chelsea.  The exhibition demonstrates just how deep New York’s abstract painting talent pool is.  Densely packed, colorful, and rhythmic, Andresen’s acrylic blobs jostle for position within each composition of these eight modestly sized paintings.   Including paintings from 2001 to the present, curator Chris Byrne has indexed Andresen’s aesthetic from the raucous to the sublime.

These are tirelessly jubilant gestural abstract paintings.  The excessive pile-ups of thrown paint splats yield so many successful accidents they seem to rewrite the unwritten laws of action painting.  Andresen’s quirky, mediated process can be likened to making an omelet – the base, pigmented gel, is poured on a smooth surface to receive the fixins: streams of colored lines and dots.  But instead of folding the omelet, it is scooped open-face by spatula and flung, creating striking effects and patterns upon impact with the canvas.  Andresen prohibits himself from any further manipulations on the canvas support.  He calls these gooey paint assemblages “Throw Paintings.”

In the Baroque composition Gelb (2007), Andresen’s finely tuned, in-the–moment paint decisions make for an effortless viewing pleasure.  Our eye just keeps sailing in and out of this marbled, greenish yellow surface with blue veining and Polke-esque orange dots.  And Andresen easily demonstrates how gestural surface activity can produce sudden illusions of depth.  David Reed wrote that Dave Hickey told him “Liquidity is the new depth.”  For Andresen, liquefied chaos coagulates to serve an emergent lyrical narrative, within the structure of an allover field.   And in light of the current de Kooning retrospective at MOMA, Andresen’s paintings underscore the ongoing significance of those incisive 1948 black and white enamels, languid paint gushes of the 60 and 70’s, and soaring white cut pastel ribbons from 1981-85.

Andresen also adulterates the material excesses associated with Larry Poons, the bizarrely underappreciated Stanley Boxer and Jules Olitski, particularly his iridescent, taste-bending, luxuriant lathers circa 1990.  In Densities of Intensities (2009), Andresen’s distanced hand and insistently impure process serve to heighten the phantasmagorical nature of this image and deepen space.  Using the weighty physicality of adjacently layered paint blobs to create color contrast, Andresen builds a web that both frames and connects multifocal events.  Peppered throughout, Cheshire stripes and toadstool dots stretch and shrink gesture and space like mirages on a desert highway.  Striated ribboning characteristic of Murano glass pulses through the acrylic paint, injecting velocity, directionality and warped perspective into the forms. Glassy greens glisten, and an enamel-like powder blue punches holes into the sky.   This dense assembly of raucous color, texture and evocative form would make a sympathetic pairing with Daniel Weiner’s riveting polymorphous sculptures were reviewed  here at artcritical recently.

Drenched in rich browns, the tonality of O’odham Rhythm (2001) is a welcome respite from the abundance of color in the rest of the exhibition.  Like a box of assorted chocolates, a brocade of caramel toffees, mochas and swirling dark and milk concoctions spins out from the opulent bilateral draping top and center.  And Bear Dance (2010), likely influenced by the Native American ceremonial dances that Andresen observes regularly, is a vibrant relief of concretions that provide hall-of-mirror distortions and melted glyphs.  That Andresen creates eye candy is undeniable.  In Frozen Jesters (2011) twisting lanes of candy cane stripes that allude to brushstrokes appear to converge with accumulations of gum-splatted, swirling peppermint rounds.

Some of these surfaces seem to want to jump the canvas for a larger one.  I for one hope Andresen finds a way to “throw” a few big ones up as well next time around.

The post Blobs, Under the Radar: Charles Andresen at Guided by Invoices appeared first on artcritical.

Carrie Moyer continues to agitate…beautifully.  Over the last decade she has used a layered graphic aesthetic to express solidarity with ideals of political, social and sexual equality.  In her 2006 exhibition, titled The Stone Age, she breathed new life into still life and abstract painting alike by fusing modernist painting from both sides of the Atlantic with silhouetted Paleolithic figures. Today, Moyer continues to reap the benefits of pluralism while joyously surfing in the wake of “the death of painting”, casting a net that is smart, wide, and fearless.

In Canonical at Canada Gallery, Moyer charts new and unexpected territory. Rock Candy Chrysalis unfolds bilaterally within a flat, black-winged lattice that frames our view of diaphanous, coral-c-olored forms emerging from a neutral ground.  The architectonic lattice and patterning throughout acknowledge a comfort with Pattern and Decoration artists such as Robert Kushner.  Textural contrasts between black line, raw canvas, and glistening or matte paint drive the formal interplay throughout this exhibition. And when Moyer drops a lightly patterned, transparent veil against or behind a flat plane, hints of illusionistic shading appear.  Though this painting is but one frame, Moyer’s methodology creates a sense of flickering natural phenomena.

In the six-foot square Frilly Dollup, Moyer shuffles ten layers of imagery while achieving spatial lift and slippery movement.  I am tempted to say that Frilly Dollup is the best biomorphic painting of the new century.  A seemingly effortless play of contrasts between texture, color, and line masks complexity and maintains clarity of image.  The formal ease, large size, decorous color, and elegant composition push beauty to the edge of current taste.  Frilly Dollup divides horizontally into three strata.  The lower portion articulates an expanding terrestrial womb that envelops and nurtures itself, while the upper third of the canvas parades an assortment of floating, colorful shapes that both nestle and pass by one another.  One mottled, stony white figure seems part Casper the Friendly Ghost, part Ken Price sculpture, but may be culled from Moyer’s resonant Shebang or Stone Age figures of 2006.  Rifling through the last 100 years of painting with indexical panache, Moyer’s biomorphs also nod to Picasso’s 1930’s beach bathers, Miró, Arp, Richard Lindner and Elizabeth Murray but function together as if she snapped a shot at the right moment at a party.  There is an interesting tension between what is guided and what is a more randomized gesture.  Though process is present, it is not as assertive as the gestures of Pollock, Lynda Benglis or Dona Nelson.  This tact allows the imagistic nature of the painting to move forward.  But ultimately it is the choreographic arrangement of pouring, staining, coaxing, patterning and sinewy charcoal line that animates Moyer’s pictorial projection.

The Tiger’s Wife intertwines psychological landscape and bodily form.  Moyer’s intelligence is haptic; she and by extension we, sense and recognize by her touch.  A softer, more modulated approach to color, form and line playfully emphasizes transparency and off-register articulations.  The smooth transitional flow between painting passages heightens the chthonic breadth of The Tiger’s Wife, deepening pictorial space without abandoning abstract peripherality.  Here, Moyer resistance to a flattened iconic field in favor of a feminine space of the possible, reflects how women artists from Carolee Schneeman, Lee Bontecou, and Murray to Moyer herself have changed painting.  A sense of multivalent form engages the viewer in a creative act of free-associative thinking.  Forms resembling eggs, tubes, a phallus, a breast, and fingers float in an amniotic cosmos outlined by a vaguely pelvic shape.   The glint of S.W. Hayter’s line and dust of William Baziotes’s atmosphere are bits of useful code that affirm Surrealist methods.  That Moyer can sink into and then pull content out of a viscous, liquid-soaked canvas enables her to dismiss a list of hooks often called upon to justify contemporary abstraction.  Moyer power lies in her ability to imbed content into the plurality of form that she has found painting still offers.  Overwrought referencing, clock-punching announcements about “the work”, psychedelic allusions, and goofy self-deprecations are absent.  Instead we are met with color, beauty, spirit, ebb and flow, the comings and goings of nether regions, experiential knowledge, and our common humanity.  In a sense Moyer reframes a question posed by one of color field’s progenitors by asking… Who’s afraid of beauty, facility and feminism?

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Heatwaves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Whitney Museum of American Art

June 24 to October 17, 2010
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

The sight of a cypress tree can suddenly flood our consciousness with Van Gogh’s stylizations.  Charles Burchfield may not have the sheer transformative force of Van Gogh, but when I exited the Burchfield exhibition at the Whitney Museum and walked across 75^th street, I was surprised when some foliage touching a wrought iron gate suddenly announced itself as a Burchfield arrangement poised for his trademark enhancements.  Although he was the first American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Burchfield’s visionary, and at times, treacly, modernism has kept his achievement by the wayside.  I first saw Burchfield’s watercolors in a group show at Kennedy gallery around 1980 and didn’t know whether to be more astonished by his paintings or by his marginal standing.  Perhaps the success of pop infused and neo-romantic landscapes by such artists as Laura Owen and Peter Doig has softened the ground for a reassessment of the mannered achievements of Burchfield during classic modernism.  The smartly structured retrospective of his watercolors at the Whitney Museum, curated by sculptor Robert Gober, makes an eloquent case on Burchfield’s behalf.

Burchfield’s astonishing early watercolors of 1917-18 kick off the show.  Most evocative here are the sparely composed, ominous and brooding compositions such as The Night Wind (1918). Burchfield’s flattened construction of space and bold composition employ the lessons of Ryder and Dove, as ominous clouds and blustery winds bear down on a modest human dwelling braced for a rough winter’s night.  By linking specificity of locale with existential dread and alienation, Burchfield tackled themes later explored by such luminaries as George Ault and Edward Hopper.  In Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917), Burchfield further heightens the state of fear and dread, with visualizations of sound.  One senses the impact of avant-garde treatises such as Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Besant’s Thought Forms.  Bells peal from the totemic church tower, and clouds vibrate, ushering forth a plague of menacing black rain on the miserably enchanted houses below.  Burchfield transforms doors into owls, and windows into grimaces by utilizing a set of self-styled forms he called “Conventions” that symbolize and summon states such as imbecility, evil, insanity and morbidity.  The net effect of the “Conventions” is one of emotional heightening in which elements of landscape anthropomorphize and attain an animist status.  A small drawing series of the “Conventions,” comprised of symbolic linear motifs and visual abbreviations, receives its own room within the exhibition.  This vital, working set of motifs is deftly encoded and nearly concealed within the paintings.

In the twenties, Burchfield abandoned this early breakthrough work and settled into a Regionalist scene-painting mode that provided some acclaim.  This fine but comparatively unremarkable period is included in the exhibition, boldly installed atop one of Burchfield’s own floral wallpaper designs

By the early forties Burchfield readjusted his course and faced the promise of his early watercolors.  Using a puzzle-piece strategy of associative-relational composition, he began to physically expand earlier paintings by attaching new sections of paper to them and by editing less effective areas.  Autumnal Fantasy (1916-44) is a clarion call heralding Burchfield’s rapidly developing mature phase.  His signature sun-star, a softly emanating light, appears fully formed.  Burchfield’s compositional inventions of echoing arches, receding diagonal boomerangs, and hazy atmospheric perspective of pale blues and yellows in this fifty-four inch watercolor crystallize this new period.  The saturated color and layered detail of the tree, foreground area, and squawking birds provide a counter focus to the commanding rough-hewn, painterly treatment and muted color elsewhere throughout.  Burchfield pushed watercolor conventions by dragging concentrated pigment, pummeling paper, and coaxing barely tinted dilutions into subtle form.  His declared affinity with Chinese painting is evident in the calligraphic strike-and-respond gestures.

The fifties and sixties are characterized by atmospheric paintings of domed forest cathedrals of transparent light and color.  Even Burchfield’s seemingly generic snow scene, The Constant Leaf, suddenly unfolds, captivates and transports the viewer as we eerily experience the silent atmospheric hum of the snowy environment. His occasional flirtations with magically kitchy, Shangri-la woodland settings must have strained cultivated modernist taste.  But this is the period in which Burchfield hit his stride, as he painted with a freedom and responsive touch reminiscent of John Marin.  Burchfield felt like “Don Quixote tilting at windmills” while executing a full seasonal cycle within a single painting in his Four Seasons (1960). But Robert Gober gets it exactly right when he writes Burchfield made “great art in old age.”  Burchfield’s prescience is noteworthy; Orion in December (1959) is in tune with some recent Chris Martin paintings.  And Dandelion Seed and the Moon (1965) is a standout for its large scale, pitch-perfect simplicity, soft luminosity and transcendent vantage point.   Upon close inspection, it is amazing how extraordinarily absent the surface is.  Using raw paper, muted grays, a few tiny strokes of green, the barest hint of yellow, and a tiny daub of orange, Burchfield summons a tremendously powerful image with great economy of means.  I’m hard pressed to think of a more poetic dismissal of the chasm between landscape and abstraction within American modernist painting.  Burchfield died two years later in December 1967, at the age of 75, having merged the streams of avant-garde, Chinese landscape, and American illustration into a current of his own.

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The shape-shifting biomorph continues its 100-plus year march at David Nolan Gallery.  Tracking the various frequencies on the pliant bandwidth of Biomorphism, Morphological Mutiny brings together paintings, drawings and prints by Steve DiBenedetto, Alexander Ross, and James Siena.  Incorporating abstraction and figuration, these three artists deliver an absorbing mix of the transformative, illustrational and apocalyptic strains in current painting.

Siena spins out maximalist effects from discreet minimal units.  His deceptively understated work yields a wealth of form and content, ranging from geometric abstract progressions and softly liquefied, optical grid flows, to cosmic-comic characters and sexualized tricksters.  In the middle zone, drawings titled Liminal Spaceand Liminal Pathway probe the ambiguous and interconnected play between unfolding space and figurative embrace. In Liminal Space, Siena dissipates form and charts the expansion of space that accompanies increasing formlessness.  Conversely, Liminal Pathway manifests embodied form that inhabits space.   Remixing high and low with a scratchy line and a fuzzy scrawl, Siena rehatches Biomorphism.  And in Angry Forms, a study sheet of five agitated shapes, he aptly insinuates a connection to Thought Forms, a 1901 treatise by Annie Beasant and Charles Leadbeater about the correspondence of emotion to shape and color.

Siena’s Earthless , with its smooth, enamel-painted aluminum surface, requires only a few seconds of attention before it works its magic and takes your breath away.   The labyrinthine spaces suddenly coalesce and rise and fall, optically vibrating as if an animated topographical map were pooling and waving its peaks and hollows.  For those interested in the psychedelic effects of retinal painting rooted in archetype, Siena offers an amazingly effective delivery system.

Across the gallery hangs Ross’s Untitled 2008-9 painting of a glam, klieg lit, sci-fi biomorph ready for its close up.   Glistening and chiseled, the figure is a world away from Siena’s expansive tail-biting interiority.  Instead, we face a caffeinated realm of enhanced, bright but relatively normative space.

Utilizing a computer collage aesthetic, Ross manipulates photo images of his plasticine sculptures and paints the results with sumptuous color and graphic finesse.  His seductive and precisely organized gradations of volume announce an ultra-mediated process.  Inspired by the microbial, Ross restyles the surrealistic figure via YvesTanguy and Gumby, shelving any vestige of automatism.  What remains is an emphatically descriptive, photo-realized affair with mutations from the lens.

In Untitled 2008-9 Ross’s highly articulated figure is set against an abstract ground; the ensuing construction of pictorial space is simple and graphic.  The preening alien seems grafted onto the decorative backdrop, an effect oddly reminiscent of Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Vogue shots of a model in front of a Pollack painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery.  In Untitled 2009 however, the ground is a dynamic field that creates a compelling tension with the figure, as both share a structural DNA that intimates the possibility of infiltration through a porous border.  It will be interesting to see if Ross will allow the figure to burst its container and break on through to the other side.

Unstable and apocalyptic, Steve DiBenedetto’s mesmerizing drawings and energetic paintings are intriguingly complex.  In DiBenedetto’s Untitled and Quantascape drawings of 2009, colored pencil and graphite seem to scatter and coalesce in rhythmic pulsations across the sheet.  Using a protean array of line and color, in which figures slip into fields, architecture and constellations, DiBenedetto distinguishes himself as one of the best drawing practitioners around.  In Untitled 2009, shape-shifting grotesques meander across the oscillating fields, and freely associate like Rorschach blots in a psychedelic blur of color.  In Quantascape the punchy and economical use of white ground nearly upends the colorful swirl of effects.

There is a method to DiBenedetto’s sympathetic and synaptically connected free flow of imagery; the continuity between the paintings is undeniable. In Untitled 2008 DiBenedetto uses a relatively modest paint application against which he incises a web-like scaffolding by drawing paint away from the surface.  White and amber paint is then reapplied to openings within and around the structure creating a golden glow. He conveys an experiential ethos reminiscent of late Surrealist paintings of the 1930’s and 40’s by the likes of Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Jerome Kamrowski.

Dibenedetto along with his comrades Siena and Ross have defined an architectural endoskeleton within the body of the biomorph, a decidedly third millennium proposition.

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