Rohrer was a native of Pennsylvania; significantly a native of Lancaster County, where he was raised in a Mennonite farming community. He was supposed to become a minister and a farmer. The Mennonite community is a separatist Christian group which emigrated from Europe and settled in Pennsylvania in the early 1700’s. While not as extreme in eliminating all manifestations of modern culture as the Amish are, the Mennonites still do not exactly embrace modernity. And so it is ironic – but also a fact – that Rohrer’s connection to modernism came after seeing a show of Amish quilts at the Whitney, in 1972. Not only did that show recharge and guide the style of his painting, it also initiated a lifelong interest in quilt collecting. In a catalogue essay for a show of Pennsylvania quilts, he remarks on this moment of recognition:

After I left home and became a painter I didn’t think about quilts for a long time, until I happened upon the American Pieced Quilt Show… The impact of that exhibition was overwhelming; in particular several quilts stood out, simple in design, like “modern art,” and brooding in color like Rothko… My surprise was total…
[Pennsylvania Quilts: One Hundred Years, 1830-1930. Moore College of Art, 1978]

Along with his steady stitch work of brushstrokes, regular compositional framework, consistently square format, and modest palette, Rohrer’s paintings are frequently lean enough to reveal the weave of the canvas. All of these attributes make quilt work a good basis for understanding what Rohrer is working with for visual reference.

Quilts, however, do not in any way help the viewer to understand the vast spaces, the heavy air, the swirling precipitation, and the solid recognition of ground and landscape that Rohrer depicts. Quilts are for inside. Rohrer’s paintings are so much about a rooted understanding of his place in Lancaster County that it would almost be reasonable to argue that the paintings themselves belong out of doors. This work is unmistakably about landscape from all points of view, both actual and intuitive. Some paintings, for example, seem to depict landscape from the point of view of someone standing in a field. Others seem to depict the same, but from above. Others yet seem to be vertical cross-sections, revealing from top to bottom the heavens, the sky, the air hovering over the ground, and a cross section of the earth itself.

From 1961 to 1983, Rohrer and his family lived in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in a nineteenth-century farmhouse. The cow barn was converted into a studio, and it stood between a pond and an apple orchard. After the Whitney show of quilts, Rohrer began to depict – with the characteristic restraint and understatement of modernist simplicity – the countryside that surrounded him, paying homage to the traditions of working the land that he had known growing up. Regular parallel lines floating over lean backgrounds, and grids, underpinning tightly patterned surfaces, seem to be metaphors for farming. Rohrer’s understanding of how the land is worked became the nexus between the colorful tradition of representational European landscape painting and the conceptual and systematic character of modernism. His mode of painting appears to be derived poetically from the site of his studio. The demands of farming the land determine a rural order, matching Rohrer’s internal, aesthetic order and sense of contemporary abstraction.

Rohrer’s earliest canvases in this show have a bland, agrarian topography: rows of narrow, fatty marks create contoured planes floating on halftone atmospheres. These atmospheres are the result of a fully wiped-back ground. One would wish to look into the atmospheric interior, but the rows of marks intervene. The rhythmic marks are secular reminders of which way we are supposed to look. Indeed, these topical lines, Braille-like, lead the eyes from left to right. There are tricks involved in this blind trust: in “Pond 3” (1975), Rohrer’s fatty, narrow lines are segmented, rearranged, and one’s eyes dive down from a shifting flat plane into an unexpected depth (uncharted by lines), and then abruptly reemerge where this punctuated surface continues.

The paintings from the late 1970’s and 1980’s are devoted to a lovingly patterned study of luminosity in landscape. Rohrer does not wipe back the ground on these ‘mid-period’ paintings. The topical direction is still there, however, and when he is working with his brush full, the strokes proceed in a consecutive embroidery of surface direction. In these, the brushstrokes are measured, and the hair-textures, like feathers, optically devolve flat colors into sub-hues. The mechanically even brushstrokes stack up, and appear to mark micro-units of space, much the way Cezanne did with his pencil marks. Most of the canvases have a two- or three-color scheme, and from a distance appear to be blurry remembrances of moments in a place (Rohrer’s field). They are large baths of tasteful sunset, sunrise, night or fog colors – colors perhaps adapted from his study of quilts – which open roundly, like a convex lens view of a landscape. Brushstrokes stand out on the raw canvas edges: a visual reference to threadbare or patched fabric.

There are enigmatic points to Rohrer’s ingenuous simplicity: why does he not allow a free fall into his realms of illusory space? In “A Walnut Black, 1980” the frayed, frank brushstrokes emerging from the embroidery of a heavy night-blue are jarring and uncomfortable: at the edges of the canvas there are these secular reminders about the kind of space he is creating. It is almost as if he flays the paintings at their edges. An equally enigmatic note about these frayed borders is that the paintings almost always bleed off the right side. There is a distinct compositional flow out to the right. While we know that Rohrer began in the upper left of his canvases and worked diagonally downward, why would he choose to leave this kind of indication of his process? These apparent details become salient elements in the images, given his notorious systematic work and deliberate, simple presentation. These are not – cannot just be – beautiful color field paintings, can they?

The latest of Rohrer’s paintings in this exhibition are the ones he did 1993; he died in 1995. Toward the end of his life a “language” emerges from his landscapes: literal symbols, not particularly calligraphic but a curious ideographic set of stamped symbols, which fly around the compositions. In the case of “Field Language 9” (1991), a cross-sectional landscape showing earth and sky, red symbols are embedded in a layer of humus, while others float in the air above. “Field Language 10” (1991), has blue symbols buried in a tan earth as others erupt and evanesce, cloud like, over the horizon. Rohrer is supposed to have “regard[ed] the landscape as a language and himself as reader and translator” (program notes). What he does would appear to be more like transcribing, however, since the symbols are senseless without their Rosetta stone. The lexicon (again from the program notes) might have been his private sketchbook. For some reason Rohrer began to depict the messages that emerged out of his landscapes in the didactic of mortal symbols and would-be letters, instead of his more profound code of brushstrokes. He went from invoking meaning in his landscapes through Fibonacci sequenced structures, to flat transposition of mysterious linear symbols. This ideography is puzzling, especially in light of his self-directed questions. Again, from the quilt essay he says, “…How was it that [the quilts] were being shown and collected as art (and I consider some of them to be art) without their maker’s acquaintance with or reference to art? Is intention central to the making of art?” Were these ideograms meaningful: pieced together from drawings and photos he took on visits to Lancaster’s fields? Or are they much deeper, intuitive gestures, condensed from artistic observations? Are they the fossils left, under the weight of a lifetime of vision? What are they intended to say?

Warren Rohrer was a local painter, “a Philadelphia painter”, and an instructor at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1958 – 1972. He was on the faculty of the University of the Arts from 1974 – 1992. Practically everyone in the arts in Philadelphia knows about him, and many were taught by him. He made regular trips to the Art Museum with his students, and people know very well which were his favorite paintings in the collections. Rohrer is known for his steady attention to Lancaster’s fields and to one field there, in particular, which is named after him. He remarks on videotape that he internalizes and absorbs the landscape, then recreates them back in his studio. The enigmas which become salient in the simplicity of his work – the compositional pull to the right, and the ideograms – are especially puzzling because of his remarks about intentionality and art-making; his paintings are crafted, thought-out. Even the ideograms do not erupt from his intuition, but are printed like mono prints.

Next to one of his favorite paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rogier van der Weyden’s The Crucifixion (1460-64), these enigmas lose some of their tension. St. John the Evangelist’s robe, and Mary’s robe have structured folds that seem like pieces of the ideograms, and so perhaps does the stylized bone at the foot of the crucifixion. The painterly quality of the Gethsemane wall is reminiscent of Rohrer’s halftone atmosphere, and some of the colors rhyme with those in Rohrer’s palette. Most striking, however, is the way in which the diptych – and there are a few Rohrer diptychs shown in the exhibition – has a serial movement from left to right. Why would these natural comparisons matter? Rohrer absorbed every landscape around him; not just the fields of Lancaster and wherever else he traveled. It makes sense to imagine that the Art Museum also was a landscape which, after pilgrimages with his students and alone, he brought back to his studio. Perhaps even more importantly, Rohrer seems to have — in his own secular and systematic way — become a minister and a farmer anyway: by planting van der Weyden’s seeds in a modernist, utopian landscape.

The post Warren Rohrer: Paintings 1972-1993 appeared first on artcritical.

Ashik Mene, a Turkish Cypriot artist living in the north part of Nicosia, was welcoming and unsurprised when he heard American English on his mobile phone. In a typically Cypriot way, word had already arrived that a foreign artist wanted to speak with him. It happened when he was waiting at the border crossing from the south: another Turkish Cypriot in line in front of him flashed him a business card, and then walked on. “…She wants to see you,” he said as he passed. Cyprus still operates as a small place, even though opening the official lines of communication has significantly enlarged the breadth of the population in the past two months. Arranging a meeting on the Other Side – whichever side that is – can be awkward unless that local network of passing the word is in operation. A phone call, difficult already because of language differences, can sometimes be cut three or four times during the course of a short conversation. In some cases telephone calls must be routed through Turkey. If one disregards the UN Buffer zone cutting the city in half, then we are only a few blocks apart, within the same Venetian walls of the old city.

In divided Cyprus, memory and geography are inextricably linked with self-identification, and they are themes common among artists in the island today. The Cyprus Problem, the result of the inter-communal troubles of 1963-1974, has shaped the psychological heritage of artists of both communities. The island has remained divided since the summer of 1974, when a Greek-backed coup attempted to unite Cyprus with Greece. The Turkish army, ostensibly defending the island’s then 18% minority of Turkish Cypriots, clapped the island with an invasion from the North, and seized more than 30% of the island. The UN has remained as a presence since then, maintaining a divsion (“The Buffer Zone”, or “The Green Line”) that stretches from coast to coast, and bisects the capital city of Nicosia.

Like the two Cypriot populations, “division”, and “vision” are similar words without similar roots. Most Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots will identify themselves with one another first, as Cypriots, and then become more specific about their own lineage, either Turkish or Greek. Artists are a special case. They generally have politics to the left of the mainstream, and they have shown together in exhibitions abroad and at home consistently over the past 29 years. Even during the most difficult times in the last five years, Cypriot artists (Greek and Turkish) have made contact with each other and shared ideas over the Internet. Perhaps “division” could be regarded, in relation to contemporary art in Cyprus, as “di-vision”: Two visions of the same act of separation and reunification.

Ashik Mene arrived at our meeting point, the Ataturk Cultural Center, and took me in his SUV over to the part of the Arab Ahmet Quarter where he has his studio. We drove up onto a dirt parking lot, and from there picked our way through some rubble, dried palm fronds and mashed cyclone fencing to his door. Inside, we went up a flight of dark, wooden stairs past the word “Amen” written on the wall, and sheaves of unstretched paintings in storage. Mene’s work space is two small rooms with tall ceilings and whitewashed plaster walls. A red carpet, and a plate of fruits set off the colors in the large canvases that leaned and hung all around; and the perfume of varnish went everywhere: “It’s a drug, yes… I must have it every day,” he commented on the varnish. My company, Cypriot anthropologist Stephanos Stephanides, sat on an old patterned sofa below painted-out window panes and slumping jalousies that had given way to a modern air conditioner above.

The paintings are all in process. “I don’t want to say I paint in Cypriot ways, but I know the air, the earth. I am trying to… [remain] international, while at the same time [acknowledging] a responsibility to experience and memory.” The canvases depict soft forms, figures, slipping in and out of an apparently unstructured ground. There is no sense of place in these paintings, but there is a lot of air, a lot of space. Figures make themselves invisible into apparent interiorscapes, and seem to overlap, to wrestle with an undefined ‘other’. He favors a range of oranges, and blues. Sometimes an area of lead white will envelop a vast space like a creeping fog: obscuring structure and surrounding – upholding – only the salient among the subjects. A few identifiable, symbolic props are included in these pastiches of pose and gesture. One is a large screw. Mene’s work is a wrestling mat where forms struggle to maintain their substance and their structure, against an encroaching void.
Ashik Mene was born in Larnaca, a major city on the south side of the island. He spent his life in the midst of Greek Cypriot friends until he returned from art school in Istanbul, for summer vacation. That was the summer of 1974, the summer of the Turkish invasion; the division of the island; and a massive transfer of populations. Mene and his family left for the Turkish Cypriot side of Nicosia. “If you leave people together, he says, “they’ll solve their problems. If you live together, you have no problem – you are living, and you know each other. It’s when [someone] pushes The Button that everything is changing…” He narrated a long list of years in which, outside of Cyprus and on holidays at home, he had taken part in Cypriot movements for unification, and more recently in Cyprus he has taken part in “bicommunal” dialogues that have convened members of both communities in the shared (Greek-Turkish) village of Pyla. “[Artists] are the people who need peace… We don’t always agree with the politicians…”
One of the reasons artists need peace is economics: this is one of the major differences between the north and the south in Cyprus. It is also the most obvious way in which Turkish Cypriot artists can benefit. They may suddenly have a market for their work, and more than two state-sponsored places where they can exhibit. The difference in economics between the artists was highlighted recently when, because of the border openings, there was an opportunity to stage an open studio tour in the whole of Nicosia. On one side, Greek Cypriot artist groups are usually successful in getting financial sponsorship from corporate entities, like banks, as well as support from the Cyprus government and some foreign embassies. The backing is used for excellent publicity and formal catalogues. But the Turkish Cypriot authorities, on the other side, prohibited participation of their artists because the Greek Cypriots had netted this commercial support. At least, that is one version of the story. In the end, “Inside the Walls of Nicosia 2003”, the studio tour named in recognition of the Venetian walls that encircle the city and its divisive buffer zone, featured only Greek Cypriot studios. Mene comments on the situation, “…we put up another kind of zone: A commercial zone.”

Loulli Michaelidou, a Greek Cypriot educated in London, is a cultural officer for the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture. Busy with her major concern, the 2003 Venice Bienniale, she spared a moment to comment on politics and artists in Cyprus. She said, “…the struggle [the Cyprus Problem] is political, but it’s also an individual one; it’s part of a cultural identity”. She elaborates: Cypriot art “…tends to be criticized for being homogenous, if not conventional… Beautification and aestheticization are still [very popular trends].” “Homogeneity, she clarifies, “is typical of small countries where deviation has traditionally not been rewarded, and where assimilation and ‘widened horizons’ have not, in the past, been valued as much as adherence to tradition.” In Cyprus there is a great market for what could be termed traditional Mediterranean painting and sculpture. Interestingly, Mene mentioned the same issue: “Conformism is dangerous for an artist… We have the exact same interests, the artists north and south. But it’s the lifestyle… If you have enough pain, you have to create”.

Artists in the south have experienced the past 29 years of separation differently. The Turkish Cypriots might have light pockets, but Greek Cypriot artists have had another kind of pain. In a much more severe way than the artists in the north, Greek Cypriots have been watching commercial developers destroy their landscape. Hills in the south part of Cyprus bear an underlying rhythm of handmade contour planes which, now grown over with feral grape vines and haggard olive trees, betray the dead agrarian past. The south is doomed because of Europeans speculating on real estate before Cyprus joins the European Union. Of course the artists are making money: the more concrete walls poured, the more walls that may need artwork.

Rinos Stefani is a Greek Cypriot born in the Paphos District of Cyprus. He spent some ten years studying art in London and working abroad, and then returned permanently to his native village of Tala. Stephani can most easily be located in his “field,” which is an expanse of recently planted olive trees near his home, and near his parents’ home. “My father grew barley, wheat, he had orchards and olive groves, vineyards – he made wine – he had carob trees, and goats, and donkeys…” He says about his painting, which is deeply rooted in the figure-in-landscape tradition in Cyprus, “I grew up in the land. I love the earth… [as subject matter], it’s spontaneous.” He has also worked on several bicommunal projects, and is an active member of the Union of Cypriot Artists (EKATE). In May, the Heliotropeion Gallery in Larnaca had some forty paintings in a show of his recent work. Nearly all the work sold.
Stephani’s metaphors of planting, plowing and reaping modify the obscure relations between men and women in his canvases on display in the gallery.

These paintings juggle poetic, erotic stories with acts of building highways, planting trees, and going to the village fountain. They are personally narrative, directly inspired by the Stephani’s life which is planted in the changing economy. The exact meanings, however, are as obscure as the source of Stephani’s laugh. His work expands beyond his modestly sized canvases. The colors are stray, almost unmixed, and reminiscent of the odd amalgam found in archaeological mosaics. The taut, linear compositions are equally archaic – rhyming with the lines drawn on jugs and plates from Mediterranean antiquity. Stephani however, most likely does not spend much time in archaeological museums. This is the autochthonous, “spontaneous” visual language to which he alludes when talking about landscape painting. He has managed, without nostalgia, to depict his personal geography in the threatened environment.

Acknowledging that artists have a “minor” role in the politics of Cyprus, Stephani expresses his opinion: “… the sudden changes at the border created a temporary sentiment… But there’s no solution to the real problem, which is the occupation of northern Cyprus by the Turkish army. For me, it’s an opportunity to meet Turkish Cypriot friends, artists, and I can get a handful of earth…”

Yiannis Toumazis underlines what Stephani said about the politics: “If I were an artist I would be thinking about the return-no-return [that we have] here. Nothing is crystallized… It is exciting, but there’s still a regime; there’s still an army.” Toumazis is the Director of the Municipal Art Center of Nicosia (the Power House). He is also the source of my connection to Ashik Mene, who used to visit the Municipal Arts Center up until 1995 – before the Turkish Cypriot authorities clamped down on communication. “Really, he said, “from nothing, there are now many new opportunities. This is a huge change. Hopefully it will… have an affect on [Cypriot art]. If not, nothing will.”

The post Ashik Mene and Rino Stephani appeared first on artcritical.