Mark Grotjahn: Untitled (Captain America) at Gagosian
January 19 to February 20, 2016
980 Madison Avenue (between 76th and 77th streets)
New York, 212 744 2313

The title of Mark Grotjahn’s show at Gagosian is “Captain America,” after the comic book character created in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of America’s involvement in World War II. In the comic, Captain America fought against the Axis powers, knocking out Nazis and Japanese soldiers in storylines that promoted extreme patriotic fervor. It’s a strange thing that this suite of 10 drawings is noted in the gallery’s press materials as “first shown in the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo,” as if embedded within Grotjahn’s works is a parallel heroic narrative.

For this series (it is only necessary here to describe one, as the other nine are essentially the same with slight variation) Grotjahn used the red, white and blue Captain America color scheme. The drawings distill motifs from his two major bodies of work: the “Butterfly” and “Face” paintings, seen in his oeuvre since the early 2000s. Each piece presents a “Butterfly”-like radial of alternating red and blue bands against a chalky white surface. The bands radiate from, or recede into, a central vanishing point. Over the image, hastily painted yellow eye shapes cover the surface at random. These “eyes” (a recurrent motif in Grotjahn’s “Face” paintings), though omnipresent across the series, are faint and barely register against the bold design of the main image. The vitality and ecstasy that are so primal in those earlier works has given way to bland seriality in the new series. While the title evokes a spirit of play, it also feels a bit sinister as it flags the artist as a hyper-masculine, self-proclaimed hero.

On Great Jones Street Grotjahn’s “Sign Exchange” project was presented at Karma, a gallery that often shows decidedly un-auspicious projects and DIY projects by artists of stature, including Brice Marden, Julian Schnabel, Rudolf Stingel, Stanley Whitney, Chris Martin. Between 1993 and 1998, Grotjahn, just out of UC Berkeley, began replicating liquor store and bodega signs from his neighborhood. He would then trade the shop owners his copies for their originals, which are on view. The result is an archive of signs and hand-painted advertisements resplendent in their low-budget glory. The tightly curated sampling of these signs (as well as several pastel painted flower stands) feels precious in a way that the then-25-year-old Grotjahn likely never intended. At the right of the entrance, a long line of multicolored index card-sized ads were hung end-to end in a kind of continuous banner of liquor brands, prices and keyed-up color; I was reminded of the nearly 10-foot-long line of paint chips that horizontally bisects Rauschenberg’s 1955 opus Rebus.

The “Sign Exchange” project is a relational aesthetics experiment wrapped in a post-Duchampian gesture: the signs register as Art because the artist dubs them as such. Ten years ago, as Grotjahn was hitting his stride, achieving critical and market success, the “Signs” project might have thrown institutions and collectors off of his scent. Grotjahn’s success is as a formalist painter; now, with his work firmly in the canon of aughts-abstraction, galleries and curators have more freedom to exhibit examples of his less conventional (i.e. less collectible) output. In 2014, Grotjahn’s painted bronze “Head” sculptures (originally conceived as studio experiments made with discarded beer boxes and toilet paper roles) were shown at the Nasher Museum in Dallas, concurrent with a survey of his “Butterfly” paintings at Blum + Poe’s Upper East Side outpost.

Grotjahn is the ideal artist for our time. He presents an image of authenticity: his work seems approachable enough — it’s AbEx without the heartache — and is systematic with the just the right inflection of happy accident to present an air of humanity. It was prescient that Grotjahn had, in the early to mid 1990s, become so interested in advertising and signage (their main function is to broadcast prices and sell goods). The work in the Gagosian show does the same thing, though its messaging is subtler. Advertising has long been free game for artists to use in their work but Grotjahn actually presents original ads in “Sign Exchange,” a gesture that seems all the more potent given his rapidly rising star. But the shadow side of Grotjahn’s success is seen in the redundant, conceptually thin uptown show at Gagosian (not to mention his self-consciously scrappy “Head” sculptures at Anton Kern on view just three months ago). For the last three years, Grotjhan has shown his work non-stop in museums and galleries (often with ambitious, concurrent exhibitions) and this frenzied exhibitionism seems to have culminated in his fatigue.

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ERIC SUTPHIN: How does collaboration function in relation to Modernism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the artist?

EMILIA AND ILYA KABAKOV: This is a very interesting question, especially considering that there are more and more artists working in pairs. Obviously there are reasons why in some cases a collaborative process can be better than those made in a solitary process. We can say that the personality of each artist, working in collaboration with the other reveals much more than when he/she works by his or herself.

One of your aims has been to restore painting’s tension, or its potential for rupture. One strategy for you is figuration, in particular, looking back to Baroque painting. What is it about figurative painting that contains the possibility for difficulty or conflict?

The return to painting and a Baroque approach has two sides: there are some elements that are working on rupture and others which are uniting everything on the canvas.

The first is a collage of all the elements of the painting, the fragmentary nature. This is the special technique that we use for such paintings in order to unite these elements. The elements of collage can consist of images from different times, but the wholeness is created by using one artistic approach for these elements stemming from different eras, in our case the style of Pierre Bonnard.

It seems that the increasing scale and ambition of your work — in particular the evolution from the 1995 Pompidou exhibition to the 2014 Monumenta presentation — has a direct correlation to an ever-expanding global art market. How has increasing globalization and decentralization of the “art world” affected your practice?

We come from a country where the art market did not exist and it is very easy to continue to disregard it. If this is about the art market, this is already such a covered territory that we are afraid to even start such a discussion. The same goes for globalization. In some aspects it does work very well, but in others it creates a catastrophe for artists, especially younger ones.

The scale of our work increases depending on the ideas and concepts and has nothing to do with the market, globalization or decentralization. The scale of the installation at the Pompidou in 1995 was in consideration of the idea we presented and the space that was available to us, the same as the project in 2014 at Monumenta.

How has the role of institutions affected the scope and scale of your projects?

That was the main factor of influence on our projects, both in museums and other art institutions. We do make a distinction between an exhibition at a museum and an exhibition at a gallery. A gallery can limit your scale and imagination, and in many cases takes an already existing work with the intention to sell. The museum, kunsthalle, kunstverein, or public space has a very specific aura and atmosphere. This stimulates your imagination and fantasy, giving you the freedom that comes with space. Unfortunately the only limit is the budget.

What scope do you hope to reach and how does ambition and scale relate to your notion of the art world as a utopian fantasy?

The most ideal result of what we are trying reach and achieve is our last exhibition at The Grand Palais for the 2014 Monumenta presentation. The Grand Palais was a utopian project, a glass palace from the end of the 19^th century. For us the possibility to realize a utopian, grandiose project in this superb space was and is the best, ideal project in the art world.

Do you see your work as nostalgic for a time when recognizable imagery had more currency than it may hold today?

The interest in painting is definitely a nostalgic interest, but at the same time there is always a hidden hope that the life of your paintings will belong to the future.

Can you discuss the ways in which representational painting functions as a conceptual, rather than purely narrative, device within your practice.

EMILIA: All the paintings are done on a project basis, as a concept as well as a narrative. Even if the narrative is used, there is a concept. But we should say that Russian conceptualism is built on narrative.

ILYA: All of my paintings are conceptual works. This means that those paintings are not only a method of explaining and representing myself as a traditional artist and painter who spends all his life working in one medium or one “visual corridor,” but rather presenting different projects which come to mind all the time. These appear not rationally, like any self-respecting artist would do, but spontaneously — one after another, or simultaneously.

Who are some artists who have been important to you?

ILYA: In the 1960s through the 1980s I did belong to a group of Moscow Conceptual artists and because of the complete isolation of the Soviet art world, I had very little knowledge of what was going on in the Western art world. In our circle the art works were always connected to a specific project. I did paintings or objects that were connected to either a Soviet bureaucratic design, a parody of official Soviet artworks, or paintings that appeared to be done by different artistic personae including characters such as the “untalented artist.”

The paintings now on view at Pace belong to the same kind of design but with a different context that we are interested in now. The concept of these paintings is to presume that there is now movement or new developments in contemporary art. As in the time of the Renaissance, we have to look back and start using the achievements of the past, remembering that the Renaissance artists used the achievements of the ancient Greeks.

So which model from the past can contemporary artists today use as an example? We are thankful that such an example from the past can be the Baroque movement. The strange combination of Baroque art and contemporary can be what we need in order to solve the problems in contemporary painting. If we are wrong, well, we will just move on to the next concept.

The post A Concept and a Narrative: Emilia and Ilya Kabakov Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

ERIC SUTPHIN: What’s the story with the banners?

BARBARA MADSEN: The banners are something I’ve been making for a long time. I made quite a few post-9/11 in Jersey City, Newark and in Washington DC. So when Arezoo asked me to do a show, I knew immediately that I wanted to put big images in the windows. But I also knew that I wanted to have an interaction with the city, so the banners had to be translucent. People use this room. I spent a lot of time sitting in here, observing people and how they use the space. If the natural light flooding in was blocked it would ruin the experience, and I did a lot of research looking for a material that is translucent, that can breath, change and let the light in.

They’re mysterious. We see them as large-scale photographic images and they might be mistaken for advertisements. Can you talk about their function as images within the city space?

MADSEN: They begin with something that’s very tiny, which I isolate and blow up. In that process they become iconographic and monumental. The objects I photograph are made from a vivid plastic, so you feel that they are advertisements for some kind of a product. When you look at the forms, there is a familiarity but the scale destabilizes your relationship to what the objects might be.

MOHSENI: They lack the text that is generally associated with ads. The banners also have a theatricality. When you see them at night from outside they are backlit and appear to glow.

And this location on Fifth Avenue is important. Fifth Avenue has a history as a sort of marketplace with big window displays showing off products. But while the objects on the banners appear familiar, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at. And that is what differentiates these banners from advertisements: an ad’s job is to be clear and sell you something, but Barb’s work tells us to look and to keep looking. Another function of the banners is that they invite us to look at the sculptures in the windows. Can you talk about the sculptures?

MADSEN: The sculptures are site specific and were made to respond directly to the library’s architecture. I wanted you to be able to see through them form both inside of the library and from the street. I didn’t want them to be closed forms; I wanted them to break down the relationship between image and object. I was thinking a lot about Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (1923 – 48). Each piece is modular so that when the installation is eventually taken down, each unit can function independently.

You mentioned that some of this imagery is taken from the video game Minecraft. This, coupled with the modularity, like Legos or building blocks, makes me think that play is an important aspect of your work.

MADSEN: I am interested in play and I have too much fun with this stuff! One sculpture has a periscope built into it, poking fun at the surveillance camera mounted directly above it. And inside that sculpture is a light, which flashes and twitches to imply that there’s a video playing inside. There’s no video, but it’s like a game of “Who’s watching whom?” There are a lot of visual puns in this piece. I invited the street artist Neanderthalogical to tag one of the pieces, which you can see from outside. I used photographs that I shot throughout the city so that when you’re looking at the sculpture, you’re also looking at the city, through the city through the sculpture.

MOHSENI: Is this the first time you’ve made freestanding sculptural work?

MADSEN: I’ve been using platforms or plinths as supports for my objects. The assemblages covered in photographic images are a first for me. I’ve been thinking about them conceptually, especially in relation to Schwitters, for quite a long time. With the Library installation, I finally had the right venue to make them happen.

MOHSENI: I see Barb’s work connected to a lineage of artists that includes Frank Stella and Nancy Graves. Both of those artists were investigating the disruption of three-dimensional space while also using intense color. The title of the show, “Plastic Age,” is important here. After World War II, plastic became essential in American industry.

But there’s also humor in the title, you’re playing off the historic “Ages” from the Stone to the Bronze and now into the Plastic Age. In two millennia we’ll be known as that weird civilization that left behind mountains of plastic.

MADSEN: When I was upstairs browsing the Pictures Collection I looked through the “Plastics” folder and I found these Monsanto ads from the 1950s showing the joys and possibilities of plastic. In the ‘50s, nobody thought twice about Monsanto. So there’s a conundrum with the love affair they created with plastic: it’s the container of our dreams but also the destruction of our dreams.

You’ve decided to use the vitrines and glass cabinets, tell me about what’s in those spaces.

MADSEN: The vitrines are dedicated to my collaboration with the Venezuelan poet Ely Rosa Zamora. I make images and she then responds with poetry. This particular book is called “The Unspecific Object” kind of making fun of Donald Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects.” Judd was against illusionary space, so I wanted to take back that illusionary space. I put out an open call on Tumblr to have people submit images of objects and upload them to the site. I then had two jurors: Arezoo and Jared Ash (a Special Collections librarian at the Metropolitan Museum), to whom I gave no set criteria, and together they chose 14 images. I asked the winners to send me the actual objects, which I photographed in black and white within architectural spaces I built. Then I printed the images as photogravures.

You’ve talked about your collaboration with Zamora and your interest in language; are there other literary references that shape the exhibition?

MADSEN: In terms of literature and its relationship to space I think about Flatland (1884), Edwin Abbott’s seminal novel about Albert Square, a two-dimensional figure who exists in a three-dimensional world. Square is persecuted and imprisoned for his belief in a third-dimension. The book talks about possibilities that we don’t understand and our limited aptitudes.

Can you talk about the photographs that are hung in the Pictures Collection?

MADSEN: The photographs conflate types of space — interior and exterior, for example — so what happens is a simultaneous implosion/explosion. I think of it as queering space and taking it as your own, transforming it into a place where “fits” and “misfits” can coexist. They’re psychological spaces that suggest possibility but also admit failure.

It’s funny, going back to the ways in which each of your pieces have this dialogue with each other… I’m standing in the Pictures Collection among aisle after aisle of picture files. So there’s a very direct tie to the function of this part of library and to what your work is doing. The sculptures in the window announce or anticipate what happens within the walls of the Pictures Collection. Did you take photos of the library while you were coming up with the idea for the installation?

MADSEN: I did take photos, but then I spent a lot of time going through the image folders in the Collection. This grid piece shows a selection of images that I think of as portraits, in which I try to make visible something that’s usually invisible.

In your case the idea of a portrait implies a relation to the objects you choose to photograph. You humanize or anthropomorphize the objects. You’ve talked about carrying your collection of objects around for over two decades moving with them, as part of a family unit. So it makes a lot of sense that you would document them as portraits.

MADSEN: It’s also a documentation of excess and hyper-consumption.

But I don’t feel you’re making a value judgment against accumulation or consumption.

MADSEN: Absolutely. I strongly believe that angry diatribe is a failed strategy. You can’t reach people by screaming at them. If you can engage people through looking closely, then you might have a chance at a conversation. But I did want to see just how far I could push the portraits without them becoming too baroque. There’s a Neo-Pop-Baroque aspect to them, they’re so excessive.

We’ll there’s a photogravure of a tiara downstairs!

[laughing]

MADSEN: That’s the queen in all of us.

The post Barbara Madsen and Arezoo Moseni in Conversation with Eric Sutphin appeared first on artcritical.

April 23 to May 24, 2015
327 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie Street)
New York, 212 375 8043

There is a tendency in contemporary art which conflates facts with content. Too often artists will point to this or that and shout “Hey! Look at this thing I know about, isn’t it clever?!” On their surface, Louise Despont’s drawings organize themselves loosely around Balinese rites and rituals. But Despont’s renderings are closer to fetishism than to ritual, less a sacrament to the unruly gods and more a testament to an artist’s own will to succeed. By way of control and precision, the artist converts those unfamiliar or “exotic” mannerisms she finds compelling into a set of data: linguistic, sonic and seismologic — enveloped in an air of the bespoke. The work’s immaculateness is hard to surmount, it begs to be prodded, poked at and taken apart.

Elegance in art is tricky. It can come to stand for good taste, which in turn suggests a classed position. Bali is Despont’s Tahiti. And from its verdant shores and pumice beaches she distills elegant images more Hermes than Noa Noa. In her fourth solo exhibition with Nicelle Beauchene, the artist demonstrates her pitch-perfect technical skills and impeccable design sensibility. Her vocabulary is rich but affected: she draws heavily from South Asian textile design as well as antique maps; the works are robust, though she approaches them with the delicacy of a miniature. Offering in Appeasement (all 2014) is the most luxurious drawing here.. It is a roughly symmetrical composition of tropical fronds, stylized vegetal forms and rosettes. Despont’s artworks owe something to Tropicalia but without its zeal and musicality. Her color is subtle: soft rose, silvery green, myriad grey and inflections of pale gold and blue unify in a constellation of shapes that recall a medieval tapestry’s threadbare surface. Despont is drawing upon the local tradition of making offerings to the gods and goddesses who preside over the geologically volatile Sunda Strait. This marine passage is situated between Java and Borneo and was the site of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa which killed more than 36,000 people. The eruption is cited as creating the loudest sound ever recorded in human history. The proliferation of lines which overlay Despont’s imagery correlate to the sonic activity of Krakatoa, or “the sound heard around the world.”

Though she utilizes stencils and hand-drawn grids, the work, over time, reveals unexpected buoyancy as a result of the artist’s uniformly light touch and muted palette. An image of two volcanoes drawn in shades of silver and grey appears in Anak Krakatau (or Child of Krakatau). The erupting volcanoes flank an island set within a stylized sea. At left, a text box reads: “anak krakatau, indonesia, sunda strait, emerged 1928.”

An entire constellation of narrative is embedded in Despont’s drawings: travel, ecological disaster, an interest in craftsmanship,colonialism and architecture. But the means by which she attempts to delve into the region’s multivalent history instead stylizes this very history into a kind of ornamentation. In this way, one might say that Despont is participating in an archetypal colonial narrative of mining an Eastern culture for its aesthetic and conceptual riches then dashing back to the West to capitalize. Two of the most successful works in the exhibition are Full Moons and Volcanic Centers. Both of these drawings show less literalism than the larger, more ambitious pieces. It seems that, in these, Despont has metabolized the ideas she is using and instead of illustrating events, she lets these events and ideas play out through the design and drawing. Another aspect here is that there is less filled-in space which lets the warm, rosy finish of the antique paper do its own work. Portions of frosty green and chalk white heighten the surface’s character.

The Sound Heard Around the World is a stylized depiction of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa rendered in shades of cool grey. Again, the event is flattened out and made decorative. Bands and cords radiate out from the volcano’s center, as if to illustrate the sonic aftershock of the eruption. Even the volcanoes she depicts are rendered like plumes — ebullient and decorative. It is evident when looking at these drawings that Despont gives care and attention, and this might be the work’s real subject.

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Robert Janitz: Oriental Lumber at Meyer Riegger
September 17 through October 25, 2014
Friedrichstraße 235 (between Hedemannstraße and Rahel-Varnhagen Promenade)
Berlin, +49 30 31566567

For his first solo exhibition with Meyer Riegger, Robert Janitz shows a selection of his three favored forms: a plant sculpture made from cut sheet metal, a suite of portraits of the backs of heads and a selection of large format abstractions made from layered paint, wax and flour. Far from being disparate or eccentric modes, these three archetypal forms actually gather themselves around figuration as a unifying idea. Janitz work is indebted to de Kooning’s early black-and-white abstractions as well as the canvas-works of the Actionists from the 1960s. “Oriental Lumber” is an eccentric exhibition that shows an artist who flits back and forth between serious abstract painting, wordplay and dada-like witticism.

Janitz has cited his plant sculptures as a Duchampian gesture but in the context of this exhibition, Margiela Fontäna (all work 2014), seems more of an ironic commentary on glossy, “finish fetish” Minimalist sculpture. It is larger than an average human and placed casually in the middle of the gallery as a houseplant would be. Its sleek and polished surface makes it something of a decoration, though its slightly sagging silver fronds give it something of a comic, Oldenbergian character. The towering plant stands in for refined taste and a pristine sensibility, a possible counterpoint to the comparatively messy paintings.

On one wall of the main gallery, five paintings were hung close together, four of these were “portraits,” and the fifth was an abstraction the same size and format as the portraits. A messy grid of chalky white on black, Proprement Dit hung there among the portraits like an imposter, daring us to draw distinctions between it and its representational counterparts. The heads are amalgamations of coiled brush marks, calico surfaces and impasto patches. These link us to the abstractions by way of brushstroke — but far from being personifications, the portraits are empty signifiers. They are featureless, generalized and flattened. One possible reading is that they conjure the anonymity of urban life. In Berlin or New York, we leave our homes and studios and file into the conveyor belt of faceless heads: the back of the head is in effect a “blank canvas” or a space for projection. The anterior portions of the brain are the oldest and most primitive. Our basest necessities are addressed by the function of the hypothalamus, the brain stem (the brain’s houseplant?). In Audrey Hepburn as Dr. Double aka The Ornithologist Janitz clues us into the projection game that he is setting up. The two-shapes-and-a-background that comprise this small black and orange canvas could be a Hollywood icon, a cartoon character or a bespectacled bird-watcher (a surrogate for a compulsive gazer). Without access to an identity the surfaces become what they really are: combinations of shapes, textures and colors. Janitz puts the infrastructure of the portrait in place but it merely dangles over the paintings’ surface like a thin veil.

The remaining walls of the gallery showed Janitz large-scale abstract paintings. These works are physical insofar as they reveal both the action and the substance of their making. But theirs is a kind of physicality that is not seductive or rewarding. We can see that Janitz moves the viscous flour-wax-paint solution across a painted layer with a very wide house painter’s brush. But this is perhaps more of a commentary on utility (what good is a painting, anyway?) than it is about experiencing pleasure or delight in the painted surface. The surface of a painting such as Rhythmische Klangformen: Eine Studie ends up appearing more like an X-ray than an action painting. This association is aided along by the interplay between the jet-black painted ground and the yellowish paste-wash that is thinly applied in muscular vertical swathes. The cords of build-up that run up and down the painting’s surface in wide intervals creates a sequence of bone-like partitions in which blank, grey surfaces are carved out. These “empty” zones in the paintings are something like hollowed out reliquaries or porticos where one might insert an icon (think back to Audrey Hepburn’s cameo) or an image of a saint. At times, the striated towers that fill these surfaces appear like processions of solemn, hooded figures.

Janitz titled the show after the hardware store in Bushwick where he shops. He is interested in workmanlike materials, ungraceful products like glue and wax. These materials have become Janitz’s stock and trade and when he began to use them there was a sense of discovery and experimentation in his work. I get the impression that Janitz would like to move beyond these washy/pasty paintings into a form that combines his interests in craftsmanship, figuration and sculpture — but here he has settled to show three types of work that each make use of one or more of these elements. Anachronistically, the work here points us away from painting and into the realm of performance. This exhibition is Janitz’s first in his native Germany, so it makes sense that he would exhibit a cross section of these varied works. He flirts with relational aesthetics with his Oriental Lumber, a custom-designed pair of Nikes that he wears in the press image for the show. The sneakers are a fitting metaphor for a restless artist who seems to need to move around a lot.

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I visited “Platform: Maya Lin” at the Parrish Art Museum after spending a couple of days in my hometown of Frenchtown, New Jersey (located on the Delaware River, population roughly 1,200). I was perhaps more receptive to the urgency of Lin’s environmentalist sculptural works than I normally would have been had I arrived by way of New York City. As a kid, one of my favorite places to explore was a rocky peninsula on the Delaware that my father and I dubbed Clam Beach because its shore was littered with sun-scorched freshwater clamshells. One could always count on finding live clams in the small pools that formed along the riverbank. Today, the little peninsula on the river is unrecognizable. Half of it is underwater and the other half is overgrown by a thicket of unruly vegetation and piles of driftwood.

The work presented in “Platform” consisted of three sculptures for which scientific imaging software was used in shaping familiar sculptural materials like marble, steel and silver. The strength of Lin’s approach has always been her ability to reduce seemingly incomprehensible phenomena to a direct, often quiet, physical encounter. A gesture as simple as folding paper is made monumental in her Wavefields (a series begun in 1995, comprised of three undulating mini-mountain ranges in Ann Arbor, Miami and at Storm King Sculpture Park in New York). The wavefields were based on wave patterns that Lin recreated as site-specific earthworks using 3D modeling software. At her best, Lin subverts the frank materiality of Minimalism by tethering her work to science and politics. These recent works allude to geo-spatial boundaries that, since Modernity, have on the one hand been strengthened and fortified through war, politics and Capitalism, and on the other, have deteriorated as a result of excessive consumption and expenditure of natural resources.

Pin River — Sandy, (2013) was the most effective work in Lin’s exhibition. In Pin River, the diffuse boundaries of the floodplain along the coastline of New Jersey, Long Island and New York City are rendered in thousands of steel pins, forming a slightly blurred wall drawing of the section of the Northeast where Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. The regularity of the construction almost absurdly orders and regularizes the chaos of the eponymous “super storm.” With this work, Lin points straight ahead at the map and tells us, “This is where the storm hit, these are the floodplains,” and the echo that follows is, “It will happen again.”

Latitudinal coordinates take the form of marble rings in the tripartite floor sculpture titled Around the World (2013-14), Each nested ring represents the topography of the ocean floor in the three works, titled Arctic Circle (the innermost ring) Latitude New York City (the central ring) and Equator (the outermost ring), The marble structures show the hills and canyons found miles below sea level: they make visible the unpredictable beauty of the Earth’s unexplored topos. But how does the gray-veined Vermont marble used in Around the World relate to the latitudes of New York City, the Arctic Circle or the Equator for that matter?

A similar dissonance between form, concept and material is felt in Lin’s wall-hung renditions of three East End lakelets titled Mecox Bay, Accabonec Harbor and Georgica Pond (all 2014) These small, fragile bodies of water were mapped and their lacy perimeters were used as the outline shape of the sculptures, though I’m not convinced that these works live up to their aspiration as talismans for environmental awareness. Silver is precious, yes. These lakes are precious, of course. But how does this precious metal connect to the ecology or topology of eastern Long Island? The works’ diminutive scale makes them look more like gilt ginger roots than fragile bodies of water. Lin wants poetry, but in this work her slick materials threaten to eclipse the conceptual urgency of her subject. In her monuments and earthworks, Lin acts almost like a choreographer who guides bodies through space. The import of her work is absorbed not simply through the visual but likewise through corporeal engagement and movement. And although one can circumambulate Around the World, Lin’s small sculptural works neglect the elements of encounter and surprise at which she is so adept.

I sat in the atrium with Lin’s work on the last day of Fourth of July weekend and watched a cavalcade of cars inch along Montauk Highway through the museum’s picture window. I would like to think that the three concentric rings that comprise Around the World might act like sonar beams radiating outward from their point of origin (Lin) — out into the world of environmentally-minded art-admirers and weekenders alike. In the waning daylight, the pins in Pin River — Sandy cast a westerly shadow that suggested the wiping away of the coastal regions of the floodplain. With this gesture, Lin subtly advances her environmental warning, one straight pin at a time.

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May 3 to June 15, 2013
Johannes Vogt Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 205
New York City, 212-255-2671

In Untitled (2012) the folds of a striped circus tent are pulled aside to reveal the howling mouths of a thousand crazed clowns. Just beyond the “tent”, decadence and jubilee unfurl from abstract forms in golden yellow, magenta and quinacridone red. The clamor of searing hue and jagged geometry is tempered and pressed in upon by the sagging navy folds which dominate the upper third of the canvas. A strong central image recurs in Circus II (tête de femme) (2012) in which a diamond form dominates the shallow space of the canvas. The geometries in Dobliar’s work are precarious: triangles, diamonds and rhomboids become animate as they careen through space. The tent form is both spectacle and shelter.

Dobliar begins each painting with a dirty brush which he moves from one canvas to the next.  Evidence of this base materiality is seen in Tête (2013) the most open and air filled composition on view. The quartered canvas evokes Alexej von Jawlensky’s “T-faced” portraits from the 20’s and 30’s. The edges of the painting are stained maroon, yellow and grey green while cylinders (cigarettes, reeds, a pan pipe) radiate from the paintings center. Five discrete forms are placed within the grid like totemic objects or indecipherable occult symbols.

In the rear gallery an array of small works on aluminum are hung against Dobliar’s custom-made wallpaper. Lopsided triangles in a murky blue tumble about through strange shimmering fields. Diffuse permutations of rose, lavender and mauve are pierced through by myriad shades of gold. The lighting has a German Expressionist quality, and the point of departure for the wallpaper was in fact a photograph of an opera backdrop designed by Kirchner.

While Dobliar’s paintings make striking use of speed and movement as their medium ­– an underlying order is present just below the expressionist surfaces of his work. With color, geometry and surface colliding and, at times, vying for attention, each element threatening to supersede the other – there is such a wealth of personally symbolic forms and formal rigor in this work to make one realize that there is much more to them than slapdash and quick thrills.

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Milton Resnick: The Elephant in the Room places a spotlight on paintings from the 1970s and ‘80s that show Resnick in some of his purest painting moments.  These large-scale, near monochrome, intensely physical, assertive paintings yield infinite depth to the patient viewer.  In a recent article in Art in America magazine the painter David Reed recounts his years under Resnick’s tutelage, quoting the first generation Abstract Expressionist as saying “it’s over for us, something else must be done. We didn’t make it, learn from our failure”. Resnick lamented the death of Jackson Pollock and the waning camaraderie surrounding the movement with an air of defiance and determination to pull from the rubble a pure vision emptied of “isms” and the trappings of taste.

As Cheim and Read’s show makes clear, Resnick’s efforts at attaining an art free from form and style was dirty and laborious business. These deeply emotional canvases present bewilderingly dense surfaces in which energy feels trapped, pulsing beneath craggy mountains and cavernous pools of oil paint.  Defying the grand gestures of Resnick’s earlier work, seen in the 2008 show at the same gallery, Resnick has used the build up and excavation of his repetitive surfaces as his vehicle towards a kind of painfully earthbound painting imbued with palpable reverence to the medium.  Accounts of Resnick’s personality reveal something of a curmudgeon, the kind of teacher who would smear flawed areas of his students’ work, although usually at the service of the painting.  He promoted the obliteration of image and the liberation of paint, to “let the paint do the talking.”

Lightness of touch is gone, as loose handling is eschewed in favor of dutifully executed, plaster-like finishes.  The canvases are not all callused, however, as some are almost even in surface, allowing their smoky color to become velvety. Untitled (1988)recalls Swan (1961), the massive action painting that dominated the 2008 exhibition.  Smaller than most works in the current show, the 1988 work present a cool, lunar surface is in a state of unrest.  The painting is neutral in overall color though remnants of vibrant color defy total austerity.  There is a sense of a slow, forceful swirling motion, like a maelstrom gathering energy. Resnick’s tenet that a painting should incur all energy but not release it is perhaps most evident in this work.

Pure force is contained within the crusty blistered surfaces as they try to resist Resnick’s rage and ecstasy.  The endless depths of paint lead to a confrontational and impenetrable impasto that confronts and compels the viewer.  With even the most archaic form is purged and any reference to external influence is ostensibly denied.

Straws (1982) seems like a glimpse back to the 1960s and a foreshadowing of the 1990s. The paint is splattered in a repetitively downward gesture over a characteristically blistered surface.  The surface is broken into three primary colors: teal, rust and earth green.  Resnick provides more breathing room in this particular work, one of several early 1980’s paintings with this title. Cosmological blue light glows below the encrusted surface.  This painting is all emotion, anguish and heaviness.  The stoic flat surfaces of the prior decades begin to yield to modulated color.  Amorphous masses of earth color float in an amniotic greenish blue like zygotes of the archaic figures that would materialize in the next decade.

Exhaustive physical and psychic energy are contained within these canvases.  A skeptic could argue that these are a contrarian’s monolithic reaction towards neo-Expressionism, a lamentation for Abstract Expressionism’s displacement.  This seemingly willful suppression of gesture and color yields the anxiety and tension that animates this phase of Resnick’s career, anticipating twenty further years of painterly evolution.

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March 31 –May 7, 2011
530 W. 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 691-7700

Matt Jones’ Multiverse was a generously dense exhibition with works covering the entire gallery space including two floor-to-ceiling wall installations.  Jones takes a fairly simple set of materials and through a process of contemplation and punk rock slapdash creates iconic wall pieces and propped figures.  There was a video work titled Every Expression Possible (2011) that featured a masked Jones acting out many different faces and expressions against the background of a Karma Charger.  As in his paintings, Jones uses repetition here to evoke a meditative calm.

But the work is also about contradictions, and these make for visual excitement.  While Jones cites Buddhist practices and meditation as a source of creative energy, we see Wolverine masks and Black Flag logos (originally designed by Raymond Pettibon in the late ‘70s) which conjure a kind of brash male ego enterprise (the rocker, the comic book character), archetypal symbols that Jones has rescued from adolescence.  He has dusted off these two icons, colored over them and reverently slathered them with Elmer’s glue.

The floor pieces were the most satisfying part of the show.  The groupings of propped figures invited interaction.  I arrived at the opening early and there were only a few visitors but I felt I had entered a crowded room.  The figures were frozen in dynamic poses and emanated excitement.  Propped paintings, frozen in animate gestural poses, act as stand-ins for viewers.  Jones plays with materiality in ways that feel at once DIY and mechanical in their clarity of execution.  The surfaces of these propped figures were treated exactly the same as the wall pieces hung nearly edge to edge along the perimeter of the gallery.  Inkjet prints are cut to the shapes of the figures and then adhered to the plywood surface with glue.  Jones works over the prints with alcohol-based marker and adds color and abstract patterns.  The final stage of the process is several coats of thinned Elmer’s Glue spread over the surface that acts as a lacquer, sealing and unifying the surfaces.  The result of Jones’ serial method is a borderline-obsessive repetition of themes and characters that is like a visual chant–we see black and white lines repeated in the Karma Chargers and the recurrent characters throughout the works.  A hum of patterns fills the room.

Jones succeeded at pulling off a sense of serenity in a room dense with punk-inspired plywood cutouts.  Karma Charger (2011), a large inverted wedge of plywood covered in Xerox sheets of black and white stripes, is a mandala that assists in bringing about a moment of Nirvana.  The idea with this construction, according to the artist himself,  is that the viewer basks in front of the device, imbuing it with his own psychic energy and that the subsequent viewers in turn exchange the other viewers’ meditative experience. When staring into the pattern for several minutes my peripheral vision dissolved, my eyes softened and my mind quieted.  I didn’t expect to be brought into a kind of guided meditation when entering the exhibition but was pleased to find a few moments of quiet contemplation and visual pleasure.

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Among the nine new oil paintings in Jon Pestoni’s first solo exhibition with Lisa Cooley Fine Art, Black Out (2010) stands out in its breathy and brooding darkness.

All of his canvases have rich surfaces that employ both simple geometric and amorphous forms suspended in delicate, painterly fields.  Pestoni brushes or rakes the dry, vibrant color across the canvas in wide sweeping strokes.  The gestures are controlled but the work retains a lyrical sensibility heightened in part by his use of keyed-up color.

But Black Out, with its witchy, hypnotic palette, is the raspy-voiced chanteuse amongst the more restrained charm school set. A performative painting, it breaks away from the subtle poetics which dominate the show to give us something bawdy and wonderful.

A collection of dainty, white, elongated forms undulate within an inky Gothic space.  The dark canvas builds upon thin veils of magenta and translucent purple while deep neutral grays obscure small patches of rich blue and green. Opaque swathes of gunmetal sit upon this complex and weathered surface to reveal a keen inner luminosity.

Jon Pestoni at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, January 16 to February 20, 2011. 34 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets, New York City, (212) 680-0564

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