September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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November 3 to December 21, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
138 Tenth Avenue, between 19th and 20th streets
New York City, lissongallery.com

People sometimes bemoan the state of formal abstraction.The critique is as follows: It’s repetitive, stale, too often attached to the grid. Yet, this is not a new critique. The grid remains, so long as the convention of a rectangular support remains. Even the most sophisticated High Renaissance painting responds to the grid – breaks with it, negates it or conforms to it. Rosalind E. Krauss bankrolled her early career attacking it. Without offering an apology for the modernist preoccupation with the grid, however, I would argue that sometimes exploring formal conventions can expand the language of once well-worn trajectories. Such is the case with Stanley Whitney’s solo exhibition, “In the Color,”at Lisson Gallery.

Whitney came of age, as an artist, with peers such as David Reed, the late Jack Whitten and the slightly older Ed Clarke. The late 1970s were a time when some didn’t believe that any kind of painting was possible; others still rejected color as too tied to a cultural moment, deemed it superficial or lacking in seriousness. The art world periodically likes to relive this hangover, usually after binging on candy-coated color that’s all too easy to like. Color is most interesting when it is incredibly specific—otherwise it can become generic.

In the show’s title work, In the Color, (2018) Whitney uses a perfect square measuring 8 x 8 feet, and employs a loose lattice, vibrant grid structure, with three horizontal bands unevenly spaced to create spatial dimension. Cadmium yellow on the left side of the canvas, cadmium red on the right, a few cobalts, teals and viridians closer to the middle, and a few pastel pinks and yellows dead center create a patchwork motif. It’s in the placement of rectangles and their sameness or relative proximity to other hues where color begins to take shape, to create space. Color becomes subject and object.

Whitney’s grids aren’t dogmatic. He allows a few drips on the right side of the canvas; a deep, cadmium red bleeds into a peach-pink, a blue-grey rectangle bleeds down the bottom left corner of the painting allowing for transparency. It’s in moments like these where Whitney seems to harken back to his earlier paintings of the 1980s and ‘90s. Using a loose geometry and a range of natural color, Whitney has found a way around the static grid that neither negates it or simply repeats it. It is a playful response, a cartooning of the grid.

And cartooning is most evident in the drawings. In Untitled (2013), Whitney scribbles, scrawls, draws sharp verticals or horizontals and even swirling curlie-cues all in crayon.They all conform to the grid like structure, the bands, and vignettes, but the language of his line is buoyant and playful and nearly collapses a sense of structure at all. The drawings elicit a whimsical quality not often seen in abstract painting.

I first encountered Whitney’s early work in Raphael Rubinstein’s survey, “Reinventing Abstraction” at Cheim and Read in 2013. In the early ‘80s, David Reed and Jack Whitten famously found new technologies and employed theoretical or synthetic color to definitive aims, resulting in new discoveries. Meanwhile, Whitney was forming out of color field painting and gestural abstraction. With loosely scrawled or drawn gestures painted wet into wet and in partial grid-like formations, the frenetic energy of these early works burst with individual intensity, as if pulsating from within. A change of focus subsequently saw color begin to dominate the language and gesture to take a more secondary role. The show at Lisson Gallery has bothtendencies on display. Nearly a survey, it spans some 22 years of paintings and drawings. A good example of his mid-career work is Untitled, (1996) in which Whitney employs the same basic compositional structures that would come to form his mature work but including distinctly colored grounds to form the underpainting for each rectangle. Flatly painted opaque layers of light blues, white, pale yellows, bright reds and deep blacks all act as placeholders for painterly activity. Inside these self-contained vignettes, Whitney’s hand is incredibly evident, deft, and robust. His brushwork is gestural, at other times drips or stains in a variety of bright oranges, creamy yellows, and grass greens to punctuate the intensity of the darker grounds. Alternatively, crimson reds, Pthalo greens and cobalt blues contrast the lighter grounds. It is one of themost lively paintings in this show.

Whitney’s paintings indicate a deep lineage back to Philip Guston and other giants of the New York School, while also pivoting in a new direction, towards territory uniquely his own, one that collapses subject and object, color and form and mesh into inseparable space.

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