January 7 to April 3, 2021
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

Albers and Morandi, an exceedingly handsome, thought provoking show, probes the surprising affinities between two very different mid-20th-century artists. Walking through its large rooms of small, widely spaced works, one senses a distillation of distillations, so to speak, as well as a gathering argument about the surprisingly fragile division between the abstract and the observed. If we ever needed persuasion on this point, this exhibition will convince, even if some paintings make a more compelling case than others.

The works of Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) fall on opposite sides of the abstraction/representation divide, of course, but that’s just the beginning of their differences. Their entire relationship to paint could seem hardly more divergent. Morandi’s fleet brushstrokes delight in the viscosity of paint; Albers’ smooth surfaces downplay any evidence of human application. Morandi’s shapes melt into rich, atmospheric depths; Albers’s never stray from hard-edged precision. But similarities abound, too. Both artists worked most comfortably on a small scale, and preferred reductive palettes and compact, centered compositions. Moreover, they shared a certain temperament, evident in the patient determination and quiet vigor that equally animate their work.

Born into a family of craftspeople in Bottrop, Germany, Albers was hired in 1922 to teach at the Bauhaus as a stained-glass artist. With the rise of Nazism he moved to the U.S., teaching first at the fabled Black Mountain College, and then settling in for a long stint at Yale, where he wrote what was to become a standard text for art and design classes, “Interactions of Color.” His early stain-glass experience may have influenced his approach to color; his classes endlessly explored, with scraps of colored paper, the internal, abstracted light of juxtaposed hues. He was particularly intrigued by the illusion of transparency created by placing a sheet of just the right color over another one.

All but one of his nearly two dozen paintings in the exhibition belong to the “Homage to the Square” series, the nested-squares compositions that engaged him after 1948. In person, their color proves surprisingly emotive, and describable only – despite the artist’s penchant for the abstract – in real-life terms. The outer, surrounding square of a painting from 1973, for instance, acts like a dense, rust-colored frame, holding sturdily in space before giving way to delicate, central cloud-like grays. The centers of two other, side-by-side paintings suggest a pale cardboard box in shadow; behind them spreads a depthless, James Turrell-like aqua-blue. (Surely, even if abstract, the blue is behind?) At first, the two paintings look identical, but a second glance shows the blue-green to be slightly warmer, the tan barely darker, in one; labels indicate they were painted fully eight years apart. Albers’s drawing, too, hints at spatial depth: his compression of the squares towards the lower edge of every painting evokes a kind of proscenium, viewed from a point one third of the way up the painting’s height.

Morandi‘s life suggests a similar mix of modesty and rigor. Sharing an apartment with his three sisters, he hardly ever left his hometown Bologna except for summer stays in the neighboring hills. After a few early flirtations with Cubism and Metaphysical painting, he turned to more realistic landscapes and, especially, the luminous still life paintings celebrated today for the maximal light they extract from minimally modeled objects. To facilitate his muted color harmonies, Morandi famously pre-painted many of these bottles, boxes, and pitchers; a certain pre-planning is also evident in their carefully aligned tops and vertical intervals. Like Albers a devoted teacher, he taught etching for many years. The exhibition includes nine of his still life etchings, which preserve, in a busier crosshatching technique, much of his painting’s atmospheric depth.

Morandi’s dozen paintings include his “Still life with white bottle and small blue bottle” (1955), which deftly captures the conversation between two utterly different verticals: a stoutly fluted vase, barely but tangibly differentiated in its creamy lightness from the background, and a petite, spindly, dark blue vial. Colors tell us how they occupy space. Pressures of hue ebb and swell, on objects and spaces alike, so that every square inch urges a single impression: buoyant vase and its small, jewel-like descendant. In another robust painting, from 1957, repeating verticals spell out the rapport between three slender bottles and a pitcher. Overlapping in subtly shifting colors, the bottles lead the eye incrementally to a final splash of blue – a pitcher, familiar from other paintings, but reduced now to a crucial foil to the volumes in front. One moves palpably among the bottles, as through a copse of trees.

Albers’s compact rhythms serve as an effective, if unsubtle, framework for color investigations. For Morandi they feel more like elegant tethers for his continuous massaging of space. But their purposes overlap. Linger with the paintings in “Albers and Morandi,” and a peculiar realization sets in: one need only zoom in on one of Albers’s “proscenia,” adopt a slightly higher point of view – and, yes, add the cadences of observed light – and one comes intriguingly close to the intimate, contained energy of a Morandi. The greatest revelation of “Albers and Morandi,” in fact, may be its affirmation of the paradox of painting: every brushstroke is both pigment and a sensation in a parallel reality.

Arguably, the installation over-produces this revelation. At two points a single painting by each artist is centered, alone, on a vast wall. The effect is striking – the ultimate tribute to an artwork, befitting a tiny Raphael predella panel or van Eyck painting, either of which could hold up to hundreds of square feet of white. But can a painting by Albers or Morandi? Even though both fully pursued a vision of painting, neither probed its full potential; their inspirations were drawn out, elaborated, and put back, so to speak, in the same reliable box of centered and repeating horizontals and verticals. When Albers ventures “outside the box” with his non-square “Untitled (Variant/Adobe)” (1958), the asymmetric rhythms open the door to new contradictions across the surface: large vs small, expansive vs condensed, here vs there, and we may think wistfully of Mondrian’s more daring rhythms. Similarly, while Morandi’s most enthralling works make ordinary objects appear startlingly new and real, he just as often settles for the look of the impactful — those insightfully aligned bottles! — rather than its realization in a momentum of forms. Bonnard, for all his technical meanderings, more vitally located his still life objects.

But then, isn’t painting necessarily an unending quest? The exhibition’s subtitle, “Never Finished,” implies as much – and leaves one wondering what the “finish line”’ might be. My own vote would be for a painting that equally embraced the dynamics of abstraction and the complex veracity of representation, using each to inform and propel the other, to come up with something as potent, lucid, and essential as – well, a painting by Chardin, the eighteenth-century still life painter so admired by Matisse and Picasso. Dare we hope for a contemporary equivalent? That would be a painting holding up to any wall.

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September 16 – October 8, 2020
87 South Euclid Avenue
Montauk, New York
bckfineartsgallery.com

In Montauk, NY, BCK Fine Arts is no longer the only commercial gallery in town: Chase Contemporary and South Etna, new COVID-era ouposts of Manhattan dealers, , opened their doors in July. . Out on the tip of Long Island, masks and outdoor receptions are the new norm, but at least the art is on view, in the flesh.

BCK’s recent offering, “Fathers and Daughters”, presents an especially appealing picture of the close relationships and shared enthusiasms of four painters. As recounted by one of the daughters, Elizabeth Kresch, the connections originated one fateful day in the early 1940s, when  a stranger – Leland Bell — stopped her father, Al Kresch, as he carried a canvas along a Greenwich Village street. The two men struck up conversation, and from ensuing shared passions for painting and jazz sprang a lifelong comraderie. Over the years, friendship swelled to include wives and daughters that were (or were to become) accomplished artists in their own right.

The wives, as the exhibition title suggests, are not included in the exhibition.  But this still leaves many paintings to savor by fathers Albert Kresch (b.  1922) and Leland Bell (1922 -1911), and daughters Elizabeth Kresch (b. 1971) and Temma Bell (b. 1945).

Each is represented in BCK’s light-filled space by several works ranging in subject matter from figure studies to landscape and still life. An aesthetic of painterly modernism prevails, with energized colors pacing abstracted compositions. One can detect the influences of Hans Hofmann (with whom Albert Kresch and Temma Bell’s mother Louisa Matthiasdottir studied) and Jean Hélion (a much-admired friend of the two fathers).

What does the selection tell us about paternal influences or generational differences? Arguably, the fathers, especially in their most abstracted work, show signs of being driven to define the historic moment: What does our time demand? What’s the most cogent use of tradition?. How to honor what nature presents to the eye? But the overall tenor of the show is of intergenerational fervor, fueled by independent encounters with forms and colors. Considering the shifting terrain of the art world during the decades these paintings were produced, they reveal a poignant faith in a particular kind of observation-based modernism.

At a glance, differences between the four painters stand out. Temma Bell’s brushy naturalism differs strikingly from her father’s outlined, planar attack; Elizabeth Kresch’s earthy renderings of light contrast with the feathery, atmospheric depth of her father’s more recent work.

But variations within each artist’s work are also evident. Except for the youngest painter, Elizabeth Kresch, the work on view of each artist spans decades – a full 65 years in the case of her father – and this allows intriguing glimpses of personal evolutions of thought. Several luminous Al Kresch landscapes from the last two decades suggest, with their layered darks and lights, the moody radiance of Georges Rouault. By contrast, a crisply geometric still life from 1998 recalls Hélion – a connection more than superficial, thanks to its animated journey through color, from a plate’s deep ultramarine rim, to a pitcher’s mild cobalt blue, to the jewel-like cerulean glow of shadowed fabric.

The thick, robust paint strokes of Temma Bell’s 1970 self-portrait become thinner in her more recent works, yet the impulse of color remain just as strong – and indeed, achieve a kind of austere grandness in an Icelandic landscape from 1981, in which a mountain range, carved by light into delicate gray-purples and deep blues, separates pulses of clouds and shimmers of sea.

Leland Bell’s predilection for black outlines, which are liable to dominate any first impression of his work, are barely evident in a small landscape from 1975, in which colors alone prove capable of locating, feelingly, every element.

And while Elizabeth Kresch’s work spans fewer years, it too reflects shifts of perception. Her small shoreline scene from 2016, with clouds rolling brightly above a wharf’s dark horizontal, contrasts strikingly with a five-foot-tall painting from 2020 of a young woman, clad in a radiant red dress, stretching lithely before a brilliant white wall.

Exiting the gallery, and absorbing once more the ocean air and low skyline of Montauk bungalows, one is reminded of life’s continuity, even in these strange times.  With a last glimpse, through the gallery window, of Leland Bell’s “Family Group with Teapot” (1980) – its figures rising with startling gravity, their hands resolving the movements of arms in wondrous, articulated dances – one may believe that life is not simply continuous, it’s unstoppable.

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February 25 to April 2, 2016
724 5th Avenue, 4th Floor
New York City, 212 755 2828

What does it mean to paint representationally? For a Photorealist, it means a point-by-point recapitulation: the fixed, dispassionate vantage point of a camera. For a more tradition-minded painter, it involves a weighting of masses and details, an eliding of some elements and emphasizing of others: in short, a process of limitless characterization. Such a painting can end up anywhere on the spectrum of complexity, from bare minimalism to baroque embellishment. But a convincing traditional representation depends most of all on making elements count — on a disposition of forms that gives weight to masses, tension to gestures, and a resolving energy to detail.

Lois Dodd, as her admirers know, is a painter who makes things count. For over six decades, she has presented unassuming subjects — typically her garden and interior scenes — in singularly taut compositions animated by circumstances of time, light, and point of view.

Her latest exhibition at Alexandre, titled “Night and Day,” reveals that at age 89 she still isn’t missing a step. Among a series of night-time urban window views, 15 Night Windows (2016) stands out for the somber glow of its dark hues: the inky, cool mass of a building close to one side — more a looming essence than a dimensional object — and the barely lighter, warmer façade beyond, with spacious blue-violets of sky above. All these elements feel fully colorful even though occupying only a tiny range of extreme darks. Setting off their spacious depths, the crisp horizontal and vertical crosspieces of a window bisect the image. As a concept, the painting intrigues, but thanks to Dodd’s weighting with color, it takes on a sensuous mystery.

Most paintings depict daytime scenes, and in these, too, color is always a factor. Cherry Blossoms + Gray Sky (2015), a study of tree trunks, seems at a glance monochromatic. But one soon senses tiny shifts of color in the trunks, as they wend with occasional, slight bends from panel bottom to top. Strings of tiny white and green dots waft across the panel, poignantly measuring out the trunks’ rise.

The natural beauty of Dodd’s subjects often acquire an obtuse edge. In Apple Tree through Barn Window, September (2015), for example, an askew window sash angles rudely across a window view of flamboyant orange-reds and greens, as if to deny any foothold to the merely picturesque.

Occasionally — as in the large canvas Night House with Lit Window (2012) — colors tend to fill, rather than amplify, the dynamics of the drawing. But throughout the exhibition one repeatedly comes across odd moments made compelling: the grid of variously clouded panes in “Steamed Window” (1980) that progress around the canvas like images on a photographer’s contact sheet; the spindly, flowering plants, as gawky as teen-agers, crowding the center of Jerusalem Artichokes, September (2015); the lone flash of pink in Pink Towel + Chicken House, June (2015), suspended from a clothesline by two tiny corners — themselves framed, above and below, by a mounding bush and the racing outline of a shed.

In such paintings we experience not the charm of the picturesque, but the confluence of two sovereign forces: nature, and color-forms on a canvas. It’s tempting to think of Dodd’s as their intermediary, both mischievous match-maker and dauntless midwife. It’s a tall order, when you think about it. But isn’t that the lot of the artist? The possibilities for characterization are limitless.

The post As Agile As Ever: Lois Dodd at Alexandre appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 17, 2015
724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City, (212) 262-5050

In her still life paintings, Susan Jane Walp exhibits a unique way of blending the delicate with the dynamic, and the empathetic with the strategic. The artist clearly has a predilection for square, nearly symmetrical compositions viewed from above, with a single colorful object – a bowl of blueberries, or half of a sliced orange – placed icon-like at center. Supporting the bowl physically, and visually surrounding it, there might be a sheet or two of paper, accompanied by a kitchen knife, scrunchie or other familiar object. Though subtle in color and modeling, her paintings hum with a singleness of purpose.

The artist renders all of these atmospherically, so that an airy depth seems to hover around her objects. Small movements acquire a palpable dimension: the lip of a bowl rises sturdily above a handful of nuts, and one can almost hear the rustling of the papers beneath. These images feel devotional, but in an artistic rather than clerical fashion. Walp seems dedicated ultimately less to symbolism than to the manner in which forms emerge as momentous optical events.

Walp’s fifth show with Tibor de Nagy is the first to concentrate on works on paper. On close inspection, a number of the paintings reveal a slightly looser approach, with brushier marks and portions of the ground showing through the brushstrokes. But their attitude closely follows that of the artist’s paintings on canvas. Walp’s strongest suit remains her empathy for her subjects and her gift for characterizing them with color and discreet detail, and these animate the nearly square and symmetrical painting Three Zinnias in a Glass of Water (2012), with its vivid portrayal of blossoms – swirling pressures of orange tints and deeper reds — that shift like small galaxies above the reflecting facets of a vase.

Some works, however, depart from the usual square format. Gerbera I (2014) captures with especial vigor the effect of a single flower sprouting through space. And, more strikingly, some of the recent works completely cast aside the strategy of near-symmetry. In several, oppositions of objects across the surface replace the concentric arrays. In Glass Vase with Etruscan Kantharos and Drapery (2014), for example, two objects – a bowl with long, diverging twin handles, and a narrow-necked vase – compete from either side to dominate the center. The artist has reduced her palette to grayed blue-greens and earth hues, but she has made every one of them count. Weighted by their particular density of color, each movement takes on a subtle pictorial urgency. The extravagant gestures of the bowl handles, stretching through space, encounter and barely overtake the broader, sturdier arc of a background fabric on one side, and the rim of the vase – a thin ellipse, tightening beneath the handle’s swoop – on the other. The objects become distinct, not through illustrational methods but, rather, through the counter-play of their internal energies.

At a few points in the exhibition, the strategizing of forms eclipses their actual rhythmic potential: a vase’s brim may coincide, all too statically, with the top of a box. Occasionally colors depict rather than embody pictorial events. But the best paintings here confirm what we may have already suspected of Walp’s work, which is that its power derives not from a strategy of centered, symmetric arrays but through something more intuitive: a comprehension of the rhythmic character of her subjects. This would be a painter’s truest kind of devotion, not one of merely assigning symbols of significance but of uncovering the momentousness of the purely visual.

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October 2 to November 15, 2014
41 East 57th Street (corner Madison Avenue)
New York City, 212-755-2828

Few painters have expanded the original impulses of Abstract Expressionism in more directions than John Walker. During the course of his half-century of painting, he has incorporated into his canvases written poetry verses, concise renderings of skulls and allusions to both aboriginal art and the old masters. He has pushed painting’s material limits, employing shaped canvases and large-scale collage techniques, and mixing all manner of ingredients into his paint: gels, chalk dust, and more recently, mud. But his biggest departure from “classic Ab-Ex” may be his reliance on the perceived world. Although moodily abstracted, his images from the last decades have been consistently inspired by observations of the real. His urgent strokes and brooding color, moreover, reveal a certain discipline of form; their forces build in ways that create discrete, tangible presences in his paintings – a feat of internal composition that hints as much of European modernism as the New York School. If the artist is an Abstract Expressionist, he’s an unusually worldly one.

For more than a decade, Walker has investigated a particular slice of the observed:  the view from his studio in Seal Point, Maine.  From the foot of a cove it overlooks a dramatic panorama, with fingers of land cutting across the vast meeting of water and sky. The tides, which alternately cover and expose wide mud flats, add to the shifting effects of light, time and weather. This disequilibrium seems to suit Walker, who says he chooses to work in the least scenic spot, one strewn with washed-in garbage. Even so, his recent paintings at Alexandre Gallery suggest the artist has reached, career-wise, a kind of personal equilibrium. The palette for his large canvases has become lighter, and their compositions more lucid. Gone are some of the more extravagant forays, including the skulls and written texts – the mud remains – as if the broad spaces and limpid light were sufficient fuel for his painting. The work at Alexandre falls mostly into two categories: six- or seven-foot tall canvases, and paintings on discarded bingo cards just over seven inches high.  All are vertical in format and boast a high horizon above a spreading plane of water/earth.

Most of the large canvases are divided into contrasting planes of parallel, sometimes zigzagging, lines. Often they include one or two realistic tokens of the actual scene: an island covered with trees, the small circle of a sun or moon. These paintings manage to convey nature’s immensity even as they mangle its topography. In “The Sea No. II” (2014), for instance, a large, white shield-like shape, articulated by vertical green stripes, hangs before horizontally striped deep blues. The energy of the forms is clear, even if their perspectival relationships aren’t; it represents a point of land intruding weightily upon the water’s spreading surface. At the top, a red sun tips into an unlikely indentation in the horizon. A sprouting of greens interrupts the blue halfway up the canvas. The lower half of the shield-form has the rough texture of mixed-in earth, grounding it metaphorically. But the metaphor isn’t really necessary: one senses land against shimmering expanse, the remoteness of sun and sky, and the isolation of a tree-covered island. One absorbs the usual paradox of painting, of material representations of the immaterial. But one experiences something else, as well – a representation made especially vital through abstract means.

Other large canvases introduce different elements. A snowfall of white or beige patches descends through three canvases; in another, tentacle-like arms stream across blue of water. At times the artist’s generalizing or repetition of forms suggests a “problem-solving” approach – the studious application of a workset of ideas. But this hardly diminishes their overall power, and the small paintings on bingo cards – over a dozen of which line one wall – are a delight.  All of these tiny works size up broad scenes with startling immediacy. Walker’s marks dash about and dot their surfaces in a frenzy, in a wider array of colors – emerald blue-greens, grass-greens, blazing oranges and subtler reds in some, ochres and browns in others – as well as freer and more profuse detail.  A thickly brushed, rather obtuse white form dominates most of the images, angling tensely across the ground’s receding horizontals. In some, a cluster of greens becomes, palpably, a tree rooted at a specific distance; in others, a sprinkling of dots could be tiny figures on an immense plain. A minority of the marks are recognizable as objects, but all read as presences in the almost mystically deep and bright spaces. Though painted on humblest of supports, the colors and forms capture the primal experience of land meeting sky, and the artist seems to experience it anew each time.

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It’s a common refrain among artists: to really get to know a painting, you have to see it in the flesh. The subtle shifts of color, the physicality of the paint, and the impact of its full dimensions — none of these can be replicated on screen or in print. All, however, count among the most elemental properties of painting, and for some artists, their qualities are so complex and subtle that they warrant a lifetime of study.

Geoffrey Dorfman is clearly such an artist. His paintings — produced through a discipline of constant improvisation — possess a bodily presence, a fleshiness, all their own. Talking about painting with Dorfman, one senses that for him it is not just a calling but a moral commitment. Gestures of paint have weight, colors have substance, and the two inform each other. “Color and texture are not separate,” the artist maintains. “Painting stands absolutely against disembodied color.”

Words will forever fall short in conveying the visual and tactile expressions of painting. Yet it seems safe to say that, for Dorfman the first gestures of paint start the hope of uncovering meaningful forms; the gathering flux confirms and strengthens these forms’ identities, and if all goes well, the forms become real — not as references to the external and literal, but according to the energies of paint itself. (“The painting is telling you exactly what it needs.”) It’s a process of incited accidents in which painter and paint are accomplices.

No surface in a Dorfman canvas remains static. Areas that seem at first an even glow of color turn out to be layers of inter-brushed pigments. The quality of space continuously changes; a portion of a canvas may seem like a close-up, shallow, clear-running stream, or as deep as an alpine lake or a hall of mirrors — though one suspects that the artist would reject even such lyrical allusions to the external.

In Pink Cabinet, condensations of forms punctuate a background of tawny green-browns. One’s eye — or really, one’s mind — wants to impose the familiar: an area could be darkening due to a cast shadow, and a “ground plane” lightening up because of vagaries of illumination. But such imaginings soon dance away in the sheer ineluctability of paint, which ranges in texture from buttery, knife-skimmed surfaces to lumpy coagulations to thin, canvas-revealing brushstrokes. Colors hum from within these turgid textures: a curl of intense white tops a sturdy, deep mauve; wandering greens incise a hard, pure yellow; oranges and greens streak in ethereal layers. (These may be Dorfman’s “shape wannabees” — forms half-emerging from the depths.) Spreading across the surface in a kind of urgent play, each element somehow remains mindful of others as well as the canvas edges.

Dorman likes to compare painting to following a thread through a labyrinth. One proceeds as best one can, but the way is never sure: “The thread breaks; you pick up the wrong thread.” Viewing a group of his canvases together, one is particularly struck by their divergent paths. Iolas follows an entirely different color scheme than Cabinet, with a dense, pink-beige background irradiated in places by an underlying yellow. Arrayed around the top and left of this canvas are a series of small, tightly drawn arcs and angling lines, some containing contrasting pulses of color. Each hue reacts to the ground in different fashion: a brilliant yellow, though close in tone, lifts aloofly; purples sink as anchoring notes; whites converse among themselves, some floating as thick, opaque strokes of paint, others revealing themselves (up close) as bare parts of canvas. Other paintings — Sun Scratch, Portal, and Inez — take a very different tack, turning to denser all-over tapestries of color.

In some canvases, faint, window-like patterns cordon off a section, momentarily redefining a few square inches as an escape, and the surrounding ones as a confining interior. Such an incident occurs in Augury, but it’s a subtle sideshow within the larger drama of merging purple and green tides, whose collision sets off a series of curious events, including a pair of misaligned blue-green half-circles and an irregular bull’s-eye of concentric polygons, ”a shard within a shard.” Across this same canvas, two pale rectangles — one a lightly limned outline, the other a gap between broad, thick brushstrokes — elicit contrary states of presence and absence.

The primal forces in Dorfman’s paintings seem at once alien and familiar. They contain animated spaces, without any kind of fixed topography; a sense of internal scale without preconceived notions of height, width or depth; presences without the usual distinctions — so crucial to our everyday perceptions—between object and void. We must dig deeper than our usual cognitive powers to come to grips with these canvases. But they compel us to try, as we follow best we can the thread left by the artist who preceded us, searching countless paths. “You have order. You depart from the order. Then you come back to it.”

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January 23 to March 1, 2014
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
(The Fuller Building, 13th Floor)
New York City, 212-755-2828

Something mysterious happens when a painter commits impressions of nature to canvas. Even though the act of painting involves reductions—simplifications of form, omissions of detail—expressiveness is liable to expand. For an artist liberated by this re-ordering (and the best are), a richness of vision supplants the sheer plenitude of nature. Lois Dodd is clearly such an artist, and her latest paintings at Alexandre shows that even after six decades of exhibiting she hasn’t missed a step.

The thirty, mostly small paintings of houses, landscapes and flowers reflect her familiar, idiosyncratic outlook: the probing, often mischievous curiosity about the appearance of ordinary objects, and the peculiarities of translating them to a flat surface. As always, Dodd hides none of her process, rendering masses in broad planes that serve as foils for agile, darting detail.

In March Snow (2013), the artist captures the minimalist scene of a neighbor’s dormer window—glimpsed, apparently, from her own second-story window—with confident color and an appealing lack of decorum. The pale, dense yellow of the facade gives way to a slightly more neutral—but somehow vastly open—yellow of sky. Nature elaborates on this pas de deux, and Dodd relates: scraggly branches reach upwards beyond the house, while snowflakes filter downwards in the space between it and our point of view. Red Shirt and Window (2013) relishes the sight of a clothesline-suspended shirt, scrawny but exuberant, against the great, mounding arc of a bush.

Riddles of details punctuate the unfolding prose of Window with Amaryllis Plant (2012). A slender, green stalk winds sinuously in front of a house’s austere verticals. A conversation circulates between a window sash lock, the house’s chimney, and a twist of yellow-green in the flowerpot—all equal in dimensions on the surface, but thoroughly apart in space.

The exhibition includes nearly a dozen close-up paintings of flowers —floral portraits, really. In some of these, an evenness of color imparts a handsome, if not particularly urgent, graphic effect. More compelling is Bishop’s Children & Monarch Butterfly (2007), in which the variety and density of color impart a dramatic depth; the uppermost blossom hovers with vivacious breadth.

In fact, it’s the paintings with the densest designs and colors that reward the most. These include Foxglove and Wheelbarrow (2006), in which broad swathes of green—of various temperatures, and lightened in places by thinned brushstrokes—silhouette a wheelbarrow’s crisp, shadowed forms. It holds midway between a foreground blossom—close enough to touch—and a sky that hangs distantly despite its patchy texture of steely grays. In Barn and Bean Vines (2013), a far-away building, resting among small eruptions of trees, is dominated by the fantastically sculpturesque column of a bean vine in the foreground. With these paintings, Dodd is in her element, shaping complex rhythms with playful ease. They exude an affection for nature that never resorts to sentiment, and an occasional archness that never descends to the merely coy.

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Charles Cajori, who passed away December 1, personified a kind of painter that has become increasingly rare, one who was not only highly accomplished and acclaimed as an artist, but extraordinarily generous and accessible as well. His enthusiasm for painting was contagious, and seemingly limitless; he valued his time in the studio, and discussions about art, far more than the machinations of the art scene. Painting was the immediate and consuming passion of his life, one he hoped to share. At this he succeeded, as he leaves behind a remarkable body of work and numerous peers and students inspired by his way of seeing.

Cajori was among the last of a generation to remember a New York art scene that was small, personal, and idealistic. Painting was a calling rather than a vocation for the Abstract Expressionists, all of whom Cajori knew firsthand. (A sign of the openness of the era is that when he met Franz Kline in a coffee shop on 8th Street he was promptly invited to Kline’s studio.) Teaching at Berkeley in 1959-60, Cajori regularly joined Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff in figure drawing sessions.  Cajori’s official accomplishments would fill a long list. They include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Jimmy Ernst Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and NEA and Fulbright grants. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, the Corcoran and the Hirschhorn. One suspects, however, that he took just as much satisfaction in collaborative work with other artists, such as his co-founding of the famed Tanager Gallery, and serving as a founding faculty member of the New York Studio School.

Hearing Cajori talk, one soon realized that painting for him was an almost mystical pursuit. It demanded an almost spiritual awareness of the process of seeing, and fearlessness about adapting to its ever-changing demands. While he painted a number of landscapes in the 50s, his real focus was on the figure—more specifically, how the viewer related to the human form within an environment. In his drawings, lines charge and angle about the surface, enclosing portions of the figure in an arabesque capturing an impressively complete and spacious account of his subject. One senses not just a human form in space, with weight and illumination, but also one’s physical relationship to that person. In his paintings, colors shift within these planes of drawing, adding a new urgency of rhythm as well as a particular quality of light. For me, the results were a striking paradox: paintings with the intimate glow of Persian miniatures, but redrawn and expanded by New York School gestures.

In these works, contingency became all, context of location everything. A Sonny Rollins fan, he sought to bring the improvisational freedom of jazz to painting. He strove not to fashion a product, or even to complete a project, but to unlock the very process of visual comprehension. In a 2002 interview  with art historian, writer, and curator Jennifer Samet, he elaborated:

Central to my notion of perception is the smallness of the focal area. We see barely a dime’s worth in one shot. In order to see something, our eyes move. As soon as they start moving, everything begins to become subject to that journey.

For Cajori, the possibility of seizing the truth lay in cohering these movements—the “interstices” of space.

Three years ago, Cajori submitted a statement for E. Ashley Rooney’s book, 100 Artists of New England (Schiffer Publishing, 2011) that accompanied several images of his work. Concise and eloquent, Cajori’s words could serve as the summation of a life’s philosophy, and a year later, at his suggestion, it was reprinted in the catalog for his last solo show in New York, at David Findlay, Jr. In full, the statement reads:

First is the acknowledgment of chaos: its contradictions and wayward forces. Then the struggle for coherence. Not a coherence of illusion but one of time and space—of form. The mode of attack is improvisational, multileveled, and non-rational. The resulting structures may seem complete, but they contain a hint of another stage. New attacks are called for. Structures evolve endlessly.

Cajori’s search may have been endless, but he has left a permanent legacy, in his work and the fond and grateful memories of his fellow artists.

Stephen Ellis, who studied with Cajori at the New York Studio School in the early 1970s, offers this recollection of his pedagogical approach.

The Studio School faculty in 1973 was a collection of Technicolor personalities. Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Mercedes Matter, Leland Bell, Reuben Nakian were all charismatic figures who dominated a classroom effortlessly. But, it seemed these luminaries burned brightest in groups. Charles Cajori was different: a specialist in the individual studio visit. Perhaps this was because he excelled at one of the hardest parts of teaching– listening. Paying attention to a student’s often naive hopes and dreams requires discipline and a humility born of remembering one’s own fledgling self. Cajori’s patience and empathy made his studio visits moments of respite in what often felt like a clash of titanic egos.

As I remember him forty years ago, he was tallish and lanky, with a distinctive grace of speech and manner, not patrician, exactly, more like a courtly country doctor. Arriving in the studio, Cajori would listen patiently to the student complaint, examine the suffering canvas, and take as much time as needed to arrive at the proper diagnosis. He was a holistic healer. Rather than pick the work apart piece by piece, he sussed out its determining logic and treated that. It was implicit in his approach that each painting was a system that would never work in detail until its larger structure functioned properly. He spoke mostly of formal matters in Hofmannesque terms. The construction of pictorial space through the architecture of color planes was key. If the planes were arranged to articulate whatever idea of space governed the painting and the color harmonized to express its implicit concept of light, then it had a fighting chance of emerging from the creative process in coherent form.

This old-fashioned formal approach may sound somewhat shallow, but when applied with Cajori’s level of skill and sensitivity, it yielded results. His kind of teaching might be compared to behavioral therapy, as opposed to the psychoanalytic deconstruction practiced by some professors. His touch was light, Hippocratic in spirit–first do no harm—but it was effective, and under his guidance paintings would invariably progress. When he arrived, it seemed there might be hope for the patient after all. I was very grateful for that and I remain grateful for the diagnostic tools he taught by example how to apply for myself.

The post Intimist Glow, Expansive Gestures: Charles Cajori (1921-2013) appeared first on artcritical.

October 9, 2013 to January 5, 2014
(Closed December 23 to January 1)
Various streets around the Lower East Side

Barbara is back on the streets of New York for her annual visit. She has been roaming the Lower East Side this frosty season, picking a new sidewalk each day.  Admission is free, and her legal occupancy (though not posted) would seem to be about three grown adults.   Taking a break for the holidays, her Big Apple tour ends January 5.

As before, the art on display within Barbara’s steel shell is surprisingly understated and delicate. Softly illuminated in niches lit by light bouncing off the pavement, the eight works on display, as Gates is happy to explain, are drawn from two series of works that he painted on small steel panels: the “Meander” series, composed of geometric, tessellated designs inspired by Egyptian art, and the “Seasons” series, which depicts simplified, suggestive images —a reindeer, a hand holding a blossoming plant, and (somewhat more ominously) a pair of handcuffs. Within the confines of “Barbara,” surrounded by the muffled rumble of passing trucks, the quiet precision of these works, with their thoughtful, somewhat otherworldly aspect, acquire a wistful resolve. Like “Barbara’s” physical location, the artworks change every day: perhaps the ultimate example of the gallery experience being brought to the people.

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New York Studio School
June 6 to July 20, 2013
8 West 8th Street
New York City, 212-673-6466

Currently gracing the walls of the New York Studio School gallery are the paintings of two accomplished mid-career artists who both paint abstracted images inflected by elements of the real. Their philosophies of painting, however, are very different. Filling one of the gallery’s two rooms, Eve Aschheim’s small canvases reveal a process of steady probing, with fine lines and carefully considered shapes set against smoothed layerings of white; suggestive but never descriptive, her forms accrue as a kind of cerebral poetry.  In the second room, the surfaces of Ying’s Li’s small to moderate-sized canvases swirl with thick strokes of paint applied in every color and tone; her subjects are far more readily apparent—one experiences coastlines, still lifes, landscapes—but these emerge through torrents of struggle. The inspired pairing highlights the fact that two painters, pursuing their art with equal ardor, can reveal utterly different notions of the rigorous.

Aschheim’s canvases hum with the allusive potential of marks: indications of motion, presences—or, perhaps more accurately, situations—arising out of subtly reworked, almost pearly depths. Lines radiate and scatter, or sift in fragments through space. Everywhere one senses the artist’s diligent attention. What might a line do here? What would it say to this form here? The viewer absorbs this process of richly accumulating associations: the openness and searching of scattered lines; the conversations between paired forms, the transience evoked by scraped-down surfaces. The separate sensations gather as mysterious, multivalent impressions. Sometimes a title reinforces the effect, as in Pinch (2013), where a vertical passage of white succinctly clips lines angling across the canvas’s width. Lines intersecting like cross hairs, and horizontal flairs of pink and yellow, take on added intensity when one realizes another painting, also from 2013, bears the title “Bullet”.

If Aschheim’s paintings are meditative probings, Ying Li’s are voluptuous declarations. It is her turgid technique that initially catches the eye, but underlying this is a strong sense of the pictorial weight of colors and forms. Each color pressurizes the adjacent ones while drawing energizes these intervals within the canvases’ rectangle. In a painting like North Chatham (Andy’s Path) (2011), one sequence—an elusive blue-green gray, a brilliant, acidic yellow-green, a richly absorbent bluish-black—anchor the impression of a foreground tree arching momentously about a path’s distant bend. Even where the subject barely emerges from the maelstrom of paint, as in Winter Lilies of Hanover #1 (2012), plastic forces continue to articulate: a vacant greenish-white holds before our eyes, a hard pinkish-white props itself above, and together they shunt a variety of sturdy blues into remote depths below. Rather than presenting scenarios, Li’s paintings embody them. This eloquence of form, however, is doubly camouflaged: once by the paradoxical nature of the best representational painting—from Chardin to Picasso—which locates a subject‘s inner character ultimately in abstract forces; and secondly, by the seductive technique that may encourage some viewers to look no further.

For me, Aschheim’s works resonate as excursions in process whereas Li’s resound as experiences of form. I find Li’s approach closer to traditions pursued by Titian, Mondrian, and Matisse, and Aschheim’s closer to the contemporary interests in the semiotics of mark- and shape-making, with Malevich, Newman and Twombly, perhaps, as antecedents. In any event, the Studio School’s exhibition presents a memorable juxtaposition: Aschheim’s self-contained search for unbounded associations next to Li’s unbounded search within a self-contained language.

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