July 3 to 26, 2015
81 Partition Street
Saugerties, New York 1247

“Supreme Fiction,” the title of Catherine Howe’s strong show in upstate New York, likely refers to the amalgam of painterly surprise inherent in work that references both baroque effects and nature. The title also makes use of Michael Fried’s idea that painterly imagery does not have to come from a realist bent, being in some cases entirely imaginative in nature. Her paintings, which at times have attained the quality of low relief, use nature as a springboard for a highly active imagination. Her collection here, of monotypes and works done on canvas or Mylar, resist easy categorization but define a place that begins with the New York School and extends toward the past in its rococo impact and to the future in its fusion of imageries and contemporary materials (carborundum grit and polyester). The sweep of Howe’s hand is expansive and exuberant but also controlled; never fussy about the consequences of her brushwork, she also demonstrates a discipline that links her to art history in ways that intensify her audience’s viewing involvement.

Actually, pleasure is what one thinks of when facing these dynamic images. One black-and-white work, made of carborundum-infused acrylic on canvas, consists of flowers and bulbs that float in a sea of gesso white. Drips and thin skeins of paint actuate the rounded blooms and plant life; the effects of these nods to earlier abstract expressionists are actually muted to some extent by the sheer energy of the present tense, always active in Howe’s style. As a painter, she wants to give us the immediate beauty of what she depicts; this desire is evident in the roiling, tempestuous quality of her brushwork. Here, mostly blackened forms, which admit a gritty sparkle in certain light conditions, surround a white flowerlike crown in the upper center of the painting. The viewer has the sense that the painting exists as a passionate embrace of an esthetics based in nature. It consequently becomes clear that Howe’s high regard for nature brings her beyond mere quotation of expressionism, a movement that reached its zenith generations ago.

Even so, someone like Fairfield Porter serves to contextualize Howe’s efforts—despite the fact that their imageries are not related closely! His combination of brushy strokes and interest in the outside world finds a later reflection in her art. In the tall, reverse-painted Mylar work entitled Geisha (2015), she imparts a fiercely emotional treatment of a sunflower in a short vase, with other white blossoming shapes looming in the upper register against a blue background. The brushwork is strongly about feeling, made evident by the powerful intuitive forms that sprawl across the Mylar. Clearly, this work and the others in the show concern the performative aspect of painting just as much as they address issues of figuration and abstraction; Howe’s audience has the sense that these paintings exist as fields of play—being action paintings in the best sense of the word.

In the discussion I attended in late July with Howe and fellow painter Suzanne Joelson at Cross Contemporary Art, the primary word used was “gesture.” As a descriptive term, it certainly characterizes the main impulse behind Howe’s art, which is gestural in the extreme. The question facing the artist and those who support her work has to do with authenticity: at what point does history intervene and make the gestural image antiquated, even obsolete? To her credit, Howe has found ways of keeping the gesture alive, primarily by emphasizing the baroque impetuousness behind a lot of expressionist art. Even so, the problem of historic precedent needs to be addressed. Howe’s considerable technical skill allows her nearly to caricature the role of the sinuous brushstroke even as she makes it clear she is in love with the luxuriousness of such a style. But perhaps it can be said that her paintings encapsulate the conflict between a historically derived embellishment and the need to make things new—a requirement in today’s art, no matter what the origins of the impulse may be.

A monotype, mostly in yellow and red, seems to be about brushwork description. A blossoming crown on the top feels like an opportunity for Howe to paint demonstratively, while the bottom half of the composition consists of a pile of transparent brushwork, whose edges exist in red. Musical in its emotive impact, Rise (2015) delivers a punch that suggests both intensity of motive and cathartic skill. Howe, who has a home in upstate New York herself, shows that she is comfortable with the landscape and flora this part of the world consists of. She knows the public gardens of the area well, deriving inspiration from a nature that is actual rather than second-hand. In her work there is a liberating voice based on the artist’s willingness to work deliberately with beauty. While such an approach cannot be seen as utterly original, at the same time, in Howe’s hands, it must not be understood as mere quotation. She balances memory of previous art with a real need to display her own reading of contemporary life. Indeed, she thoroughly succeeds in doing so.

The post The Sweep of the Hand: Catherine Howe at Cross Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

Ching Ho Cheng: The Five Elements at Shepherd Gallery
April 7th through May 9th, 2015
58 East 79th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 4050

Likely the first American artist to prominently feature the selfie, Tseng Kwong Chi has already become an important figure in the history of contemporary American photography and performance history, even though he died of AIDS in 1990. His work is on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. And Ching Ho Cheng, not quite as well known in New York art circles, deserves equal status and recognition for his remarkable psychedelic paintings and torn-paper collages, which maintain a startling contemporaneity — this despite the fact that Cheng, too, died during the AIDS crisis in 1989. His work is currently being shown at Shepherd Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

The two shows demonstrate the fact that, early on, the art of Chinese expatriates in New York was not fully recognized, but this failure was not because of a lack of accomplishment. Indeed, Tseng and Cheng formed a nucleus of a small, but remarkable group of Chinese artists working here during the 1980s, including sculptor Ming Fay and multimedia artist and author Mary Ting. Their activities, begun well before the mania for Chinese art arrived, reflected the budding realities of being an Asian artist in the city’s varied cultural context.

Of the two, Tseng has received the most publicity as an originating participant among the Asian-American avant-garde. He also successfully connected with the downtown scene in the 1980s, becoming a close friend of graffiti artist Keith Haring. His black-and-white photographic art, in which he poses in a Mao suit alongside bohemian comrades or the world’s wonders, is a much a performance event as it is a documentary record.

In New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) (1979), Tseng offers a startlingly forceful image: he is seen jumping straight up into the air, towering over the graceful if slightly worn lines of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the great icons of New York City. As usual, Tseng wears his Mao jacket and dark sunglasses, His left hand, clenched into a fist, is raised high above the bridge — or so it seems, given the low perspective he uses in shooting the photograph. At the same time, he holds in his right hand the shutter-release cable that enables him to photograph himself.

As a picture, New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) is a visionary romance invoking the city and bridge, but it also announces the extent of Tseng’s ambition. It is clear here, and in Hollywood Hills, California (1979), in which the artist assumes a smart pose, looking upward on the left and wearing reflective sunglasses, with the famous Hollywood Sign in the background at right. Not only was Tseng posing as a prophetic tourist, he also was asserting the right of a Chinese immigrant to participate in the exclusive, fully American rite of passage through the appropriation of historical icons.

The situation for Cheng is comparable, but also different. In the late 1960s, he made psychedelic paintings: highly detailed and patterned works that feel like suspended music, more or less inspired by the great rock melodies, and the great guitar solos, of the period. One work in gouache and ink on rag board, Queenie Study (1968), feels like a spiral slowing moving downward, away from the viewer. The descent is accomplished through circles of red and black bands — dotted with myriad spermatozoa — which ring more and more tightly as the imagery moves toward the center of the composition.

One untitled work from 1987 consists of torn rag paper colored with iron oxide. A leaf-like piece of torn paper, coppery and regularly dotted with depressions that resemble craters, is placed upon another copper-colored sheet whose angle of placement can only be seen at the bottom of the composition. Cheng commits himself to imagery of more or less uncontestable beauty.

Cheng’s determination to create something memorable, even something exquisite, resonates in profound ways. An untitled canvas from 1988, created with iron and copper oxide, as well as acrylic paint, is stunning in its range of colors from gray to black to a fiery copper hue. On the upper left is a black egg-shape, done with acrylic; it balances the differing background colors, which are not directly legible as imagery.

A much earlier work, from 1979, is a very subtle study of a window’s shadow on the wall. Painted with gouache, it marvelously suggests impermanence. The windowpanes are rendered as being on an angle, with a single band or bar separating the two sheets of glass. The band and background are painted a gray-blue, and as a study, the painting is wonderfully satisfying, a kind of image we often see and remark upon, but never capture because of the mercurial nature of daylight shadows.

If Tseng and Cheng were merely pioneers as Chinese artists during a time of remarkable cultural change, their work would be less valuable even as it documented, both abstractly and figuratively, the spirit of that time. But these artists are highly intelligent; moreover, they are technically accomplished in their chosen mediums. Tseng’s photos are memorable in formal terms, just as Cheng’s paintings and torn-paper collages remain in the thoughts of his viewers at least partially for their excellent execution. One hopes that the lives of these two men will remain secondary in interest when the actual works are looked at and read for what they are: sophisticated artworks that hold the viewer’s attention.

In fact, Muna Tseng, sister of the artist, has remarked that writers may focus “too much” on her brother’s death; the same might be true of Cheng as well. This makes sense, as death played no role in her brother’s art, or in Cheng’s. Both men celebrated life. Tragically, both men were stricken young. That doesn’t mean, however, that their work is immature, or that they produced only small bodies of work. Now, Tseng and Cheng are carefully presented to the public by their sisters (Muna and Sybao Cheng-Wilson), who do their best to increase awareness of each artist’s achievements. Time will determine whether the work will be considered major; it is this writer’s belief that Tseng and Cheng will be included among the very best artists of their time.

The post Visionaries and Visions: Retrospectives of Tseng Kwong Chi and Ching Ho Cheng appeared first on artcritical.

January 29 to February 28, 2015
958 Madison Avenue (at 75th Street)
New York, 212 628 4000

New York veteran Lisa Bradley’s abstract paintings communicate feeling above all else. Often looking like cloudscapes, and usually occurring in a dark, midnight blue, Bradley’s pictures summon visions of endlessness on a cosmic spiritual level. Her work is open to contemplation and deeply felt experience; the paintings are mystical in nature and suggest the sky, the ocean — places where one finds and retrieves the self in heightened circumstances. Because the paintings are so resolutely abstract, it is hard to pin them down to a particular place; Bradley’s audience must imagine both the emotion and its provenance in processing the inchoate intensity of her art. Championed early in her career by the famous dealer Betty Parsons, Bradley can claim kinship with major New York School artists such as Rothko and Pollock; however, her independence as a painter is notable, in large part because she is so determined to present an undertow of feeling and force through abstraction alone. Interestingly, though, the radical self-containment of Bradley’s paintings often opens up to sweeping vistas that relate to the infinite. So the works have the tendency to switch back and forth between closed and open states. Thus, Bradley’s broad horizons issue forth from a relatively narrow spectrum of expression; the paintings are closely related, and their cumulative effect on the viewer is striking.

How does Bradley’s art compare now, when seen in the light of rising artists? The start of her career belongs to a different time in New York, when painting was of primary importance in the hierarchy of contemporary art. Things have changed — there are many kinds of art vying for our attention — but abstraction has never died out here, where the romance and legacy of major New York nonobjective artists continues to make a pronounced impact. Bradley consequently looks like a painter who has continued in her own fashion as she follows her creativity in subtle ways. Her style, large and voluminous, is found in sequences of related imagery. One moves from work to work and gains appreciation of the dense color and mysterious patches of light, which heighten the sense that something is about to happen. The feeling one has on seeing the paintings is that of silent imminence; it proves hard to explain them with words.

Indeed, intellectual readings fail to explain the meaning of Bradley’s art. In the fine painting Passing (2011), we look at a dark-blue background, against which passages and spots of white contrast in luminous fashion. Although it is not a large painting, Passing presents a spectacle indicative of imminent change — we can ask what it is we are passing through, or if the changing sky or currents of the sea are about to engage in another transformation. The title of the painting, a single word, hints at the occurrence of something reshaping; it is an idea supported by the abrupt contrast between light and dark in the painting itself. As Bradley’s viewers, we are struck by the intense flux of elements caught in a particular moment, just before everything alters. Another painting, Through This (2012), feels like a study of the deep sea. Like Passing, it is painted a dark blue with bits of white color rising from underneath the surface. The title suggests a meaning, but it is hard to say exactly what it is; the image is an intuitive experience.

The oceanic feeling of Bradley’s pictures, both in a literal and figurative context, never goes away. Indeed, the grandness of the pictures is what sustains them. Larger than life, they display a ready familiarity with sublime feeling. Nothing Lost (2012) could nearly be the background sky in one of El Greco’s more melancholic paintings; instead of blue, Bradley’s work brings forth a few blurs of light in a nearly black setting. The implications of the picture’s title are as mystical and incipient as the art we see. At times Bradley’s enterprise can become unclear by her refusal to explain or define her motives. But Bradley is a painter who believes in large philosophies. Because she is working with nearly a boundless sense of form, particulars give way to large insights. So Bradley’s art reminds us of the formless attractions of color alone, and the pleasures of meditating on the infinite. She leaves us room for thought.

The post “Hard to Explain”: Lisa Bradley’s Mysterious Abstractions appeared first on artcritical.

December 12, 2014 through January 25, 2015
56 Bogart St (between Harrison Place and Grattan Street)
Brooklyn, 718 473 0819

Deanna Lee makes paintings and drawings that reference several influences: the biology slides she looked at while growing up (her mother is a scientist), the actual pattern of the grain of the wood she paints on, her heritage as a Chinese-American artist who has copied reproductions of Asian paintings. These experiences and conditions have resulted in very good art; her paintings demonstrate a fascination with the cusp between abstraction and figuration. The latter is evident in Lee’s treatment of her imagery, which can suggest topological maps or, in her ink drawings, some of the Chinese landscapes she is familiar with or the jagged images of an artist like Clyfford Still — one painting is directly inspired by the American painter. Lee shows us how a miscellany of influences can enrich and deepen our experience of painting, especially in New York City, where so many artists come from different backgrounds. We are by now quite used to the various reports of artists with different experiences from our own. It is clear that this has been the strength of New York as a cultural capital, which remains a center for artists who want to work out relations between American culture and their own new — or in Lee’s case, relatively new — history of immigration.

Lee’s art evokes feelings of nostalgia for lost ways of seeing. But she regularly contemporizes her perceptions by seeking unusual sources for her art. In clfrd (2014), clearly a reference to AbEx painter Clyfford Still’s style, Lee also constructs an elegant gouache-and-acrylic composition that builds off the lines of wood grain on the face of her panel support. These lines occupy large passages in the picture, particularly the vertical body of light purple on the left side of the work. In the middle, viewers find a ragged vertical of yellow that cuts into the purple hue seen on either side of it. Some deep red, mostly enclosed by the purple, shows through toward the edges of clfrd; the origins of the painting’s beauty derive from a tradition well understood in America, where Still’s legacy is well known. Lee’s reading of the past shows us how a painter can find a dimension of change in the idiom she works with.

In AWGP 3 (2013), Lee works on a smaller scale; the painting’s dimensions are nine by twelve inches. Repetitive light-blue lines, again a reflection of the wood grain beneath, look a bit like a mountainous Chinese landscape. They occur on a background that changes from a purple below to olive green above, with a curling mauve strip dividing the two areas. The work leans toward the decorative, but not in a negative way; one is reminded of the high hills and broad mists of Asian painting traditions. There is a point where Western abstraction and Asian traditional art meet, for the latter’s painterly effects can be isolated and turned into something non-objective. AWGP 2 (2013), another small painting, works in a similar way. The picture, which presents regular horizontal lines of dark purple repeating above two equally divided green grounds (one a dark forest color and the other an acid green), could be the detail of a contour map. Its thin strips begin with a lake-like image inserted at the bottom of the composition. Here the feeling is that of an oasis, a point of reference dictated by harmony. It resides in what could be an actual place, one very nicely detailed by the painter.

Eagle Street 1 (2014), one of six ink works on vellum put up in the show, continues with the notion of a repeated outline, in this case showcasing the closely patterned cracks of her studio wall. Looking a lot like the skin of an onion, the painting has several thin lines that edge out of the body of the bulging image. One of the best things about Lee’s art is the multiplicity of its references, which in this instance range from landscape to abstraction to the rendering of a particular thing. Her work’s ability to bring up several allusions at once is one of its greatest strengths. As a painter, Lee offers us a language that is more widespread in its inspiration than it seems. Moreover, the specificity of its structure — the studio wall pattern — allows Lee to work from a reference that is culturally neutral, even if the image’s material — ink — looks to a Chinese past. As a method, this is extremely interesting, for it supposes that the means of inspiration can be as specific and local as the place where one makes art, as the title of the piece indicates. In general, Lee’s paintings remind us that today’s artists often explore, more than kind of, cultural effect; Lee does this extremely well.

The post The Pictorial: Deanna Lee on the Cusp of Figuration and Abstraction appeared first on artcritical.

January 8 to February 7, 2015
138 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets
New York City, 212 750 0949

Eric Holzman makes small, luminous paintings that refer to locations in Westchester and the Hudson Valley. These paintings emphasize a lyrical abstraction as well as a closely noted view of landscapes and trees. Though small in size, they do not yield to limited ambition. Indeed, they delineate, in a completely contemporary manner, a tradition of painting that reaches deep into American art history.

Holzman looks for tight compositions that encapsulate not only the shape of the landscape but also its feeling, which can best be described as visionary and mystical, not unlike the pastoral landscapes of Albert Pinkham Ryder. But the expressiveness is not high-pitched; instead, the lyricism is understated, muted even, within quite a dark palate of browns and greens. Unlike much art today, Holzman’s paintings reward close and extended gazing; they act as meditations not on what the life of nature might be, but rather on what it consists of now. Also, there is no real sense of nostalgia or ecological despair; the beauty of the paintings derives from persistent study of the green forms surrounding us. As a result, there is an air of realism that comes close to the way we see and experience nature, however precarious its position actually is.

Painting, which is far from dead, is in the hands of Eric Holzman singingly alive. He begins his paintings in situ, which may well account for the verisimilitude they convey. He then finishes the work in his New York City studio, where he incorporates a complex, built-up surface that compellingly corresponds with the particular view he is addressing. It is a difficult task in contemporary art to relive and push forward the genre of the landscape, which in the age of the Internet can seem antiquated and anachronistic. But Holzman bravely undertakes the recording nature in all its particularity, a stance still capable of engaging, even moving the viewer in the transcendental tradition of American writing and art. The curving forms of the trees fill Holzman’s art in ways that intensify the small dimensions of the paintings, which can be seen as serving an idealized vision of nature—even if the foliage is accurately rendered, with an eye to actual form. In many ways the persistence of Holzman’s interest in nature, in art-world circumstances that heavily favor technology and conceptual underpinnings, starts to look like a brave move to keep alive something of our relations with the outside world, which sadly we are changing beyond recognition.

Atmosphere is key to Holzman’s art. Billowing masses of dark green spread out across his canvases, to the point where they form more or less abstract passages built on the vernal forms from which they originate. In Kessico (2000), we see a small, blue-green tree in the foreground, with a pond just behind it. Trees in the background and to the right add a magical, mysterious atmosphere that sweeps across the small dimensions of the painting. The colors of these vernal shapes — olive green and blue green — don’t seem quite true to observation, intensifying the feeling of a dreamlike reality. Yet the viewer feels that this is an actual place, recorded in the moment but with an eye to posterity.

In Elm (2008-14) a large green tree rises up above a series of smaller trees grouped together at the bottom of the painting. An unusual dark mauve background contrasts with the darkish greens of the trees. The muted hues tend to place the composition in an atmospheric ambience. What comes through more than anything else is the formal elegance of the tall elm, which curves over the green forms beneath. The painting appears modest, but lasts a long time in the viewer’s thoughts.

While it is difficult to see these paintings without thinking of the Hudson River School, Holzman is not aiming to overwhelm the viewer with visions of an echoing sublime. Instead, he is content with returning to landscape art something of the dignity that those earlier painters conveyed. The rich textures of the applied paint serve to enhance our perception of the painting, whose rough surface adds to its contemporary feeling. Late Afternoon/Crestwood II (2013-14), a deep mass of green and brown foliage, has a small curving white truck placed right in the middle of the painting. The light is muted, as might be expected for the time being depicted; there is a marvelous haze that seems to emanate from the leaves. Here, as elsewhere, Holzman taps a quiet, but far-reaching vision in which the landscape has recovered from the great damage already done to it. His art facilitates this vision in profound ways.

The post Atmosphere is Key: Eric Holzman at Lori Bookstein appeared first on artcritical.

October 22 to December 19, 2014
648 Broadway, Suite 804, between Great Jones and Bond streets
New York City, 212.268.3628

Vicky Colombet asks us to suspend disbelief. Her skill at creating something that we can read only with difficulty, while suggesting that it is in fact a picture of something, demands in return an effort on the part of the viewer that allows us to experience her painting in an open way.  Her paintings at Christian Duvernois work both as pure abstraction and as studies of nature. They can manage to seem resolutely nonobjective while conveying the weight of a study of mountains or stone. In fact, her philosophy of form can be said to occupy a point where abstraction and nature meet.

The French-born American artist has lived in New York for fifteen years, more recently dividing her time between the upstate and the city. Developing an imagery of unusual, complex beauty, her art evokes historical Chinese landscape paintings with their extraordinary insights into nature.

In a beautiful black-and-white triptych, Earth Series #1304, #1305, and #1306, (2014), the artist has painted what truly looks like photographs, with each of the three small paintings worked up in white on a black ground. The pictures are remarkable for their intricate and enigmatic renderings of what can be read as cross-sections or x-rays of human tissue. The forms radiate jaggedly across the space of the composition, functioning as an allover imagery that draws us into its tangles, splotches, and curved ridges.  Dense accumulations of mark making are counterbalanced by large areas of negative space. Colombet consistently works in the intersection between painting and photography; she includes a suite of manipulated photo images in the show as well.

Colombet, who makes her own colors using natural gem and earth pigments, is working out a language that owes its power to nature and the sublime. The shift of the imagery’s movement is usually upward, suggesting transcendence through nature. The angle might be that of a mountain rising toward its apex, while the intricacies of the brushwork intimate a detailed view—as if one were looking at the individual strokes of paint with a microscope. Additionally, the artist is showing a group of cloud photographs, taken with her iPhone. These photos work out a nice correspondence with the photograph-like paintings found in Colombet’s show. The low-resolution shots were printed on vellum and allowed to dry over time. They seem nearly to fluctuate in movement, a result based on the rough edges of the ink.

Earth Series #1314 (2014), a large painting on her typically unprimed linen, has a complex mass of blue forms occupy the lower three-quarters of the picture. Entanglement is key to the painting’s structure, which builds upward in fractured shards. As in the triptych, nature is suggested in this picture by what might be a massive cliff, whose rock face is composed of myriad facets, making the surface intricate nearly beyond description.

Earth Series #1310 (2014) employs a similarly active surface, this time with black paint. The mass of shard-like shapes angles upward toward the right, giving the general feeling of a high ascent.  The eye travels up the painting, with the left half of the composition, a compelling negative space, representing the void. Colombet’s singular vision juggles the opposition of representation and abstraction. The notable intelligence of her art is, indeed, based upon an objective, nearly scholarly research into the relations between the two.  Vicky Colombet extends our knowledge of art’s ability to communicate effects that are inherently mysterious but truly compelling as things to see.

The post A Philosophy of Form: In Vicky Colombet, Abstraction and Nature Meet on Equal Terms appeared first on artcritical.

Inspired by meeting John Cage in New York in the 1990s, after pursuing cello studies at the Oberlin Conservatory, Theresa Chong’s early work incorporated chance/random aesthetics and musical notation into elaborate and elegant ink painting. Now, midcareer, Chong returns to an abstraction that skirts Asian traditions in ways that are deeply original: small marks on exquisite paper hold their own between highly worked, nearly textural embellishments and a fine sense of overall composition. The small paintings, usually with top and bottom bands framing the composition, occupy that hybrid, Asian-Western territory that after the length of a generation has now reached the point where bridging two distant cultures has become a critical cliché. This does not mean that Chong’s efforts in this area are to be faulted; instead, it seems that the practice of appropriation has become so widespread as to lack the visual punch it once had.

But Chong’s double reality has little to do with the theft of one style or the other. Instead, in her work we come face to face with a stylized treatment of abstraction built upon gouache brushstrokes and colored-pencil markmaking. Areas are constructed from darker and lighter shades of black and gray, so that the lighter domains feel very much like islands in a dark sea. While the first impression of the artist’s efforts is that they are primarily abstract, over time they take on the suggestion of natural effects — of what exactly, we are not sure, but they do seem to imitate nature. The realms are not tied to a classic grid pattern; instead, they are resolutely organic in both small forms and the overall expanse of the composition. Chong points out a general direction for interpretation by naming her works according to entries in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese manual for the practice of divination. Titles such as Following or Gathering Together form a visual commentary on a literary text with a weighted philosophical orientation.

The patterns in the works correspond to rubbings of Chinese stone markers, as Lilly Wei points out in her catalog essay. The myriad small, fine lines represent duration, the passing of time, while the lighter sections of the drawings correspond to passages in which the stone has dwindled, the result of weathering. No matter the specific cause of the image, these drawings are resolutely beautiful, confirming a generally Asian perception of the artist’s hand as it faces nature. But Chong does not necessarily stop there — it is important to realize that despite the static nature of drawing and painting, her works embody the notion of change over time. In K’UN (Earth) (2014), horizontal rows of very small vertical lines mass into two darkly painted organic shapes that look like lakes surrounded by a land mass. Two black bands, on top and below, frame the composition. The feeling is one of earthen weight — the image corresponds nicely to its title. And despite the small size, the feeling of density is very much alive in this piece, likely the result of the intricacies of the drawing’s surface. The delicacy and large number of the short lines shows how a small surface can be loaded with weight thanks to the technical prowess of the artist.

The feeling of an imagined landscape is taken up in Lu (Walking Carefully) (2014), although nothing specifically belongs to a rendering of nature. A high number of lighter areas complicates the painting and gives it a variable density. These areas range from quite small to relatively large within the composition, which is nearly 12 inches square. Two broad black bands of paint contain this small scene, at once abstract and figurative in its suggestions. Huan (Dispension) (2104) consists of a large, relatively white light area of crosshatching, with miniature points of white. Three smaller islands, composed of the small, darker lines, drift in the open sea of cross hatching, while a rough, dark triangular area dominates the upper right of the picture. The feeling is that of a still pulled from a film.

Collectively, these drawings of consummate skill and precision form a sequence that will remind Chong’s audience of an album of Chinese ink paintings. While they lean toward abstraction and, as their titles imply, the portrayal of ideas, the pictures also abound with natural themes. Chong’s combination of approaches indicates that nothing is entirely abstract or completely figurative. Discerning the similarities and the differences is a source of compelling pleasure.

The post Imagined Landscape: Theresa Chong at Danese/Corey appeared first on artcritical.

Milton Resnick deserves recognition greater than what he has received until now. This large show of work covering his entire career, presented in immaculate galleries at the epic-sized Mana Contemporary arts complex in Jersey City, goes a considerable distance to recognizing Resnick’s contributions. From the start to the end, he was a painter of high courage and integrity — someone who belonged to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists but who never quite found the validation he is worthy of. At this fine show we have much of his oeuvre in a single place, where his contribution can be assessed from the vista of his entire career for the first time. Photos of his pictures cannot do justice to the rough but exquisite surfaces he came to paint over the decades of his efforts; there exists within the body of Resnick’s art a vision that promises to be seen not as tangential but rather central to the New York School’s early history. In fact, the Mana show makes it clear that we have missed integrating Resnick’s art into the accomplishments of the New York School’s first generation. His gifts, from the early colorful efforts to the final depressive, but marvelously rough paintings accompanied by simple figures, clearly need to be organized within a revised understanding of the art of his time.

It is surprising to see Resnick as a somewhat neglected painter, in large part because he was so much in the thick of things in New York. Born in 1917 in Bratslav, Ukraine, Resnick immigrated to New York in 1922 with his parents, where the family took up residence in Brooklyn. He took art classes at Hebrew Technical Institute, Pratt and the American Artist’s School between 1929 and 1934. Unfortunately, his father disapproved of his studies in art and forced him to leave the family’s home. He began a relationship with Elaine Fried around 1935, but she left him for Willem de Kooning in 1938. During the Depression he worked for the WPA and he served in the US Army during the Second World War. Afterward, he became a founding member of the Artist’s Club and was friendly with Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and de Kooning himself.

In 1948, Resnick met and later married Pat Passlof, a fellow painter, and traveled to Europe, but he was unable to paint there due to emotional difficulties. He returned to New York and in 1951 he helped organize the noted “Ninth Street Show.” At the beginning of the 1970s, Passlof and Resnick separated, with Resnick living in the upstate New York town Rifton. Max Hutchison Galley began showing his work in 1972, and continued to through the early ‘80s. In 1975, he and Passlof reconciled. In 1984, after decades of abstraction, he started to incorporate figurative imagery in his work. By 2000, Resnick had begun suffering from arthritis, which made it impossible for him to stand and paint, though he continued to work on paper. Then, in March 2004, distressed over his illness and his difficulties working, he took his life at home in New York. Resnick was recognized by the New York art world, but never to the extent to which his contemporaries gained fame.

Resnick’s art realized a considerable amount, both graphically in the overall gestalt of the painting and, as he developed, texturally in the surface of his art. Even early paintings by Resnick display great perspicacity. An untitled oil on board from 1946 nicely demonstrates how sophisticated a painter he was even before turning 30. In this small work, we see some of de Kooning’s influence, his organic forms echoed in Resnick’s work of this time. Biomorphic yellow, purple, black and red forms, along with two small, green squares, embellish an off-white ground, communicating a lyric experience to Resnick’s audience. This poetic tone never entirely leaves; it remains even when he starts to paint according to a darker vision.

Resnick’s art throughout evinces a thorough interest in surface; and this becomes clearer as time goes on. During the 1970s and ‘80s he began making exceptionally rough, striated exteriors, nearly minimal in appearance. In a very large (more than 10 feet long), untitled work of 1975, the application of paint is deliriously thick, building up and off the canvas to the point of low relief. The color of this horizontal painting, an olive green with hints of yellow underneath, shows us that his gifts included experimentation with color in highly original ways. Here Resnick exhibits his talent for understated color, as well as his penchant for an impasto surface. Melancholy in feeling, the painting’s muted hues bear an ongoing, and deeply moving, emotional stance. Straws in the Wind II (1981), another big, horizontal painting, continues the artist’s interest in a heavy build-up in paint; its color, a dark charcoal listing toward black, is dense with excrescences, adds a heightened tangibility to its roughened surface.

One finds these works embracing gloominess in the 1980s, and the emotional register of his work remains substantially the same for the rest of his career, being oriented toward a dark, emotional palette. The show also makes it clear that the figure entered into Resnick’s paintings late in his career. In one 30-by-40-inch canvas from 1989 we see him playing with imagistic art: two dark, blue and flesh-colored figurative forms occupy the middle of the painting. However, they could equally be read as abstractions in the midst of a highly original, sharply idiosyncratic black ground. One seeks, mostly unsuccessfully, an outlet enabling escape from the gravitas of the picture, which offers a relentless surface and small room for egress. The painting’s bleak mood would be repeated again and again in the late paintings Resnick made.

Likely the most pertinent fact about Resnick is his emotional intensity. But even as his pictures communicate his drift into depression, you can see him working hard on a tangible surface that remains a statement about art rather than a personal treatment of his psychology. The paintings, both early and late, are so consistently high in their achievement, they must be seen as representative of a major artist.

One hesitates to ascribe too much of a psychological reading on seeing a body of work by a man whose tragic end is difficult to accept; however, such an interpretation might well describe the general tenor of his output, difficult as it is. One has to weigh the melancholy of these final paintings against the tragedy of Resnick’s suicide. Clearly, they communicate a more and more isolated psychological state; the artist’s viewers are reminded throughout of his death to come as they contemplate his morose art. Resnick lived his artistic life under the shadow of more famous painters, but that fact should not be allowed to diminish his ambition and his reach. Indeed, his accomplishments are not to be denied; his paintings expand the spectrum of the Abstract Expressionists who used paint as a physical entity, artists such as Pollock and de Kooning. In the thicket of his surfaces, we see the AbEx demand that we look at paint simply as paint, so that the surface is neither given to narration nor to intellectual content. It is what it is. At the same time, we do not do justice to Resnick if we walk away from some sense of a personal presence in his pictures. The emotional depth of his abstraction is highly impressive, and must be seen that way. In a way, he survives because his art communicates negative feeling in magisterial ways — a bit of a contradiction, perhaps, but one that asserts the truth of his career.

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Mengyun Han: In Between Islands was at the Today Art Museum (Beijing) July 7 to July 21, 2013

These days the Beijing art world appears to be treading water.  798, the famed art district there, has become heavily commercial, for instance, and the quality of criticism is unfortunately low—due to the custom whereby the artist and not the magazine pays for the article being written, ruining even the pretense of objectivity. These problems, coupled with the burst bubble of high prices associated with the vertiginous peaks of the market in the mid-2000s, have slowed the pace and weakened the creativity associated with robust dealing. The painter Mengyun Han, only in her mid-20s, offered a very strong show of lyric abstraction at the Today Art Museum; yet her accomplishments, strong as they are, must be seen within the constraints of Beijing’s scene—for example, the fact that the space in the Today Art Museum can be rented despite its origins as a public institution (it is now private). In China, the business of art proceeds without too much trouble, but it is impossible to find an independent writer who can rise above its cash-in-the-hand exchanges. Indeed, one of the last things said to me during my recent stay in Beijing was that a writer cannot make a living in the city.

All of this combines to dirty the waters artists, curators, and writers swim in. Apropos of which, a disclosure before I comment on Han’s paintings: I wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition. But I can say with assurance that she put up a show remarkable for its sophistication and accomplishment. Han is determined to maintain a mostly Chinese view of things—this despite the fact that she spent four years at Bard College in upstate New York and a semester in graduate school at Rutgers University. Her influences, she maintains, have to do with Taoist philosophy and traditional ink painting, although, perhaps inevitably, one also sees the work as being inspired by mid-20th century abstract expressionists, whose influence still is felt among painters in New York. But, to be fair, she made it clear in conversation that her esthetic is based upon a measured view of both Western and Asian cultures—an outlook that adds to her unusual complexity as an artist. Indeed, she uses both oils and ink in her paintings, not so much as a compromise but rather as an example of dialogue.

Letting, (2013) is a fine, densely painted pattern of vertical threads, rather like an abstract tapestry; it is very large (120 by 48 inches) and commands the space by virtue of its subtle patterning, achieved by her coloring certain areas brown and gray. Its composition reads clearly to someone familiar with Western abstraction, but it would also register in the thoughts of someone interested in Asian calligraphy—a merger that is present in much of the art in the show. A much smaller painting, Momentum, (2013) is very powerful, even monumental in the thrust of its movement. Composed of ink on paper, the painting consists of two broad bands: a vertical black stripe rising upward, with part of it bleeding into a semi curved, lightly inked horizontal surface. The combination is striking.

Wandering Mind, (2012), an oil on canvas done in black, gray, and white, conveys the noise of the mind when it is not directed toward a single point. Samsara III (2012) is a large, four-panel painting that folds across the corner of two walls; it consists of a white composition with a V-shaped design painted into it, and this is followed by three darker panels—ostensibly the blindness of death coming after a shortly lit period of life (one remembers that samsara is a Buddhist term, referring to the cycle of life and death). It is an ambitious work of art, whose size induces extended contemplation; the viewer feels as if he could walk into the painting. In these paintings, Han shows off ambition of a genuine sort, transcending the very worldly terms surrounding her as a Chinese artist.

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January 15 to April 6, 2013
Grey Art Gallery, New York University,
100 Washington Square East,
New York City, 212-998-6780

We have all heard of Allen Ginsberg, the ecstatic poet of Howl and “Walt Whitman in the Supermarket,” but not quite as many know that he was an assiduous documentary photographer who focused on relatives, friends, and lovers. As a way of recording the moment by someone who fully believed in living in the moment, Ginsberg’s photography tends to produce—at least for this writer—an aching nostalgia for a fast and loose New York whose marginal neighborhoods were not yet gentrified. Despite immortalizing his pals, Ginsberg cannot be seen as a formalist at all. Instead, he was a literary shutterbug who returned to many images he had of his early years , mostly taken of friends on the Lower East Side, and annotated them with anecdotes and stories whose interest is equal to his photographs. In these wonderful, straightforward snapshots, Ginsberg captures a magical time in New York, where rents in the East Village were remarkably cheap, allowing him to write his declamatory poetry and document writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and major counterculture figures like Dylan and Wavy Gravy. If it is true that a certain Sturm und Drang characterized his milieu, Ginsberg nonetheless had the presence of mind to know that this was indeed a magical moment in American cultural history.

While the images may evoke little in the way of fine art interest, the super-size egos of Ginsberg’s pals make their urban romanticism a way of life. Peter Orlovsky, something of a poet but best known as Ginsberg’s long-term companion, can be seen cavorting naked in the countryside; Burroughs’ cadaverous charisma reminds us that, beyond the romanticism, literature of a serious sort was indeed being written; and a classic image of Jack Kerouac silently mouthing off on the street, in front of a statue of a stature in Tompkins Square Park, indicates that wildness pervaded the tissue of relations among these very gifted and equally rebellious proponents of alternative culture. Ginsberg often gave his inexpensive 35-mm camera to friends so they could capture his remarkable presence; movingly, he comes across in the images of himself as a bit goofy, but also warm-hearted man of unusual intelligence. His milieu is the stuff of legend, much of it so well known that Ginsberg’s handwritten explanation beneath his images can seem slightly redundant; but the poet is resolute in his determination to fix in memory the moments of idiosyncrasy and the pleasures of free love that characterized the Beats.

Beat movement poets Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder are both represented—Corso is seen in a tiny attic room in France and Snyder in Zen monastery gear in Japan. Ginsberg himself poses nude both early and late, with the latter image, taken in a hotel room in late 1991, revealing a pot belly and a slightly quizzical expression. His pictures of the seasons in his building’s back yard, taken through the window in his kitchen are so straightforward as to be esthetically negligible, but demonstrate an awareness of nature in the midst of city life. Even so, the images are important because they have been taken by a master poet and historian, whose literary discipline belies the informality and randomness of a life lived on the boundaries of New York, both geographically and culturally. There is a marvelous picture of Neil Cassady, caught in an embrace with a woman beneath a movie marquee featuring Marlon Brando in The Wild One; Cassady, the model for protagonist Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road, comes across in the photo as the charming rogue he actually was—truth always lies just under the surface in these documentary images. Even Robert Frank, the great photographer of America, makes it into the show. In all, the Beats lived life on the edge, filled with a counterpoint sexuality and glamour that remains genuine, largely because the insights of Ginsberg and his friends were so original and new.

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