January 15 to March 7, 2021
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, theodoreart.com 

Because I’ve known Sharon Butler, her work and her blog, “Two Coats of Paint” (to which I occasionally contribute) for a very long time, I am not the person to write about her new paintings disinterestedly. What I can do, however, is offer some thoughts about her work informed by many conversations with her about painting in general and her paintings in particular, and by an understanding of her approach to making art enriched by reading many of her essays and reviews.

In her widely read article, “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists,” in The Brooklyn Rail, 2011, Butler expanded on Raphael Rubenstein’s ideas, laid out in “Provisional Painting” in Art in America, 2009.  Butler described “casualism” as an open-ended, aleatory process that many painters were now using.  Their aim was to steer clear of abstract painting’s tired tropes (like using wide gestural brush strokes as a sign of emotion) by adopting a “calculated tentativeness” and accepting “awkwardness.” She argued that this casualist approach led to paintings that were almost beside the point, or that manifested a “passive-aggressive incompleteness.” While Butler didn’t out-and-out proselytize for casualism, her enthusiasm for “enervated casualism”—for an engagement with accident, uncertainty, imperfection and  incompleteness—was palpable.

Butler’s current exhibition of fifteen paintings from 2017-2020, however, suggests that casualism’s grip on her work has loosened. True, the foundation for each of her new paintings still seems like the stuff of that 2011 essay—in her case, a starting point for her paintings of quick, improvisational digital drawings made on her phone that are, in her own words, “toss-offs”—but the realized paintings that grow out of these drawings are decidedly not beside the point. They’re well-planned, well-executed, peculiarly—and purposefully—beautiful pictures.

Butler’s phone drawings, loosely based on imprecise geometric forms that she immediately posts on Instagram, are part of an ongoing series she calls, “The Good Morning Drawings.” Butler’s social media savvy makes her keenly alert to the way an offhand drawing posted on a social media platform instantaneously changes from something private and confined to the studio into a public “work of art” to which an audience responds with clicks. Given the plethora of drawings she’s made, searching out the “best” or “worst” drawings is a futile enterprise. The point is, once posted, they all take on an air of importance—almost as if made by an alleged art influencer such as Benny Or or Banksy.

Two paintings from 2019, each only two feet square—Most Popular (October 2, 2018) and Most Popular (November 23, 2018)—and which include colored circles and half-circles sitting atop scumbled surfaces, were based on Instagram drawings that had received the most “likes”–an absurd if intriguing starting point for a painting. (Dates within titles refer to Butler’s original Instagram posts.) At other times, Butler selects a drawing to turn into a painting simply because she has a hunch it will make a good painting. Consider Mueller Report (January 11, 2017), a stunning larger painting (52 x 45 inches, finished in 2019) in which three parallel, vertical forms lie on a lovely pastel ground; each is made up of three attached triangles or diamonds suggesting harlequin patterns, with colors hinting at something military. Their dark values play back and forth effectively with the brushy pastel negative spaces.

Although Butler’s iPhone drawings have the benefit of both immediacy and quirkiness, they’re missing what’s missing in all electronic screen art: Materiality, a sense of scale, and touch—factors that, if not the be-all and end-all of painting, at least most often give it life. Paintings-in-the-flesh solve this problem. This isn’t to say that every painter who approaches painting this way lands on something beautiful. Only because of Butler’s sophisticated and sensitive brushwork and individualized color (something that continues to come out of her casualist approach) do her compositions end up strong rather than flaccid. The paintings feel slightly off-balance, but not so much that they’re ugly. They’re actually just right: off-balance only enough to avoid cliché.

The problem for abstract painters like Butler (and me) is that if paintings as beautiful and grittily compelling as Butler’s can grow out of toss-off phone doodles, why should any of us fret over our compositions? Isn’t it enough to just develop our touch and a sense of color? For me, the scariest thought of all is that composition might just be an anachronism of the 20th Century, and the future of abstraction will be owned by those who accept a post-compositional approach to their paintings. Right now, Sharon Butler has the best of both worlds.  

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January 25 to March 10, 2018
520 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, nancyhoffmangallery.com

In writing about this exhibition of eight paintings and three collages by Peter Plagens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, I happily abandon any pretense of objectivity. My point of view comes from nearly 37 years of marriage to the artist, more than three decades of sharing a studio with him, and our ongoing conversations and arguments—big and small—about painting and its meaning. That Peter doesn’t know I’m writing this essay, and won’t know about it until after it’s published, makes clear, I hope, that I alone am responsible for any errors in description of either his studio practice or artistic intentions.

At first glance, Peter’s paintings and collages seem poles apart. At one end, we’re talking enormous, aggressively vibrant abstract paintings; at the other, restrained, elegant collages containing words and images. That said, it’s not hard to suss out that Peter is on a quest to reconcile opposites—clean and messy, refined and rough, colorful and neutral, abstract and figurative, orderly and anarchic, certain and uncertain.

With over a thousand art reviews and essays about art to his credit, Peter has probably written more words about art than any other serious practicing American artist. His art criticism is clear, jargon-free, and peppered with cheeky turns of phrases (“the shitification of the art world,” or “the calculated indolence of a road crew”), easy colloquialisms (“punches above his weight,” or “a second body blow delivered to art”), and snappy references to popular culture (in a recent review of an exhibition, he referred to the artist as “the Sara Lee of the art world”).

This rough and tumble attitude in his writing also shows up in his painting, which he’s been tenaciously going at for more than fifty years. When he slathers wet paint across the surface of a canvas, oblivious to the possibility of “mistakes,” or when he decides a color, once chosen, cannot be altered, he’s opening up his art to the peculiar beauties of randomness. Even so, he lets paint off its leash only briefly; most of the time, his work rests on deft brush handling, acute awareness of the properties of color, and close attention to detail. It’s no surprise that his favorite artists are the Flems.

Peter begins his collages by tacking a piece of paper to the floor. Next, he slowly nudges pools of different hues around its edges. After the paper dries, he places it on his table and slaps down an image in the center—a word or phrase cut from an artist’s announcement, a little snippet from a piece of paper found on the street, an image cut from a photograph or an advertisement. From then on, his task becomes one of bridging the gap between the concrete image in the center and the indeterminate colors hovering along the paper’s edges. His method is always to gradually surround the center with collaged bits of colored paper and painted abstract shapes until, like Goldilocks, he finally senses things are “just right.”

Peter’s paintings, from the start, are made on the wall. He begins by covering the surface with loose and squiggly Gorky-esque marks, letting drips fall where they may. After this dries, he applies successive layers of paint to make a large, rough-hewn shape—sometimes a neutral gray, sometimes a saturated color—that sits on the original messy ground. Last comes a geometric form, drawn intuitively and placed approximately in the middle of the painting, and divided into six or seven shapes; these he fills in with pre-determined colors. His rule in painting, as in his collages, is to never correct anything.

Peter is not a formalist. His art is an impassioned, full-blown expression of his worldview. He understands the universe to be indecipherable, unfathomable, unknowable—existentially speaking, absurd. To deny this, in his mind, would be both foolish and futile. Painting makes him feel he’s among the lucky ones, for in wrestling with the wordlessness of paint, the ineffable wonders of color, and the chance-driven associations generated by making collages, he finds a way to assert meaning. If one of his paintings or collages manages to generate a small, shivering sensation of beauty along the way, he’s fully satisfied. Blathering on about its social or metaphysical properties would only muck things up.

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