September 16 to November 10, 2021
33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, galeriezurcher.com

In today’s art world, there are those who dabble in sculpture to produce inflated toys at great expense.  Let Tom Doyle’s sculpture be offered as a counterexample.

As opposed to statuettes writ large, sculpture’s engaged space-time relations attain to a complexity of thought manifestly palpable in the here and now. By this dimensional complexity, what works is given a workout: that is how Tom Doyle’s sculptures establish themselves, that they are also playful does not trivialize them.

The validity of sculpture as altogether worthy, and thus our assumptions about its nature, come through the legacy of modernism, a legacy of modern art’s reinventing itself through the significant styles of Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism, a complex genealogical stock in the art vineyards giving consequential vitality to art. Doyle would benefit from this and better develop his ‘American vernacular’, as the current exhibition has named it, through an assumption of hands-on craft at home in the modern European abstraction that had already begun to nurture sculpture’s version of Abstract Expressionism.

Located in Kettwig, Germany in 1964 for fifteen months, and being given the run of a disused wool factory, Doyle seized on the opportunity to construct assemblages of metal machine parts and wood scrap. That he was fluent in forging, taught to him as a child by a blacksmith while growing up in Ohio, made it possible for Doyle to develop his idiom from within, and yet while in Germany, at a remove from art-world pressures. According to art historian Kirsten Swenson‘s extensive interview much later, Doyle’s mature sculptural idiom emerged under conditions more permissive than those adopted by David Smith with his strong two-dimensional orientation; although respecting the art of David Smith, Doyle considered his own, gesturing exuberantly in three dimensions, more allied to David Weinrib, John Chamberlain and Mark di Suvero.

To look around plazas where public sculpture sits is to come to terms with the reality that we take the era of the 1960s for granted. But Doyle’s sculptures give us no recourse to passivity, or nostalgia, or the pleasant acceptance of applied abstraction in works interchangeable with one another. No tokens, but in singular works well developed within the formal premises set out, Doyle’s visual literacy is such that it shows as fully cognizant of the difference between the simplistic and the simple, complicated fuss and modulated structural integrity.

A given of modernist theory is that sculpture, no longer a matter of mass, is volumetric, incorporating open and closed spatial relations as it can now by utilizing industrial materials for support and for counterintuitive heft. Sedentary Taurus, 1965, does the job. Folded and bent, cantilevered planar elements are hoisted atop a linear criss-cross frame, yet this basic antinomy is already modulated through skewed orientation and internal twist; voids and their opposite play out, yet not in platitudinous opposition. Helpful to development within form is internal scale: through twisting, large becoming small, then becoming larger again, as sculptural structure induces accelerated shifts through a spectator’s changed position. A changed position is here memory: what was is now still in play imaginatively, a recognition of the relations that still obtain.

How to evade mere décor: that is the problem set out in Swallows Swoop Shiloh, 1965. Doyle makes trouble for himself by invoking good taste: a few elements in neutral off-whites to which a single hue dramatizes the difference in furnishings–a kind of decorator’s “move.” But what he does to outflank taste is to keep the sculptural coherence of the entirety by way of a directness and roughness of the contrastive compound. Further evident is the principle of dislocation: what is massive is a blocky hewn wood element that could be a stand but is midway up; on the ground where the conventional stand should be is a painting—that is, a planar element in color.

Color is indeed the proverbial elephant-in-the-room. The well-known and on-going ideological wars within modern art theory do provide a profound understanding of genre, excelling at its definition: sculpture, the art of three-dimensional work, painting, the art of two-dimensional work—not some mash-up of categories to compensate for a lack of artisanal rigor. But to this, de Stijl has a classic modernist rebuttal: the largest aesthetic category being neither painting nor sculpture, but design. Indicating functional difference through color, then, is a pragmatic strategy, De Stijl design offers a way through space not beholden to isolating the types of practice. So in Swallows Swoop Shiloh, the function of the base gets its due. Meanwhile, antithetical to painting, the color plane is not on the wall where “it ought to be,” but by a radical dislocation makes its appearance on the floor as the necessary base engenders a sculptural presence.

By the way, for the taxonomy of mass, see Doyle’s Rally Al Round, 1964: a sidelong glance at the geometric elemental form by which cylinder, sphere and cone are primary structures.

In Doyle’s art, knowledge of the tradition is enabling, not disabling, as it gives him the formal instrumentalities with which to think with the medium. Let us count the ways: point, line, plane; vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and torque for these: as well as folds, bends, bends’ reversing convexity to concavity’s implicating volumetric space; scale within volume, opacity, transparency at eye level, above and below the same; gravity and levity–degrees of.

The post Gravity and Levity: Tom Doyle in the mid-1960s appeared first on artcritical.

Richard Rezac at Luhring Augustine Chelsea

531 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, luhringaugustine.com

A drawing in a project room of Richard Rezac’s solo exhibition this summer at Luhring Augustine was at once plan and elevation, as elegant as it was documentary—but of what, the viewer might ask? Provisionally it be called a thingmabob.

On consideration, one can discover a legitimate way of naming these works, as Rezac’s catalogue essayist Graham Bader does, as the entwining object and image. This set of terms is more than merely felicitous. “Object” and “image” are not mere words chosen at random but key terms in the history of ideas through which significant aesthetic ideologies have fought for creative co-existence. (Put differently: not all things are art; criteria matter.) When Donald Judd speaks of objects, what gives his reductive modernism force is that Constructivist engineering has informed his thinking, a certain narrative by which sculpture is non-trivial. Or, when André Breton and Aimé Césaire speak of an image, they are wielding the instrumentality of Surrealism to get at psychological and political resistance and revolt. No mere juxtaposition will do: under the rule of metamorphosis, sense becomes other: a kind of signifying non-sense, or otherwise, an annealing synthesis.

The relevance of object-image to Rezac’s works is spot-on. What should be frivolous in his art is not, because the object’s physical properties forge a connection through strong antinomies. The image comes into sharp enigmatic focus through an unapologetic assertion of difference.Take  Soliloquy (2019) for example. In some parallel universe, a carpenter’s workbench and underground grain vaults cohabit, and the resulting tool plays a practical role.  Another work, Untitled (19-05) (2019) consists of a table atop of which is some sort of dune. If this artifact coheres it is owing to an unsaid force whereby heavy rectilinear gravity is tipped toward image by an unshapely shape atop it. Of the considerable inventiveness typical of Rezac, perhaps the least effective is the most apparently inventive: the suspended piece, Chigi, Pamphili, (2019), an assemblage with three elements that remain unassimilated and, hence, rather twee.

Relief assumes the orientation of painting yet with the rights and privileges of sculpture. Through the binding of painting with sculpture comes a certain gravitas, as with the cast bronze Untitled (18-06) (2018). The causes are clear. Small as most of this sculptor’s works are, the size of this piece is not diminutive as it falls within the viewer’s normal sight lines. And even so, smaller than most paintings typically are, this relief and almost all others, draws the view close, enlarging the subtly calibrated craft for engaged  perception. Rezac’s choice of scale, then, brings material and technique into view as a constructed intensity embedded in planarity. Relief is sculptural compression. Here lies the force of its construct. Tension between technologies is a content of that construct, a kind of agon despite the patterning —Indeed, because of it, given that Rezac flaunts ornamentally and structurally extremes in the same .   Untitled (19-11) (2019) .Why can its overt decoration of the diaper pattern seem engaged between clamps? Think of the suction cups for footpads of a gecko on a tree branch.

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October 28 to December 19, 2020
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, tanyabonakdargallery.com

This is as bracing a show as we have come to expect from the German painter Thomas Scheibitz. Didactic and ludic in equal measure, each of his paintings is charged with the task of bringing together opposing forces in a world where art is equally figurative and abstract. If the paintings prove they are something much more than pastiche, it is owing to further dialectic: that the paintings be handsomely realized yet left unsettled and unsettling.

How we know this is immediately apparent in an overview of the exhibition where each painting flaunts its singularity–in striking contrast with shows commonly seen wherein in a bid to convince the viewer of the career, all works on display are merely alike.  Consistency is not the goal when it comes to Scheibitz so much as inner stylistic coherence and purpose.

Pile (all works, 2020) is architecturally disposed, yet freely so. Linear squared elements and planar and volumetric spaces are conjoined in an unforced way to maintain a sense of perpetual experiment and exploration. If ever there was a painting that could claim to be descended from Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten blocks, this is it. Founded in 1837 to induce learning in children through active play, Froebel developed his set of building blocks, which are still in manufacture, to stimulate inventiveness in relating objects in space. Universally known to induce spatial thought and so a child’s portal into adult worlds, this concrete genealogy was very evident in Scheibitz’s previous exhibition at Bonakdar, a show of paintings devoted to the topic of the studio. Geometric and volumetric figures conjoined in a kind of mental space of creative learning. In the current exhibition of deliberately disparate canvases, Pile has all the attributes of creative learning through mental alertness. But as cerebral as this may sound, when viewed up close the painting is typical of the artist’s sensitized craft.

Taken together, Key and the hanging sculpture Magnet , both from this year, are explicit as to method. Scheibitz’s visual vocabulary derives from abstract universal elements that lend themselves to being read as signs, elements he freely permutates Hanging together in Magnet are shapes in outline which create interference such that interior spaces proliferate. Permutations and combinations yield rich figure-ground ambiguities. Key has fused the spatial choices in a flattened quasi-cubist picture plane reminiscent of Juan Gris. Through such revision, Scheibitz has set himself an ambitious program of learning that also extends to embedded meaning and reference. Compelling attention in this regard is Speicher 1072. Budding stalks, perhaps? But this is not adequate to the ambiguities, not so innocent, neither as common motifs nor as universal elements set out in neutrality.

Simple clarity of figural elements in a straightforward-seeming planar space in this painting gives off an air of innocence, but this assumption is soon dispelled by consideration of its title. This contains a reference to Camp Memory, site of the 2014 massacre of Shias and non-Muslims by Islamic State in Tirkrit, Iraq. Implicit in Scheibitz’s practice is an indeterminacy of sense that lends itself to cultural associations of an unsettling kind, without these being allowed to impose themselves. Thanks to reworking the givens of composition, however, the artist leaves us with a difficulty. As spatiality involves social intensity stemming from relative geographical positions, the work induces dynamic intensities through transfigured compositions. We cannot be the facile decoders of signs.

The post Building Blocks: Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar appeared first on artcritical.

531 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, luhringaugustine.com

A drawing in a project room of Richard Rezac’s solo exhibition this summer at Luhring Augustine was at once plan and elevation, as elegant as it was documentary—but of what, the viewer might ask? Provisionally it be called a thingmabob.

On consideration, one can discover a legitimate way of naming these works, as Rezac’s catalogue essayist Graham Bader does, as the entwining object and image. This set of terms is more than merely felicitous. “Object” and “image” are not mere words chosen at random but key terms in the history of ideas through which significant aesthetic ideologies have fought for creative co-existence. (Put differently: not all things are art; criteria matter.) When Donald Judd speaks of objects, what gives his reductive modernism force is that Constructivist engineering has informed his thinking, a certain narrative by which sculpture is non-trivial. Or, when André Breton and Aimé Césaire speak of an image, they are wielding the instrumentality of Surrealism to get at psychological and political resistance and revolt. No mere juxtaposition will do: under the rule of metamorphosis, sense becomes other: a kind of signifying non-sense, or otherwise, an annealing synthesis.

The relevance of object-image to Rezac’s works is spot-on. What should be frivolous in his art is not, because the object’s physical properties forge a connection through strong antinomies. The image comes into sharp enigmatic focus through an unapologetic assertion of difference.Take  Soliloquy (2019) for example. In some parallel universe, a carpenter’s workbench and underground grain vaults cohabit, and the resulting tool plays a practical role.  Another work, Untitled (19-05) (2019) consists of a table atop of which is some sort of dune. If this artifact coheres it is owing to an unsaid force whereby heavy rectilinear gravity is tipped toward image by an unshapely shape atop it. Of the considerable inventiveness typical of Rezac, perhaps the least effective is the most apparently inventive: the suspended piece, Chigi, Pamphili, (2019), an assemblage with three elements that remain unassimilated and, hence, rather twee.

Relief assumes the orientation of painting yet with the rights and privileges of sculpture. Through the binding of painting with sculpture comes a certain gravitas, as with the cast bronze Untitled (18-06) (2018). The causes are clear. Small as most of this sculptor’s works are, the size of this piece is not diminutive as it falls within the viewer’s normal sight lines. And even so, smaller than most paintings typically are, this relief and almost all others, draws the view close, enlarging the subtly calibrated craft for engaged  perception. Rezac’s choice of scale, then, brings material and technique into view as a constructed intensity embedded in planarity. Relief is sculptural compression. Here lies the force of its construct. Tension between technologies is a content of that construct, a kind of agon despite the patterning —Indeed, because of it, given that Rezac flaunts ornamentally and structurally extremes in the same .   Untitled (19-11) (2019) .Why can its overt decoration of the diaper pattern seem engaged between clamps? Think of the suction cups for footpads of a gecko on a tree branch.

The post The Entwining of Image and Object: Richard Rezac’s Sculpture appeared first on artcritical.

Hélio Oiticica: Spatial Relief and Drawings, 1955–59 at Galerie Lelong

November 3, 2018 to January 26, 2019
528 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, galerielelong.com

The Brazilian artist and activist Helio Oiticica (1937-1980) had a genius for turning settled commonplaces into startlingly stirring problematics. In his hands, the square and the diagonal prove sufficient means to create a world of thought-forms, orders or systems—and, indeed, polemics. A principle believed long settled comes into its own again, full of generative possibilities.

Although the exhibition of his early work at Galerie Lelong is decidedly uneven, to witness apprentice studio exercises alongside drop-dead perfect realizations is far more satisfying than the all-too frequent encounter, in a gallery or museum setting, of predictable examples of masterful production.

The exhibition centers on Oiticica’s emergence as an artist who was none the less soon to become fluent in the language of Neo-Concretism. Thanks to the Grupo Frente, and in particular the mentoring by Ivan Serpa, Oiticica and others, including Lygia Clark, he attained to an abstraction that picked up where Constructivism left off. Eager to reformulate assumptions of society though the potential inherent in combination and permutation of the one and the many, for Grupo Frente (which went from 1954-57) abstract art seemed the ideal means to posit and then to bring about dynamic change. The point would be to approach this modelling of human relations through an integrity of means.

Although certainly not the first time the implications of the square had been proposed Helio Oiticica reasserted it with high hopes and every aspiration to intelligent visual literacy. Metaesquema 212, 1957 and Sêco II, 1957, range between extremes of composition issuing from the square, and the square skewed: a diagonal orientation of the rhombus now activating the developing visual field with mobile relationships.

In a certain sense, this phase shows Oiticica to be an orthodox modernist, albeit while exercising his prerogatives to explore implications within a rigorous set of givens. The diagonal line drawn corner to corner within the square augments the form through its extra length in such a way as to become the source of growth and change. The constraints are not stultifying in Oiticica’s early works. But more expanded vocabulary does not necessarily help matters: and exercises in color to create an encyclopedia formal relationships (of red-plus-blue, in transparent, translucent and opaque stages within and without concentricity of circles crossing quadrilaterals) do seem still in parts. Some of these exercises remain practice pieces, especially when compared with Malevich’s exemplary axiomatic clarity or El Lissitzky’s Proun 99, 1924, at the Yale University Art Gallery, a work that “nailed it.”

The square and the diagonal are enough to create a world of thought forms, and through that, to posit and then inaugurate new ways of being and doing. Untitled, 1955, introducing a curve, is one way; another is through increased concreteness, as in Relevo Espacial, 1959-60, a hanging planar relief constructed of triangles the internal edges of which cause perceptual folds. And there is no one more gifted than Oiticica in enfolding relationships so that the in-between spaces restate the diagonal interstices in ways both sensible and intelligent. The concrete approaches to structuralist antimonies, then, are not just emergent, they compound the art in its productive energies.

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November 14, 2017 to January 13, 2018
529 West 20th Street, between 10th & 11th avenues
New York City, .joseebienvenugallery.com

With hanging nets so fine that seeing the wiring requires an intimate stance merely inches away, Juliana Swartz’s Void Waves and Bone Scores induces a close attention unusual for viewing full-sized sculpture. From there, the hand-made construction is interesting enough to induce even closer viewing: irregularities, slight in some works, approximately chaotic in others, make a point of their structural sophistication.

Just when this display of refined works seems merely exquisite, audible spasms and knocks change the nature of the lyricism completely.

Emitted from these complicated nets are sounds not corresponding to their refined visual nature. Then, too, abruptly violent visible movements manifest a similarly disjunctive state of affairs between the sculptural matter and the expressive manner.

Void Waves and Bone Scores exists in the slipstream of sound sculpture by now well established, going back generationally, in a genealogical tree which includes not only Cagean capture of ambient sounds but also programmed machine noise as heard through musique concrète, and many avatars of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine. So, in a certain way, Swartz has been the beneficiary of more radically innovative art prior to her own. But she has also brought the sound scores up-to-date, in digital recording of sounds from her life world. Here is her playlist for Bone Score (Tangle), 2016:  sounds of breathing, a Geiger counter, fireworks, electrical current, a windy night, a flock of birds.  For Bone Score (drum), 2016, a constructed concatenation of materials of which include unglazed porcelain, stainless steel, magnetic wire, magnets, abaca paper, and wood, the sounds entail breathing, swallowing, metal flexing, an MRI, rain on a metal roof, a Beatles song, a heart beating, and a man’s last breaths on an oxygen machine. But these sound sources are not identifiable as such, having been digitally manipulated.

Within speakers, copper wire coiled around a magnet issues vibrations that, in turn, transmit along and throughout Swartz’s wire sculptures, generating sound. But this is not program music, as the sounds captured do not mimic actuality, they are actuality itself. The sound samples, having been slowed or otherwise manipulated to the brink of abstraction, morph in passage in order to discourage literal identification: Hence the slight uncanniness in the sculptural presence. Fortunately, none of this is obvious or pedantic, owing to the timing for infrequent, not incessant, playing. Also, not all the wire sculptures are  wired for sound.

What does emerge is a tactful and well-executed cluster of sculptural forms objectively programmed to be expressive of subjective states of affairs, as if inhabited by a very irritable Arachne. The intermittent perturbations in movement and sound are dissonant with respect to the loveliness of the visual elements as initially encountered. The pieces contribute a dissonant note also to Swartz’s practice of the art of well-being, informed through Eastern meditation, to render being somewhat more complicated and interesting in its embodied world.

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October 19 to November 22, 2017
534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, miandn.com

For several decades now, a notion has been advanced that history is a subcategory of literature– not the other way around. Like storytelling, history, in this reckoning, is invested in interpreting accounts of events focused to a purpose.

In her deservedly celebrated Post-partum Document (1973-79) Mary Kelly put her son’s linguistic and cognitive socialization, and her reactions to it, within the frame of a discourse and rendered it the object of a six-year study.  For her current exhibition, Kelly herself is the object of self-study, framed loosely as she once understood herself in the world.

“The Practical Past” is a memoir from the artist’s current perspective on her life in the collective spheres she inhabited in the 1960s and ‘70s and their relation to events before and since. Much of this is writing made visual through letters from that time reflecting concerns and worries about how to live the engaged feminist life, These are transposed in digital projections that nonetheless reflect Kelly’s decision to do a kind of cottage-industry piecework.  In a slightly mismatched gridded array, the overall text of handwritten correspondence renders originals as multiple iterations. What appears to shade and fade into historicism is also stuff.

In days of yore—i.e. before digital technologies became the lingua franca of art schools—protest literature was much seen on newsprint, in an affinity with posters of the avant-garde and their cheap card stock. In the current show, Kelly’s homage to the journal “7 Days” has the look of such protest technology, although it isn’t print at all (we are told), but rather an assemblage of vinyl templates and lint.

At the other end of craft are framed notes, written on letterpress luxury stock, , authored in a diarist’s voice that allows Kelly to lay down her thoughts about her identity with respect to the engaged life without rehearsing the latter’s ideological endgames. The largest evident arc of the story establishes world historical events through photography—or that it how it initially appears to the viewer. Specific images, celebrated for capturing cultural eventfulness in modern history, are seen projected large on gallery walls as if to situate personal practice within collective memory. The perennially profound steadfastness of booklovers standing amid ruins of Holland House Library during the London blitz in 1940 is an eloquent argument for literacy and its necessary purposes in reading to understand. Also in universal collective memory is the raising of the French flag on the eve of the general strike in Paris, 1968. These images of European consciousness to be held in universal experience establish the scale of history in the mind of the individual activist, writing letters and essays in ephemera substantial to herself.

The story Kelly tells in visual terms is dispersed. The several modes of discourse each in composite techniques, some not at all apparent, render the elaborate exhibition hermetic within an allegorical postmodern historicism. That almost all images are comprised of screens of lint is a fact of manufacture to be discovered in reading matter of the checklist and press release, and otherwise so understated as to be unsaid. The TV “snow” projected is aptly present and clearly so, a device for placing the archival images of eventful history in the transmission of information. Interesting to debate, then, is how the sequence of observed encounters with Kelly’s images affects the sense and meaning of them. If one starts by identifying larger pictorially realized political events and progresses through her personal letters, a framework of activist initiatives in history unfolds. But if one starts, instead, with the read information of the lint, this changes the terms of engagement: the frame is now women’s work, with the artist subject to the initiatives of others.  What is up for debate is whether understated complicated crafts articulate the theory-in-practice more adroitly than brutally overstated, spectacular room-size installations dedicated to the polis and its grievances. After all, in what other modes of praxis can history conjoined to literature be effectively visualized?

One thing is certain: “The Practical Past” is a refreshing study. It is also an antidote to the super-sized party-favors in the art world—meant to divert the adult daycare center and its caretakers who are the enablers of dangerous behaviors.

The post Visualizing Historicism: Mary Kelly’s Personal Reckoning appeared first on artcritical.

May 6 to June 17, 2017
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Reductive rather than Minimal, strictly speaking, the art of Robert Mangold continues to induce a gyroscopic equilibrium of formal elements in relation to one another. That the relationship of part to whole is how to test the valid authority of line in and on a planar surface, which in turn must hold its own in respect to the supporting cut relief:—this composite of essentials remains constant throughout the body of work, however varied the rational format. This exhibition in particular is indicative of shaped canvases treated as framing devices of all sorts, some of which result in forced compensation for a cut hole’s demanding attention. More than with his past shows, this aggregate of formats puts the artist at risk of losing it all if the drawing isn’t just right—neither merely accommodating the frame within its bounds, nor being irrelevantly dramatic. A test of constraints, this show sharpens the viewer’s critical eye.

Yellow Extended Ring Frame, 2014, for instance, proves that an eccentric format need not be a liability but can be a challenge to composition. Given a strong shape, the response must be in kind: the set-up puts pressure on, to come up with an equally dynamical color and line, if the entirety is to cohere. Imagine a kind of hippodrome in a bright cadmium yellow, round which lines twist as they run their course. The elements of line planar surface and relief do indeed all pull together even as they remain in tension. And something else rewards viewing: close up, one sees the rehearsals of line in approximations of the curve in undisguised preliminary drawing, unaffected—not pathetic, not rhetorical.

In this assortment of works on view, drawn squares within a field contrast with the meanders favored, to raise the issue of the formal dualities Mangold has at his disposal: positive and negative shape, inside and outside edge—these occasion highly contrastive dualities. Possibilities are tested, not all are pursued.

Puncturing most of the works are rectangular cutouts, generally symmetrical with respect to the frame, yet a few are asymmetrical in size and position. Taken together, they represent the sort of composition made familiar through orthodox modern abstract art. Mangold shows his reductive strength by adhering to the proposition that abstraction is the fundament of form. Examples of this loyalty are to be found in an ochre painting, Yellow Double Square Loop, 2015, and the acidic Two Open Squares within a Yellow Area, 2016.

But there is a reason why Double Red Square Frame B, 2015, has pride of place in this display. The perfectly poised, yet inventive, drawing captures the principle of calligraphy that is line’s special attribute, and interacts with the dulled rose pigment applied to the surface, streaked and stained enough to manifest painting as such. Given the eccentricity of format, it should not work as well as it does; yet the rounded ends of the diptych’s outer corners, if anything, help to draw attention across the panels. The result is miraculous. Or, in Aquinas’s terms, integral, a harmonious and radiant whatness.

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January 5 to February 4, 2017
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, paulacoopergallery.com

Can technical doggedness produce compelling art? In his current show of new work, Dan Walsh has found a way to do just that.

The paintings, especially, feel like they have arrived, achieving equilibrium of plan and craft. The visual image is the hook for all this, as Walsh has relaxed his previously familiar pictorial strictures to allow for a variety of approaches to a basic scheme: vertically oriented, broad bands diminishing in width as they increase in number. A unit so generic, the band does not illustrate anything but itself.

The warrant for Walsh’s artistic approach goes back sixty years to when representation of the already seen world veered away from abstraction evocative of symbolic ideas, to flaunted signage. For this purpose, the artist’s hand—synecdoche to expressive individuality—became instrumentally neutral. Materials and techniques of a derivative nature rose to take charge of received ideas, the vernacular, and the domain of transmitted information. Flash forward to early canvases done by Walsh in the 1990s. These were derived from graphic reductions of fireplaces or boxed archives, motifs no longer endowed with tectonic structure and practical function of workable things in the world but functioning instead as deliberately affectless demarcations of the surface of the picture plane. Thus transcribed, the graphical lines were a curious amalgam of the literal and the arbitrary, for which imagination was entirely beside the point, effecting a metamorphosis and synthesis of processes that abstract painters of the New York School had presupposed went unnoticed. From this inflection of formulaic transposed mark-making came something other than the well composed, finely attuned image but lifted from the already seen—although overlooked—everyday idiom. This is the opposite of the truth urged by Hans Hofmann, when, as a modernist, he said that as soon as a mark is made on a canvas, a composition is in force.

The current exhibition does execute diminishing series often enough to raise expectations of pattern making; but otherwise, also at odds with itself, it shows eccentricities not so predictable. Color schemes in some works are of good-taste favorites—taffy beige or baby blue—but do not read as decoratively pleasant either owing to an amusing reverb effect or to a brightly plangent counterpoint in the interstices. Seen up close, variables in brushy paint handling that integrate formal and optical matter are done well–this, without bending the rule of consistency so as to interrupt the surface as a whole.  So at the least, Walsh is calibrating his neutrality.  And at the most, he is attaining to the mastery in technique that allows for a kind of elasticity of moves within the methodical technique he swears by. To this end his Klimt Book has its own kind of perfection worth noting. To this end the exhibited copy of his Klimt Book has its own kind of perfection worth noting. Open to a double-page spread the book renders a succession of ellipses waxing and waning as though through the passing day into night—suspending a fanatic’s dream of micro-optical gradation in sequence through the digitally printed mica-inflected inkjet and silkscreen.

What’s curious is the contrast between the hermetic and everyday ingredients comprising the image: each set of four ellipses-within-squares is placed within a kind of rustic crate more in the style of Richard Artschwager than anything that might be found in an ebonized dining environment of the Secession architect Josef Hoffmann, whose Palais Stoclet, in Brussels, houses the Klimt Frieze that inspired Walsh’s book project in the first place.

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