October 29 to December 19, 2020
537B West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, asyageisberggallery.com

At first glance, the works in Rodrigo Valenzuela’s recent exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery look like drawings, but the images are actually built from a complicated series of “translations” from one medium or situation to another. The Chilean-born LA-based artist’s starting point in these images is the ubiquitous polystyrene forms of consumer packaging; these are then cast into concrete components and carefully stacked into composite sculptural forms that are then photographed and translated to photogravure.. Defying their immovable appearance, the sculptural forms are specifically constructed without reinforcements or adhesives binding the parts together and exist only for their final output in two-dimensional form, as seen here in these intaglio prints.

Each ‘stature’ is photographed against the same industrial backdrop of the artist’s own studio. This repeated tableau serves as a constant, displaying the technical array and sleight of hand employed from image to image—shifting variations that move the forms between solidity and surrealness, and variously reveal the glimmering textures of the stained concrete and the flanking metal grating that come to life under the velvety tonalities of photogravure. The results echo portraits of Brancusi’s studio “anonymous sculptures” of Hilla and Bernd Becher. Some are reminiscent of the structural sketch-up paintings of fellow 2013 Skowhegan participant, Avery Singer. More pointedly, many recall brutalist architecture or pre-Columbian ruins. Valenzuela’s forms resonate with a highly particular power that manages to fuse the martial, the technological, the prehistoric and the occult.

His photographed constructions always start with materials charged with meaning. Previous bodies of work employed photocopies (which he terms “the material of bureaucracy”) and dimensional lumber and other construction materials to underscore the importance of invisible labor. While earlier work regularly depicted a dismantled architecture in a state of destruction or ruin, Statures offers portraits of integrated architectures born of deconstructed and discarded elements that seem equally born from the alienations of capitalism.

There is a tension in the work between formalist order and improvisation, and an impulse for transparency of means versus a manipulation of means. Valenzuela’s upbringing in Pinochet’s Chile, his interest in brutalism, and, according to the gallery press release, his ”fascination in the power of architecture to impose control” all seem pertinent to a reading of these images as Corbusian puzzles rejecting and affirming signals of power. Architecture and authority share the task of “holding together” various structures to create order and stability. Repeated translations of the image in the convoluted interplay between artistic modes (from discarded material into sculpture to photography to final rarified product in photogravure) confuses the authority of Valenzuela’s architectures and intentionally disrupts this stability — as humble materials are fortified and monumentalized, and/or the integrity of the final monumental image is undermined and denied. In any case, the works themselves comprise an ideal recipe for artistic authority: politically meaningful starting materials; a demonstrated art historical awareness; seductive formalism; transformation of media; an opulent finished product.

Despite pandemic-related slowdowns, this exhibition is part of a global tour: exhibited last at Kandlhofer Galerie in Vienna in October, after New York it moves next to Patricia Ready in Chile in 2021. Each work is an edition of eight with two artist’s proofs. Viewers home-bound at this time can also enjoy the images in the artist’s beautifully designed monograph, Journeyman, published by Mousse in 2020.

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January 18 through February 22, 2015
348 South 4th Street (between Hooper and Keap streets)
Brooklyn, 347 776 1023

For “LIVE/WORK,” Annette Wehrhahn shows a new series of paintings and other propositions that revisit the indeterminable boundary between the space dedicated to living and the space for work — with the products of each infiltrating each other as equals. Black work boots and heeled pumps sit on a ledge above and in the periphery of paintings, some works insert materials like drop cloth that point back to the conditions of their making, and others include personal effects. Hide (2015) is a shirt with acrylic on canvas. The fabric, suffused with paint, is fixed and flattened with long sleeves outstretched and a jam of wrinkles permanently set. It’s worth noting that Wehrhahn is a founding member of Soloway, and her apartment and studio are on site behind the storefront exhibition space — putting Wehrhahn in the middle of the project that she and her collaborators have successfully built over the past five years, and amplifying the live-work dynamic. On this occasion, the exhibition intentionally extends into Wehrhahn’s domestic space in back where Candles (2014) hangs just inside against a lime green wall above the bed.

Werhahn’s Portable Cave Paintings relate the dimensions of the artist’s body against the work and exhibition space. The paintings are on swaths of unstretched canvas nearly as tall as the space is long, and in the earthy palette of Lascaux or Altamira. On the surface, Wehrhahn has traced her body with oil stick in overlapping seated or reclining configurations — physically marking and zoning the actual space of her body, and denoting presence like chalk outlines or a choreography diagram. The sienna, ochre, and umber oil crayons are rubbed into a waxy fictile residue that reveals tracks of activity, motion, footprints.

Most of the cave paintings are hung vertically from the ceiling, pierced with large metal grommets that liken the thick canvas to hide. Some are strung up on big hooks and another is fished through the rope of a laundry pulley as if it could be moved to alternately obscure the storefront window or the front door. For Wehrhahn, the portability of the paintings suggests a sort of nomadism. Approaching “LIVE/WORK” through the term’s associations with housing classifieds, real estate development, and gentrification, the relation to the figure to space in these works is also reflective of Wehrhahn’s considerations on how spaces like hers and others affect the surrounding neighborhood. Artists inevitably begin the neighborhood transformation that ultimately prices everyone out, and contributing, in some sense, “to our own extinction,” as she describes it.

Wehrhahn chooses to distribute the figurative cave paintings among a series of winsome, abstract, processed-based paintings — perhaps to play with another sort of artificial delineation. Works in this second set are all on roughly octagonal and ovoid-shaped wood panels. Shape with Holes (2015) bleeds matte black over primary blue and green oil paint, topped with shiny black enamel that crinkled as it set. The surface was then drilled with a hole saw — punching out a scatter plot of circular eyes that variously reveal the painted under-layers, the fresh wood beneath, or the wall behind. Table (2014) is coated in white milk paint and marked with similar drilled impressions, but with the addition of functional metal legs attached. Seat (2014) bridges these works with the Portable Cave Paintings by depicting a single chalk-lined seated figure — the aerial tracing of a rear end and legs Indian-style over the middle of the painting. Sitting at the center of the panel, you could form the shape by drawing a circle around yourself — turning at each of the interstices to continue the line. The scale of these works is roughly an arm’s length from the shape’s center, and the other abstract wood paintings, like Candle (2014), take the same scale that Seat seems to personalize.

Exhibiting her abstractions with the cave painting’s silhouettes leaves the trace of the figure on everything. That fugitive quality enables the works, when taken together, to achieve some of that distinctive sense of presence/absence felt when looking at cave art and other ancient cultural material. And ultimately, it’s a pleasurable turn of operations to see someone taking back space through painting. The paintings are a departure from Werhahn’s previous work; bright, acidly colored silkscreen prints with patterns and textures that tangle with simple, contentious conversational phrases. However, the basic operation is familiar as Wehrhahn has a capacity for extracting expressive and convincing results through outwardly simple gestures, and both series seem sprung from the same headlong mixture of psychic intensity and material ease.

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November 15 to December 21, 2013

Jack Hanley Gallery
327 Broome Street
New York City, 646-918-6824

NEW/USED/WET/BROKEN, the debut solo exhibition of Jeff Williams at Jack Hanley Gallery, features work that tests its own structural or material vulnerabilities. Williams, an artist who divides his time between Brooklyn and Austin, Texas, highlights and isolates various scientific processes behind physical degeneration. His intricate sculptural installations (all 2013) are composed as chemistry and physics experiments. Going beyond illustrating the effects of age and erosion, many of his works activate entropic processes and house the ingredients of their own undoing. The show consists of eight pieces ranging from a twenty-foot monumental steel column to a photo printed on newsprint, to floor sculptures, wall propositions, and video.

In #13, a two-foot-long aluminum I-beam protruding from the wall about four feet off the ground, looks sleek with a single buxom wine glass hanging upside down by a wire stemware rack attached to its underside. The I-beam is bent just enough to perfectly curve around a one-inch-thick threaded metal rod that buttresses it from the floor. Williams has coated the wine glass with liquid gallium, a camouflaged threat, as gallium’s smooth silvery sheen mimics the surface of the aluminum. Gallium and aluminum are in the same periodic group (called Group 13), but gallium “attacks” aluminum—it is so highly corrosive to some metals that it can weaken or dissolve them. In #13, these elemental enemies are held together in risky proximity so that the glass endangers its own aluminum support.

Oxidation Table is a six-foot-long metal fabrication table that was found by the artist this summer on the Skowhegan campus in Maine. It’s composed of a rebar frame supporting 18 rusty steel slats, upright and spaced at regular intervals. The table’s heavily rusted surface is friable and brittle and the top edges of the metal slats have been eaten away into craggy, fingerlike formations. The rows of steel rails resemble miniature ruins or models of early Richard Serras. Three slats are so warped by corrosion that they no longer lay flat in the table’s slotted base, but wrench upward into dramatic arcs.

Multiple times a day, gallery personnel spray the table with a solution of hydrogen peroxide so that the piece continues to degenerate over the course of the exhibition. Because the slats are made of untreated metal, the surface begins to bubble right away and one can watch the oxidation process happen within minutes. The work spotlights the high degree of technology built into everyday materials and brings to attention the fact that most of the metal in our built environments is chemically engineered (galvanized, coated, blued) to resist the natural processes of oxidation and material decay. On a subsequent visit to the gallery, I found that a large section had broken off one of the rails. As the structural integrity is further compromised, the table becomes a kind garden to rust and its rich, powdery red-oxide pigments. Flaking pieces of rust that range between Indian and Venetian reds, siennas, and umbers continually reveal a fresh layer of cool gray steel underneath, waiting to be disintegrated.

Cibolo Creek is a floor sculpture that juxtaposes old and new, and human interference with natural processes. The work consists of a shiny yellow blowtorch fitted into an upright steel slab, facing a limestone fossil—a pairing that bridges the primordial with the contemporary and creates a strange visual approximation for a large span of time. The opposition of these two objects also plays with thermal decomposition. According to gallery staff, Williams lights the torch during impromptu performances in the space, exploiting a chemical reaction that happens when the limestone is heated. Breaking the 60 million-year-old Texas fossil into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, the flame causes it to sputter and spew ancient debris onto the gallery floor, later cleaned up by gallery staff.

Chemical reactions and other unseen mechanisms yield striking physical changes in raw materials. In his art practice Williams repeatedly asks “Why?” all the way down to the atomic level. The artist’s embedded research adds conceptual drama and playfulness to works that are formally inscrutable. There’s a wonder and sensitivity in testing a material’s range and resiliency—that aluminum, for example, can be formed into a weight-bearing I-beam, or broken down by another metal or, in another sculpture, extruded as a foam. Williams is attentive to details, like the exposed bluish seams that bisect each of the two twenty-foot-long torqued building ties in Column, or Cibolo Creek’s interdependent, propped components, which seem to perfectly anticipate one another. Delicate decisions like these ensure that the sculptures’ experimental and procedural components are not deadened, but incredibly vivid.

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