Postmasters
459 West 19th Street (at 10th Avenue), New York

March 5 – April 2, 2005

Any beekeeper can tell you that when the bees in a hive become too numerous for the space available, all or some of them will leave to begin a new colony elsewhere. Their en-masse activity is called swarming, and it usually occurs after periods of rapid population growth due to fertile surroundings and favorable conditions. Presumably, Diana Cooper experienced such an optimal environment in Italy last year as a Rome Prize winner, for it is clear that she has been busy populating her brain with new artistic ideas. Some of Cooper’s new concepts have emerged from her creative comb and taken up residence at Postmasters Gallery in Swarm, her aptly titled, first New York exhibition since her return from Italy. It is a honey of a show.

There is one dominant piece in each of the gallery’s two rooms. The other works are seen in relation to the dominants—like Workers hovering around their Queens. In the first room, the viewer is immediately drawn to the graphic vibration of a large, predominantly black and white installation that shares the show’s title. As the name suggests, many relatively small parts act in unison, giving the work a swirling, dynamic energy. Like the hexagons in a honeycomb, recurring forms play a major role in the dynamic strength of Cooper’s works. In this installation, a chorus of chevrons and rounded, technological looking shapes soars along the walls and the floor. Like almost all the pieces in the show, it is remarkable in its complexity, impressive in its overall form and demonstrative of another trait that Cooper shares with bees: an ability to build intricate, marvelously engineered constructions using simple materials. Bees use wax; Cooper uses mostly corrugated plastic, cut paper, felt and foam core.

In the second room, Orange Alert: USA is the royal in residence. Its bright orange presence spans the room from floor to ceiling, emitting a visual hum that commands attention, almost impelling viewers to kneel in respect. There is even a pair of felt strips projecting straight from the base of the piece to a cushion that could be used for genuflection.

Or, maybe the pad is meant for introspection. The most memorable components of Orange Alert: USA are small windshield-like objects made with foam core frames and orange gel panes. Visible through them are red felt shapes that look like distant spiky mountain ranges. While four-wheeled travel and far away mountains have symbolized American optimism since the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada highlighted the horizons of settlers in covered-wagons, in this work, the tables have turned. Red mountain ranges, whose contours resemble turbulent economic charts as much as picturesque peaks and valleys, seen through orange windshields, all in front of a fealty pillow, provide a striking combination. Shall we take a knee and contemplate whether instead of seeing things through the rose tinted lenses of late 20th century sanguinity we now huddle behind worldview windshields colored in the orange-alert chroma of caution?

Maybe, but Orange Alert: USA is flying solo in terms of subject matter; geopolitics and economics are not obvious themes in this show. The real common denominator here is the complex visual lyricism Cooper achieves in coupling technological shapes with organic rhythms. In title and in appearance, Mechanical Cloud sums up this intriguing partnership. Its combination of angular and rounded forms brings to mind disparate elements such as circuit boards and cell structures, subway maps and snakeskin patterns; and marries them harmoniously. Tropical Depression, Trapped and Untitled (The Emerger) are all similarly successful, evoking a wide range of imagery including electrical schematics, fungal colonies, topographical maps and urban planning diagrams. All of these pieces, like good Worker bees, function well both individually and as a part of the group, supporting and strengthening their Queens.

But every swarm includes a few Drones: haploid bees that do nothing but mate and die. Genetic placeholders, they are like DNA vessels that pass genes to the next generation without contributing new traits of their own. It is a testament to the quality of this Swarm that only one such cipher exists here. Moving Targets in Black and White functions more like a receptacle for Cooper’s artistic stem cells than as a finished piece. It will no doubt grow into something as beautiful and alluring as any of the other pieces in the show, but it is underdeveloped and has been unfairly asked to hold a wall by itself. It would be interesting in an exhibition of studies, or as part of a documentary on Cooper’s studio practice, but it cannot compete with the other works in this show.

Overall, it is evident that Cooper has been as busy as the proverbial bee in constructing wonderfully engaging and interesting works. If she keeps up her pace, the buzz will be about how her visual sting hurts so good.

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The Painting Center
52 Greene, 2nd fl
New York NY 10013
212-343-1060

March 1 – 26, 2005

The two main types of lava that flow from volcanic vents are “Pahoehoe,” consisting of ropy strands and fluid looking whorls, and “Aa,” which is more crumbly and chunky. The terms are familiar to geologists and people who live in volcanically active regions, but painters might also do well to appropriate these Hawaiian words whose meanings apply perfectly to the two main branches of thickly-painted pictures. Aa, the crumbly one, would equate to works such as Anselm Kiefer’s Bohemia Lies Beside the Sea at the Metropolitan Museum, while Pohoehoe, with its fluidity and undulating surface, is epitomized by Colleen Randall’s works currently on view at The Painting Center.

Randall clearly loves paint, and lots of it. Her abstract and enthusiastically impastoed paintings are made with numerous layers that progress from thin washes, to thicker, more buttery strata as the works develop. Even her works on paper are caked with a generous helping of once liquid acrylic; they look like ejections from the business-end of an active artistic volcano. The energy and gusto of her images indicate that Randall truly is a creative fountain to be reckoned with. The Painting Center’s press release states that her work is “rooted in the abstract tradition,” which is true. However, the roots here reach deeply enough through the tiers of that tradition to draw upon the wellspring of Impressionism and the images relate as much to the dappled-light of Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette as to anything post-Cubism.

Randall’s splashes of light and her thick paint give her canvases the look of liquid tectonic quilts pieced together from crisp, bright colors that temper one another in concert. Sometimes runny, sometimes stringy, elastic or viscous, her paint is applied and manipulated in a nice variety of ways. One or two dominant, usually cool, hues give each work an overall color-statement, while hotter shades simmer in the interstices of the surface, punctuating the pictures and threatening to bubble forth depositing a new layer of color. The most interesting pictures include one or more conspicuous forms that stand out like crystals amid still fluid magma.

Such contrasting forms and impending eruptions of color are the results of a creative process that mimics natural actions. Randall’s images appear to have developed over time like the sedimentary deposits and alluvial fans they echo. During her additive procedure,the dramatic weight and volume of the paint itself becomes the most important aspect of the works, serving as a surrogate for any depiction of recognizable objects or locations. In a surprising twist, the massive pigment load and heavy textures often become atmospheric—a remarkable quality here because it is more often associated with thin, diaphanous paintings; and made more surprising by the fact that it imparts the works with a feeling of spirituality despite their connections to earthly, geological activity. The beauty and impact of her most successful works grows in parity with the amount of paint applied.

But aesthetic weight and actual weight are not necessarily related and Randall’s paintings do get bogged down at times. Some of them become murky and unreadable due to an excess of competing colors, while others suffer when the power of individual marks is lost in a cacophony of overindulgence. This diffusion of power due to the presence of extraneous imagery is what Randall should most diligently avoid. Though the commonly quoted art school adage “less is more” does not readily apply in Randall’s case, she should nevertheless remember that subtraction is as much a part of the painting process as addition. If Randall can mine even deeper into her artistic depths and turn up the heat on her editing process, there is no doubt she will continue to unearth painterly gems and ascend painting’s Richter scale while transforming cold oil paint into molten emissions from her creative core.

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Stux Gallery
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
212.352.1600

February 24 to March 26, 2005           

On September 6, 1522, Victoria, Ferdinand Magellan’s tar-encrusted, worm-eaten but once-proud flagship sailed into the bay of San Lúcar, Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. Some believed her arrival signaled the end of the Age of Exploration, but contrary to their expectations, similarly epochal discoveries continue today. Soon, we will need to stretch our world view to accommodate robot soldiers, sub-cellular micro-machines and maybe even life on Mars.

To warm up for these mental gymnastics, you might consider viewing Heide Trepanier’s paintings at Stux Gallery on 25th Street. Her drippy, suggestive and excretory biomorphic forms hint at the existence of as-yet-unexplored places both infinitesimal and vast. The paintings look like Seussian snapshots of an unknown, but not unbelievable, world Trepanier has found. In the gallery foyer, the tone of the show is set by Party Hag, an installation piece whose title brings it to a personal, slightly raunchy level, but doesn’t strip it of otherworldliness.

In the main gallery there are numerous canvases filled with similar imagery in a range of sizes and hues. Each composition appears to have been derived through a somewhat freeform process in which the artist drips, dollops and drizzles acrylic paint of varying viscosities and colors onto a monochromatic ground. The resulting tangle of webby nets, knobby splotches and vaguely ejaculatory splashes is then embellished with black outlines that give the work a cartoonish feel. But beware, the silly or comic ideas the Disney-esque outlining may invoke belie the violence and carnality that are the real subjects here.

Indeed, titles like Fatalist, Vomitorium and Blowhard Skin Dealer indicate Trepanier’s seriousness. The forms in her paintings grapple ferociously, smashing and surging against one another in a ballet of lust and carnage. In her artist’s statement, she declares her pours and swirls to be “psychological prosthetics” that “act the way [she would] like to but wouldn’t dare.” They “have orgies, rip each other apart,” and generally appear to be exercising the animal instincts they were born with.

Clearly, Trepanier possesses instincts of her own which show in her ability to manipulate her materials. The works are attractively lyrical, both graphically and colortistically. Yet this show is more than a display of dexterity; through an editing process in which she emphasizes certain shapes, and relationships between shapes, over others, the artist implies specific narratives that impart to each painting a personality of its’ own. This is no small feat and especially remarkable given the repetition of both motif and technique the artist uses to achieve it. Trepanier has managed to extract a surprising amount of mileage from simple technical means.

But has she been ambitious enough in exploring the world she has worked so hard to uncover? She appears to be sailing in the same waters she familiarized us with in paintings of a few years ago—but has the wind left her sails? The figure-ground tack she is on here has not changed much since her last show at Stux. The characters in paintings such as The Pig, the Snake and the Cock, as interesting as they are, have not evolved significantly from their forebears in earlier shows. While it is nice for an artist when a formula works, it is problematic when the works become formulaic. Trepanier has reached such a crux. Perhaps she should consider trading her prosthetics for the actual—ripping apart her subject matter and having an orgy of paint could re-awaken her sense of discovery and open up some more new worlds.

After all, if Magellan, instead of tenaciously pursuing his quest to find a water route to the Spice Islands, had hung out with King Charles re-hashing earlier voyages, nothing would have been gained. Trepanier has begun an interesting painting journey and for further discoveries should keep adding spice of her own.

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