September 6 to October 20, 2018
521 West 26 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lorettahoward.com

Much of David Row’s earlier abstraction was predicated on dark, often curved bands that meandered over textured monochromatic fields. Curves have also appeared with frequency in his subsequent development, though with each iteration they are put to surprisingly different use. Like many abstract painters, Row works in series. And this latest, of relatively small paintings, continues with the irregularly shaped canvases he has contended with for several years now, but with a few notable changes typical of his restive approach

Unlike the chromatically rich selection shown at the Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, in 2017, Row limits his palette here to a mid-range cobalt blue combined with black and white. From this narrow medley he manages to coax compelling variations by applying two interdependent rubrics: the first is the commonplace method of controlling a color’s intensity by adjusting the amount of surface each occupies; the other involves cropping painted forms—reclining Os and Xs—with multiple diagonal edges. The Os in particular, when interrupted diagonally suggest a larger shape that amplifies each painting’s scale and pictorial depth. Illusions of deep space thwart emphasis on surface, but never entirely. Between barely contained expanse and concentrated interlocking geometry these images exude a complexity one would not expect from such small panels.

Most of the nine pieces in the main gallery are less than two feet in any direction. Their compression induces a viewer to seek answers that may explicate their elaborate construction. Axis 2 (2018), for instance, teeters between resolution and near chaos depending on which spatial illusion catches a momentary optical bias.

Searching for patterns within the series, one discovers that five of the nine paintings, including Axis 2, are made of components consisting of shapes formed of three, four and five sides respectively. It’s not a hard and fast rule but occurs often enough to hook the viewer into a heightened awareness of how the shapes fit together. Such casual consistency is typical of Row’s approach to composition, as he seems willing to follow a formula so long as it produces a desired visual effect. Though his canvas shapes seem to revisit issues tackled in the 1970s by Kenneth Noland, the analytical depth to which they are subjected, particularly in this series, indicates a willingness to investigate many aspects of abstraction simultaneously. He avoids ideological traps. Pitting one abstract element against another suggests a permanent restlessness. The search itself seems to be the point.

Selectively distressed surfaces are introduced into otherwise largely hard-edged compositions without looking arbitrary or directed toward novelty. Whites are slightly dulled with embedded gray newspaper text, too small to read and often reversed or upside-down, but visible enough as body text to suggest a faint gray tone. Though unreadable, they add a temporal aspect. The speed one brings to scanning the lines produces a braking effect on one’s sensitivity to the scraping, which is gestural and thus implies quick, assertive movement. A dynamic counterpoint develops. The crater-like gouges left by granules of sand embedded in the wet paint act against the text, while the text acts against the sweep of the painted curves.

Xs and Os are not just cropped but overlapped and occasionally split. Counterclockwise, (2018) the one large piece in the show and the source of the show’s enigmatic title, imposes a black ellipse on a blue background with a large keystone-like section severed and pulled slightly out of alignment. This partial amputation forces a change in scale that might be more discovered than planned. Either way, it remains impossible to decipher which section was pulled from the other—which was the fixed element, and which has been moved. There is no way to resolve it but to recognize that Row is not after gestalt. The dynamic born of his intuitive method becomes the primary element with which a viewer engages the work. One is drawn visually into his thought processes.

Considering much of current abstract painting’s focus on spontaneity and one-off effects, Row’s tendency to revisit abstract elements embraced by earlier painters—not just Noland but Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothea Rockburne and Al Held, with whom Row shared a close friendship—may seem retrograde. But Row evidently depends on viewers willing to look beyond the superficial recognition of a style’s elements. He’s interested in how the elements function in a single painting. His aesthetic hangs off slender threads tying abstract painting to both feeling and intellect.

David Row is accessible in the best sense of the word. The way each painting in this show begs for engagement, first with itself and then with the whole series, recalls the provocative hang quotes in a magazine article that begs a full reading.

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September 8 to October 8, 2016
521 W 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 695 0164

At Loretta Howard Gallery this month, six sculptures by Joel Perlman make the best argument I’ve found recently for reassessing a growing tendency to consider an artist’s dedication to working with a specific material as something that has passed into history. I don’t mean to imply that the assemblage techniques currently dominating, for instance, the Turner Prize competition are not adding to a welcome broadening of the sculptural genre. I’m wary of allowing technical mastery to lapse into a misguided notion of obsolescence. Intimate knowledge of a material gained through hands-on experience and nurtured along with an artist’s talent, judgement and intuition, has been a property of sculpture shared by nearly all cultures and in nearly all historical contexts. It is not a style. It is the recognition that sculpture has a formal essence.

As Perlman’s work shows, to develop an intimate and tactile knowledge of a specific material is not to unduly confine one’s experience, but to foster a level of focus that frees intuition and helps an artist develop an instinct for spatial language. His passion for industrial metal, specifically steel came early in his education. Leaving his native New York to spend a portion of his undergraduate years studying with welded sculpture pioneer Brian Wall at the Central School of Art in London, he returned to the states to complete a degree at Cornell, then went on to Berkeley. Though Wall has been a definite influence on his work, the sculptures at Loretta Howard are very much in the tradition of David Smith, particularly in regard to Smith’s innovative drawing mode as exemplified in the Whitney’s Hudson River Landscape (1951).

Like Perlman’s 2014 exhibition at Loretta Howard, the current work concentrates on a motif of open circular frames, with perimeters punctuated by half round and triangular shards dispersed intuitively along their curved edges. These marks function like swells and blots along a line of ink. One might consider them distant cousins to Pollock’s flung sinews, but the level of compositional control Perlman displays belies that tempting parallel. More than signs of mere spontaneity, these smaller elements read as stops or accents on a line of thought. When enlarged they intrude into the open space within each circle, redefine that space and accentuate the work’s abstraction. When smaller, they enliven pieces like Double Trouble (2015) by provoking a calligraphic interpretation that can lend itself to a range of implied references. Triangles suggest saw teeth; strings of half-rounds suggest worn gears.

Yet in either case, Perlman favors the abstract side of the spectrum and keeps the viewer’s eye trained on how the open spaces are defined by interruptions along the overlapping curves that define each piece. In Masterpiece (2015), a lower and upper emphasis on perpendicular circles cluster in a way that gives the space created in the center an illusion of expansion, which subsequently de-emphasizes the implied references to machinery. It is a delicate balance that changes with one’s concentration. The control Perlman demonstrates attests to his comfort with thinking in formal terms. Foremost here is a non-verbal and intuitive methodology apparently developed over decades of practice.

Perlman’s confidence allows him to occasionally leave the tactile security of steel, which informs his process through a feeling for weight, resistance and flexibility, and move to a near weightless material like Styrofoam in order to construct sculptures designed to be cast in bronze by means of a process similar to lost wax. Four of the pieces in the exhibition, including Double Trouble are fabricated this way. Casting in this manner is not all that different from the usual welding procedures, considering that it is based on assembled elements. Moreover, the production of multiples to which casting is often associated, is not possible in a loss system. Thus the motivation for its use is more like an exploration of visual ideas—sketching so to speak, not creating a line of multiples.

Each of the four cast pieces received a unique patina. Though subtle in range, color is important to Perlman, who prefers color that seems to deviate modestly from the look of the material beneath. And as he works intuitively, so experimentation with painting techniques follow. The two larger pieces in the gallery, Broadway (2016) and Wonder Wheel (2015–16) have been painted using a technique called powder painting or e-coating, which employs an electric current running through the sculpture that encourages an ionic bond between pigment and surface.

The formal vocabulary established in the smaller bronze pieces takes on an entirely different feel in the considerably larger Wonder Wheel. Here the triangular and half-round elements are scaled up, releasing them from their accentuating role and putting them to work merging and equalizing their relationship to the circular elements. A sense of solidity now joins the shards to the curve, leaving a more unified mass, the effect of which is to draw the eye to the irregular spaces between the solid elements—spaces that resemble the simplified edges of Matisse’s cutouts. They also — perhaps accidentally — create a pun on the idea of a cut-out.

It is this complexity, arising from nuance set upon nuance that makes contemplating these six sculptures a rich and open-ended experience. The variety of uses to which a few elements can be employed is limited only by the artist’s ability to see beyond the material fact of each shape toward a unified sculptural essence. And that ability, that sensitivity to variation and adaptation that Perlman’s work clearly demonstrates, ought to be a larger part of sculpture’s continued progress.

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Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

The post The World Outside: “Landscapes” at Marlborough Chelsea appeared first on artcritical.

March 3 to April 23, 2016
293 Tenth Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“James Nares: Portraits,” currently at Paul Kasmin, offers one of the more intriguing efforts by a contemporary artist to affect the portrait genre, currently enjoying a popular revival. Though appearing at first glance to be still photos, these portraits are actually shot with a special video camera that can record in excess of 300 frames per second, many more times a camera’s normal rate. Each portrait in the exhibition amounts to an extremely slow-motion video displayed on HD screens with their respective subjects posed mostly in conventional head-and-shoulders format. The result is that a viewer can track a subject’s movements as methodically as one can follow a snail on a branch. In acquiescing to this weirdly protracted form of observation, the effect is mesmerizing — just as mesmerizing as it was in Bill Viola’s “Quintet” videos 15 years ago.

The glacially slow movement of each subject certainly holds one’s attention, and to put this to use, Nares had each sitter accentuate a specific movement. Titled with the subject’s first name only, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Jim (2015) offers a turn of the head, while film critic Amy Taubin, in Amy (2015), augments a similar gesture with a smile that replaces a grave stare. These examples are mere fragments, as some of the videos last up to 20 minutes. Art critic and curator Douglas Crimp, posing for Douglas (2015), clasps his hands together just under his chin, sometimes interlacing his long fingers in a series of gestures that resembles the sort of unconscious movement a portrait subject is likely to indulge in when an appropriate gesture escapes them.

Others display more calculated gestures, like Jahanara (2016), in which a young woman in South Asian dress performs dance-like motions with her arms gently ascending and descending. More than the other pieces in the show, her gestures seem calculated to complement the camera’s artifice. And this is where the work’s more contradictory aspect becomes apparent. Though charming, her attempt to cooperate with the artist’s intentions manages to put even greater emphasis on the camera’s unusual interpretive bias, coldly thwarting her effort to create something personal.

Jahanara is a portrait of one of Nares’s three daughters participating in the series. The remaining subjects are all well-known art world figures and friends of the artist, suggesting Nares wished to lend his project the standing of celebrity along with a note of personal and emotional involvement. Visual aspects are ordinary. The lighting of many is stark but not exaggeratedly so — softly diffused and aimed generally toward the front. Whatever contrast it creates naturally changes as the subject turns from left to right, or right to left. Backgrounds tend to be dark. A deep charcoal blue for instance does the job of offsetting the platinum shock of Jim Jarmusch’s hair.

A temporal medium like video applied to a still-image genre like portraiture brings the viewer into an unsettling space where neither a feeling for cinema nor any sensitivity toward still images are much help in coming to terms with what they are experiencing, mostly because as a hybrid their individual characteristics cancel each other out. To watch Amy morph from a frown to a smile holds our attention to the tiny muscle changes that create her expression. But in doing so, the expression itself becomes secondary — it feels bypassed. What can be appreciated of her humanity is undercut by the camera’s mechanism.

As social animals we are super sensitive to, yet almost entirely unaware of, how we read facial nuance. I challenge any parent to actually describe the physical subtleties that reveal their child is telling a fib, though their ability to read them is usually unquestionable. In watching Amy’s face dissected into many small moments, one is witness to the mundane mechanics of what makes a smile, the muscle contractions splayed out in laboratory fashion. It’s worth noting that the camera — a Fastec Troubleshooter — was designed as a scientific instrument.

There is a mildly absorbing yet ultimately alienating strangeness in these videos. The ambiguity Nares produces — hardly an unwanted aspect of an art work — is reflective of how he places the viewer in a conceptual no-man’s-land between the time the subject expended posing and the duration of the video one sees in the gallery. One ends up hovering between methods of seeing, alternating between intimacy and voyeurism.

Voyeurism has deep roots in Western art, extending from Johannes Vermeer to Andy Warhol; the latter’s screen tests of the late 1960s are characterized as influential by the artist in an essay by Max Lakin in last month’s Vanity Fair, which coincided with the show’s opening. The Warhol reference seems an odd choice, since Nares’s ostensible approach to his subjects is the opposite of Warhol’s cold-blooded gawking. Nares clearly seems interested in creating genuine engagement with his subjects. And yet this clichéd use of slow motion actually pushes a viewer away from the subject and repositions them behind the artist, who is behind the camera, which functions according to the methodically relentless purpose for which it was designed.

If I were to seek the missing link to the connection Nares claims between himself and Warhol, I’d look to Richard Avedon’s deer-in-the-headlights celebrity portrait work of the last century. Though Avedon is a still photographer, he makes for a better precursor to an artist working in the portrait mode. In Avedon, as in Nares and Warhol, the blending of celebrity (real or imagined) confrontation and the supremacy of the lens renders the camera’s intrusion inevitable. If I am to accept the context of portraiture that Nares insists upon, I cannot ignore the fact that the only real video content is the plain evidence, in each portrait, of time passing, the banality of which is overcome by the fantastic properties of the super slow aspect — not what I can grasp of the subject’s humanity. For all their close-up beauty and dream-like dawdling, as portraits they are more weighed down than lifted by the camera’s obstinate scan.

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July 22 to December 19, 2015
1230 5th Avenue (between 105th and 104th streets)
New York, 212 831 7272

Framed, perhaps unavoidably, by the artist’s predilection for mixing graphic and painted methods, Rodríguez Calero’s “Mártires Urbanos y Santos de Nuestros Días,” on view at El Museo del Barrio through December 19, 2015, is an exhibition that announces something more than Calero’s remarkable ability to mix media. Though her layering of techniques is somewhat unique and decidedly complex, there is really nothing unprecedented about them, which only proves to be one of the many reasons why her work is extraordinary — it embraces contemporary painting’s limitless possibilities yet transcends the unfortunately popular and futile search for the next new thing by taking a higher road.

Here are images of mostly solitary figures that are more than the dizzying array of visual sources and picture-making methods used in their creation. Though each panel is a composite of photo collage, stencils, embossments, painting, drawing and applications of metal leaf, what comes across in nearly every instance is a stately elegance — I would even say a genuine and rare beauty — the source of which is undoubtedly the artist’s commitment to images that address human dignity, furthered by a gift for design, color and especially nuance. As layered as the surfaces are, and as readable as each pictorial construction remains upon completion, to focus exclusively on their process, which I admit is tempting, risks missing both the vision and the ambition of their maker.

Only the second in the museum’s Women Artists Retrospective Series, (the first was an exhibition of Marisol’s work late last year) more than a hundred examples of Rodríguez Calero’s paintings, collages and acrollages (a term she coined to represent the more complex of her techniques) fill a long, narrow space in the main gallery that aptly resembles a nave. The sacred connotation this brings to the room is superfluous but certainly consistent with her highly effective use of sacred and iconographic tropes. Many of the images echo traditional representations of saints, but without making too much of the connection. In fact, it is her ability to fuse the sacred with the secular, and sometimes with the slightly profane that keeps a viewer’s focus trained on the stubborn spirit of each panel’s unique persona.

As they are rather complex images, a more austere example might serve as the best overview. Saint Anthony (1999), is built outward, so to speak, from a single photographic fragment cut from a magazine depicting the head of a young bearded man cradled in a high-collar sweatshirt. Added to this image is a hand and arm from another magazine clipping, and at the bridge of the man’s nose, yet another magazine fragment, in this instance revealing a woman’s eyes, tilted slightly against the axis of the male jaw that subtly emphasizes the benevolence of her gaze. Surrounding this gender-aggregated head is a nimbus of pale gold, painted in a manner similar to the decorative rubbings that overlay the painting’s deep liturgical red ground with decorative motifs. The pattern repeated in this particular motif is reminiscent of stamped sheet metal tiling that once covered ceilings in older New York tenement buildings.

Obviously not a purely traditional representation of the 13^th century Paduan monk, it is instead an assertion of the living metaphor St. Anthony embodies — a sympathetic archetypal figure that one could imagine seeing, as the artist apparently does, in the face of stranger on the street. It is this vision of living memory that Calero maintains so effectively in her work. Generally what comes across is the artist’s informed familiarity with, and an affection for, Nuyorican street culture filtered through the somber gravitas of the Spanish Baroque, the delirious fecundity of Picasso’s early decades and the manic inventiveness of Kurt Schwitters — all of whom are mentioned by the artist as significant influences.

The textures and rubbings that draw each composition into a coherent vision form a theme that runs through many of the larger panels. Yet their symbolism is delimited by their opulence, which is apparently the result of intuitive selections, each informed only by the graphic possibilities they offer. The tin ceiling reference may be interpreted as a visual trace of a NYC tenement, but in other panels, such as a riff on Catholic Sacred Heart imagery in The Apparition (1994), more mundane studio detritus functions much the same way, specifically in the figure’s crown, made in the shape of those extruded wedges that come attached to art store canvases — their dark silhouette offset by a flaming red nimbus encircling the figure’s drooping head.

As with all the larger panels, the focus is always on a figure enveloped in an ethereal, magical or hallucinogenic ambiance, the range and variety of which is stunning. But these represent only half the exhibition. The rest is devoted to examples of Calero’s more modestly scaled and more spontaneously fashioned collage work, much of which seems more attentive to a hip-hop than to a votive premise. These figures dance, bend and pose in gestures that recall imagery from advertising and music videos, although a few, such as Exotic Dancer (1994) use totemic imagery that reminded me of paintings by the late Emilio Cruz. Others, like Silent Scream (1997), echo notes typically struck by Francis Bacon.

Art historical connections fly of the pictures like sparks. Gustav Klimt came to mind as I stood before the majestic and mysterious Virgen Maria (2004), an experience I must report demands a visit to the exhibition. Its reproduction does little justice to its color and delicacy — a criticism, I hasten to add, of just about the only flaw in the show’s beautifully designed bilingual catalog. My only other gripe is the choice of a distracting yellow for the walls of the room where the collages were hung. But aside from these minor aspects, it is one of the most impressive retrospectives of a living artist I’ve seen in a long time.

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April 2 to May 9, 2015
529 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 9666

Julian Hatton’s painting seems to have been focused for some time on the contention that abstraction, if allowed to breathe in a deeper pictorial space, can maintain visual opulence without drifting too far from its essentially two-dimensional syntax. Among a generation of artists who matured on this side of painting’s pluralist expansion, where each painter’s style, look and touch was far more varied than that of their canonic New York School predecessors, Hatton held to a loose figurative scaffold based on landscape elements both perceived and imagined. Though the iconography in this recent work remains readable — each painting’s horizon is still easy to find — there is, in newer panels such as trouble and scrim (both 2015), a softening of the edges and a swelling of forms that now shimmer behind translucent washes instead of bending, as they once did, into each other’s space. From an optimal distance — coerced from the viewer by the five-foot spread of their frames — their reconfigured cohesion seems to rely less on drawing and more on a spontaneous manipulation of hue and texture.

The resulting airiness is a clear departure from his earlier work, which is reprised in this exhibition by trio (2012-13), an example of his harder-edged shapes, apparently reconstituted during the painting’s many stages of development so as not to diminish the careful co-ordinating of its unique structural invention. To drift from the success of this method is risky, for what’s been so appealing about Hatton’s work until now has been precisely its interconnected complexity. The changes seen in this exhibition may be attributed in some measure to his establishing a new studio in upstate New York. Like Bonnard in the south of France, Ellsworth Kelly in Chatham or de Kooning in East Hampton, a move from city to country will, for reasons not always linked to the landscape itself, reset a painter’s perspective.

A clue to the path taken in this shift between the earlier compositions and these newer, cloudier apparitions may be found in imprint (2014-15), a five-foot-square panel representing the artist’s trials at keeping the structure fixed tighter to the surface. Here, a familiarity with Hatton’s elevated horizon line helps the viewer read the ghost of a landscape that still exists despite the missing diagonals and story-book trees of his earlier work — elements that had once supported Hatton’s penchant for excavating spatial illusion with little cost to a lively surface. Imprint marks the change as its simplified shapes are not immediately recognizable as landscape elements. They also seem unusually tolerant of each other’s position in the composition.

And yet warbler (2014-15), to my eye the most adventurous of the newer canvases in the show, still owes something to the lexicon of the earlier work, though here it seems Hatton’s method has turned to a new and pronounced improvisation. warbler’s surface remains in an agitated state. Not a single section of color is truly resolved. Edges are ragged and makeshift. Translucency dominates. There is even a gestural coarseness replacing what was once a controlled chaos of endlessly suggestive shapes. The color alone in Warbler provides the link to earlier work, being mostly middle tones of contingent primary and secondary hues.

For anyone who has followed Hatton’s work these many years, an effort to catch up to where he is now will require diligence, which I believe is a fair expectation for him to make as his paintings have always appealed to a visually smart audience. Because his abundant inventiveness had constituted as near a legible pictorial language as created by any painter in recent memory, encountering its contraction will demand a real and unavoidable learning curve. The fact that Warbler takes pride of place on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue seems more than a hint that he is unlikely to turn back. Hatton is a painter whose strength had always been his ability to develop variations on a theme. The construction of an intelligent, readable and teasingly ambiguous pictorial image, even in this new looser style, still speaks to a continuity of vision.

Hatton has never been a painter fixated on concocting a new look, and there is no indication here of chasing novelty, nor is there any hint of applying arbitrary effects to avoid comparison with contemporaries. From the beginning his work has been a conscious adaptation of landscape elements knit tightly into compositions that owed a great deal of their cohesion to those compositional properties that as any instructor knows are maddeningly difficult to formulate verbally but can be appreciated in its many variations from the mature Nicolas Poussin to the early Richard Diebenkorn. As art fairs continue to hawk brightly colored things apparently meant for the simpler aim of accessorizing the expansive blank walls that once provided inexpensive working space for New York’s artists, it gives one hope to watch a painter keep to self-imposed limitations, not in spite of, but because there is more than enough room within a rectangle of canvas to address a thoughtful and historically aware sensibility.

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February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

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Mary Ijichi, Dan Mills, and Jeffrey Reed at George Billis Gallery
October 28 – November 22, 2014
525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 645 2621

Functioning as pressure valves for excessively solicited curators and dealers, cluster exhibitions — mini-one person shows that offer a third alternative to the expansive solo show and the thematic group show — give artists the benefit of a solo listing, and the sponsoring gallery an efficient scheduling solution. Of the venues I visited one evening this month, the Painting Center managed to squeeze together solo shows by Elisa Jensen, Lois Dickson and Ying Li in their modest space, while the George Billis Gallery offered its own trio of solos with Jeffrey Reed, Mary Ijichi and Dan Mills. Billis’s recently expanded gallery is a welcome improvement for a venue dedicated to providing exposure to a large stable of artists. Lois Dickson’s choice of Elisa Jensen and Ying Li to share the space with her this month is an expression of solidarity among the membership of this long-standing artist-run institution. I wished they all had more space to share.

Elisa Jensen’s work was surprisingly large, having previewed the images online and assumed a scale that would have matched what I know of the space itself. They are urban scenes with a flat, linear quality reminiscent of Ben Shahn. The wall graffiti in Yellow Skirt, Brooklyn (all works 2014, except where noted) shares the same slender calligraphy as the bicycles depicted in several other pictures. By a crude delineating technique, Jensen suspends her imagery between a gritty realism and a self-conscious primitivism that in tandem captures both the solidity and the transient temporality of a cluttered Brooklyn sidewalk.

On the other side of a half wall, Lois Dickson’s abstractions evoked a melding of space and figure one might associate with better examples of allegorical symbolism. Her ability to match a remarkable inventiveness with subtle paint handling is particularly evident in Backstage, a canvas that, frankly, deserved the sort of space Larry Gagosian recently squandered in his uptown digs on the sophomoric maneuvers of Richard Prince. It is a canvas of rare erudition and presence. It alone is worth the trip to this fifth floor roost, high above the gallery district’s hinterlands.

Ying Li, occupying the small chamber (the euphemistically familiar “project” room) to the side of Dickson’s allotment, succeeded in reproducing the charged feeling of a working studio with selections from an extended study of views framed by the square lights of a large, grid-like window. The window is that of a space Li moved into after her husband’s untimely passing. The poignancy of her sharing her partner’s perspective on the city through the same transom is kept silently personal, leaving the viewer with a characteristic maelstrom of multiple views, painted in Li’s fierce, brawling color and seismic texture. And yet the Monet blue of City Series #3: Blue Curtain hints with both delicacy and abandon at the solitude of a podium on an empty stage.

Attuned, I suppose to the square frame of Li’s work, I was drawn immediately, at Billis, to Jeffery Reed’s landscapes. On panels measuring little more than nine by nine inches, Reed proves himself a match to the elusive ambition of his forebears: the depiction of air and light. Refined in the studio from outdoor studies made in Maine, Pennsylvania and Ireland, Reed combines memory and visual notes to produce jewels of form and color, informed by late afternoon cloud patterns, sunlit structures and receding planes — well, let’s face it, the most conventional aspects of landscape painting one could imagine. And yet there is not a hint of pedantic posturing or histrionic calls to tradition. Soft Rain, measuring a mere six by ten inches, is an affirming tour de force of nature seen through a sensibility.

Reed’s sturdy reserve proved that he, too, could endure the compression of an undersized-solo-show confederacy. But there was still more to see. A mere head turn and I was presented with Mary Ijichi’s drawings and collages, again of modest scale hovering around sixteen inches, which blend string tape with acrylic paint on Mylar. Quietly contemplative, they mimic the delicacy of Paul Klee but with a different sense of playfulness. Here the focus is on the phenomenology of patterns. The text-oriented pieces place her closer (though not necessarily indebted) to Agnes Martin. They reiterate the accidental texture of a Roman Opalka, yet steer clear of his obsessive density.

Ijichi’selegance compels the observer to locate herself at an optimal viewing distance, which turns out to be rather close and fortunately harmonious with the installation. Intimacy, however, is not an interest shared by Dan Mills, whose very public approach is to apply color to large printed maps by painting over their written information, returning the cartographer’s data exertions back into the drawn and painted renderings that all maps really are. Though most of the work failed to transcend the obvious gimmick, there were notable exceptions: Bleed (52) displays genuine painterly authority, and Outtake A’s (2013) extended strokes offers a winning digression from the motif. They work because they do not rely on their maps per se.

Those of us occupying the lower echelon of art-world actors struggle to resist what often seems like structural hostility toward an art of circumspection. But as the struggle continues I suppose we have to make the most of available opportunities. The organizers of these six exhibitions may not have been able to provide optimal viewing conditions for their artists, but it proved enough.

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Though trompe-l’œil in its purest form is generally considered aesthetic froth, a stream of modern practices from Op Art to Arte Povera found new ways to exploit perceptual enigmas born of visual confusion. But it was Jasper Johns whose painting opened the neo-Duchampian era by combining a deft painterly touch with a more cerebral version of the same parlor trick. Depicting the already flat image of a map, or painting the word blue with red paint introduced philosophical inquiry under the auspices of a visual gag. But significantly, Johns remained a painter, meaning the self-depreciation implied in his paradoxes reveals a shared confusion between artist and viewer, reflective of both painting fluency as a medium and the human limitations of perception. Johns’s early work represents the watershed moment between the fall of self-discovery inherent in painting and the ascent of the assured and declarative, if not dogmatic tone of what became conceptual art.

What’s interesting about Paul Sietsema’s exhibition at Matthew Marks this month is how it begs comparison to Johns, as Sietsema, with similar confidence in painting as a visual medium, takes the viewer beyond visual gags to again provoke difficult questions pertaining to the meaning of a painted image. Where he differs from Johns is in his uneven use of painting as a method, which he applies brilliantly in some pieces and to almost no effect in others. The discrepancy has to do with Sietsema’s apparent wish to be both painter and pure conceptual artist. Consequently, he is divided against himself.

The gallery, in synch with the artist’s often-articulated purposes presents the work with typical speculative hyperbole as, “… address[ing] the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, and the systems in which these objects circulate” — a program meant to train the viewer’s focus on attendant associations accompanying images of telephones, coins, newspapers, and industrial labelling. However, like any artist, Sietsema’s technique best reflects his intuition and sensibility, and is apparently hands-on and informed by a painstaking construction of visually juxtaposed realities. Regrettably, these elaborate processes sometimes prove irrelevant to the efficacy of his final image. The result is that some pieces are far more compelling than others because their technical complexity provides the greater part of their visual and conceptual punch.

The more successful canvases — as Johns often were — pair common imagery with the viscous medium of thoughtfully applied color, yet with the significant difference that Sietsema’s paint is itself depicted by a trompe-l’œil manipulation of the medium. Where Johns used a leaden encaustic membrane to keep the paint layer foremost in the viewer’s mind, while allowing flat imagery to rest uncomfortably on the picture plane, Sietsema creates convincing illusions of paint puddles and painted objects that function as a layer in a peeling deconstruction of the picture plane itself, advancing beyond what Johns did 60 years ago.

White Painting (2014) joins the illusion of a floor or table surface with the linen surface of the painting, then places on this visually amalgamated plane the image of an old telephone, coated with the same white paint that forms the puddle in which it sits. The surface beyond the perimeter of the paint puddle is scumbled with a duller white, revealing a section of bare linen at the bottom of the frame. One’s grasp of the illusion is then challenged by the fact that the shadow of the phone halts at the edge of the puddle, leaving the remaining painted canvas as flat as one knows it to be. Its effect is truly bewildering.

Closer to Johns’s preference for flat imagery like maps and flags, Red Painting juxtaposes several small areas of exposed linen within what appears to be a physically disturbed puddle of dried red paint. Optical confusion ensues as the light, masterfully implied in the modelling of a disturbed paint surface, is contradicted by the texture of the actual linen, which appears to be bathed in the even light of the gallery. There are other canvases that play with coins slid through paint puddles and across newspaper fragments.

Ironically, by raising the bar with real and determined skill, he manages to make his other work shallower by comparison. The link in these other pieces between the medium used and the subject addressed is missing. What he refers to as drawings — paintings made with ink — do not transcend their obviously photographic source material. By a transfer technique inadequately described in the press release, Sietsema paints black and white photos of studio activity, reminiscent of late-1970s performance art; he uses halftone patterning, which has long been a cliché in both conceptual art and commercial design meant to mimic “serious” art. Wrapping the image around the frame, as Sietsema does, merely adds a conventional assertion of postmodern cheek.

Several paintings, apparently products of a similar method, depict the rutted surface of weathered stones carved with a single date, yet neither offer much more than the mystery behind the dates. Like On Karawa’s Today paintings, Sietsema’s use of paint as a medium for these images is void of any purpose specific to the medium of paint itself. The artist’s hand is all but invisible, leaving one with the reliable supposition that in spite of how many hours of brushwork it must have taken to complete the image, the viewer remains, in essence, confronted with a manipulated photograph. In similar fashion, several films in the exhibition fail to transcend their considerable technical dependency, leaving only their deadpan content. If anything, Sietsema’s few genuinely marvelous paintings suggest that painting cannot be used as just another visual medium for addressing preconceived ideas. Painting’s timeless relevance is inseparable from its contrary and uncooperative nature.

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Kneeling where Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue triangulates Atlantic and Fourth, my job was to hold the end of a measuring tape against a street lamp. At the other end, sculptor George Trakas calculated the distance to an open spot in the triangle and noted it on a drawing he brought with him. The purpose of this exercise was to corroborate a spot on the unfinished plaza surrounding the Atlantic Avenue subway kiosk where a tree could take root without interfering with the usual tangle of utilities beneath the asphalt. Trakas had earlier delineated this patch of earth as the best place to plant a Silver Linden, a tree that would serve as the culmination of a project he has labored over for a decade.

We met at the Atlantic Avenue station to tour Hook, Line and Sinker, the abbreviated title for an amalgam of interconnected sculptural elements riffing off the commercial and natural history of this busy transit hub. The project was initiated in 2004, but to date, the northwest end of the street-level plaza remains unfinished, closed off to traffic by painted demarcations and temporary lighting. Trakas envisions this section to be elevated a foot or two to the height of the finished plaza and shaded by the tree.

Currently all that rises above pedestrian level is the landmark-protected brick and sandstone kiosk, designed by Heins & LaFarge in 1904. Though abandoned as an entrance after the station’s renovation, the kiosk was preserved for its elegance, its symbolism of past civic munificence, and to provide a skylight for the expanded public space below. Work on the plaza surrounding the kiosk was partially completed in 2004 and updated in 2013 with enhancements by Trakas, working in conjunction with Parsons Brinckerhoff di Menico and Partners, including granite seating elements meant to be shaded by the tree. But the end of the plaza is unfinished, and as long as it remains so, and as long as the tree remains unplanted, Hook, Line and Sinker will also be incomplete. The tree is crucial to the interlocking metaphor Trakas has wrought below ground.

Hook (Archean Reach), Line (Sea House) and Sinker (Mined Swell), the full title for the tripartite installation, addresses the borough’s development along roads that extend inland from its waterfront. As a port city’s pathways tend to develop perpendicularly from the water, Brooklyn’s gently curving shore caused its neighborhood streets to clash at odd angles, thus creating the borough’s distinctive civic centers. It is this web of routes emanating from the sea (as much as the street names themselves) that inspired Trakas to introduce nautical imagery to an underground subway station.

With an extensive body of site-specific sculptures stretching from La Jolla and Bellingham to the banks of the Hudson River at Beacon and at Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, Trakas has earned a reputation as an artist committed to reminding us of our archetypal connections to the water’s edge. Addressing public concerns ranging from shorefront repair and reclamation to simple accessibility (and often both) Trakas has dedicated his career to creating places rather than pieces. He is not a monument builder. Visitors to his Newtown Creek Nature Walk (2007) in Greenpoint sometimes raise the question, where’s the art? What Trakas brings to his work and what he leaves for the public to contemplate is a deep sense of what was there originally, how it shaped the site he encountered, and how it affected what he built on it, or beside it, or within it.

My guided tour of Hook, Line and Sinker began with explicit instructions from the artist that I was to take the D train from Bleecker Street to the Atlantic Avenue stop, just one of many paths I could have followed to the site. Taking this particular route was intended to prepare me for a narrative of movement and landscape that informs the sculpture. My trip began underground at Bleecker, stretched over East River via the Manhattan Bridge, descended again beneath Flatbush Avenue to the inevitable ascension, this time by foot, back to street level — a rolling sea voyage, replayed as an ordinary commuter trip. When I met up with him at the Pacific Street entrance he launched into the history of the work and how its title invites and encourages overlapping interpretations.

Hook (Archean Reach) refers to the curved passageway leading from the Pacific Street entrance to the tracks below, which he has emphasized with a sculptural wainscot of polished metamorphic granite, undulating wave-like as it amplifies the floor’s gently rolling movement from turnstile to platform. Substantially more sculptural than the ceramic tile wall it undergirds, both its weight and color succeed as image and structural enhancement. Care was taken in its design so as not to interrupt the commercial and practical aspects of its location. Thus clean breaks were inserted to allow for a newsstand, vents and maintenance doors.

The sculptural aspect of Line (Sea House) is more implied than physically present, as it constitutes the interior vertical space directly below the kiosk. The kiosk itself has been transformed into a symbolic lighthouse, while architecturally serving as a clerestory opening, providing daylight to the platform and stairs below. For this space Trakas had originally settled on the inclusion of new steel markers embedded in the old walls where the original stair stringers once descended to a cramped landing. But an opportunity to solve an unforeseen problem led to one of the site’s more overt seagoing references. Electric lamps had to be installed to provide lighting at night, raising the issue of how fixtures were to be maintained in the now-floorless kiosk hovering over the stairs. The solution was a rolling gantry Trakas designed in the shape of a boat hull, with a functioning helm able to move the entire structure laterally on rails across the open space, thus providing maintenance workers (entering through the now-locked street-level doors) the ability to re-lamp light fixtures, while inadvertently enriching the artist’s rail and sea metaphors.

Sinker (Mined Swell) is an incline made of huge quarry-faced granite blocks that widen on their dressed sides as they descend between parallel staircases below the sky-lit platforms to the lower trains. They follow the stairs while enclosing the base of several steel columns. As the most massively sculptural element in the design, Sinker creates a visceral outcrop of bedrock that, when washed with the daylight from above, emphasizes the connection between street traffic and its subterranean rail extensions.

What’s missing is the tree: a single declarative chord sounding the opening of the three movements playing below. Not only would it provide an organic contrast to the steel and masonry underground, its branches would reach out toward incoming commuters from every direction, its roots suggesting the disseminating subterranean routes.

Trakas had submitted his proposal for the final plaza design to MTA’s Arts for Transit program and to the DOT in 2011, including the drawing that showed the exact spot where the tree could be planted. According to Bonny Tsang at the Department of Transportation’s press office, “DOT has been working with community stakeholders and Forest City Ratner Companies to develop a plan for this plaza. The formal design phase will be initiated in the near future.” Apparently the decision has yet to be finalized.

The question of whose design will be applied to the remaining street level space remains open and thus explains the long delay in finishing the project. When decisions are tossed back and forth between city agencies, while developers and “various stakeholders” vie for advantage, the only thing that is certain is that the artist, though a primary stakeholder, is but one voice.

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