October 23 to November 28, 2015
15 Rivington Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Street
New York City, 212 242 2772

In 1906 the critic Philip Hale remarked that he perceived a “fine insanity” in the work of Marsden Hartley, by which the artist took him to mean “a strong insistence upon the personal interpretations of the subjects chosen.” While Marsden might not be the first name to come to mind in viewing John Lees’ fourth solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham, Lees does harness his unequivocal mastery of paint into building images that speak of a similar, profound commitment to inner reflection.

A sense of gravitas pervades these somber works. The paint itself is what is initially so striking and so momentous, inexorably annexing the viewer’s attention through its almost unbearable beauty of crusty and pitted layers of rich pigment. Clown in a Frame speaks this exalted language of densely textured paint- the language of Georges Rouault- without reservation, even absconding with Rouault’s decorative framing. Yet the source of the sentiment informing the subject transcends easy reference to the French master and is deeply personal for Lees. Lees was the clown. Lees was Dilly Dally (the puppet from the Howdy Doody show of the 1950s). The relationship between subject and artist is direct. These two characters, that of the Dilly Dally and the clown, are primary sources of identification for the artist in his childhood and adolescence. Resurfacing in his work over the years, they have become an integral part of what Lees refers to as “purging” himself of his past. Clown in a Frame and Dilly Dally are images born of memory, densely processed through years of labor in the studio. However, the note that Lees seeks to sound is, in the end, less about memory, less about Time recollected, but rather about the ongoing effect of Time, the process of aging. The clown and Dilly Dally show severe signs of the wear and tear of Time passing—especially in the mournful watercolor Ghost of Dilly Dally, 2007, where the image of Dilly Dally is especially haunting, the surface of the paper barely retaining a few traces of the hapless puppet who has been literally effaced.

These images, are, however, but an introduction to Lees’ most powerful treatise on aging, the portraits of his father. First evoked in a fine series of tooled drawings on the first floor of the gallery, the father assumes true iconic form downstairs in five fiercely moving paintings in which the remorselessness of Time gnaws and gnaws at this simple fellow sitting in his armchair with his Lucky Strikes and drink. Four of those images are quite small and so tactile that if this was a museum show there would be a barrier keeping them at at safe distance from the public. The persistent process of toil that produces these savage, mottled surfaces could, in a lesser artist’s hands, suffocate the image. Indeed, even in the work of Frank Auerbach sometimes the paint itself has a tendency to dominate and overpower the image, reading as paint before it reads as form. Here, as in Rouault, the endless layering is constantly felt in service of form (It is of considerable interest that Lees cites Rouault again and again as “the door” that he found and opened and led to his becoming an artist). Lees proves himself skillful at resuscitating his work time and time again over the years, often scraping and scouring with chemical removers until the surface reawakens. For to Lees, it is all about the paint. “If the paint does not go bumpity bumpity, what’s the point?”This pitiless working of the paint is best witnessed in Man Sitting in an Armchair (Red Dog), 2008-2015, where the greater part of the back plane of the picture has been scraped entirely off. The most evocative of all these smaller portraits of the artist’s father is Man Sitting in an Armchair, 1971; 2013-14. Here the head is processed completely out of focus, dissolving into the stream of passing time, the red dot of the cigarette package glowing like a dying ember.

Dominating the lower gallery is the largest painting of the exhibition, Man Sitting in an Armchair, 2008-2015. Here, again, the focus of the picture seems not so much about a memory of a man, a father, but rather about the diffusion of the form through aging. Miraculously, as the edges of the forms dissolve, the forms themselves seem heightened and fulfilled. Indeed, the forms assume a feeling of inherent necessity in terms of the pictorial structure, as opposed to the diffuse forms that often may actually weaken the structure of an Impressionist work. The content of Lees’ portraits is also somehow mysteriously sustained, despite the vagueness, despite the exaggerated or caricatured features. One still feels the keenness of his pain in confronting his feelings of his father and the need to purge those feelings is palpable.

Perhaps the most curious work of the entire exhibition is In the Park, 2008. A figure of an old man with a cane is seemingly morphing into a man playing a saxophone. The fractured image is riveting. What is the meaning of this? Lees cites the old man as a self portrait, the image as a refection on the inevitable aging process, mixed with his love of jazz. He feels that his pictures, at their best, touch on the big sound of saxophonist Ben Webster: “big sound, big tone, but played out in paint.” Again, the working of the paint itself in this mysterious work is ravishing, every quadrant of the canvas alive and rich. An orange cat tightens the right foreground, its paws almost fixed into the frame. A tiny black glyph becomes another cat, a white limbed runner dashes in from the right with a radiant yellow shoe and a spectral palm gloomily closes the top left which makes the completely scraped opposing right corner breathe into infinity.

The theme of aging continues with the series 42nd Street, pieces dating from 2014 and 2015, and not bearing the full burden of Lees’ incorrigible work process. Still, the play of surface and color powerfully and inventively reverberate and the text of the actual 1933 film of the same title, painstakingly scripted throughout, adds a poignancy to these more brazen images. The mood is significantly lightened, however, and the gravitas reduced to an understanding of the cinematic scene introduced in the text.

There is a reason for this lightening of tone. The 42nd Street series has its place in Lees’ vision, heralding in a new season of more immediate and hopeful, less troubled and inflicted work. After a long, long and often dark road, confronting and wrestling with his personal demons and trying to reconcile himself to his past, Lees speaks of wanting to “pay attention to life here now” and purge himself of all the unpleasant associations he has with his youth. He wants to, in a word, move on. The new wave of images will literally be born out of the older images, the artist incapable of starting on a virgin surface. Rather, he can already visualize transfiguring existing, unfinished works into new configurations- figures morphing into trees, trees into figures, cats into birds. Through a new lens, Lees is now willfully seeking to repudiate the weight of previous themes or subjects.

And that shall indeed be a much anticipated development for those of us who have enthusiastically followed Lees’ journey thus far, through the glass, darkly.

This show has also been reviewed by Aimee Brown Price

The post A Fine Insanity: John Lees at Betty Cuningham appeared first on artcritical.

June 4 to July 3, 2015
138 10th Avenue (between 18th and 19th streets)
New York, 212 750 0949

In his fifth exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, called “Corpus,” Bruce Gagnier continues developing his curiously articulated figures into a rugged opus of forceful, dignified gravitas.

One is greeted outside the entrance by a heroic bronze, Sys (2011), with a green-brown patina; inside, nine standing sculptures and a handful of drawings of heads populate the gallery. Gagnier’s deeply personal manipulation of human form has now become noticeably more subtle and comprehensive in the new work, even within this exhibition. For instance: whereas in The Boxer (1990-2000) the figure’s shoulders are starkly disrupted from the torso and the hands reduced to stubs, by comparison Lena (2015) appears almost graceful.

Contributing to the sculptures’ oddness is the startling dynamics of the anatomy. Skewed into opposing planes, the head, torso, and pelvis of each piece charge the figures with disturbing restlessness, albeit quieted from earlier works such as Princess Y (2008) or Emma (2007), both exhibited at Lori Bookstein in 2010. The feet, roughly hewn and solid, are often pressed right up against the edges of the bases upon which they rest. Curiously articulated toes grip the base and create a palpable tension that is shot upwards into the aggravated volumes of the body. The arms have an odd straightness and, spearing downwards, effectively oppose the surge from the legs and torso, projecting the head upwards. The entire complex of rhythms and counter rhythms that orchestrate the body find their full resolution in the head, where all of Gagnier’s inventiveness finds its fullest expression and the features are articulated into stunning configurations. In Yensine (2015), the face is opened up to reveal an astonishing distance between her right nostril and tear duct, which, coupled with a widened leap to the ear thus elongates the head horizontally to thrilling proportions, all of which triggers almost audible traces of bereavement or loss. In Yrsa (2014), the entire face is shifted to the right, the ears thrust far, far back and the head contorted into a surprisingly serenity.

To understand the palpable emotive impact of the exhibition is to recognize that Gagnier’s direction is not reducible to merely formal concerns, but seems to be triggered by what Leon Golub called “The Dervish Principle,” namely “that the prime elemental resources with the psyche have intense pictorial equivalents.” Every facet of each sculpture is conceived or driven by an overall purpose — that of creating and revealing the psyche of a persona, or character. Gagnier consciously works with such a purpose and feels a given sculpture is successful only relative to his having awakened a truly individual persona. In his studio, as he slices a compromising section of a thigh or torso off, shifting it to one side or adding it to another sculpture altogether, Gagnier is searching for a truly visceral construction of character.

Even as he finds a broader solution to the composition of new work, where one remarks the consistently leaning torsos, arms spiked downwards, low waists, squatting legs — Cleo (2015) and May (2014) being notable exceptions — he manages to tune each form to a convincing individual. In Ludovic (2015) the left leg advances, the left arm is thrust stiffly back and turned towards the thigh, the head solemnly level. In May, by contrast, the left leg is tentatively pushed forward, the left arm bent back behind the body, but now flexing outwards and the head is tilted up into a rather dreamy, hopeful pose. As all the forms of the body are eventually summed into a whole being, each formal equation being valued largely on the basis of its emotive and psychic possibilities, characters do emerge, and quite odd characters at that. Part of their peculiar power is that oddity. Each appears to be conceived in an almost distraught groping for a very specific arrangement of forms that will awaken within the figure and viewer those broad and deep fields of human emotions such as loss, redemption and pathos, Nothing light or effervescent is on display in this exhibition. The figures are then given names that for the viewer may be either laden with content or unnervingly foreign (they are, in fact, suggested to him, almost on whim, by his wife, the painter Tine Lundsfryd).

Inherent in an appreciation of this sculptor’s work is to feel their relevance within the great trajectory of sculptural tradition. Gagnier himself defines his efforts as shouldering-in among the powerful achievements of the past — be they northern European sculptures of the late-Renaissance, Edgar Degas’s small sketches of horses and women, or the monumental bronzes of Auguste Rodin. Gagnier allows his knowledge and his love of the history of sculpture to nurture and inform his work, while at the same time creating images deeply personal to him. His opus is an apt illustration of what T.S. Eliot speaks about in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” writing: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves… complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.” And that is exactly the experience of Gagnier’s oeuvre. The powerful surge of the past is, in the end, contained and expanded. The work has indeed shouldered the old order into a new configuration — a configuration that now allows for their scarred and battered, torqued and twisted, devastatingly soulful presence.

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