Bill Jacobson: figure, ground at Julie Saul
March 16 to May 26, 2017
535 W 22nd St #6F (between 10th and 11th)
New York, NY, 212 627-2410

Two current gallery shows in New York neatly draw upon the Romantic tradition in ways that raise questions about the place of Romanticism in contemporary culture. Soulful encounters of the individual with the immensity of the world is a theme explored variously by Susan Bee in “Pow! New Paintings” at A.I.R. Gallery, and Bill Jacobson in his show of new photographs, “figure, ground,” at Julie Saul. Each approaches, whether intentionally or contingently, and from different angles, aspects of the Romantic legacy. As the natural world, where encounters with the sublime were previously staged (and thus was, historically, one site for reverent awe at man’s place in the moral and material universe), comes under ever-greater threat, and as new ideological perspectives have come to dominate thinking about the self, one might wonder what Romanticism means today.

Bee’s exhibition at A.I.R., the non-profit cooperative gallery for art by women founded in 1972, refers explicitly to imagery in the early art of the Romantic canon, paying homage to paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch. Works such as Melancholy and Blooms Day (both 2016) borrow directly from those artists — from Munch’s Melancholy (1894) and from Friedrich’s Woman at a Window (1822), respectively. Here, people lose themselves, wonder at powers larger than themselves. That adoration is further heightened by Bee’s use of emotive, expressionistic paint handling and high-intensity color.

Likewise, in paintings based loosely on film stills, couples kiss and cuddle. The brightly colorful patterning Bee applies to her appropriated images becomes, in this suite, cosmic and psychedelic, as if each person is fully becoming one with the other in a trippy union, fulgent with emotional outpouring radiating in colorful waves. Although elements of narrative remain encoded in the gestures and poses of those intimates, it largely gives way to deep absorption in their unifying admiration.

A formalist experimenter, Jacobson has previously constrained his pictures in blurred black-and-white portraits of lone men, and in pictures of large, colorful sheets of paper staged in various natural and man-made sites, resembling misplaced monochrome paintings or Suprematist compositions. Like Bee, at Julie Saul, Jacobson produces images of people with their back to the viewer — another apparent reference to painters such as Friedrich, Thomas Fearnly, or John Constable. Staged in natural settings, they experience the landscape while tacitly inviting us to look at the same view. Unlike Friedrich, though, who often used this same device, Jacobson’s shallow depth of field focuses on the figure and leaves the natural setting in which they stand blurred and hazy.

Another series, called Lines in My Eyes, also relays, obliquely, the interiority of his subjects in photos that closely isolate bare body parts: a collarbone and shoulder in Lines in My Eyes #7219 (2017), for example. Like figure, ground, Jacobson switches between color and black-and-white photography as needed. Each model’s full body is unrevealed, and often even their gender remains unknown. The viewer is invited to reckon with them intimately, scrutinizing skin and joints, as if familiar with the sitter.

One thing that Romanticism emphasized was individualism, the experience of being a small human in a large world. In contemporary America, individualism invariably verges upon the solipsism of self-improvement, self-affirmation, self-love, self-definition. Such values seem to be emphasized in every magazine, newspaper, and blog in the English-speaking world but they often overlook the need to universalize and think beyond one’s own interests. The way such Romantics as Friedrich emphasized the emotional state of the individual was to paint them with their back turned, as here, too, Bee and Jacobson depict their subjects. The viewer’s perspective is not preeminent, but neither is the subject’s fully understood. Instead, both are left in a state of compromise, but in a way that opens up possibilities for community and, indeed, communion. One hopes that this facet of Romanticism might find greater purchase, as it would seem that deep and resonant empathic responses to the world may be essential, if mankind is to continue.

Note: A book of Jacobson’s figure, ground series accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Bill Arning, Robert Glück, and Barbara Stehle, and another, 945 Madison Avenue, with photographs from the Breuer building cleared during the Whitney Museum’s departure from the site, is due later in the spring.

The post Back Turned: The Romanticism of Susan Bee and Bill Jacobson appeared first on artcritical.

Regina Granne’s graphic work—spare, sure-lined renderings of nudes, still lifes, and interiors in graphite or pastel pencil—grapples with the question of how we know things and locate meaning in the world around us. Her finely tuned, pressurized arrangements present the rational and unexpected in equal measure, layering scalar contrasts and dramatic foreshortenings into a careful, tightly structured grammar. Her particular skill is an ability to make her forms at once known quantities—with histories and associations folded into them—and empty, cipher-like abstractions.

Twenty five of Granne’s works on paper were gathered together in “Increments: Drawings, 1970-1995,” a mini-retrospective at A.I.R. Gallery this spring and for a hand-bound exhibition catalogue by Brooklyn print house The Crumpled Press. Granne is a painter, too, and she displays in both mediums an interest in the registers of figuration: maps and drawings populate her oils, arranged on tabletops with 3-D objects like flowers and toy soldiers. But where the paintings model form in pigment and shadow, the drawings are resolutely, nakedly linear. It’s all contour, joints, and structure, and the negative space takes on an intensity of pressure that verges on dislocation. Looking at the work, you “know what all this is,” Granne notes in the catalogue’s interview. “It’s a room, with a figure, and a book on a table, and yet something is wrong, or…not what [you] expect to see.”

In Large Still Life with Pears (1976), Granne juxtaposes a foreground still life with a reclining nude. The pears on the table, as large as the figure’s head, are rendered in simple contour, like the foreshortened face, torso, and arms of the model, and endowed with the same sense of poised arrangement.. Granne employs a number of strategies to obfuscate the true distances between things, cropping out the edges and corners of spatial planes (tables, beds, walls), or using the barest of surface details (architectural molding, the bump of a shoulder blade) to indicate the presence of weight beneath.

Granne worked until the mid-1960s in an abstract vocabulary, a background that doubtlessly refined her keen eye for locating formal patterns across varying depths and distances. But she is less interested in the flattening of space per se than in the states of being of her depicted objects. What is the visual data before us, and how does that add up to a flower, a face, a believable depth? What are the angles of “increments,” the specific shifts of perspective and portrayal, that alter our understanding of what we see? How can we equate a semicircle of pears with a model’s neck and shoulders, and keep them simultaneously distinct?

Hanging rugs and illustrations frequently appear in the later interiors, such as Marika and Jacopo (1993), which pairs Jacopo Bellini’s contrapposto St. Sebastian, curved across the open page of a book, with the ‘real’ weight of Granne’s reclining model. These quoted depictions are as much about definitional categories of image and object as they are about temporal pauses, our desire to make something static from the flow of information around us.Horizontal Still Life (1980) (illustrated in the catalogue though not on view at A.I.R.) arranges its vases and flowers with an exactitude that verges on the decorative, their thrusting stalks and angular handles static as an architectural frieze. Precisely situated in undelineated seas of space, Granne’s forms feel at once boldly declarative and alarmingly precipitous, shifting meditations on perception, object, image, and transience.

The post Regina Granne: Increments: Drawings, 1970-1995 at A.I.R. Gallery appeared first on artcritical.