November 21, 2015 to January 17, 2016
325 Broome Street 1W (between Chrystie Street and Bowery)
New York City, (917) 517-4929

In the paintings of Ann Pibal, quietly resonant color and stringent asymmetry assert a hard-edged intimacy. There is an implied scale beyond the actual size of these small pictures in acrylic on aluminum, Her current show presents two series, both from 2013, hung at the same height on opposite walls of this long, rectangular gallery space. The titles hint at specificity without reducing meaning to something prescribed or directed: RBWC a group of five paintings with gold as a background color, face DHWT, six dark blue and brown paintings.

The gold paintings constitute a single, multi-part work, whereas the dark blue and brown paintings remain a series of related, but independent works. This fact adds complexity to serial thinking. The two groups of works contrast structurally, as well as conceptually—the gold are light filled and somewhat reflective whereas the blue and brown ones are light absorbent and close in tone. Perhaps the former tend toward an idealization where the latter are more earth bound and rational. But such generalizations are qualified by connections between the two groups, with constant and subtle variations at play and a sometime withdrawal from, and undermining of, symmetry as a given. Often close symmetry – more akin to the slight off kilter of the human body than exact mirroring – is like a ghost or reverberation within the image rather than a formal presence. We are aware of it even though it is not, in fact, fully expressed.

All the gold paintings contain a regular ten-inch bounding square that itself contains concentric squares that radiate, each a different color, in a rainbow sequence. Over the course of permutation within this set, horizontals become diagonal and one work may appear as an enlarged section of another. This turning and focusing is actually like a sequence of thoughts, at once both intuitive and analytical.

RBCW 2, reveals itself to be increasingly complex once the presumption of any straightforward balance has been, all be it incrementally, thoroughly undermined. A fast assumption, like a reflex, might lead to seeing the painting as only iconographic in its apparent simplicity—a single stem of parallel lines vertically off-center and flanked by two squares. But a moment later, the viewer is engaged in discerning comparative differences—thickness of line, difference of color, variable spacing, placement of shape, corresponding horizontals. In contrast RBWC 3, using the same colors and linear elements, demonstrates just how much change can occur within restricted means, enlarging a sense of ongoing possibility, within designated formal and conceptual frames. Like one stanza among several in a poem, or one fugue following on after another, the ensemble sense of RBWC is actively built.

The dark toned color of the DWHT paintings, together with solid shape, represents something quite other to those of the sharply graphic RBWC. In using a lot less contrast between the two colors, blue and brown, not only is the light crisply internal, but time seems to move more slowly, too, and the space is gradual in its expansiveness. In DWHT 2, a receding pair of centrally placed, symmetrical, inverted V’s are beneath a slightly off-center horizontal line—consisting, like the V’s of two adjacent lines, one shorter and blue—as if this horizontal could itself be converted into a V. This off balancing is so slight that, once noticed, it charges the painting with a silent, calm, and yet, occasionally surprisingly tense, emotional force. Josef Albers, and Pibal’s contemporary, Tomma Abts, both come to mind. The beauty, common to all of the paintings, is that the shifts, when located, are as much felt as they are measured. Pibal’s art is not one of cool formalism. There is a precision here that does not exclude either intellect or sensual pleasure. Neither of these attributes is reduced because of the presence of the other; on the contrary, they combine to enhance each other.

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September 10 to October 25, 2014
519 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Asymmetry, illusion and odd numbers all add up in this, Tomma Abts’s second exhibition at David Zwirner.  She was last seen in New York in solo exhibitions six years ago at Zwirner and at the New Museum. There are eight oil and acrylic paintings ranged across three walls and five pencil drawings on paper grouped on the remaining wall. All the paintings are hung at what might be considered a lower height than usual, one that invites contemplation from close quarters.

Fenke (2014) is positioned singly over toward the right end of the wall. It is the standard size of 18-7/8 x 15 inches that Abts has been using for some time now. Surface as a subject and its contradiction through an irresistible illusionism propels a counterpoint that succeeds in engaging vision, touch and thinking equally.  Fenke even has a slice cut in from its edge, inviting real space to participate and contrast the illusions of depth created elsewhere in the composition

On the adjacent wall, Wybe (2014)  – one of four this time, three equally spaced, and one distanced further away, again to the right – is divided into two parts by a diagonal space of half an inch or so.  This startling incursion does not masquerade as part of the composition as in Fenke. Wybe evinces a sense of over-painting: there are fine gradations across the canvas tooth and opaque skins marked with ridges formed by edges of now submerged shapes.  We sense an image repeatedly reconfigured or lost, a result of many hours in the studio.

Abts’s approach is intuitive – the geometric planar compositions emerge without a prior plan and so refute along the way the need for a fixed rationale.  Her space is a shallow and completely convincing one, always askew and splintered. Her use of shading and muted color that evokes unnatural light and obscured passages of space recall the sculpture of Vincent Fecteau.

When installing the exhibition Abts looks for a precise relation for her works to the gallery.  The position and height of the works and the lighting are, in a way, the continuation of the idea of composition, this time applied to the gallery itself. Once installed Abts then titles the paintings, sourcing from a dictionary of first names. This way of titling and the size of painting naturally bring portraiture to mind.  and abstraction of this order can indeed portray an emotion or atmosphere, complex feelings and states of mind. Certainly there is openness in how the viewer may choose to identify the characteristics seen, both formally and psychologically. The paintings are a physical and visual language that discovers rather than seeks equivalences to experience. They do, of course, provoke new experience using a vocabulary of traditional means and forms sometimes considered exhausted.

The five drawings made with pencil and colored pencil read as permutations – there seem to be rules or a set of principles that they extend from, in a musical sense. Contained within each linear element is a striped pattern of yellow, red, green, blue and graphite carefully filled in against the white of the paper. The lines pass over and under each other their color joining intermittently and in so doing imply a movement that flickers restlessly suggesting at turns that the lines incise the paper or are slivers of planes seen through slits. The space and diagonal dynamics are close to the paintings – the white paper is substantial and pressing rather than acting as a void. Both the paintings and drawings, whether planar and opaque in the former or skeletal and rhythmic in the latter, somehow remain fragmentary whilst lacking nothing.

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