April 12 to June 7, 2015
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

Walking into “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views,” recently at Callicoon Fine Arts, was like walking into a kids’ art studio where the adults have lost control — but much stranger. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, the three artists responsible for the visual cacophony, filled the gallery from floor to ceiling with a schizophrenic amalgam of sculptures, videos, and two-dimensional pieces that fluctuate between fantasy and nightmare. Despite the frequently bright and graphic nature of the works, the artists successfully maintain enough editorial restraint to hold the installation on the precipice of dizzying inundation, without ever falling over.

The Haerizadeh brothers originally met Rahmanian in Tehran, and then moved to Dubai to escape artistic censorship in Iran. In light of the recent controversy involving the United Arab Emirates prohibiting members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and NYU professor Andrew Ross from entering the country, it might seem ineffective for artists to defect from one area of creative oppression to another. The act reveals the omnipresence of political manipulation that artists in the Middle East have faced for decades, which forces artists to find ways to challenge the highly congested political systems both locally and abroad.

The exhibition at first appears to be a playful free-for-all of image and text, and then reveals itself to be a darkly comical and deeply satirical critique of power, identity, sexuality, and culture. Long-stemmed amaryllis — flowers whose common name is Naked Ladies — grow out of a black-and-white, geometric path that snakes around the gallery floors and walls, and leads to a row of collages by Ramin Haerizadeh, hung low on the back wall. Each titled Rib Room (2015), the works feature fractions of images of women from fashion advertisements or art historical paintings with their bodies partially drawn back in with ink and pencil, and stamped labels that read phrases such as “PORK ROAST” and “SKIRT STEAK.” What could be interpreted as an objectification of female identity becomes part of a broader narrative critique of dehumanization by power structures. In two of Rokni Haerizadeh’s series, he paints on printed stills from YouTube videos and makes Rotoscope-like animations over top, adding animal heads and body parts to humans in protests and demonstrations.

Rokni pairs fable-like images, which melt in and out of clarity and painterly abstraction, with titles such as But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014–2015) and Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase (2013–2014) that further enhance the works’ ominous tone. Rahmanian’s paintings and collages continue the thematic removal of identity through images ranging from tragically funny puns to celebrity defacements. In his series Rearview Portraits (2012), we see the backs of the heads of elderly white men in suits and a white-haired woman wearing a crown and pearls (bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II, though none of their identities is openly revealed). The portraits hang close to the ground or shoved into corners, as though they were put on a time-out for bad behavior.

The show’s installation occurred over a period of several weeks, during which time the three artists brought their own artworks, works by Etel Adnan, Hannah Barrett, A.K. Burns, Martha Wilson, and Rose Wylie, and a variety of readymade objects into the gallery space. Through the process of extending their shared work and living spaces into the confines of a commercial gallery, the artists present a good-natured dismantling of the conventions surrounding artistic autonomy; everything is presented as one holistic idea, as opposed to a group show of many separate but related artists. The collaboration has resulted in an immersive experience that is further heightened by the show’s many three-dimensional objects: sculptures inhabit the space as both autonomous objects and interventions with the gallery’s bureaucratic operations. In the back office, where the exhibition continues, the gallerists sit on pieces from Untitled (2015): white plastic lawn chairs with blue painter’s tape partially covering the form or extending it in strange, decidedly nonfunctional protuberances. Break Free II (2015), a fuzzy cat tower decorated with bizarre hoardings both analog and digital stands like an absurd sentry near the entrance. An iPad and an iPhone playing videos of the artists, the devices’ chargers, wind-up teeth, bungee cords, a plastic ear, and various other bits of everyday life make up just one of the installation’s several readymade compositions.

Saturated with layered cultural and art historical references that have been turned on their head through the artists’ contemporary reexamination, “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views” creates new language through familiar signs. Imagine a car that has been crushed for disposal at an impound lot, and then expanded back to some semblance of its original form. All the initial information is there, but it has been translated into something entirely new. The collaborative, reconstructed visual lexicon enables the artists to use satire to criticize a humorless system.

The post The Way of the World: Three Iranian Artists at Callicoon appeared first on artcritical.

April 2 – May 8, 2015
528 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

A work of art being so much more than its physical makeup, you can’t classify an artist simply by her knack for manipulating materials. And yet, when paired with a nimble poetic sensibility and a fervent desire to plumb the farthest corners of human experience, aptitude can occasionally ascend to genius. Such is the case of artist and poet Etel Adnan, who at the august age of 90 is finally getting the attention she deserves. The show of her work now on view at Galerie Lelong — a tidy selection of paintings, pastels, tapestries, makimono (Japanese folding books), and a single film — speaks to two things: Adnan’s endless fascination with “the miracle of matter itself,”[1] and her unshakeable belief that there is much more to this world than matter, accompanied by a passionate impulse to explore what lives both within and beyond it. Adnan’s art is a love song to the Universe, and it is our great fortune to have been invited here to bear witness.

Adnan’s semi-abstract compositions are compact, often no larger than 13 x 16 inches, presenting patchwork vistas built up out of numerous teeming and opaque parts. They look not meticulously designed but more intuitively improvised, each distinguished by the brusque yet sensitive juxtaposition of thick bands of color. The paintings in particular are very worldly, yet the planet they evoke is not one riddled with toil and grit (as depicted in Adnan’s literary works such as The Arab Apocalypse and Sitt-Marie Rose) but rather a relaxed, clarified version as seen through the eyes of someone who has glimpsed the bigger picture: mountains, ravines, the skyline, the sea, all rendered in a controlled palette of piquant hues. In Untitled (2014), for example, uneven slabs of taxicab yellow, olive green, rich caramel, and tawny are tempered by a stout sliver of bright cornflower blue; the recipe is unusual and arresting. But the mood is, above all, self-possessed. The images elicit a solid, sturdy calm. They do not move, or when they do, it is by a slow surge of coarse abutting forms or sharp diagonals, careful collisions propelled by broad, textural strokes. Like tectonic plates that shift mere inches over thousands of years, peaks growing slowly skyward.

The internal sense of gravity bestows urgency on these small surfaces and turns them into something other, and more tangibly compelling, than mere decorative objects. Adnan applies her paints with a palette knife, and always on a table or flat surface rather than an easel. As a result her images look putty-ish, almost edible, nourishing even, and somehow more substantial than your average spread. Untitled (1989), the oldest painting included in the show, is especially ripe. Where mossy green pushes up against creamy citron yellow, the two colors are rendered more distinct, yet also manage to merge into a dynamic structure that encompasses the whole. Sky blue, crackled black, tan, Kelly green, and a smear of dusty lilac are at once offset and unified by two dashes of raspberry red, an indiscriminate equal sign. The three pastels (all 1970), conversely, are confections scribbled on paper, their many squarish harlequin morsels coming together with “the suddenness of an island in one’s life.”[2] The total image is lovely, but forceful and fluid in the way a single, soft line is, not unlike the inky trails that delineate the unfurled makimono.

The Universe keeps creeping in, mainly in the color combinations, which are pleasantly disarming and never compromise. The tapestries seem to bustle and buzz with pulsating tones of lime green, blood red, and ochre, while the paintings are more poised and minimal: two milky tones of blue cut with hillocks of tender peach and elephant gray. Adnan’s whites are never flat, but dimensional, tinged with the slightest hint of puce or beige. She is a smart, conceptual colorist. Her sense of art, the seemingly impossible act of reflecting the subjective self and the objective cosmos simultaneously, is moored in the future. She is always reaching forward, though not in a spirit of prophecy, but of hope. Her work may share certain aesthetic qualities with that of, say, Arthur Dove or Hans Hofmann, but it carries an attitude all its own. When describing her artistic process, Adnan once said: “What you do is make your composition. You trust your… shapes, your gestures. You trust that something beyond that will come through even if you don’t know exactly what.”[3] This is an artist who dares to push beyond the empirical, adjusting and challenging the maps we’ve made to navigate our selves, our world, and what we think we know about them. The experience, if somewhat troubling, is terrific.

[1] Adnan, Etel. Journey to Mount Tamalpais. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1986. 63.

[2] Adnan, Etel. Seasons. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2008. 30.

[3] Weaver, Kathleen. “The Non Worldly World: Conversation with Etel Adnan.” Poetry Flash, May 1986 (No. 158).

The post “The sky has entered our senses”: Paintings by Etel Adnan appeared first on artcritical.