January 9 – February 15, 2020
515 W 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, albertzbenda.com

In contrast to the figure based abstract paintings shown at Tsibi Geva’s first exhibition at Albertz Benda Gallery in late 2017, the current show presents an ensemble of pattern-based gestural abstractions. Titled Substrata, the recent work focuses entirely on what Geva believes is the ground structure of painting, the very foundation of what he sees while walking around that inspires him to paint, anything from the terrazzo tiles under his feet to the mesmeric glimpses of urban Mediterranean patterns on the buildings around him. There is little concern for going outside the parameters of materiality or concretizing the narrative scope of what surrounds him.  Over the years, Tsibi Geva’s paintings have persistently taken their own course. There is nothing explicitly formal about his surfaces. Nor do his paintings attempt to follow the direction of a style of pictorial nominalism. The artist prefers to remain conscious within the act of painting rather than insisting that the unconscious is the derivation of his aesthetic. Despite Geva’s fierce attention to the gesture, it is not possible to place him in the context of “action painting.” This is not the origin of what Geva is about. He is a thinking painter, not a romantic.

Born and raised on Kibbutz Ein Shemer close to sixty-nine years ago, Geva is a painter with a significant history, which needs to be taken into account. In the process of growing up with an architect father, the concern for seeing and understanding structure was a preeminent aspect of his education. Eventually, the artist’s acute awareness of structure discovered a counterpart that leaned inadvertently in the direction of decoration whereby the grid –influenced by the presence of Bauhaus buildings in Israel – would eventually give way to what Geva called “entropy.” He would soon designate “irregular patterns’ that included ornamentation as having expressive content as a complement to formal structure.

While growing up in relative proximity to a Palestinian village, Geva had indirect, though distant access to experiencing the vernacular architecture around him. This included various collaged improvisations he witnessed in Bedouin homes built on the high desert region near the border (that eventually changed after 1967). Even so, these innately organic structures offered the young artist an alternative way of perceiving form – in essence a type of form without form. This complementary relationship began to merge into his work as a painter. This became particularly evident in a series of paintings based on Keffiyeh scarf patterns, worn by Arab men, which appeared to some viewers of Geva’s paintings during the 1980s and 90s as a semi-radical motif.

The paintings currently on view at Albertz Benda open another door for Geva. It is a somewhat ironic door in that it returns to the notion that the concept of structure – whatever that might be –is no longer within the realm of isolation. Given that all the paintings in the show are untitled, and painted in acrylic on canvas (with one painted in acrylic and oil), and all executed in 2019, (except one from 2018), I will proceed according to measurement and description. The painting I wish to address is constructed with six panels of which three are rectangular and three are square. Together the six panels constitute a single large square painting on the rear wall of the back gallery.

The focus on structure, of course, has not gone away even as the gestural force of the painting lends its overwhelming presence. Emphasis is given to the quadrilateral shape, the scale, the relative isolation of each gesture, and to the color black. The painted backgrounds of the various canvases reveal light earth colors with sparingly applied touches of the three primaries, which are scarcely noticeable. Of the various works chosen for display in Substrata, this painting carries the most significant magnitude. The balance between the entropic gestural forms and the unique architectonic construction of the painting’s support appears to have found a profound match. Nothing is left hovering.

The paintings on view in Substrata are indeed “entropic gestural forms.”  But they also have a structure buried within them, a sense of geometry given over to floating particles in space, reminiscent of the torn paper works of Hans Arp or intensely applied gestural fields where the paint ruptures our ability to find a discreet form.

There is a distance between language and entropy in terms of how form is identified. But for Geva, the form becomes less important than the repetition.

There is no real narrative in these paintings, no exact timeline. There is another vertical rectangular painting where the hardedge sectioning has been obliterated and replaced by square black nets in with two nondescript banners in red and blue monitoring one another near the top. It is doubtful to suggest that the particulars have meaning in such paintings. Therefore, we turn to the allover process – to the unclear borders, the borders Geva knows so well – not only in the academic or political sense, but in the painting sense. Here we may grasp the sense of a painting, where in Geva’s case, everything is let loose, where the turbulence becomes amenable and striated, deceased and overturned, one layer upon another. The process assumes to be endless. However, once the structure is intact, and once we discover how and where it exists, the painting comes alive on its own terms. We have no further to go other than to acknowledge where we have been. Finally, we are able to open the door to the present.

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September 10 to October 3, 2015
515 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 244 2579

It’s customary for galleries to display their artists’ newest works. That is understandable, for we want to see how these figures are developing; we usually leave it to museums to offer a broader historical perspective. But it can be very instructive, also, to study the origins of a now-celebrated artist. Bill Beckley started showing art in 1968, at the moment when change was in the air in New York. He was one of a group of now-legendary artists associated with the pioneering Soho Gallery at 112 Greene Street — they included Louise Bourgeois, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dennis Oppenheim. This densely packed exhibition provides a good overview of his first decade of artmaking.

“The Accidental Poet” included Myself as Washington (1969), a photograph that anticipates Cindy Sherman’s playful studies of personal identity; and the text with photograph Joke About Elephants (1974), a precursor of Richard Prince’s joke paintings. There is Rooster, Bed, Lying (1971), a bed underneath a chicken wire cage housing the live rooster who was present at the opening. In Photo Document for Song for a Chin-up (1971), which was performed by a tenor at the opening, a tenor sings while doing a chin-up. Artists of the previous generation, the Pop painters and Minimalists, who came of age in the 1960s, defined the unity of their concerns by creating distinctive visual styles — a Warhol, like a Lichtenstein or a Donald Judd, is unmistakably their personal product. Early on in his career, Beckley, as a figure of the next generation, thought differently. What links these visually varied early works together is what might best be called a consciously eccentric poetic sensibility, his irony-laced fascination with unexpected sensory pleasures.

Beckley is interested in the relationship between the ways that words and images tell stories, as in Cake Story (1973), in which a photograph of a piece of cake is accompanied by a short funny story musing on the commonplace expression, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” And he is fascinated with juxtapositions of events in the news with his photographs and texts — Mao Dead (1976) is a good example, with its reproduction of a headline announcing Mao’s death; two mysterious photographs and a short story about reading a newspaper. One basic, longstanding rule governing the visual arts is that pictures and words tell stories in essentially different ways, and so should not be mixed together. This is why the comic strip, that bastard art which promiscuously mixes image and text, is generally thought a marginal art form; comics, it is said, are books for weak readers who need help from images. By bringing words into his visual art, Beckley—along with some other artists of his generation such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner- decisively demonstrated that this traditional way of thinking was all wrong. In De Kooning’s Stove (1974), for example, his written account of de Kooning supplements our understanding of the accompanying picture of a red stove. And in First Sexual Experience (1974), the photographs play against the text, which they frame.

Beckley is an unusual figure — a visual artist who can write — and so it’s worth considering the meaning of the title of his exhibition. How did he find himself to be accidentally a poet? Beckley perhaps answers this question when he tells this story: in 1969: he was walking while painting lines directly onto the ground, making From Sunrise to Sunset, recording his work in photographs. He then imagined a more ambitious plan, painting a line across the Delaware River. Halfway across, however, the current took away his camera, and so, with no visual documentation remaining, his telling of the story became the work of art. When he got to ground on the other side, he discovered that he was at the spot of George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware, a scene archived in Photo Album—Washington Crossing, March 10 1969 (1969), which consists of a postcard showing Washington accompanied by Beckley’s written commentary. By presenting the record of how he avoided making his painting, he thus created this elusive work of art, a story that (for all I know) may be totally fictional. Near the end of the period presented in this show, the first decade of his career Beckley expelled words from his art.

Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain (1975-1994) leaves just the visual narrative with the red (hot) faucet on the left and the blue (cold) one on the right, with the yellow drain in between. He discovered that images alone allow him to tell stories. Recently, however, it’s worth noting, he’s returned to writing. The story-telling impulse, so it seems, is not easy to suppress.

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