February 28 through April 11, 2015
132 Tenth Avenue (between 19th and 18th streets)
New York, 212 367 7474

The first New York solo exhibition by Brazilian Jonathas de Andrade recently closed at Alexander and Bonin. De Andrade works mainly with installation, video and photography, and is a rising star in Brazil’s contemporary art scene. Based in Recife, on Brazil’s northeast coast, de Andrade has shown his art throughout Europe and the United States. Last summer in New York, the Guggenheim’s survey on contemporary art from Latin America, “Under the Same Sun,” featured de Andrade’s Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast (2013).

At Alexander and Bonin, de Andrade re-installed Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, and included other works that expand it. In the ground floor’s main gallery, the first piece was 40 nego bom é um real (“40 Black Candies for 1 Real,” 2013), a two-wall installation in which illustrations and text provided a recipe for a banana candy produced in a fictional factory. One could follow the story as if it were a comic book on the wall, with montages of digital images og the production line of Nego Bom, a real banana candy popular in the region. In Brazil, nego is often a “warm” way of calling someone black, although it also contains deep-rooted racist connotations.

There is humor in the fact that one follows a recipe and a production line in the form of comics, with directions on which ingredients to use, how to let the mixture rest, or when to add sugar. The workers are focused, often smiling. But as one’s eyes moved along to the installation on the right wall, irony started to replace comedy. Two prints depict another illustration from the fictional factory and the plantation: arrayed on two plywood sheets are 40 small notes printed on paper, and 40 small portraits of workers. Each note has a short description about each worker and their monthly pay, and after assembling the pieces of de Andrade’s inventory one realizes those men were part of a system of cheap labor.

In Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, in the rear gallery, a similar semi-fictional account continued. Photographs hung from the ceiling, suspended at the viewer’s height by monofilament threads; many more pictures were mounted on the walls, their distribution and position varied. These photographs were color portraits of men from northeastern Brazil, printed on wooden posters, all sized equally. While in 40 Black Candies for 1 Real the pictures of workers seem to be taken from history books, in Museum the photographs show ad-like faces and bodies enlarged, bleeding to the posters’ frames.

The installation had a strong anthropological tone, as if de Andrade were studying these people. On one wall, he reproduced two newspaper sheets with classified ads. One reads, “I’m looking for a strong, brown-skinned man — ugly or handsome — for a photograph of the poster of the Museum of the Man of the Northeast.” Another said, “I’m looking for a man over 30 years old, who works with his hands and knows of local craftsmanship for a photograph poster of the Museum of the Man of the Northeast.” In 2012, de Andrade advertised in local newspapers and documented his encounters through photographs and notes. The project for the artist’s Museum is a comment on a real institution of the same name, in Recife. Founded in 1979, the mission of the actual Museum is to preserve customs and crafts from the northeast of Brazil. It takes its inspiration from the writings on “racial democracy” by Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900 – 1985), who wrote on the emergence of the Brazilian mulato, a brown-skinned ethnicity from the northeast, the children of indigenous peoples, blacks, and Europeans.

In de Andrade’s works, though, the traces of Brazil’s colonial origins of color prejudices and stereotyping are recounted. Brown-skinned northeastern farm workers are one of the most neglected classes in Brazil, whose struggle with racism mingles with labor exploitation. One could spend hours reading and comparing the excerpts from these stories, and could fill the fiction’s gaps with one’s own imagination about these characters. The portraits are also stunning, funny. When these men take over de Andrade’s Museum, they become models. As they strike a pose, they look incredibly sexy, sometimes feminized, working against the stereotypical idea of the macho northeastern man. Some of them reveal to the camera their bare, muscular chest — forged by labor rather than a gym — while they hold objects like hammers or plumbing tools.

De Andrade provided that group of workers with a temporary empowerment, which may have survived at least the span of a camera’s shutter release: the piece consolidates the artist’s attempt to break with stereotypes, even though one could question what happens with that subversion when an installation with portraits of minorities goes for sale in a gallery. The flip side of that question, though, is de Andrade’s continuing concern with labor and exploitation, which is part of a broader project on reviewing his own position as an artist: he stands on a contradictory threshold between being implicated within exploitation and enacting the role of a pseudo-anthropologist. And it is through humor and fiction that de Andrade sustains this contradiction, as when he adopts the supposedly friendly word “nego” to reveal prejudice. As a Brazilian myself, I am also interested in what we, as spectators, do when these stories pass on to our hands. To select the best portraits of the Museum, or to scavenge information among classified ads often makes us smile, but it may also make us think about the position we occupy: of those who exploit, of those who observe in silence, of those who commiserate, or of those who take action.

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September 6 to October 11, 2008
132 Tenth Ave. at 19th Street
New York City, 212-367-7474

In the title for his 2007 Venice Biennale, critic and curator Robert Storr exhorted the art world to “think with the senses, feel with the mind.” One artist who has already staked a claim to what could be called the “concept-sualist” position is Robert Bordo. With his new show at Alexander and Bonin of 14 landscape canvases, the Montreal-born painter demonstrates himself to be more than ever the heady hedonist.

He has an incredible touch, seducing the eye with lubricated surfaces as if his medium is butter and cream rather than oil and pigment. In paintings such as “Heatwave” and “Green Girl” (all of the works discussed in this review are dated 2008), the composition consists simply of free, casual-seeming, lyrical brushstrokes in monochrome mushes made of one blended color applied over another. He achieves this gorgeous succulence without giving way, however, to a sloppy-joe expressionism, as if an accumulation of gestures is inevitably linked to the “soul.” And yet, the effect is anything but mechanical, for there is no soulless, clever-clever deconstruction of painterly activity here.

His painting is often suspended in a beautiful tension — between indulgence and restraint, depiction and form for its own sake. The two paintings mentioned already, which show him at his most abstract, maintain a strong connection with nature, whether in palette or in atmospherics, a sense of what it is like to be out in the landscape in different seasons. Their odd mix of purposiveness and nonchalance is another of those tensions that energize his work.

The diversity of this show, which finds its unity in values rather than effects, is another of its strengths. There is a wide divergence in terms of palette, texture, focus, and scale, but consistency in the depth of pleasure these canvases strike in the materiality of paint and the way its manipulations arbitrate the space between representation and experience.

“Cold Shower” gives us raindrops as broad, hairy strokes of blue and white mixed on the brush and arranged as isolated signifiers against a pale blue ground. Random dots of pink offset an almost too easy all-overness.

“Buddy” and “Skunk Cabbage” both home in on a closely cropped leaf or vegetal form, animating the surfaces with specks of staccato marks that minutely vary in color, length, and direction as if following a randomly changing magnetic pull. “Buddy” juxtaposes mauve and turquoise, each of a dull pastel hue, in a jolie-laide combination that is subversively gorgeous.

Mr. Bordo’s mode of picture making born of stylized abstractions from nature belongs firmly within an American tradition, and this show in particular has paintings that make no apology for their allegiances. “Creek,” a painting of wet in wet shades of dark gray and black that evokes a nocturnal, or heavily shaded, reflective view of water, acknowledges the “Black Brook” series by Alex Katz, while “rut” appropriates a composition of Milton Avery’s that Mr. Katz in turn was happy to repeat, of a compacted meeting of sea, sky, and sand at the edge of an open expanse of almost pure, blazing yellow. “Cabaña” is a dead ringer for a late Avery painting and an early Katz collage that schematizes the notion of landscape as layer cake.

But in joining this patriarchal succession from Avery through Mr. Katz to himself, Mr. Bordo is neither lacking in originality nor offering mere commentary on past masters: He works on his own terms. Where Avery was searching for significant, pregnant forms within nature, and Mr. Katz, in making similar reductions, was grappling with the relationship between perception and style, Mr. Bordo makes painterly experience itself the focus of his interest. Distinctions between form and style dissolve in his perplexingly pretty paintings.

Mr. Bordo’s work is also, and rightly, compared with a strand of critically self-aware contemporary painting, whose luminaries include the Belgian Raoul De Keyser, the American Thomas Nozkowski, and the younger British artist Merlin James. But while, like Mr. Bordo, these are artists who confront the problematics of their activity with quiet, understated insouciance, Mr. Bordo is unbridled in the sheer delectation of his paint application, eschewing the gritty, chewy difficultness of these peers. He is reductive without ever being austere. In a sense, his charm is his way of being difficult, because he pulls it off without coming across as playing style games with cuteness per se.

Art historians (such as Svetlana Alpers and the late Michael Baxandall) have theorized very suggestively about “pictorial intelligence,” a quality found in abundance in Mr. Katz and in the new painting highbrows identified above as Mr. Bordo’s peers. With Mr. Bordo, however, it feels more appropriate to talk about “painterly intelligence,” as his thought process is so intimately bound up with the materiality of color, substance, and application. It could indeed be another of the pleasing tensions, the problematics, in Mr. Bordo’s work that sometimes the intellectual quotient that is so satisfying about his work is caught between ideas about paint and ideas in paint, but the emphasis with him is always closer to the latter. Contrary to the impression a viewer of this new body of work might have if prejudiced by the picture-within-the-picture theme of his early work, Mr. Bordo is not a conceptual artist who has taken up paint as his inquiry; he is a painter who thinks in paint.

The joy of this at once cerebrally and viscerally engaging exhibition is that, without being programmatic about it, Mr. Bordo gently forces the viewer to confront the fundamental dichotomy of illusion and actuality that lies at the core of painting’s magic.

A version of this review first appeared in the New York Sun under the head “The Heady Hedonist” on Thursday, September 11, 2008

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RE:LOCATION
Alexander & Bonin through July 28
132 Tenth Avenue at 19 Street, 212 367 7474

A BRIGHTER DAY
James Cohan Gallery through July 14
533 West 26 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 714 9500

Summer is for group shows in art galleries and innocent family fun on the beach. Right? Not on the second count, if you believe what a slew of group shows in New York have to say.

Marvelli even title their seasonal grouping “Nightmares of Summer.”  It is co-curated by Marcello Marvelli and his collector friend George Robertson.  An earlier summer presentation at the gallery in 2004, “Black Milk, Theories on Suicide” curated by Monica Espinel, suggests that a sombre, if not sinister worldview might reflect the gallery’s sensibility as much as a war and terror-torn zeitgeist.  Mr. Marvelli and Mr.  Robertson have gathered images that reflect “the darkness inherent in all paradigms of light, the dark cloud contained by every silver lining.”  Rather than a gothic horror fest, however, this strange gathering is characterized by a perverse good cheer.

Barnaby Furnas sets the tone with “Holiday” (2005), an angel of the apocalypse masquerading as a kid on the beach.  Mr. Furnas has made the terrifying exhilerations of battle his distinctive theme in images, often in watercolor, that at first read as joyous explosions of beauty, and only yield their awesome portents on closer examination.  Here a young, fleshly beauty with golden wings wears a gormless, demented expression on her face and splatters what could be blood in all directions.  A second image by him in the show is a red glowing composition that looks a bit like a close-up of a molten oil rig: the image itself isn’t as sinister as the title and the medium: “Dead Red” (2005), dispersed pigment in urethane and ink on bald calf skin.

This keeps company with a pair of nautical drawings by Francesca DiMattio of Nineteenth Century battleships caught in distress.  These crackle with a sense of danger in the way that recalls David Fertig’s neo-romantic Napoleonic battlescenes.  The DiMattios in turn flank a dense, brooding charcoal drawing, “Untitled (Situation with Octopus)” (1998-2004),  As with the second Furnas, context is all: the octopus looks like he is having a whale of a time.

Several collages by Nils Karsten have a maccabre humor: he gives spiky body hairs to the smooth legs of the appropriated little Victorian girls who populate his ghoulish compositions.  A theme running through this show is the ickiness and unappeal of sweating limbs, parched throats, and exposed body parts.  Several historic photographers induce degrees of alienation at the thought of nakedness: Diane Arbus with her loadedly, unconvincingly non-judgemental view of “A Family One Evening at a Nudist Camp, PA” (1965) with ill-at-ease looking corpulent couple and their child under an ominous sky; an André Kertesz distortion; a Hans Bellmer puppet.  Bellmer’s awkwardly thrust together mannequin parts and prothetic limbs find echo in a pair of poignant collages by Robert Beck that focus on press photos of the naked corpse of a murder victim at a gay pickup beach.

Michael St. John brings an “In Cold Blood” meets the Mansons sensibility to his nighmarish evocations of murder.  One canvas, “Dead Body Inside” (2006) scrawls the words of the title in a demented scrawl next to photograph of a forlorn cabin.  Marilyn Minter (of Whitney Biennial poster fame) takes body squalor to Dantean depths in her blown up C-Print deconstructions of the beauty myth: “Soiled” (2000) has copious dirt between a cropped image of lurid, green-painted toe nails, while “Drool” (2004) focuses on a menacing, saliva-filled mouth animated by a vampire-like grin.

Then there is guilt by association for some of the remaining images: Ann Craven’s saccherine Hallmark Card-like portrait of two pink birds in a tree and Stuart Elster’s dense, sickly monochromatic seascape at dawn become convincingly nightmarish for keeping natural company with overt horrors.

The miserablism of “Re:Location” is neither fantastic nor seasonal—it derives from the alienations and privations of exile and war.  Some are overt in their politics, others more oblique, but all are pervaded by a sense of frustration and fear.

Willie Doherty shows three sets of five c-prints laminated on aluminum from the larger “Apparatus” (2005) series which dwell on scenes of grim decay in Northern Ireland: boarded up houses, tattered flags, graffitied projects.  “The Troubles” has been Mr. Doherty’s career theme.  Previously he has dwelt on such issues as surveillance, or riot control; these images concern the banal, day-to-day squalors of a divided society.  Somehow he finds hidden poetry in his hideous landscapes, creating constructivist patterns, for instance, in the way he crops a bird’s eye view of hemmed-in, barricaded walkways.

Cages and barrier are often Mona Hatoum’s metaphor of choice for oppression, alienation and exile.  In superficially lighter mode, her work here is a curtain on which a newspaper article has been printed.  The title, however, hints at political portend: “Every door a wall” (2003).

The visitor passes through this curtain/door/wall to the back gallery where an intriguing object by another artist of Palestinian extraction, Emily Jacir, takes on added meaning from its placement and company.  “Embrace” (2005) is a pointlessly mini-luggage carousel, around six foot in diameter, motion sensor activated by the viewer—a complex metaphor perhaps for exile and the frustrations of reconcilliation.

I preferred the poignant little paintings after emails from Gaza residents that she last showed at this gallery, but the cool meanness of this object sits well with other exhibitors: Diango Hernández’s “The underdevelopment is a long game, do you want to play” (2005) which has the words of the title in shiny little letters along a rusty pipe that is placed within an oval toy train track; and an inscrutable 1970s-style hexagonal brass architectural fixtures of unspecified usage by Rita McBride installed at ceiling level.  Relief from such pretense and tedium comes in the form of an untitled Doris Salcedo sculpture, as ever poetic and enigmatic in its melancholy description of the human condition.

No one would accuse “Re:Location” of being laugh a minute.  If you prefer your nihilism with a smile James Cohan has a group show titled “A Brighter Day,” a hint of Monty Python sarcasm in the title.

It’s a sprawling show of eighteen artist united in their chirpy interpretations of apocalypse, oppression and decay.  Several artists bombard the viewer with despondent or desparate verbal messages delivered with beguiling visual upbeat: Jenny Holtzer inscribed “What urge will save us now that sex won’t” onto a white marble footstall; McDermott & McGough emblazon the sadomasochistic song lyric, “Violate me/ in violent times/ The vilest way/ that you know/ Ruin me ravage me/ Utterly savage me/ On me no mercy/ Bestow” in multicolored letterpress fonts on a torquoise ground; Alejandro Cesarco prints “When I am happy I won’t have time to make these anymore” in pretty colors on a page; Trenton Doyle Hancock compulsively scrawls “You deserve less” like schoolboy lines to fill a whole wall with designer intensity.

Other exhibits render the macabre in saccherine colors and delectible surfaces.  Folkert de Jong’s Polyurethane, silicone rubber and styrofoam sculpture “Dust” (2004) has a survivalist sitting astride oil barrels and supplies with guns, megaphones and a kerosene lamp to hand in nursery pink and blue.  David Altmejd renders a cadavre in an advanced state of decay amidst cracked mirrors and neon lights in “The Settler” (2005), a work of weird beauty.  The marquetry compositions of Alison Elizabeth Taylor of survivalist girls in a bombed out wilderness, and Eric Swenson’s meticulous rendering of the hideous decapitated head of hybrid animal similarly collide luxurious craft and dark message.

There are pleasurable surprises in this studiedly strange show: The tight, anachronistic realism of Michaël Borremans enigmatic miniature “Flattening of a Hellhound” (2000), the collage of a cellphone transmogrifying into a ghoul in the lotus position on William Morris wallpaper of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, “Dread Medley (Sapphire version)” (2004), and above all, the exquisite 11 minute video installation, “Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany)” (2005) which quotes a passage from the cult sci-fi writer on an imaginary city where subterranean motors rearrange the streets after visitors have passed through them and then segues into gorgeous video animation of rooms melting into color-coded reconfigurations.  Emerging from the subdued mystery of Ms. Lislegaard’s installation, it really is a brighter day.

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 8, 2006

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 8, 2006.

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