August 3 to 19, 2017
254 Broome Street, between Orchard and Ludlow streets
New York City, castorgallery.com

Upon meeting for the first time, even before greetings are exchanged, strangers form conscious or subconscious impressions of each other. Accurate or not, these momentary decision based on visual cues color further interactions. Castor Gallery’s aptly-named summer exhibition, Strangers, curated by Emma Frank, presents a room full of faces and figures where none of the engagement of traditional portraiture has been allowed. The viewer is obstructed and frustrated by a variety of visual devices that prevent the depicted subjects from returning their gaze.

Jesse Draxler uses a traditional portrait format — showing the sitter’s head and shoulders — but his “portraits” are non-functional beyond this formal coincidence. All of his subjects have their heads turned from the viewer: Some barely shift from a profile view, and others almost totally face away. All of the heads are presented in silhouette, painted black and lacking any obvious markers of sex, ethnicity, or personality. The subject’s head in Consciousness Antenna III (2017), turned away and looking down, appears to be covered by a skintight hood; a black line runs from the base of the skull down the figure’s spine. The left-hand figure in Living with a Ghost (2017) has the same stripe, but the nearly identical figure to its right — its doppelgänger — is painted completely black, a shadow standing in the foreground.

In her large-scale painting Tell Me You Love Me (2017), Krista Louise Smith likewise presents a double “portrait” with a disruptive twist. An exquisitely-painted nude, rendered in oils from groin to neck, embraces a second woman tentatively carved out of negative space. The leftmost figure’s breasts and depilated vulva are presented in detail, yet her head lies teasingly outside of the frame in an inversion of traditional portraiture and its focus on the face’s expressiveness. The ghostly figure serves as an opposite: She is shorter, has pubic hair, her face is in the frame, and she stands in profile rather than facing the viewer. The edge of a painted hand is wrapped around her belly, a loose embrace that prevents her from slipping out of reach.

The figure in Smith’s painting appears ghostly, but two other artists use literal translucency in their work: Anthony Goicolea’s Anonymous Self Portrait (2016) depicts the artist removing (or possibly putting on) an opaque shirt on an otherwise see-through resin panel. The shadows painted on the panel mingle with the literal shadows cast by the light passing through it. Juan Miguel Palacios also uses translucency in his work, but his panels are layered on top of damaged sheets of drywall. His Wound series of paintings show the figures’ heads floating on layers of vinyl atop a literally wounded ground in a tense fusion of the spectral and the material.

Mercedes Helnwein’s oil pastel works on paper present a different variety of ghostliness than the aforementioned paintings: She draws from vintage photographs and plays up the nostalgic sensations found within, yet subverts their narrative qualities with brightly-colored interventions. Queen of the Underground (2015) plays up the contrast between an illuminated figure and the shadowy background that surrounds her. The only substantial color to be found is a pink smear across her face, a mask that shows her eyes yet prevents the viewer from interpreting any expression she may have. Tiffany (2017) exhibits a similar tension: Helnwein has again layered a brightly-colored mass on top of the subject’s face. The vibrant orange scotoma hovering in front of her face doesn’t completely obscure her expression, but her glassy-eyed stare raises the question of whether she sees it, as well.

Even after spending ample time with these paintings, the figures depicted continue to resist recognition and remain strangers.. In this respect, the work in Strangers provides an amnesiac version of the experience of meeting someone for the first time, with its attendant anxieties and excitement, allowing the viewer to introduce themselves again and again.

The post Social Amnesia: Strangers, curated by Emma Frank appeared first on artcritical.

Jack Whitten at Alexander Gray Associates
526 West 26th Street #215. 212 399 2636. www.alexandergray.com

Greg Drasler: On the Lam at Betty Cuningham
541 West 25th Street. 212 242 2772. www.bettycuninghamgallery.com
reviewed by David Cohen (capsule reviews)

William Anastasi/N. Dash at Nicole Klagsbrun
526 West 26th Street. 212 243 3335 www.nicoleklagsbrun.com

Ronnie Landfield: New Paintings  at Stephen Haller Gallery
542 West 26th Street. 212 741 7777 www.stephenhallergallery.com
reviewed by David Cohen (exhibitions)

Will Barnet: Small Works on Paper from the 1950s at Alexandre Gallery
41 East 57th Street. 212 755 2828 www.alexandregallery.com

Anthony Goicolea: Pathetic Fallacy at Postmasters
459 West 19th Street. 212 727 3323 www.postmastersart.com
Was discussed at The Review Panel, September 30

Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street. 212 977 7160. www.mariangoodman.com
reviewed by Jonathan Goodman (exhibitions)

Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
138 10th Avenue. 212 750 0949. www.loribooksteinfineart.com

Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings at Marlborough
545 West 25th Street. 212 463 8634. www.marlboroughgallery.com

Ad Reinhardt: Works from 1935-1945 at Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street. 212 421 3292, www.thepacegallery.com

Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World at Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue. 212 570 3600 www.whitney.org

Loren Munk: Location  Location  Location at Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street. 212 410 6120 www.lesleyheller.com
reviewed by Greg Lindquist (exhibitions)

The post Last Chance Saloon: A Dozen Shows Closing This Weekend appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201602483″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson, and Ken Johnson join David Cohen to discuss Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters, Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly, Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

The post September 2011: Berwick, Bronson, and Johnson with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

April 28- June 2, 2007

Anthony Goicolea’s photographs are fantastical constructions of derelict landscapes. His large-scale black and white photographs—they measure up to eight feet wide—fill the front room at Postmaster, depicting traces of man’s interaction with the natural environment in a surreal manner. Goicolea’s photographs are at once meditative and filled with malaise, atmospheric and materially present.

Although they can recall the stillness of Ansel Adams photographs of the American landscape, they are less documents than constructions, as they have been worked in Photoshop. Goicolea culls elements of urban decay, unusual occurrences and dramatic atmosphere, primarily from European locations. From foreground to background, soft edges of objects overlap sharper edges.  By the way they digitally reassembling space, an irregular depth of field is created. Goicolea’s process recalls digital matte painting– a technique in contemporary cinema used to create virtual environments– yet mounted on aluminum and laminated with matte Plexiglass, these photographs as objects are convincingly material.

These landscapes are largely absent of the human figure, for which he is most known as a photographer. In previous work, meticulous digital montage self-portraits self-consciously addressed issues of male adolescence, sexuality and Catholicism.  The new work follows a steady progression away from self-portraiture into environment while additionally working with drawing and painting.

Yet the human figure does appear in less overt ways in the series of ten diptych portraits in the rear gallery. A photographic negative, hand-painted on mylar, is digitally reversed to produce a positive image. These ten daguerreotype-like portraits of elderly men and women, Goicolea imagines, are the inhabitants of the worlds in the front room. In Deconstruction (all works 2007), figures implausibly hang from hammocks inside of a dilapidated façade-less building, nestled behind a foreground of rubble. In Low Tide, presumably it is the character of Dina (a character who appears in the diptych portrait series) sitting at a park bench at the foot of an ocean rock formation, across which tramlines dangle.

Like Goicolea’s previous work, these photographs have a tendency towards meticulous detail– in North Bank, for instance, hidden on the horizon between the buildings are minute suburban and industrial buildings neatly placed in a grid pattern. A lone chair in the foreground of Sky Lift prods one to look closer and discover, amid the haze, silhouettes of figures walking single file across the background. These displaced details evoke the surreality in the work.  But he subtly avoids absurdity and overstatement.

Goicolea’s treatment of sky unifies an ominous tone in the work.  Open, airy, and often polluted, it emotes a brooding and foreboding mood. These expressive skies bear a strong resemblance to a similar mood in the paintings of David Caspar Friedrich, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. Most impressive are the vertically wavering cloud forms in North Bank, a nearly eight foot wide photograph, whose blurry and blended quality suggests further feathering and enhancement in Photoshop. The wispy clouds contrast with the dour, anonymous industrial architecture, in front of which an iced irrigation pond extends. Smoke Stackdescribes a heavily polluted sky where swirling, heavy plumes of smoke hang over a packed architectural panorama.

The most surprising thing about Goicolea’s current body of landscape photographs is their black and white format. Technically, this may allow a more seamless assembly of these disparate elements, as no painstaking color correction is necessary. However, the lack of chroma gives an old-fashioned feeling to these scenes. And while Goicolea’s contemporary subjects foretell a bleak future, his photographs anachronistically recollect a past quickly being forgotten.

The post Anthony Goicolea: Almost Safe appeared first on artcritical.