October 29 to December 19, 2020
537B West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, asyageisberggallery.com

At first glance, the works in Rodrigo Valenzuela’s recent exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery look like drawings, but the images are actually built from a complicated series of “translations” from one medium or situation to another. The Chilean-born LA-based artist’s starting point in these images is the ubiquitous polystyrene forms of consumer packaging; these are then cast into concrete components and carefully stacked into composite sculptural forms that are then photographed and translated to photogravure.. Defying their immovable appearance, the sculptural forms are specifically constructed without reinforcements or adhesives binding the parts together and exist only for their final output in two-dimensional form, as seen here in these intaglio prints.

Each ‘stature’ is photographed against the same industrial backdrop of the artist’s own studio. This repeated tableau serves as a constant, displaying the technical array and sleight of hand employed from image to image—shifting variations that move the forms between solidity and surrealness, and variously reveal the glimmering textures of the stained concrete and the flanking metal grating that come to life under the velvety tonalities of photogravure. The results echo portraits of Brancusi’s studio “anonymous sculptures” of Hilla and Bernd Becher. Some are reminiscent of the structural sketch-up paintings of fellow 2013 Skowhegan participant, Avery Singer. More pointedly, many recall brutalist architecture or pre-Columbian ruins. Valenzuela’s forms resonate with a highly particular power that manages to fuse the martial, the technological, the prehistoric and the occult.

His photographed constructions always start with materials charged with meaning. Previous bodies of work employed photocopies (which he terms “the material of bureaucracy”) and dimensional lumber and other construction materials to underscore the importance of invisible labor. While earlier work regularly depicted a dismantled architecture in a state of destruction or ruin, Statures offers portraits of integrated architectures born of deconstructed and discarded elements that seem equally born from the alienations of capitalism.

There is a tension in the work between formalist order and improvisation, and an impulse for transparency of means versus a manipulation of means. Valenzuela’s upbringing in Pinochet’s Chile, his interest in brutalism, and, according to the gallery press release, his ”fascination in the power of architecture to impose control” all seem pertinent to a reading of these images as Corbusian puzzles rejecting and affirming signals of power. Architecture and authority share the task of “holding together” various structures to create order and stability. Repeated translations of the image in the convoluted interplay between artistic modes (from discarded material into sculpture to photography to final rarified product in photogravure) confuses the authority of Valenzuela’s architectures and intentionally disrupts this stability — as humble materials are fortified and monumentalized, and/or the integrity of the final monumental image is undermined and denied. In any case, the works themselves comprise an ideal recipe for artistic authority: politically meaningful starting materials; a demonstrated art historical awareness; seductive formalism; transformation of media; an opulent finished product.

Despite pandemic-related slowdowns, this exhibition is part of a global tour: exhibited last at Kandlhofer Galerie in Vienna in October, after New York it moves next to Patricia Ready in Chile in 2021. Each work is an edition of eight with two artist’s proofs. Viewers home-bound at this time can also enjoy the images in the artist’s beautifully designed monograph, Journeyman, published by Mousse in 2020.

The post “Holding Together”: The Photogravures of Rodrigo Valenzuela appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 29, 2016
537B West 23rd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 675 7525

Pimples, cinnamon rolls, and a mountain man making paintings in the nude are some of the kinds of imagery found at Rebecca Morgan’s exhibition of recent paintings, ceramics, and works on paper at Asya Geisberg Gallery. The exhibition is titled “In The Pines,” and that is the exact feeling you get when viewing Morgan’s work since all the pieces seem to come out of an off the grid culture. Purposely made to be humorous and grotesque, Morgan presents hyper-detailed representations of stereotypical Appalachian Americans.

The ceramics included here expand on her earlier work in the medium, which she previously exhibited at the gallery in 2014. Her raku sculpture Pajama Jug (2015), with its elaborate and intricate caricature of a head, and its gonzo look, echoes the two-dimensional media. All of the dozen ceramic jugs are figurative with similar anthropomorphic appearance, splayed teeth, and bulging eyes but are individuated too. Each one’s uniqueness leads one to wonder what their backstory is and how they came to be. Moreover, their reference to alcohol and its effects makes a veiled reference to promiscuity and licentious behavior found throughout the exhibition’s images.

Drawing on influences such as R. Crumb, Francisco Goya, and MAD Magazine, with an ice-cold splash of Dutch style — e.g. Pieter Brueghel, Hans Memling, and the Van Eycks — Morgan shakes the bottle and pours out a delicious mixture of exaggerated bumpkin-looking characters. This is evident in Family Reunion (2016), which depicts a trio of all-American country folk indulging in a buffet of cake, soda, corn, and Cheezies Puffs snacks, some of which are served on a matriarch’s saggy, bra-less breasts — yummy!

All of the manically detailed complexity and bright color of Morgan’s work may make viewers envy the pair of awesome shades worn by a stoned young man in After Work Sunset (2016). Although the characters are made comically freakish, Morgan’s cartoonish renderings are imbued with a proud sense of charming guilelessness and self-acceptance. In a 2015 interview with Priscilla Frank for The Huffington Post Morgan says, “These characters are blissfully unaware, unruly, wild, and untamed. They are off the grid and free and not affected by anyone or anything’s influence and I’m very attracted to that concept.”

Morgan uses her crazy bunch as models to show what life could be when guilty of sin. Wandering Smoker (2016), a beautiful drawing, shows a close-up portrait of a strabismus man puffing on a corncob pipe. Rendered in graphite on paper, it’s tame compared to the bright paintings, with its precise hard lines and features, but is wildly drawn to give it virility and ferality. This picture is a break when trying to figure out exactly where Morgan was coming from. It is the perfect portrait of a normal man from the country enjoying a nice unhealthy smoke from a handmade pipe.

Viewers may wonder, however, if these works are too grotesque and belittling of America’s rural citizens. The imagery has the superficial appearance of objectifying and stereotyping country folk as brutish, over-sexualized, and drug-addled lunatics whose lives include a surplus of over indulgence. Nonetheless, most of her characters could easily be transferred to a stereotypical depiction of Brooklyn: beards, beer, anachronistic clothing, promiscuity, self-indulgence.

In the painting Plan B on Easter Sunday (2016), a woman with garish turquoise eye makeup, extends her tongue lasciviously, taking a birth control tablet on it in the manner of a sacrament. Elsewhere, in Creeper in the Grass (2016), a maniacal perverse man voyeuristically spies on a full-breasted blonde woman passed out in a field of daisies. Between the two of them, which join the narrative and portrait aspects of the show, and serve as bookends in its organization, Morgan provides a host of interesting characters for viewers to contend with. Her work is funny, exciting, crude, and skillfully made. Although it may make the viewer feel wrong, it is totally right — a guilty pleasure.

The post Hillbillies in Chelsea: Rebecca Morgan at Asya Geisberg appeared first on artcritical.

University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
February 5 to March 23, 2013

The exhibition was shown in two parts at:
Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410 6120

Asya Geisberg Gallery
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, 212-675-7525
April 24 to May 24, 2013

We may one day recall 2013 as The Year That Abstract Painting Came Back. Historical exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925) and the Guggenheim (Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960), as well as Loretta Howard Gallery (DNA: Strands of Abstraction) and Cheim & Read (Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s). The year has also been a notable one for contemporary shows: Paul Behnke at Kathryn Markel, Jennifer Riley at Allegra La Viola, Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, to name a few, with Sharon Louden coming to Morgan Lehman in October. And that’s just considering New York.

Add to this list POUR, an exhibition that showed simultaneously at Asya Geisberg Gallery and Lesley Heller Workspace after originating at Florida Atlantic University. Curated by Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, POUR established that the desire for good abstract form, achievable by way of liquid paint, is a perennial concern. In Chaim Potok’s 1972 book My Name is Asher Lev, abstract painter Jacob Kahn says to Asher, “I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.” We’re well on our way. Moreover, we seem to be doing so having settled a debt to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg goes largely unmentioned in the catalogues, criticism, and conversations surrounding the aforementioned exhibitions. Helen Frankenthaler’s name comes up in the POUR catalogue (this is a show about pouring paint after all), but so does Rubens and Chinese scroll painting. Finally, we can have a show of abstract painting in New York without it turning into a referendum on Greenberg. When someone turns it into one anyway, as John Yau did on behalf of Thomas Nozkowski in his March 2013 review in Hyperallergic, it sounds dated and beside the point. Greenberg has taken his rightful place in the cosmos and we can choose to navigate by his light, or not.

It now seems possible to draw a line from Carrie Moyer’s lesbian activism to her formidable shape-making, and think it only natural. Moyer, who was made a Guggenheim fellow this year, co-founded Dyke Action Machine! in the early ’90s and designed the group’s  agitprop. Her painted images have long combined elements from political posters, Tantra drawings, and a vocabulary of abstraction derived from Morris Louis. The last of these influences has come to predominate her work in recent years, as she keeps experimenting with painting techniques. While plenty of splatters remain on her canvases in the state in which they landed there, Moyer seems to have enlarged certain incidents of gravity and viscosity until they form flat, opaque arcs with the graphic fortitude of industrial signage. For added visual heft, she paints in subtle shadows around the edges of some of these shapes. The total effect is both delicate and arresting.

The “pour,” as presented by Condon and Prusa, takes one of two forms. The first is the revealing pour, the one with which we’re familiar from Jackson Pollock – paint as the manifestation of itself, the literal trail of evidence made by the action of colored liquid on a support. There is a distinctive grid, irregular and rounded, that appears when you tilt a canvas with a dripping swath of paint on it along one axis and then across it. This drip-grid appears in work by both Jackie Saccocio and Carolanna Parlato. Saccoccio, working handsomely in a vein first opened by Jules Olitski, is emptying out otherwise busy abstractions with a high-value, neutral color poured generously into the center.  She uses the drip-grid to integrate the figure and the ground, by breaking up this central shape at the edge and allowing the more saturated colors there to show through. Parlato, in contrast, uses  the drip-grid as a design element. In Drizzle (2009), areas of viridian, fuschia, and scarlet have been given the same treatment, one layer after the next, and she tops them off with a lemon-over-green coat that is itself allowed to drip, locking in a diagonal that composes the canvas. Angelina Gualdoni used an analogous technique to create Opening the Gates (2011), but the paint was tilted every which way, and she dosed the broad, black pathways thus formed with chalky violet while they were still wet. The interpenetration of the two colors results in luminosity.

The other form taken is the hiding pour, in which the force of the falling paint removes evidence of the human hand from the application, leaving the viewer to wonder how the shapes got there. David Reed’s No. 611(2010) is painted in oil and alkyd on polyester, using dripping, squeegeeing, and masking of translucent paint on the slick surface, producing an abstract calligraphy of blue across an elongated six-foot rectangle. Carrie Yamaoka’s works on reflective mylar, coated with colored gloss that has been allowed to pool across the supports’ bending surface, are so limpid and so devoid of evidence of their manufacture that they may as well have come from outer space. Roland Flexner’s moody, diminutive landscapes of liquid graphite form from controlled accidents of surface tension on paper. Their appearance is a wondrous collision of an abstract contact print with a Sung Dynasty forest scene. Ingrid Calame’s Pop-bright whirls and scrapes of enamel on aluminum may look improvised, but in fact are the product of meticulous tracing in the urban environment.

Later in My Name is Asher Lev, Asher and Jacob conclude a satisfying day of painting with a walk on the beach. Gazing at the sea, Jacob remarks, “Sometimes I think all water is blood. It is a strange feeling.” No more about it is said. Among painters, no more would need to be said. But I might elaborate this way: liquidity is vitality. The artists of POUR have made this beautifully clear.

The post Oil as Water: POUR at Lesley Heller and Asya Geisberg appeared first on artcritical.

February 23 to April 7, 2012
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, (212) 675-7525

For her fourth solo exhibition since earning her MFA from Bard in 2004, the prolific Allison Gildersleeve refines her take on the painterly interpretation of the natural landscape in nine paintings dated 2011 or 2012, in oil and alkyd on canvas, that are rooted in perception but only loosely tethered to the world of appearances. Her ostensible subject matter is the verdant woodlands of her native New England, but the greens of chlorophyll do not dominate these lushly chromatic compositions, shot through as they are with vibrant magentas, shadowy violets, slithering oranges and murmuring grays. The liberties the artist takes with hue; her autographical, apparently improvisational mark making; and her boxed-in, anti-panoramic compositions imply a landscape subjugated to her pictorial will. Beyond the artist’s sheer painterly virtuosity and coloristic panache, the exhibition foregrounds questions about the contemporary relevance of the centuries-old tradition of landscape painting.

The works range in size from the three-foot-wide Thin Line to Squall, which is 68 by 72 inches.  In the latter painting especially, the range of Gildersleeve’s virtuoso paint-handling is on display; its streaks, swipes, smears, spots and splats catalogue the ways that a loaded brush might contact a canvas. A turbulent surface is pitch-perfect for this picture, in which a damp wind whips a line of scraggly treetops under a churning sky.

Insofar as pictorial space emerges despite aggressively physical paint application, Gildersleeve is a descendant of Cézanne, but her palette brings to mind the unbridled color of the Fauves. The bottom two-thirds of Candyland (58 by 54 inches) is thicket of sugary yellows, bubblegum pinks and a reddish tan the color of caramel. Delivering on the title’s promise (and every child’s fantasy) of ubiquitous confectionary, even the shadowy foliage spanning the top of the painting is speckled with the colors of cinnamon and chocolate.

The artist is adept in her use of neutralized color. A cluster of closely related grays spilling across the midsection of Slippery Pink (52 by 52 inches) is a wonderfully understated foil—a “ground” in two senses—for the painting’s tangle of stems, stalks and twigs in lively tints of lime, lemon and watermelon; further, the grays  facilitate the chromatic functioning of black and white, which ripple through the painting as fully invested hues.

While Gildersleeve’s touch is animated and her color sumptuous, her compositions are abruptly cropped, hedged in by the edges of the canvas as if the viewer is wearing blinders. There is no suggestion of awe-inspiring, expansive space—no “sublime” in the Romantic sense—but quite the opposite: a sort of tunnel vision that eliminates the periphery and induces a disquieting absence of context. Beyond the snaggle of sticks and tattered rags in the foreground of Hide-Out (52 by 54 inches) is a deeply recessive space that splits into two or three routes among the distant trees. Inward-slanting diagonals at the upper left and right subtly imply a vanishing point just above the top edge of the canvas, channeling space further.  Similarly, in The Day Needs Fixing (54 by 60 inches) a tumbledown wall or embankment—an ancient boundary between properties?—and the sun-dappled path that parallels it recede in radical perspective to a clearing in the distance. The likelihood of becoming disoriented in these woods, of getting lost, is nil.

In a recently produced video now posted at Gorky’s Granddaughter website, Gildersleeve notes that her locations cannot be taken for wilderness. The presence of some artifact or evidence, however subtle, of human culture or habitation significantly qualifies the experience of nature. Indeed, crisscrossed by trails and obsolete stone walls, spotted with overgrown fields that once were farmed, Gildersleeve’s favored milieu is an exurban interzone where nostalgia for an agrarian past meets the exigencies of upscale housing in a postindustrial economy. Acreage buffers us from the neighbors, and vice versa.

The anxiety this conflict produces is subtle but insistent. Giants (60 by 54 inches) depicts a stand of majestic white birches bathed in midday sunlight. But for dazzled bits of whitish sky at the top, the composition is all-over, a variegated edge-to-edge field of relatively naturalistic greens and ochres in chromatic dialogue with the quirkier elements of Gildersleeve’s palette, which lurk in the shadows. The trees’ lower trunk and branches, as well as the ground plane, are cropped out of the frame; the unobstructed view is from a distance, maybe across a lawn or a parking lot. We are at an unbridgeable experiential remove from the motif; we scrutinize the vagaries of sun and shade in the foliage for meaning as if we are reading tealeaves. Here as elsewhere in this convincing exhibition, Gildersleeve’s manifest self-consciousness about her relation to the modalities of landscape painting provides a welcome bit of friction to her otherwise smoothly enjoyable blend of chromatic audacity and tactile finesse.

The post Tunnel Vision: Allison Gildersleeve at Asya Geisberg appeared first on artcritical.