January 22 to February 22, 2014

515 West 24th Street
New York, 212-206-9300

Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle’s source images are most likely not trending on Instagram. His trademark subjects, when reviewed as a list, sound tearfully forgettable: parked cars, covered parked cars, middle class suburban houses, trees, peopleless streets. Yet, he conjures something moving and miraculous with these ascetic ingredients. The watercolor Six Cars on 20th Street (2007) centers on a beige, empty road that fills the picture to the brim, save for a small glimpse of blue sky in the corner. A few precisely placed, transparent cars are enjoying small patches of shade, leisurely anchored to San Francisco’s hilly street as if casually immune to gravity. It feels as if the very Californian sun it portrays dried off the paint. Bechtle’s nonfiction of the most overlooked moments in life can send viewers to the verge of panic about becoming enthralled by the beauty of sheer banal insignificance.

Bechtle’s current exhibition at Gladstone Gallery provides a much-needed respite in a world serving up artworks constantly growing bigger, louder, and more ingratiating. The artist himself sheepishly peers out from one of the few oil paintings in the show, Bob’s Sebring (2011), next to a silver convertible a bit too snazzy for his outfit, in front of a square garage. Born in California in 1937, Robert Bechtle seems to have arrived at his minimal subjects and technique after carefully rejecting all that was cool. He was exposed to German art while serving as an army private there in the 1950s, and enjoyed Pop art shows at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962. He purposefully avoided Richard Diebenkorn’s painting courses while studying at the California College of Arts, in fear of becoming influenced by his contagious energy. After some short-lived trials, he found his long-term subject: keenly scrutinized painted portraits of everyday cars and empty streets, based on snapshots. The paintings are furnished from a Kodachrome, sun-bleached palette, and a seemingly interminable supply of time.

Most of the paintings in the show are based off of images taken in San Francisco and the Northern California suburbs in its vicinity, where the temperature dial is locked at 55 degrees and the sun’s simplifying rays expel clouds, distinguishable seasons, and palpable deadlines. The time of Clay Street, Alameda (2013) appears to be just past noon according to its telling, jewel-blue shadows. The supposed subject matter lingers at the edge of the well-measured composition, perfectly skewed to avoid approaching the edge of motion. Car-lined streets extend to the horizon as people patiently await the discovery of worthwhile destinations. Brief, poetic painterly details do not awaken their enervation; rhythmic telephone wires drape past the sky like garlands, and the unevenly trimmed canopies are feathered by brilliant numberless shades of green. A dirty, rectangular blotch in the middle of the street hides an attempt to restore something -– what sort of excitement could have possibly disturbed this neighborhood? Meanwhile, the still sunlight embalms the scene like room temperature formaldehyde, so clear it’s practically negligible. The photographic qualities of this work are apparent, but the shutter’s ability to capturing fleeting moments is irrelevant as time itself seems to be immobile anyway.

For Bechtle, a stationary mobile car is a powerful symbol of ennui. The watercolor Covered Car on De Haro Street (2013) is accompanied by an almost identical charcoal incarnation, Covered Car on de Haro Street II, where every grain of paper is mobilized for expression. This miniature portrait of a parked car, humbly presented in a size befitting the deceptively minor subject, is possibly the most immediately arresting work in the show. In a view reminiscent of that from the spontaneous cropping by a surveillance camera, a shapely cluster of spectral yellow tarp covering a vehicle is suspended on a slanted street, triggering a gentle, engaging instability. There is something weighty and insouciantly sublime about this unmanned outline of a car and its Hopper-esque stillness. Momentarily, this effort to alleviate sun damage assumes the mysterious tick of a filled body bag, but imaginative viewers might be disappointed by its content: it is probably just another Sebring.

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Robert Storr, Gregory Volk, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Shahzia Sikander at Brent Sikkema, Robert Gober at Matthew Marks, Harriet Shorr at Pelavin, Magnus von Plessen at Barbara Gladstone.

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Arthur C. Danto, Mario Naves, and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to review Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone, Christo and Jeanne Claude at the National Academy, Carroll Dunham  at Barbara Gladstone and Tom Otterness on Broadway

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Stephan Balkenhol at Barbara Gladstone Gallery until May 31 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-9300). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices

“Tony Oursler: Recent Works” at Metro Pictures until June 6 (519 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-7100). Prices: $45,000

“Bruce Gagnier: Sculpture, 1989-2003” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art until June 13 (50 E. 78th Street, Ste. 2A, between TK, 212-439-9605). Prices: $6,000-$12,000

Anyone who takes an interest in sculpture can’t fail to notice the yawning gulf between “public” artists and their art-world peers. You can be fêted by museums, collectors, and the press and yet never get a bite of the commission cherry. Yet those who *do* often crave the recognition of gallery shows and reviews. Harry Roseman is rare in this split profession: Respected within the art world, he just completed a 600-foot-long frieze at JFK’s International Air Terminal. Millions will breeze past “Curtain Wall,” like it or no.

I haven’t seen the piece, but on the evidence of his current show of related materials at Davis & Langdale, I’m tempted to book Kennedy next flight – Newark man though I am. Mr. Roseman invests his curtain motif with formal and psychological depth. From photographs, the Kennedy commission, characteristically circumspect for this artist, looks to be rich in metaphors of arrival and expectation, theater and homeliness: a Statue of Liberty for the postmodern age.

Mr. Roseman’s curtains reference old masters – Schongauer’s engravings and Piero’s paintings – as much as the drapery of medieval carving. But he also “draws” – with a camera – from life. Exhibited alongside his sculptural reliefs are perceptive but unpatronizing observations of drapery surreally at play in the world: Louche, bordello-red window dressings in a French café thêatre; incongruously high-chroma tarpualins amid old-world rickety farm equipment. The netting around a crop of tobacco in Connecticut becomes a canvas, making what’s behind seem painterly.

Unfortunately, too much is crammed into this show for its own good. Davis & Langdale is an ambitious gallery in pokey premises. The photographs and a harassed-looking wall drawing over-determine how the sculptures are to be interpreted. Their true marvel, especially in the non-colored reliefs in clay or gypsum, is a subtly harnessed anthropomorphism that needs space to flutter.

Stephan Balkenhol’s latest show of free-standing sculptures and carved reliefs closes this weekend at Barbara Gladstone. The German sculptor, who lives and works in rural France, is internationally and deservedly renowned. Marshalling incredible technique with understated force, he can be thought of as a young sculptural counterpart of Alex Katz. There is an aloof poignancy common to them that is at once tough and vulnerable. They similarly reconcile opposites: Awkwardness and fluency, bruteness and sensitivity, economy and detail.

Rough and smooth cohabit effortlessly in a Balkenhol. Sometimes he seems, literally, to draw with an axe, and even where he obviously is using a more delicate implement, he manages to balance tender specifics – especially in hand and face gestures – with an all-over robustness. A couple of large architectural reliefs that depict Chartres cathedral and a castle balance intricacy and consistency in a way that’s worthy of Canaletto. Mr. Balkenhol likes soft, blond woods like ply and wawa, which he keeps fresh-looking with bright paint, rough finish, and pentimenti.

Another relief, this time of a “man in space” from 2003, places the figure in a deeper register than the “ground” – outer space – creating an energizing optical ambiguity. Often his carving technique leaves behind burr, making the chippy surfaces at once vulnerable and animated, like the mortals he depicts. Mr. Balkenhol is alive to the meaning of his means to a degree unprecedented in the current scene.

Tony Oursler is showing a couple of doors down from Gladstone, at Metro Pictures. Like Stephan Balkenhol, he has a trademark style, but comparison of the two artists is an object lesson in the distinction between originality and novelty. It’s the American, with his gimmick worn thin, who comes across the loser.

Mr. Oursler’s contribution to the world of forms is the “video effigy,” a projection of faces onto abstract sculptural objects. In this new body of work, in contrast to the looser, more ghostly puppets familiar from earlier in his career, the knee to waist-high supports are solid structures. These include a donut and various balls and biomorphs. “Coo” (2003) arranges two smaller egg shapes on a bigger one beneath to read like a Mickey Mouse head (an apter metaphor for his artistic project than was perhaps intended). Three separate videos project – in disconcerting misregistration of a mouth and eyes – a person in green makeup squeaking away in plaintive baby talk. The pinkness of a salivating orifice and the whiteness of teeth and eyeballs aid and abet the surreal nastiness of the piece. Technically clever, moderately amusing, and easily forgettable, Mr. Oursler’s is the mannerism of an art-world moment.

Speaking of mannerism, what on earth is to be made of the sculpture of Bruce Gagnier, showing in a packed installation at Lori Bookstein? Mannerist in an art historical sense, this work brings to mind the bodily contortions of the later 16th century. There is also something of the grotesqueness of the modern American painter Ivan Albright: Mottled surfaces read literally as gruesome skin disorders.

If Mr. Gagnier were exhibiting in Chelsea or Williamsburg, might the veteran sculptor be mistaken for a young protégé of hot button appropriationist John Currin and master of the abject Paul McCarthy?

It is a subversive thought, but also a misreading that falls away with calm appreciation – which, for all their weirdness, these pieces compel. Underneath the existential angst of Mr. Gagnier’s disconcerting surfaces and deeply awkward anatomies, a genuine classicism yearns to break free. The real fusion here is of late Roman bronzes and Giacometti.

This article first appeared in The Sun, May 29, 2003

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