February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

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October 20 – December 17, 2011
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

The discrepancy between technique and expression is one of the fascinating paradoxes of art. Who would think that Ingres’ corseted technique could lead to such expansive descriptions? (Or, that Seurat’s careful building of tones would culminate in such gutsy massings of form, or Soutine’s thrashings—which stylistically seem to say, “Take me anywhere but here”—bring his subjects closer to the viewer?) Ingres’ obsessive details and distortions are an entertaining symptom of his loving Raphael not wisely but too well, and we may find ourselves in the peculiar position of admiring him despite his intentions.

Like Ingres, Brett Bigbee brings formidable rendering skills to idiosyncratic figure paintings. Nearly 20 drawings and paintings by the artist, who was born in 1954, recently graced the walls at Alexandre Gallery. Producing only one or two paintings a year, the artist has perfected a singular style that seems to combine the iconic reserve of American colonial portraiture and the descriptive effulgence of French academic painting. His precise modeling imparts to his figure and still life paintings both a glowing intricacy and a slightly surreal exactitude. Bigbee’s attentions are actually quite selective: he invariably renders reflections on the irises of eyes, but no eyelashes to speak of; their whites always include that tiny fold of flesh at the inner corner, but nary a vein. One might expect to find a vulnerability in his portraits, given his painstaking method and the fact that all are members his family, but, if anything, they seem inoculated by their brilliant rendering. They have a porcelain opacity that triggers, for me, an “Ingres reflex”: an admiration for the work at odds with its intentions.

The forms in the seven graphite drawings in the exhibition feel as much incised as drawn. In several portraits, the exquisite detail—the finely cracked lips, the darkly opalescent pools of eyes—impart an Ingres-like effect of self-generated organisms. Study for James (2000) is typical in that all forms become more diffuse as one proceeds away from the riveting eyes, until one arrives at a uniform tone at the sheet’s perimeter, the hair melting into an enclosing vapor. In this respect, Bigbee’s approach is distinctly unclassical; great traditional artists such as Ingres would locate a necessary role for each element, from encircling jawline to embellishments of hair, in characterizing the whole of a face.

Like George Tooker or William Bailey, Bigbee appears to approach drawing as an additive modeling process. Neighboring adjustments of tone actively create sensations of volumes, which accrue, in rather passive rhythms, to fill the surface. Opposite to this “from-the-inside-out” approach is the “outside-in” process of Matisse or Ingres, who, though fully capable of shading, start by locating and relating points across the paper, and building through the tensions of intervals. This is an approach based in composing, and it makes for different expression: the singularity of an arm extending through space as opposed to forms emerging evocatively from the depths. (In truth, great artists from Watteau to Degas had a foot in both camps, pacing their rich, modeled tones with vigorous intervals. But I’ll admit I’m keener on outside-in composing. Modeling without composing takes you to light-weight seductions—to Greuze and Bougereau—while composing without any tonal modeling at all can take you to such extraordinary places as Picasso’s line drawings or Rembrandt’s pen-and-ink sketches.)

Consequently Bigbee’s drawing is indeed muscular in its modeling, but not in the quantifying of human gesture. His infinitely patient approach to all parts of bodies produces some intriguing effects. For instance, the younger boy’s head and left arm pop out disconcertingly in the five-foot-tall drawing Joe and James (2001-2003), while both bodies seem to drop from the heads, rather than grow from the support of earth, imparting to them something of the aspect of pinned specimens.

But might this be the result of a conscious decision? Consider the small, remarkable drawing titled Abby (2004) Here, the slight pursing of lips, the shading about the eye sockets, and shadows about the base of the nose, eloquently lead from one to the other as asymmetrical pressures, all within the tangible embrace of a head. Honoring the mobility of features, the artist turns the subject’s eyes, wondrously, into the summation of a vulnerable entity.

In fact, lingering a while in the exhibition at Alexandre, one may sense in many of the works a particular kind of magic.  Academic artists are frequently strong, if conventional, draftsmen and less than active colorists. Their hues tend to fill rather than direct, adding simply an evocative sheen to what’s already there. Bigbee, however, appears to be the rare painter whose expression is more coherently expansive in color than in drawing. Indeed, his color sometimes weights elements left at loose ends by his iron-willed drawing.

In James (1999-2001), a portrait of a mother and her baby, the face of the baby is a marvel of modeling, and not just tonally, but with colors eliciting the movement between lit and softly shadowed areas. It represents what must be an extraordinary amount of work, yet it feels limber. Bigbee deftly catches even the curiosity in the baby’s gaze. Colors lend tangible weight to certain other sequences, too: there’s a luxurious depth in the movements between the baby’s shadowed ear, the deep absorbent red of his mother’s dress, and the pure blue of sky visible in the window—all coexisting within an inch of canvas space.  But such are the peculiarities of Bigbee’s attack that the entire remainders of the figures’ bodies have less sculptural presence. One recognizes strategies in the drawing; the baby’s curling fingers just broach the encompassing contour of his mother’s shoulder, while his other hand, resting atop her wrist, launches the larger echo of her fingers. But the drawing fails to build to such affecting events, and in this case even Bigbee’s empathetic color can’t enliven them rhythmically.

The exhibition includes five still life paintings, and here Bigbee’s precise descriptions avoid of the surreal overtones of some of the figural work. He also brings to them the stronger aspects of the portrait paintings, with simpler compositions again showing more momentum of rhythm. The six fruit in Quince (2000-01) vividly capture the orbiting energy of orange spheres in a leafy world. Dark Earth (2010-11) catches the singularity of a bright clover blossom arcing from a darkened patch of soil; behind it, the division of a glowing rock, by two blades of grass, sounds a telling response.

Dominating the exhibition, however, is Abby (2005-10), a portrait of young girl standing alone in a field. One imagines that Bigbee summoned his full powers for this six-foot-tall canvas, and in technical terms it’s a tour de force. Yet it impresses also as pictorial expression. Bigbee’s colors impart to the figure a palpable presence, as if she had precipitated out the scene’s thick, darkish air. Though the face and hands still flirt with that porcelain inertia, her vertical form holds powerfully in space against the taut horizontals of distant water and the rocks at her feet. Far-away treetops connect in an uneven wave that buoys the pale shoulders of the girl, who stands awkwardly, as if she wasn’t quite sure how she got there. The artist clearly knows, though—at least on some intuitive level—having conjured it through some remarkable chemistry of color.

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