May 28 to Jul 18, 2015
526 West 26th Street, Suite 211 (between 11th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 462 4406

The woven, the embossed, the embedded and the laminated: upon viewing “Paper Route 66,” one felt a bit like Carl Linnaeus trying to develop a taxonomy for works on paper in the year 2015. The summer group show at BravinLee Programs featured six sub-curated spaces of artists from around America: Houston, Pittsburgh, Miami, Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore. While the show was too small and neat to allow for the consideration of larger questions like “Is regionalism dead in the Internet age” or “Is there a new American style?” the 20 artists and 26 works did present the confusing array of methodologies and processes that continue to complicate the increasingly non-literal categorization “work on paper.” It also gave a pleasant taste of each curator’s/curatorial group’s taste in choosing works.

Phillip Pyle’s Super Huey (2015) and Mark Ponder’s Jim Jones is Awesome (2015) presented a pair of portraits in Houston curator Paul Middendorf’s selection. Starting off the exhibition with these two heads — Huey’s in a bulbous cosmic helmet printed on glossy metallic paper while Jones a barely registered face receding into the space of the off-white paper — immediately gave the show a totemic mystical bent. This was bolstered by Devan Shimoyama’s Shadow (2014-15), a sparkling, glitter-covered pair of heads breathing rainbows and exuding galaxies, chosen by Amanda Donnan and Kim Beck from Pittsburgh. These were the only faces, but hero-worship was invoked by Spider Man and Gulls (2015) a six-part composition that posited an abstracted Spidey in the lower left-hand corner and played off that theme in a series of abstractions, by Stephen Booth and Jordan Bernier, chosen by curator Freddy, of Baltimore.

The work on paper inhabits a conflicted interstitial space; it lingers between finished piece and study, between experiment and pared-down iteration of larger works for which the artist is known. Corey Escoto, chosen by Pittsburgh’s Amanda Donnan and Kim Beck, contributed a delightful little muted geometric composition on Polaroid, Grid and Gob (2015), which resembled some sort of not-too-distant-future cocktail, a very nice evocation of his larger and more sublime sculptures and installations.

Next to Escoto in the Pittsburgh section was a quietly engrossing relief etching by Delanie Jenkins, Untitled (from the traces of absorption series) (2005-2006), a piece that plays on the ever-present patterns contained on the sheets of ultra-absorbent paper-towels, but shifts the designs into an off-kilter gear that results in a disquieting hallucinogenic sensation. Also capitalizing on the manipulation of texture are two prints from the Object Print Collection (I, IV, 2014) by Jessie Vogel, chosen by Amy Mackie of New Orleans, where the deep reliefs left by the collagraphy process imbue the paper with an almost object-like presence. Megan Heeres, chosen by Detroit curator Jennifer Junkermeier, reverses this process by embedding two circular thin metal chains (“found jewelry”) into handmade paper in A Certain Slant of Light (number 2) (2014). The foreign matter is not only described by its color and how it bulges through the tissue, but in the oxidation process initiated by the paper-making process itself: brown rust blooms form around the metallic elements. Slam Dunk, Madras, and Port (all 2015) by Justin Long, chosen by Amanda Sanfilippo of Miami, brings the operation full circle by dispensing completely with paper and drawing implement and instead sews series of acute isosceles triangles into a variety of fabrics. The fragile lines of twine play off the solidity of the red in Port and the quirky plaid in Madras and remain very much drawings.

Of actual recognizable drawings, there are a few. Sanfilippo-chosen artist Cara Despain presents two drawings Shallow (2001) and Belvedere [Birdcage] (2009), with narrative architectural fantasies, meticulously drawn, and toned and dusty with graphite. Despain utilizes wallpaper patterns and rococo silhouettes to visually frame and impose a composition on her surreal images of houses and garden vistas. While invoking a traditionalist sensibility by calling on these archaic forms, there is a literalness in the use of the wallpaper patterning that is much more contemporary — a kind of hand-drawn texture mapping. Jennifer Odem’s Table Study (2015), chosen by Amy Mackie, depicts a pair of enigmatic blobs placed squarely on a 12-legged schizophrenic table in a sort of fairy tale/fable-like visual composition, with spidery pencil lines and films and skeins of gouache reinforcing the fact that this is definitely a drawing. Oddly enough. Odem also employs the mimicry of a wallpaper/textile pattern on one of her blobs, and similarly to Despain’s drawing, the texture has a presence which seems disembodied from the rest of the image: again like a collage or texture mapped image. This pattern mimicry in these carefully drafted images leaves one with the impression that perhaps Odem and Despain are yearning for, or a bit jealous of, the tools being enjoyed by the other artists in “Paper Route 66.”

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This “Hub” linking artcritical articles on Thomas Nozkowski by five writers in the last twelve years is re-presented on the occasion of the three-decade survey of his legendary 16 x 20 inch tableau by BravinLee programs at VOLTA, the art fair at Pier 90 next door to the Armory Show, on view in New York City through Sunday March 8.

artcritical writers on Thomas Nozkowski:

Nora Griffin, 2013
David Brody, 2010
David Cohen, 2010
David Cohen, 2008
David Cohen, 2006
David Cohen, 2003
Sherman Sam, 2003
Joe Fyfe, 2003

and Thomas Nozkowski on Jane Freilicher, 2014

More information on the artist can be found at Pace

Full index entry for “Nozkowski” at artcritical

“HUBS” presents artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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Of the various names of beauty we have touched, hozho is the most comprehensive, which we might explain by saying the Navajo way of life is aesthetic at its base. But we also should simply say that beauty is not, for the Navajo, an aesthetic concept: it’s not primarily about the way things appear — though it includes the universe as a whole. It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all of these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state.
-Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty, 2004.

At her memorial service earlier this month I found myself thinking about Jennifer Wynne Reeves and hozho, with its implicit moral imperative. It struck me that Jennifer lived, made and wrote in a state of hozho.  Minutes after I had this thought the woman with the guitar started to sing a Navajo song about peace all around us which became a singalong to close the beautiful and elegant service to this woman’s singular life and work. The nearest English equivalent would be to say that Reeves lived a life bathed in Grace.

Reeves anthropomorphizes abstraction in an ultimately humane way, abstracting emotion in the way Pina Bausch does in her choreography. The Garden of Gethsemane (2014), with its off-white picket fence, and its multicolored abstract striped figure, reminds me that in the suburbs no one can hear you scream.

Jonah (2012) has a series of lumps of an Autumn palette forming a figure with wire arms in a gesture of either helplessness or praying — the two go together — facing away from the gaping red maw of a giant fish. It is archetypal in its appropriately named biblical theme.

Place (1997) drives home the impasto and materiality of Reeves’ work that does not show up in reproduction on Facebook, where I became one of her followers and a commenter on the long threads accompanying her art and her writing. I didn’t understand her work well on Facebook – it was over my head – but when I went to the opening of her memorial show at BravinLee and saw it for the first time in all its material glory, it went straight to my heart.

Place has a heavily impastoed cake form in black with white frosting accompanied by equally dimensional blobs in sky blue and sea green stacked into a figure. Kym Ghee, my Facebook friend who met me at the show, said all of her paintings were delicious and edible with something uncomfortable taking place underneath. No painting illuminates this principle more than Place.

Klee and Arp were designated the humorous painters of the time by art critics. I would add Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. But their humor is not lacking in gravity. People err when they think of life as pure tragedy, for they will become melancholics, or of life as pure comedy, for they will become clowns. Life is both tragic and comic at the same time. Reeves shares with these artists a sense of the tragicomic.

Among her contemporaries she belongs with Thomas Nozkowski, Stephen Mueller and Jonathan Lasker to the genre of narrative abstraction. Mueller and Lasker the most: Mueller for his spirituality and early Lasker for his symbolism. Lasker was the Forrest Bess of the TV Generation. Reeves’ work shares this spirituality and symbolism.

Come walk in hozho with the work and writing that Jennifer Wynne Reeves has left behind.

BravinLee programs is at 526 West 26th Street #211, New York City, 212 462 4404

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It is tempting to designate Clint Jukkala’s Telepath – one of a baker’s dozen of chirpy nursery-hued canvases in the artist’s first show with BravinLee programs – as the tripping grandchild of Matisse’s Moroccan in Green.  Colors and textures are reminiscent of the master’s North African sojourn of 1912/13, while the strong purposive wobble of the giant split disks of eye and lens seem pure Matisse—with hints of Robert Delaunay and Joan Miró.  It is also Matisse via Color Field abstraction, flower power iconography and Alfred Jensen, to flesh out the lineage. Gendering this progeny probably comes down to whether the fading blue verticals and sergeant-major’s stripes betwixt those dominating orbs read as facial hair or beaded veil, but the bald pate tips masculine.   Equally ambivalent is whether Jukkala’s schematic yet highly individuated personages are the objects of an intoxicated gaze or themselves look out at the world (or in, at the soul) through psychedelic eyes. Matisse in Morocco, meanwhile, feels like the right blend of the canonical and the exotic for this consummate insider-outsider, the Yale MFA graduate (and instructor there before taking a chair at the Pennsylvania Academy last year) who paints his fresh, nutty, insouciantly sophisticated persona-abstractions with a constantly rewetted innocent eye.

Clint Jukkala: Cosmic Trigger through June 7. 526 West 26th Street #211, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 462 4404

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Lance Esplund, Maddie Phinney and Barry Schwabsky join David Cohen to discuss exhibitions by Polly Apfelbaum at Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden and D’Amelio Gallery, Stan Douglas at David Zwirner, Douglas Florian at Bravinlee Programs, Ron Gorchov at Cheim & Read, Eve Sonneman at Nohra Haime Gallery, and Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman Gallery.

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“Color Your World!” proclaims the headline of the February 2010 Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, typed over a detail of Nina Bovasso’s limited-edition, vivacious floral carpet. Though I am neither a resident of Connecticut, nor possess a home or bank account suitable for the purchase of such a rug, I am seduced by its exuberant Pop sensibility and relentlessly bold, cheery hues. Inside the magazine, in an article cheekily titled “Art Under Foot,” it shares a page with other kaleidoscopically bright, geometric rugs, but it is likely that this is the only rug commissioned by a commercial art gallery that also represents such artists as Mequitta Ahuja, Thomas Nozkowski, and Amparo Sard.

In just under a year, John Lee and Meredith Rosenberg of BravinLee Programs, a Chelsea gallery, have commissioned artists Peter Halley, James Siena and James Welling, as well as Bovasso, to create lush designs for rugs made of hand-knotted, tightly woven wool or silk. “Each rug is one of a kind and has been crafted by weavers in the Kathmandu area, whose skills have been passed down through many generations,” says the website, and each rug displays “rich texture and subtle color variation.” Lee and Rosenberg selected the weavers, based in Nepal, for their high-quality production and laws against child labor, after several test runs with rugs made in India, Morocco and Mexico. They made it a priority to join GoodWeave, a certifiably child-labor-free program that donates part of its profits to educating children in Kathmandu. Each rug is artist-signed, and bears an individually numbered GoodWeave label as a symbol of ethical business.

The process of creating the rugs always begins with the artist’s design, which can be either drafted completely anew or adapted from a previous work—most often a painting, drawing, or photograph. The design is then sent to Nepal, where yarn color samples are chosen and shipped back to BravinLee for approval by the artist. While the original design concept belongs to the artist, it is up to the weavers to interpret the designs, resulting in a process that is ultimately collaborative and dependent on the stellar, by-hand craftwork of the weavers. The weaving process itself takes about three months—with each rug measuring around 6 x 9 feet, this seems no small endeavor—and rugs are usually produced in editions of fifteen with two artist’s proofs. In this way the process is not unlike printmaking, in its scrupulous repetition and production of editions, and in fact Meredith Rosenberg describes it as “the alternative to an editioned print.” Right now, she says, the rugs range from $4,000—$12,000, in an attempt to keep them at a competitive price with other high-quality rugs in the design market. So far the clientele has mostly included the collectors with whom the gallery is already familiar, but interior designers and decorators have been showing interest as well. The ultimate hope is, of course, that even those who have no previous interaction with art galleries will be interested in purchasing the rugs, and interested in the BravinLee Editions project.

Rosenberg, who has a Masters Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, says she is fully committed to opening up the often esoteric and insular (not to mention expensive) world of contemporary art to a larger audience, as well as further breaking down the boundaries between fine art and design. She discovered the project through Lee, her thesis advisor at FIT, and it coincided with her particular field of study at the time: “I was doing my thesis on marketing conceptual art,” Rosenberg explains, “and how to take something conceptual and make it into a commodity.”  The partnership that became BravinLee Editions was formed not long after, and the “commodity” point of departure shifted from conceptual art to work that is, perhaps, more easily marketable. The website for BravinLee Editions echoes Rosenberg, in that the mission is very much to “explore and experiment with other ways in which fine art and fine art imagery can be utilized as the basis for a design platform.” In exploring the rugs, their strong graphic sensibilities and vibrant colors, I was faintly reminded of a certain strand of modernism that embraced the world of industrial design, that strove to emphasize the purity of materials and craft. The legacy of the Bauhaus seemed nigh—or perhaps it was just the lingering ghost of the recent MoMA exhibiton—but especially that of Anni Albers, whose vivid, austere, and texturally complex formal influence can be found in the bold grids of James Siena’s rugs and the stark, black and white abstract rug by James Welling.

There is, needless to say, a long modernist precedent of artwork that complicates the distinction between visual art, architecture and design, from the Bauhaus, to De Stijl, to Russian Constructivism. If the overarching aim of the BravinLee Editions rug project seems to be to create a utilitarian object that channels the blue-chip aesthetics of artists like Halley and Welling into a completely different medium, this begs the question of why textiles at all? Why not chairs, tables, light fixtures, kitchen appliances? How do the selected artists’ practices, which range from painting to photography, translate into the textile medium? Does this reveal more to us about the depth of their artistic practices; does it actually challenge or inspire the artists to adjust how they view their own work?

Within the last five or ten years, New York in particular has seen the growth of a certain textile zeitgeist and a resurging interest in the “tapestry fetish object,” as Rosenberg put it, in addition to interest in the rich history of the medium. This all was perhaps ushered in with the magnificent tapestries shown in the 2002 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence,” so popular it spurred the 2007-08 sequel “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor.” There was the moment early in 2010 when James Cohan Gallery mounted “Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists,” just across the street from the BravinLee gallery which, at the same time, was showing the rugs created by Bovasso, Siena and Welling. Such exhibitions have revealed the relative lack of textile work by contemporary artists, the end product of which, in its labor-intensive and detailed process from the wool-dying to the loom, can be quite stunning. It is often the warmth of textiles—of woven materials, carpets, throws—the tactile, tangible sense of presence and handmade craft, of home, that makes this medium come alive. Perhaps these qualities are what make the prospect of owning a unique, artist-designed rug so compelling.

Most of the artists selected by Lee and Rosenberg work in the two-dimensional mediums of painting, drawing and photography, making their work easier to translate into the carpet format. Rosenberg says, “We’re really interested in [taking] the painting off the wall and living with it on the floor.” This gives the notion of living with artwork on a day-to-day basis a slightly different meaning, when it is a work on which one must constantly worry about spilling crumbs or red wine. Bovasso’s Flowers on a Walk (2009), which runs at a cool $8,000, seems to have garnered the most press attention, with the Connecticut Cottages and Gardens cover, and brief features on the Apartment Therapy and Better Living Through Design websites. The rug does not stray far from Bovasso’s paintings and drawings, which are filled with rich colors and swirling with spastic, orgiastic patterns. The rugs of James Siena—Global Key (2009) and Nine Constant Windows (2009)—also echo and eagerly transcribe his complex, rigidly formal geometric paintings and drawings, which visualize mathematical formulas and sequences. James Wellings’s New Abstraction #1A (2009) seems to channel Franz Kline; based on an abstract photograph, its beautiful, graphic swaths of black seem ready-made for a room composed of clean lines and modern architecture. The vital strength of each rug chosen by BravinLee is the utter translatability, the enhancement of each deceptively simple design in this flexible, heavily-textured medium. The rugs are incurably modern, but this is their strength too, knowing full well that, in the end, each rug must easily match the color scheme of the rest of the parlor or living room they will eventually inhabit.

In the preface to her book On Weaving, Anni Albers wrote: “Though I am dealing in this book with long-established facts and processes, still in exploring them, I feel on new ground. And just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships”. Albers was able to constantly comprehend and learn anew as she pushed her textile practice to the limits, even when it fell out of fashion. One could argue that the artists and weavers who produce rugs for BravinLee Editions are doing the same but with different stakes, producing an object that is tricky to define, skimming the line between fabulous decorative art object and pragmatic design piece.

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JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE
Gray Kapernekas until June 17
526 W. 26th Street, no. 814, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-462-4150

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI: WORKS ON PAPER
BravinLee programs until June 17
526 W. 26th Street, no. 211, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-462-4404

STEPHEN MUELLER
Baumgartner Gallery until June 7
522 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-242-4514

Joseph Marioni is a monochromist who seems to be trying to kick the habit. Each of his paintings resonates to the name of a singular hue. Whenother colors lurk beneath the surface and occasionally peep through it is to be the exception that proves the rule.  The first and last impression is of one color.  At least, that is the way things used to be.

Mr. Marioni works in acrylic, applying thick layers of it to big, often square canvases with a housepainter’s roller. The resulting surfaces, mottled and sticky looking, differentiate him from the legion of monochrome painters who prefer complete impersonality and evenness. And the indulgent richness of Mr. Marioni’s colors in their glistening state separates him from those uncompromising conceptual-minimalists like Alan Charlton, for instance, who favors gray house paint precisely for its anonymity.

Mr. Marioni’s surfaces arouse ambivalent responses. Because of the size and association of his chosen tool, we tend not to think of the brushstrokes as “expressive,” yet painting’s busy edges bristle with personal, local, intuitive decisions. The incremental surfaces may seem arbitrary, but combined with the warmth and specificity of his colors, they induce empathy. The eye wants to linger and involve itself with the complexities of the surface.

His new body of work — the inaugural show in Peter Blum’s new Chelsea gallery space — represents a departure for Mr. Marioni. The typical square has given way to a landscape format. And the hovering background colors, which the final surface all but covers, assert themselves with newfound boldness. Mr. Marioni’s trademark strategy has given way to something altogether more imagistic: The singular, top color is now presented as a shape inhabiting a field defined by another color, which achieves some degree of equality, albeit within a figure-ground relationship.

These new works are all obstinately titled “Painting 2006.” In two of them, tree trunk-like forms fill out their base; colored silvery and pinkish white, respectively, they also resemble sheets hanging out to dry, fluttering against very dark, almost black grounds. Such illusionist readings are abetted by the differing degrees of saturation of the strokes that suggest volume.

These veil-like shapes put me in mind of the poured, stained canvases created in the early 1960s by the Abstract Expressionist Morris Louis. Has Mr. Marioni joined the traditionalist fold? The fact that he has recently found an eloquent champion in the veteran formalist critic Michael Fried — in contrast with his more conceptually oriented followers and collectors in Europe — encourages such an impression — as does the sumptuous, resonant lushness of these works.

Although Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, like Mr. Marioni, has emerged in the wake of minimalism, he represents a different tradition of painterly abstraction, connecting to older models (Kandinsky, for instance) while also seeming more *au courant.* His four canvases happily crowd the tight Gray Kapernekasspace , both among themselves and internally. Whereas Mr. Marioni needs the cavernous Blum barn for his grand statements, Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe benefits from the forced intimacy of this gallery.

These paintings, each 70 inches square, are unabashedly pictorial. In them, Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe manages to reconcile the sensibilities of a color-field painter and a miniaturist, exploring a remarkable range of touch, temperature, attitude, and scale.

For Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe, monochrome is a delicate achievement rather than an act of defiance. He is more inclined to closely related hues, or cheeky contrasts, such as the expanse of vermillion and strip of purple in “Step” (2004–05). The bigger areas of color are separated by a ziggurat form — it looks like a skyscraper at its base, then tapers to the right, into the vermillion zone — made up of fastidiously painted strips of color.

“The Chameleon and the Wraith” (2003–04) presents suitably contrasting treatments for the creatures named in the title — though which is which is open to conjecture. One area has neatly dispatched little squares and rectangles, the other a heap of sticks in the process of coalescing into some kind of figure. These contrasting geometric and organic activities cohabit within a pink-and-blue ground into which they sink, or from which they emerge.

Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe’s intimacy of touch, his quizzical scale, and the patient way he builds his picture from abstract shapes and sensations relates him to Thomas Nozkowski, one of the contemporary masters of abstract painting.

Mr. Nozkowski’s latest show is gorgeously installed in BravinLee’s railway-carriage gallery. Two blocks of six drawings face each other in the first room; the next displays the drawings from his recent collaboration with the poet and critic John Yau, the 2005 “Ing Grish Suite;” a luminous set of recent etchings occupies a third room. These works on paper don’t have a traditional relationship to painting — they are neither preparatory, nor a release for tangential interests. And there is nothing tentative about them.  The dozen drawings in the front room fill the page as much as any Nozkowskipainting does its canvas.

These drawings, each approximately 22 inches by 30 inches, are remarkable both for their consistency and for the variety of imagery and palette, The consistency comes from Mr. Nozkowski’s insistence on a strong figure-ground relationship: His quirky forms seem deliberated, as if representing something temptingly specific while obstinately eluding actual figural associations.

“Untitled (Q-14)” (2002) has a flattened, yellow shape resting on a brown mound with what could read as landscape behind (purple surmounted by green.) The yellow shape might almost read as an animal of some sort, lying sidesways to display its breast. And in another cheeky flirtation with literalism, “Untitled (Q-55)” (2004) has two voluptuous shapes in harlequin patterns that want to read like lower, stockinged female legs protruding from behind the picture plane.

Stephen Mueller is a close cousin of both Messrs. Nozkowksi and Gilbert-Rolfe, sharing with the first a penchant for emblems and with the second a cheery palette of lyrical, slightly camp contrasts. But Mr. Mueller has an altogether more whimsical attitude toward figure-ground relationships.

On the one hand, he paints emphatic shapes that float within receding space. On the other, he deploys patterns as a means to frustrate credible readings of volume and depth.

“Mneme” (2006) plays a cosmic game of push-pull, in Hans Hofmann’s sense of the phrase. The background is a melding rainbow of watercolor-like strokes in pinks, purples, and mauves, over which a transparent gray orb floats, as if the shadow of a planet in eclipse. Superimposed are various flat forms: two pink eggs striated in a spectrum from light to dark; a blue rectangle, framed in white and red; and a typical Mueller shape that reads like three vases—joined at the hip—that is internally united by thickly painted, brightly colored stripes.

The smaller canvases are capable of more focused contrasts of flatness and depth. “797 Untitled” (2006) is a gem. Against a red ground, a bright green, pineapple-like mandala shape crescendos toward burgundy at the top. The shape is filled with raining diamonds, in oranges and reds that are hued to the ground. The different sizes of the diamonds denote depth, despite the flatness this pattern simultaneously achieves.

This is gorgeous painting, yoga for the eye.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 25, 2006

The post Joseph Marioni at Peter Blum, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at Gray Kapernekas, Thomas Nozkowski at BravinLee Programs, Steven Mueller at Baumgartner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

“Jessica Stockholder: Table Top Sculpture”
Gorney Bravin + Lee, 534 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 352 8872

“Jeff Gauntt”
Brent Sikkema, 530 West 22nd Street, New York (between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 929 2262) through November 22

Usually, adolescent instincts in front of a work of art are best ignored. Yet on both occasions that I stood in front of Mark di Suvero’s monumental “XV” (1971), which is being given a new airing by Paula Cooper, I had to suppress a childlike urge literally to run up one of the strutting I-beams that forms the “V” of its title. (The sculpture essentially consists of an “X” imposed upon a “V,” and it rhymes a little more with the rafters of this extraordinary roof than anyone can have bargained for). The piece exudes all the butch and brawn of the constructed metal sculpture tradition to which it belongs, reaching 21 feet into the air to fill this capacious gallery. It is, if nothing else, a feat of engineering.

Luckily for me, “XV,” and fellow visitors, I restrained myself. But that the work brought out a sense of movement and joy is no bad thing. Mr. di Suvero clearly has ambitions in this direction. The second sculpture in the show, a 1990 work called “Hopesoup,” is actually a mobile. While no one would claim Calderesque whimsicality for it, fun is nonetheless the order of the day. Its industrial components defy their own clunkiness with graceful, balletic movements. If “XV” nods in the direction of the heavy-duty idealism of the Russian Constructivists, “Hopesoup” allows a light-hearted skepticism about the pretentions of the machine age: It is more Léger’s “Ballet Mecanique” than Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International.”

On a label that lists assistants who helped in this installation, a name popped out: Ivana Mestrovic. Inquiry confirmed her as the granddaughter of Ivan Mestrovic, who at the time of the birth of his nation was fêted worldwide as Yugoslavia’s Michelangelo. His carvings are rather fabulous, but his reputation has gone the way of his homeland. What will history do with Mr. di Suvero’s?

The septuagenarian is rightly held in high esteem as one of the more substantial heirs of Calder and David Smith. But steering his aesthetic course between whimsy and brutalism (the raw and the cooked), he seems hemmed in by his most notable peers, Richard Serra and Anthony Caro. To me Mr. di Suvero is always too sculptural to compete with Mr. Serra in minimal bravura and not sculptural enough to genuinely surprise and intrigue like Mr. Caro.

Inherent in Mr. di Suvero’s constructed forms is a nostalgia for industrialism and the avant-gardes that it spawned. And despite the energy and accomplishment of his works, it is hard not to detect in them a corresponding hint of weary displacement.

***

In her relentless quest for prefabricated forms and synthetic colors, the art world’s scavenger supreme, Jessica Stockholder, has found a new, hitherto untapped source: other people’s art.
Her latest exhibition crams a salon hang of 42 works by contemporaries into a studiedly eclectic gallery corner. The viewer can savor the selection in the comfort of rescued retro furniture, and browse magazines if they get bored.

The artists taking part are presumably good friends with enough of a sense of humor to allow their creations to take their chances amidst the visual riot of Ms. Stockholder’s installation. She is a deft hand at picking out colors and textures that howl. But appropriating artworks is a logical development for her, and it is not such a surprise that artists as prominent as Mel Bochner (her colleague at Yale, where she leads graduate sculpture), Barry Le Va, James Hyde, David Reed, and Elizabeth Murray should play along. For at the end of the day, Ms. Stockholder is actually no iconoclast at all.

She raids the depths of kitsch for her source materials and is determined to break down boundaries between art and life. But unlike her forebears in this tradition – from the pioneers of Dada through Rauschenberg and Oldenburg to contemporary masters of the abject like Mike Kelley – Ms. Stockholder has an aesthetic free of anger or the need to denigrate. On the contrary, she has a Midas touch.

While she generally keeps found stuff intact, she chooses and arranges it so as to shed the commercial and industrial “anti-patina.” There is no implicit social critique: She is as pure a formalist as she is impure a dadaist.

Despite her nominal status as a sculptor, and her protean output as an installation artist, Ms. Stockholder has the heart of a painter. She takes brush and paint to her surfaces, delighting in the gruesome painterliness of oils smeared against bathroom mats or carpeting. Her whole palette, as an appropriator, is surface-oriented, having more to do with color and texture than volume or presence.

Her connection of art and life has the optimism of the romantics, with pop culture taking the place once occupied by nature. Goethe could intuit that products of the imagination were an order of nature, subject to its laws of growth; Ms. Stockholder tests the commonalities of class art and crass non-art but leaves each party’s honor intact. The artworks retain their aura, while somehow her use of even the tackiest chandelier or garish moulded plastic refrains from patronizing its intended consumers.

***

Jeff Gauntt’s second exhibition at Brent Sikkema confirms him as a force of nature and artifice combined. After seeing his show a few times I still couldn’t decide if he has the insouciance of an outsider or the canny of a fully clued-in art-world apparatchik.

With exhilarating craft, Mr. Gauntt carves dreamlike, folkloristic tableaux in wood, and colors them in a trippy nursery palette. Trees, tree houses, birds, and branches abound, with roots fiddling their way through compartmentalized subterranean and submarine realms. The imagery is odd but undistressingly so, a kind of low-octane surrealism. Carving and coloring alike are precious, delicate, somewhat fey.

Mr. Gauntt constructs an elaborate kindergarten for the eye. It’s hard to know what the eye is supposed to do when it gets there, but the journey is fun.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 6, 2003

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“Online”
Feigen Contemporary until August 9
535 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-0500

If Paul Klee could famously “take line for a walk,” then James Siena has taken it to the wild side. A stunning, extensive display of 78 of his drawings fills the spacious Chelsea premises of Gorney Bravin + Lee. While some works date back to the mid-1980s, the majority are from the last few years. During this time, Mr. Siena has regularly exhibited paintings. Although he works on a pronouncedly small, sometimes even miniature scale, his prolificacy is remarkable precisely because of the mind-boggling feats of concentration his work entails. (The works on paper, incidentally, have an untraditional relationship to the paintings in that they tend to be larger, are no more exploratory, are equally colorful, and are at least as sharply defined.)

Mr. Siena has the involved totality of vision of an outsider or a primitive. Not that this stops him from being art-world savvy, of positioning himself in relation to recent art and current issues. Like his peers Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli – with whom he shares an almost retro penchant for “trippy” psychedelic effects – his idiom collapses the division between process and product. There is an intensity of craft that undermines the quaint critical notion that how the work was made is merely the artist’s business. On the contrary, recognition of the meditative detachment that went into their facture puts the viewer into a similar state. This is art that makes you want to say “Om!”

Mr. Siena’s mind is a museum without walls. Cultural references and associated sensibilities range from African textiles, the decorative lozenges in Gustav Klimt, Bridget Riley’s swirls, and Moghul miniatures, to the outsider visions of Friedensreich Huntertwasser and James Castle, Tantric art, Escher, Aztec architecture, Haring’s grafitti-inspired notation, and Maori tattoos. Any list is partial, yet the more eclectic it gets, the more, counter-intuitively, it affirms a unity of purpose in the artist. All this stuff is not so much source material as points of affinity. It is as if, in his higher aesthetic-meditative state, the artist tapped decoration’s collective consciousness. The beauty here, however, is that he doesn’t lose sight of the cultural value of diversity. He unironically reconnects abstract painting to a deeper wellspring of pattern generation. The minimalist grid mutates into a spider’s web.

The key to understanding Mr. Siena is to see that he works algorithmically. In classic pictorial aesthetics, form is discovered in relations between static components. Without necessarily overriding this criterion, Mr. Siena’s art sets a different dynamic in motion, one that has to do with the rhythms of unmechanical repetition. In his scaled-down, slowed-down pictorial world, fluctuation is a subtle equivalent of gesture, mutation a kind of narrative.

At best, narrative incident reveals itself quietly and unforced, as in the accordion-like bulging and squashing rows of “Double Recursive Combs, Red and Black” (2003), a gouache that recalls African design motifs. Other times, however, narrative seems imposed, as in the graphite drawing, “Partially Coffered Unknot” (2003), which has a dense knottedness at the top, almost depicted in perspective, that gives way to a single thread at the bottom: a heavy-handed plot by Mr. Siena’s standards, threatening his gentle equilibrium.

This is not to say that his art conveys a single mood. On the contrary, there is a welcome range of temper. But formally speaking, all-overness suits Mr. Siena best, as it frees him to introduce a subtle play of layering versus flatness. In a dense, pulsating arrangement of interlocking shapes entitled “T-Ramparts” (2003), for instance, modulations in the pressure of the pencil send a shimmering wave across the sheet, to magical effect.

***

OnLine, a sprawling 38-artist salon at Feigen Contemporary, was curated by Charlie Finch, the subtlety of whose contribution to aesthetics is indicated by the title of the book he co-authored: “Most Art Sucks.” On the evidence of this show, he has a correspondingly robust appetite for the trashy and the illustrational. Which isn’t to say his taste is necessarily uninteresting: Walter Robinson’s washy porno playing cards and Hilary Harkness’s coyly lesbian comic-strip adventures are enormous fun as ever. Luckily, Mr. Finch enlisted two highbrow friends, George Negroponte and Rob Storr, to co-select with him. Three distinct sensibilities brought diverse talents to the table; undiplomatically, published statements by each name names.

The theme of line and drawing does not seem to have held back any selector from artists pursuant of neither. But there are fine works and surprising juxtapositions that vindicate their efforts. For instance, the sharp, primly architectonic wall drawing by Storr-choice David Brody at the front of the gallery relates in its circumscribed mutations to the fey, ethereal, but in its way equally obsessive romanticism of Negroponte-nominee Eric Holzman, hanging downstairs.

Two artists who usefully test definitions of drawing here are Karin Davie, whose “Separations in Deep Yellow” extends her Op Art interest in curvy, wavy lines into sculptural relief, with pigment and zippers sunk into cascading paper, and Alexander Ross, whose giant untitled gouache with acrylic from 2002 pushes the linear and the painterly up against each other in an energizing collision of languages.

This article first appeared in The Sun, June 26, 2003.

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