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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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James Gardner, Walter Robinson, and Alexi Worth joined David Cohen to review Petah Coyne at Galerie Lelong and the Sculpture Centre, Diana Thater at David Zwirner and Zwirner and Wirth, James Hyde at Brent Sikkema and Cecily Brown at Gagosian.

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June 10 to July 17, 2004

Burt Barr’s work is, in many ways, unique in the field of video art. His work is technically polished and full of wit and reference to film arts of all types. Three recent pieces make up his current show at Brent Sikkema. Two screened pieces are featured in the main gallery. “Roz”, and “The Mile: Running Time 7:25”. “The Fan”, in the back Gallery, is not strictly speaking a video piece, though it does incorporate a video DVD.

“Roz” seems to be a pretty straightforward color video. Roz (Roz Leblanc, who is a beautiful African American performer) stands in the shower and begins to lip Sync to a soundtrack which is Otis Clay singing a soulful version of “The Banks of the Ohio”.

The classic film genres evoked quickly become complicated. Hitchcock bounds to mind at the sight of the tiles in the shower and Roz’s wet hair. The framing of the shot is reminiscent of Warhol “Screen Tests”. Something in the camera’s steadiness and the crisp color recalls Godard. The fact the she is lip syncing (she looks like she’s following instructions) to a man’s very deep voice becomes remarkable. The fact that she’s singing a song about the murder of an unwilling lover becomes outright spooky.

“The Mile: Running Time 7:25” is just that. A woman jogs on a foggy Dune road. The soundtrack is her breathing and footfall. The time is counted down in the corner of the screen.

“The Fan” consists of a shiny oscillating fan on a wooden pedestal, onto which a video of the same fan (in operation) is projected. This produces a shadow-and-film double image. Sometimes the oscillations of the real fan and the projection coincide and sometimes they don’t. In addition the projector light on the real fan creates a spinning reflection on the walls as the fan moves back and forth. This is a really beautiful post-minimalist installation sculpture. The three make quite a provocative stop off on a hot afternoon.

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“Suzanne Caporael” at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery until February 12 (730 Fifth Ave at 57th Street, 212-445-0444).

“Graham Parks” at Feigen Contemporary until February 19 (535 W 20th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-929-0500).

It seems to be widely assumed that questions about the language of art reached a dead-end at some point in the 1970s, after which anything but structural issues were up for grabs. A number of contemporary artists have put paid to this notion, however, with work that reopens the file on art and language but without reverting to the arid, somewhat pompous posturing typical of the decade when semiotics dominated the way artists thought about, talked about, and made art.

Once again painters are questioning the rudiments of their art — treating brushstrokes, say, or paint itself, or the support, to a kind of linguistic analysis —without becoming reductive or theoretical. They are engaged in what you might call semiotics without tears: Self-consciously laying bare the building blocks of pictorial syntax in ways that actually encourage poetic whim and painterly delectation. This has been true in past work of three artists I admire who are each subject to solo exhibitions right now: James Hyde, Suzanne Caporael, and Graham Parks.

Mr. Hyde is up front about his conceptual intentions and approaches them with insistently good cheer. In some works in his current show at Brent Sikkema, he actually incorporates pieces of parquet and what look like toy bricks — as if to literalize the metaphor of the building block (one piece is actually called “Paragraph” to enforce the linguistic connection). This would have tied in very neatly with the work the other two artists presented in their immediate previous exhibitions at their same current galleries — Greenberg Van Doren and Feigen respectively — but as it happens, each has moved on to less overtly structuralist, relatively personal and expressive bodies of work.

In 2003 Ms. Carporael exhibited a series titled “Littoral Drift,” which represented named estuaries from around the world. She took her cue from John Stilgoe’s book, “Shallow Water Dictionary” (1990). Inspired by the way the author interconnected etymology, natural history, and personal observation, she sought an equivalent in a systematically pared-down range of colors and a set of shapes that, although subjective, had the feeling of being determined by some concrete, empirical measure.

The new body of work, in a show called “Reading Time,” is more diffuse in genre and style, with literal, immediately legible imagery: figures, buildings, trees, sunsets. Though there is more gutsy painthandling, restraint is still her hallmark. She retains her essential, most delectable characteristic: a kind of dispassionate intensity. She crafts grounds that are deliciously slippery (they read more like glassine paper than linen, lending them a slick, designer quality.) Her colors are often teasingly ambiguous in temperature.

Ms. Carporael is conscious of mark the way the best modern poets are of words. Every one she makes seems deliberate and examined, without becoming precious or ponderous in the process.

You could say, actually, that brushstroke has taken over the role played by shape in the “Littoral Drift” show. Sometimes, the artist constructs the image out of lush horizontal strokes in almost caricatural fashion, as in “434 (armless man in green sweater)” (2004) or in various striated cityscapes. Images of a sunset, a tree in bloom, a snowstorm, or a Parisian park recall, in the almost mosaic-like application of individual brushstroke-tesserae, such disparate sources as Nicolas de Stael, Klimt, Alex Katz, and Cézanne.

The strongest images in the current show are the two seascapes where the waves are at once strokes and shapes (the same is true of the snowstorm but the effect there is less taut, more decorative.) In the seascapes, which recall certain Mondrians circa 1909–10, the subject makes depictive sense of the glossy ground. The choppy waves are built up of single-stroke rectangles, hued in a tight range of coolly contrastive blues, purples, mauves, and — inflected by these colors — whites.

The beauty of Ms. Caporael’s waves is that density and direction alone establish dynamic, while the brushstrokes, individual in color, character, and shape, remain inviolate (at once signifier and signified, in structuralist parlance). Works of contained passion, these pictures are, in a profound sense, composed.

***

Graham Parks’s last show at Feigen marked an extraordinary debut, and not just as a Cinderella tale of the arthandler — at the gallery that now represents him — made good. With small, quirky, graphic designerish paintings of delicate poise and precision, he seemed to have hit upon the painterly equivalent of a haiku: poetry that derives from its opposite, the prosaic. By choosing as his motif functionalist architecture at once bland and utopian, he seemed to strike a miraculous balance between image and means.

His new show continues to tease out the unpainterliness of his finely honed craft. The pictures, once again, look more like something else, this time woodcuts or — more precisely, as he actually paints on wood and exploits relief techniques — like inked-up blocks themselves. He has turned his back on the city to explore nature, photographing woodlands and parks in his native Spokane , Washington , and in Kyoto , Japan .

The new images bid farewell to the jazzy intervals and perspectival compressions that were the joy of his first show. There are clever things going on, technically and metaphorically, with games of negative and postive, push and pull, remoteness and investment. But with their newfound intricacy, their dense alloverness of foliage, there is a loss in lightness. Mr. Parks’s haikus have become epics. Still, the show suggests an artist of extraordinary potential who is close to finding his form.

***

Lightness will always be Mr. Hyde’s form. Where both Ms. Caporael and Mr. Parks take finesse to one extreme, Mr. Hyde takes unfinish to the other. He is truly an heir of arte povera, the aesthetics of the artfully down at heel. He is so intimate with the agenda of the French abstract-minimal Support-Surface movement as to be their honorary consul in New York .

This new show puts the brakes (temporary, it is to be hoped) on his recent turn towards sumptuousness, with a renewal of the rough and ready inquisitiveness that marked his debut in the early 1980s. There is no hint of the voluptuous form he had been exploring in the last few shows, where a giant, gallery-sized pillow, filled with newspaper or pumped with air, would support an ethereal, impressionistic painting. Nor do we have his plexiglass vitrines, filled with random-seeming accretions of paint. The new work recalls Richard Tuttle in its precious slightness of means. Painterly gesture is almost absent in this relatively austere body of work.

Although his work is rarely two-dimensional, Mr. Hyde insists painting is indeed his project. And he is no prankster: Within his oddball and quirky means, he explores the most traditional of painterly concerns. In the present show, for instance, this includes light. Surfaces include buckled segments of heavy, plastic sheeting, chromed steel, and vinyl that reflect the viewer, the environment, or found objects in varying intensities. In a departure for Mr. Hyde, a few images use digital prints as supports: One shows a child carrying a torch, upon which a cropping frame of painted masking tape is imposed. It is an enigmatic, and probably not, at the end of the day, terribly profound statement, but it is part and parcel of an inquiry that’s open, liberal, intelligent and fun, and thus welcome on all counts.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 13, 2004

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“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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Kara Walker: Drawings, at Brent Sikkema, through July 25
530 W 22nd Street- 212-929-2262

Kara Walker and Lisa Yuskavage are showing right on the same block (West 22nd Street). Are they a chip off the same block, too? They both take postmodern intention-bending to new extremes, pitting authenticity and expression against style and posture. And for both, ambiguity is stock in trade: kitsch and craft collide in art that sets out to dazzle and unsettle.

Kara Walker is best known for her costume-drama silhouettes. Installations of Beardleyesque cut-out figures at first seem like joyous circus parades but on closer inspection are revealed to depict appaling acts of “blaxploitation.” Hieronymous Bosch meets “Gone with the Wind” in fiercely political, erotically fantastic meditations on the legacy of slavery. A profound subject is brought to a slick surface.

In terms of ideology, it’s hard to tell where her first allegiance lies: with Frantz Fanon or the Marquis de Sade. You’d think such imagery was cooked in a bubbling cauldron of rage. Her poetry, crudely (if artfully) typed on reference cards, bears vivid witness to depths of indignation. But, far from resulting in a radical call to arms, Ms. Walker’s art deposits maker and viewer alike in a limbo of moral bewilderment.

Ms. Walker doesn’t merely depict victimage; she embodies it, in the way her methods are always and pointedly labor intensive. The dexterous, exquisite cut-outs, especially, seem to require calm, patient, loving skill. Ambiguity, in other words, is as present in the fabrication as the product. The artist is alienated labor and wants us to know it.

In harmony with her cool skill, her sexual imagery – for all the grabbing and penetrating that goes on – entails little in the way of passion, for givers or receivers alike. (Again, Sade is a useful point of reference, for in “le divin marquis” sexual extremity is measured in numbers and times, not degrees or intensities.) A favored motif, drawn from medieval art, is that of Aristotle and his mistress, with the venerable philosopher ridden like a horse.

Ms. Walker’s graphic mark-making, in contrast to the silhouettes, can be rich in affect. In this show of works on paper of various sizes, including smaller cut-outs, at Brent Sikkema, there is considerable variety of line and texture. She has taken up a kind of smudged brass-rubbing technique, for instance, that recalls Larry Rivers. Her mannerist figuration brings to mind Paul Wunderlich and Pierre Klossowski. Recent forebears aside, some of her most scatalogical and psychologically involved drawings seem genuinely Goyaesque. A monstrously disengaged head, for instance, is endowed with a priapic nose which penetrates a passing naked “negress” (her caricature justifies the word) who nonchalantly holds on to her bucket of soapy suds.

The most acute ambiguity in Ms. Walker has to do with the free and easy manner with which she traverses the line between racist stereotype and an attitude of “black is beautiful,” as in a giant, voluptuously worked-up, graphite “Afro.” It is as if she is lost in iconography the way artists talk about being lost in form. But the deliberately unresolved tension of style and content in her work, an endless loop between what could equally be artworld posture and true feeling, ultimately denies any possibility of catharsis. Greek tragedy may have had its origin in the Dionysian orgy, but at the end of the day, Sade ain’t Sophocles.

***

From tragedy to farce: Lisa Yuskavage’s absurdly big-busted, saucy postcard girlies are sisters under the skin of Yale classmate John Currin’s monstrous muses. The art world, it seems, will never tire of would-be alchemists extracting from the base matter of low culture a clever-clever fools’ gold.

What”s most depressing about the meteoric success of Ms. Yuskavage, however, is that champions and detractors alike have taken on trust her “masterful technique”, whereas actually all she boasts is the kind of nerdish facility high school students admire among their peers. A critic sharply upbraiding her for her content could compare her lurid luminosity to Georges de la Tour – of all artists! If an old master can be defined as the deceased author of painting with life in it, then Ms. Yuskavage, very much with us, is the opposite on both counts.

But we surely know where this critical malaise comes from. The ironic revival of painting – conceptual art had deemed the medium passé – presupposes that “technique” is something separate from an engagement with form, as if the laying down of brushstrokes is to a picture what production values are to a pop record.

The recent paintings, on view at Marianne Boesky, suggest that even on her own intellectually lethargic terms, Ms. Yuskavage is running out of steam. Since exchanging her old source material, vintage copies of Penthouse, for a live model (an old high school chum) a vacuous softcore humanism has crept into her work. But it is too little, too late. Her bead bikinis in “Couch” (2003), are blessed with a vague hint of Wayne Thiebaud, but elsewhere her dry-brush flowers are dead on arrival. In “Groom” (2003), there is a hint of painterly interest in the billowing pink clouds and in the skin against the servant’s purple bodice, but nothing where you’d expect it, the drapery folds or the mistress’s breasts. In truth, Ms. Yuskavage doesn’t have the stakes for any kind of high wager with ambiguity. Her technique is flimsy, and her imagery is boring. Neither her paint nor the flesh it purports to depict is remotely sexy.

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 19, 2003

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Brent Sikkema
530 W 22nd Street
New York NY 10011

“I like the hole thing”, a visitor to the Merlin James exhibition was overheard saying to the artist at Brent Sikkema Gallery on opening night. James’s odd-ball little canvases are often pierced through, with varying degrees of restraint, exposing the wall behind (the gaping hole in the painted wall of A Courtyard), or intimating some dark presence (the discrete tear, reading almost as a painterly mark, in Goats in the Foro Traiano). “The whole thing“, James jested in response, “Why, thank you!”. A play with language, the discovery ofdouble entendre, self-deprecation thinly disguised as a bravura gesture, are as typical of the paintings as of their painter. And like the whole, the holes which are its part are redolent of multi-layeredness -much, indeed, as a hole literally cuts through and yet accentuates a surface.

As in Henry Moore, the apertures in Merlin James manage at once to be a functioning formal device and an invitation to psychological speculation. As a modernist strategy, the Jamesian hole acts as a kind of reverse collage. But James is hardly the new Fontana. His punctures, like indeed his collage elements, the hair and other stuff layered into the paint, are more suggestive than axiomatic. Another overheard viewer at the opening (another commentator upon the openings) poetically muttered how these pictures “are already damaged”, an insight which captures the essence of his project. For James wants his painting to relate to tradition, and yet he manages to invest it with a melancholy air, stranding it in the present. The held-back quality, the wistful imagery, the visible unease, the angst about expressivity, the critical self-consciousness of these pictures, all point to a difficult birth, as if by caesarian.

Merlin James was born in Wales in 1960. He is of the generation, though anything but the temperament, of the YBAs. Against the prevailing “dumb conceptualist” ethos, he is that exquisitely rare thing, an artist both cerebrally and emotionally invested. He is perhaps as well known on both sides of the Atlantic for his writings about art as he is for his own painting. He is read in the Burlington Magazine, Art in America, the Times Literary Supplement, and in catalogues devoted to the artists he has championed, who include Derain, Soutine, Helion, Sickert, Lowry, and – rarely, for him, a contemporary painter, Alex Katz. He is literally an Alex Katz “professor”, for in the first half of this year he held, as its first encumbent, the Alex Katz Chair in Painting endowed at Cooper Union by that School’s illustrious alumnus. The lecture coming from that residency, recently published by Cooper under the title, “Painting Per Se“, is a polemical plea for medium specificity, an argument for nuance and against a fashionable blurring of boundaries which leaves painting stranded as just another option within the bigger category of visual art. Noting, towards the end of his talk, how the muses “were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who was Memory”, he celebrates the fact that each art form had its own muse, that “there were already varieties – categories – at the very source of creativity”. He then muses with Merlinian wizardry as to why the arts are born of memory, how it is the job of art to commemorate, and to block the forgetting of eternal truths. “But also,” he continues, “I like to think that memory is the mother of the Muses because any form of creativity- any art form- requires a continual internalization of its own tradition, an ever-present consciousness of its past… Each painting contains the memory of painting.”

If painting contains the memory of itself, as memory lapses, plays its tricks, opens up lesions, and clouds over with nostalgia and other projections, the painter must creatively fill the holes that result. All the while, new forms generate new memories.

A recent memory for anyone in New York who follows art was that assault on painterly consciousness, the Gerhard Richter exhibition, which closed the Modern (which has embarked on several years of major renovations and decamped to Queens) ten days before James’s opened. To the casual observer it might seem that the younger painter is more a protégé of Richter’s than of Katz’s. Both Richter and James, after all, treat us to a painterly reworking each of a Milan landmark. The nonchalently smudged monochrome of Richter’s touristic snapshot image of Milan Cathedral recalls the quirky late works, taken from press clippings, by Walter Richard Sickert (a Jamesian hero) as Sandford Schwarz perceptively remarked in the pages of the New York Review of Books. While Richter famously reworks photography, James is more famous for transcribing old masters: he once exhibited fifty drawings after a Poussin at the National Museum of Wales propped against a wall opposite the original. It is all the more disconcerting, therefore, that he has adopted a set of vintage photographs as the source for all his images in his current body of work. These mid-ninteenth century records of artistic sites and historic landmarks in Italy are the product of Fratelli Alinari Fotografi Editori, a photographic agency founded in Florence in 1854 which provided the plates for many standard reference works of the following half-century.

Richter and James are both painters whose work is, at a fundamental level, about painting. But a contrast in attitude and affect could not be more pointed than it is between these two artists. Note how so many in James’s modern pantheon, from Sickert and Morandi to [William] Nicholson, [Gwen] John, and Alex Katz, are “painters’ painters”; they all figure in an almost unwritten, secret history-within-the-history of painting. His rapport with them could not be more opposite than Richter’s deconstructive alienation from the “greats” morbidly lampooned in his 48 Portraits, 1971-72, a series of copies of encyclopedia portraits. Cold, clever, formal, official Herr Richter is, surely, the anti-painting person’s painter. He was in deadly earnest when he announced, in 1966, that he preferred many amateur snapshots to the best painting by Cézanne. Richter images are about the impossibility of painting per se, even while revelling in painterly tricks. Having his cake and eating it. Richter indulged a fluxus-dada denigration of painting even while ingratiating the walls of the very bourgeoisie he sought to épate with his “capitalist realism”.

James’s choice of images, and more to the point, what he then does with them, and how the source images function subsequently, belongs to an entirely different order of aesthetic experience. Firstly, the photos are not chanced upon banalities; they are images treasured for their artistry. Alinari brothers, indeed, disemminated photographs as acutely conscious of “the memory of painting” as many a contemporaneous painting. For when photography was a new medium, with empty accounts in the memory bank, it borrowed from older image making media well into funds. Meanwhile, its technical presence forced the painterly heirs of painting to look afresh at nature, as if through a camera. Photography aped painting tradition just as the American nation-builders aped Tory Englishness.

James retains the melancholy of the deadpan image with an almost Chiricoesque intensity. But there is no tricksy approximation of sepia tones or painterly imitations of camera shake. Indeed, there is no explicit need for the viewer of his paintings to know that they are based on photographs, though to do so is to add a layer, not to peel one away. The photograph is the starting point in a construction of a painterly image calling for color, texture, gesture, stroke, puncture, collage, all to give affect to its achievement. Looking at an Alinari print is like looking through a camera oscura: a meaning-laden reduction. But rather than cruelly discarding the Alinari images once used, James gives them new life. It is surely telling, meanwhile, that now his images are so explicity not “from life”, but derived from the nature morte that is photography, they are more populated than ever, by people, camels, goats.

James paints as if his highest aim is to be a painters’ painter: his images are deliberately murky, obscure, strange, private, poetic, small, ambiguous- fragments shored against his ruin. His new show at Sikkema, however, betrays a newfound generosity towards medium and touch; there is still the intentional deadpan of acrylic, as he shuns the easy-won lushness of oil, and an affection for the artifice of art-school color. But, in the phrase of F.R.Leavis, an appropriate critic to cite in relation to a painter so concerned with medium specificity, he is “learning to be spontaneous”.

Maybe, at the end of the day, James and Richter are exercised by the same angst. But Richter’s solution is nihilism where James’s is empathy. Richter will only paint in quotation marks, yo-yo-ing from phoney abstraction to anal photo-realism, with a “Ho Ho” as he does so. James actually paints, all the while conscious of the probable absurdity of it, as if propounding an argument which he knows has a gaping hole in it, but animated by a conviction deeper than logic, a faith.

I had the privilege, some months ago, to join a private tour of the Richter with its curator, Robert Storr (who is not moving with Moma to Queens but is joining the faculty at NYU instead; a tremendous loss to the Modern). Anyhow, I couldn’t help but chuckle inwardly when Rob anounced that Richter’s turgid gray squiggles from the early 1970s, his aptly titled “Un-Paintings”, were in “dialogue” with the contemporaneous white abstractions of Robert Ryman. “Where’s Ryman’s half of the ‘dialogue’, Rob?” I should have heckled. One cannot dialogue in un-painting; un-painting is inherently solipsistic. Whereas one of the joys of Merlin James, I find, is its constant generosity towards the possibilities raised by all sorts of other painting. James’s reticence is about self-denial, not viewer-denial. The exquisite near-monochrome Windmill (White) 2001, indeed, brings Robert Ryman into an unlikely conversation with Rembrandt van Ryn, with Merlin James as interpreter.

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