September 13 to October 22, 2016
45 East 78 Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

More than 25 years since they were made, the paintings in “Sean Scully: The Eighties,” now at Mnuchin, have lost none of their potency. In fact, for this viewer, they have only increased in resonance. The early ‘80s represented a transitional moment in Scully’s career, and by the end of the decade a mode of painting emerged that was assertively and recognizably the artist’s own. Moving to New York City in 1975, Scully worked in a stringent, hard-edged minimalist style. This changed definitively following a stay at the Edward Albee Residency on Montauk in 1982. Included in this exhibition are several works made on found wood during that residency. This resourcefulness proved to be of great significance for Scully’s development as a painter.

Bear (1982) is comprised of two vertically joined panels. The left panel is horizontally striped with alternate dirty white and black bands; the right panel is narrower, and while both panels are level at the top edge, the right half extends below at the bottom edge and is striped with broader blue-gray and black bands. The two sides appear to splice together contrasting realities, like montage in cinema. They picture an idea of simultaneous proximity and distance — a central concept in Scully’s painting from the 1980s. More can be said of duality in Bear as the two sides of the painting move at different visual speeds, the right panel tranquil in comparison to the agitated movement of the left panel. Oil paint is applied in an aggressive, rhythmic way, adding to the sense of musical interval and percussive measure. In paintings such as Bear, elements are already present that through variation and change of emphasis proved adequate to Scully’s ambition — any changes made are intuitive and responsive to paintings already made, rather than for the sake of change or embellishment. Shelter Island (1982) again contrasts bands of black and grayed white on two panels — this time on linen, one stretcher deeper and so more forward than the other — on one side the bands are vertical, and on the other horizontal. Typically, the painting is frontal, its surface actively worked in oil paint, wet into wet. This remains so for all other paintings in this exhibition, and it’s just as much in evidence in Scully’s paintings seen at Cheim & Read as recently as early 2015.

The off-white and black bands recur — take, for example, A Green Place (1987). In this instance, single bands of black and off-white occupy a rectangular segment inserted at the top right of the composition. Together they form a horizon line between what could be seen as a dark sky above and pale sea below. Horizontal bands of red comprise another rectangular section inserted on the left side, contiguous with the painting’s left edge. Together, these rectangles, like paintings within a painting, operate alternately as windows or figures within the surface. The vertical orange and green bands that otherwise fill the composition provide the wall or ground against which these shapes function. While remaining abstract, associations are not expunged. The painting recalls elements of a Henri Matisse painting and the indebtedness shared by both artists to fabric patterns (in Scully’s case, stripes) seen on visits to Morocco.

Two more paintings are entirely composed of off-white and black bands. Both somber and sensuous, they are possessed of an acute intensity. Triptych Aran (1986) is the more reductive of the two, whereas Empty Heart (1987) — consisting of three superimposed blocks of vertical and horizontal black and white stripes — is exposed and stark. A more chromatic atmospheric light is produced in other paintings, though there is always a gravitas that leans composition toward invention rather than playfulness. For instance, A Bedroom in Venice (1988) is muted with soft blue light that brings to mind the humid air and radiant light of that city and its effect on color sensation. Longing, melancholy and urgency all prevail in these paintings. This denies a place for complacency and evinces a drive and focus that both address art-historical connections, and the contemporary world vis-à-vis the particularity of Scully’s own experience, be it emotional or visual.

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May 5 to June 18, 2016
547 W. 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 242 7727

Spanish painter Juan Uslé’s recent work, now on view at Cheim & Read, bears an inseparable connection with environmental conditions experienced out of doors, and out of an urban scape, perhaps. That low, raking illumination at dusk, the change physically in our receptiveness to color and tonal contrasts when surrounded by fading light in the transition from day to night, are all more intense, slower, and more subtle away from the noise and artificial illumination of the city. I say “perhaps” because in the city there is that incredible moment when fading natural light combines with electric light. All of this, it seems, both informs and is contained in, these new canvases.

There are only three sizes of canvas present, SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLORADO) (2016) is an example of a series of paintings begun in 1997 and is rendered in the largest size. The other paintings are considerably smaller, at 24 by 18 inches and 18 by 12 inches, respectively, and also belong to longstanding series in their own right. The earlier paintings often comprised vertical as well as horizontal brush marks that moved and stopped, moved and stopped, sequentially, to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat. These paintings, when made in New York are frequently made at night when the city is somewhat quieter, and the heartbeat can be felt in the silence, varying as it does, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, over time. At 120 by 89 inches, the field of this painting visibly absorbs light and reflects it at different intervals. The light reflected is modified by the paint that covers a prepped gessoed surface in uneven — fluid, abrupt or staggered — rhythms. The gradations recall the restless, wrist-driven, backgrounds of Goya’s Los caprichos (1797–1798) or the apparently black surroundings of Velázquez’s Cristo Crucificado (1632). The Velázquez is 98 by 67 inches, a large painting that presents an image of Christ on the cross in an isolated and classical contrapposto posture The apparently black surroundings, or ground, of the figure are not actually black but a kind of unfathomable green black consisting of a multitude of brush strokes that accumulate and with their different directions pulse and variegate the light that falls onto the painted surface. It is a surface alive with the repetitions of Velázquez’s hand in motion in a way like the stepped movement of Uslé’s hand as it tracks across a painting.

In Kayak (Aral 11) (2015), like the other small paintings here, demands its share of wall space. In regarding the space afforded between paintings in the installation, it comes as no surprise that the smaller works require as much wall space as large works. In Kayak shares the horizontal repetitions, each one above the next, of SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLARADO). However, the change in scale takes us closer to the painting in a different way, the view now close, like a person is close to the water in an actual kayak, something Uslé experiences regularly. Between each band of black horizontal translucent brush strokes that deposit the pigment loaded into a medium of vinyl at intervals, like silt, are lines of opaque paint of various colors. The final, bottom passage, though, is not, as might be expected, more translucent paint, but instead another band, this time of opaque black. One’s eyes have to adjust as if to perceive a shadow or afterimage. This increases the complexity of this painting in denying expectation, both in beauty and structure, exponentially.

In part three of George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), titled “The Propagation of Things,” Kubler writes:

The occurrence of things is governed by our changing attitude to the process of invention, repetition, and discard. Without invention there would be only stale routine. Without copying there would never be enough of any man-made thing, and without waste or discard too many things would outlast their usefulness. Our attitudes towards these processes are themselves in constant change, so that we confront the double difficulty of charting changes in things, together with tracing the change in ideas about change.

He goes on to state that a condition of the present is the acceptance of continual change. It is this that Uslé’s paintings embody, even celebrate, successfully, neither avoiding repetition nor denying difference. All the paintings in this exhibition are part of larger series, and each painting is assertively particular despite, or one could say because of sharing a continuity of formal elements.

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Balancing discipline and emotion, Sean Sully’s paintings from the early 1970s exude a curious mixture of formal consideration and felt observation. Grid (1973), for instance, strikes a note of homey quirkiness with its layers of pattern superimposed within the eponymous hard-edged structure, a bit like the patches held together by a beloved pair of jeans. Seeing works from the outset of Scully’s career in a renovated warehouse in a humble corner of Queens – Cheim & Read’s outer-borough new venture – inevitably makes us connect with the collective energy of the massed hipsters at work nearby.

May 20 to July 1, 2016
16-13 Stephen Street, Queens, NY –

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The last day of Jonathan Lasker’s show at Cheim & Read was forecast to be the year’s coldest, but out the window it looks bright and sunny. Meteorology and art criticism find themselves in accord, for Lasker is surely one of the most ambivalence-inducing abstract painters to have emerged from the postmodern storm clouds of the 1980s, one for whom it is very difficult to take the temperature, let alone know what mood to wear when looking at his confected enigmas. At one level, the insistent grid, the childlike “primary structures,” the almost insolent nursery colors, the quote marks that surround every gesture and the knowing play of graphic versus painterly all seem to seal his aesthetic within the microclimate of art about art. But the strange darkness of symbolism, the vanitas of that cross and those insistent yet ambiguous forms – is that a slice of bread in garish yellow? a falling bomb in the receding overpainted pentimento? – demand personal, psychological readings that don’t mesh with the chromatic chirpiness. Lasker seems to be saying, with Pierre Bonnard, “He who sings is not always happy.”

January 7 to February 13, 2016. 547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 242-7727

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April 9 to May 9, 2015
547 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 242 7727

How can abstract painting develop — and what kind of history can this art form have? Figurative painting proceeds by identifying new subjects, and, also of course, by painting familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways. Obviously non-figurative art cannot develop in an exactly similar way. Kandinsky and Mondrian backed into abstraction by stages, as did Jackson Pollock. And then once abstraction became an ongoing tradition, working in series provided one way of keeping going. Such otherwise diverse figures as Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Mangold develop a composition, rework it until it is exhausted, and then move on. What abstract artists legitimately fear nowadays is falling into a signature style, the repetition of a basic composition in varied colors — Kenneth Noland’s chevrons in various colors would be a good example of that. If abstract art is to transcend mere decoration, it is essential for it to find some deeply imaginative way of developing.

Sometimes an exhibition review must deal with such general questions. The gallery publicity for “Transgressions” cites Bill Jensen’s very numerous inspirations — African tribal art, Chinese poetry and philosophy, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, and Russian films. And it offers an eloquent description of his surrender to a fascination with process, and his striving to avoid “preconceived outcomes.” The critical question, then, is how these very disparate influences can be synthesized in his paintings. We have the heavy black line drawing of Transgressions (Flesh) (2013), the brilliant colors of the triptych Loom of Origins (2014 – 15), the blood reds of Mountain Tiger-Sky (2013); and the drips and painted hands of Angelico, Angelico (2012-15). And the nearly all black Now I believe it peak (Huangshan Mountain) (2014 – 15). Each of these paintings is splendid — each of them could, I believe, be one work in a strong show. But seeing them together is like seeing a group show of oddly diverse artists.

Jensen is a much admired senior artist. By sticking to his guns at times when abstraction has been beleaguered, he earned our respect — and the right to be boldly experimental. That said, this is the strangest show, by miles, of a famous artist that I have seen in a major gallery. It’s a very daring exhibition, for it’s as if Jensen wants to put everything in his paintings. Up the street from Cheim & Read is Thomas Nozkowski’s show at Pace. Nozkowski is regularly praised (or blamed) for the variety of his compositions, for his refusal ever to adopt a signature style. His pictures are very varied, and yet, a Nozkowski is always identifiable. What, by contrast, I find in Jensen’s show is a boldly promising incoherence. This is why I admire Transformations even as I fail to understand it. But who knows what I’m missing: I have been wrong about ambitious artists before.

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The promotional video shows the five exhibitions discussed by The Review Panel, March 13, 2015 at the National Academy Museum. Scroll down for the media files to hear what the critics had to say. The next panel takes place April 17 when critics Sharon Butler, Noah Dillon and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss the Triennial at the New Museum and the Invitational at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish joined moderator David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read, Peter Fend at Essex Street, David Hockney at Pace Gallery and John Walker at Alexandre Gallery.  The panel took place at the National Academy Museum.  Video by Anna Shukeylo.  Recording Engineer: Isaac Derfel.

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Mitchell: May 15 to August 29, 2014
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-242-7724

Intimate Forest: April 23 to June 7, 2014
224 48th Street, between 2nd and 3rd avenues
Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 718-833-9100

Celebrating the end of a singularly unlovely winter, two galleries have burst into summer verdure.  Chelsea has an exhibition of eleven semi-abstract paintings of trees by Joan Mitchell, dated from 1964 to 1991; in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, fifteen contemporary artists also explore the theme of trees in varied styles and media.

Who would have believed that such a commonplace object could inspire such a range of responses? But there’s magic in trees. Not only are they beautiful to contemplate, and useful for building and fire fuel, but, according to Anders Knutsson, co-curator of the Brooklyn show, trees “have figured in every known religion and belief system on earth,” from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis and the sacred fig tree of Buddhism, to the “battle cries of the Environmentalists” (aka “tree-huggers”).

Mitchell’s paintings were inspired by French landscape. Having established an enviable reputation as a second-generation abstract expressionist in the early 1950s in New York, she went on to spend increasing amounts of time in France, moving there permanently in 1959. From the later 1960s until her death in 1992, she lived on a 2-acre estate in picturesque Vétheuil, a Paris suburb painted many times by Monet.

These paintings represent – or at least reflect – her garden-like surroundings there.  In my opinion, the paintings that come off best in this selection are those that tip toward the representational as opposed to the reflective.

The statuesque 9-foot tall Tilleul (Linden Tree) (1977) faces the entryway to the gallery and leaves no doubt about what it is. The color contrasts are striking.  A taut, strong upward rush of blackish-blue lines captures the branches of the tree. They’re embellished with daubs of aqua suggesting leaves, while a crepuscular yellow surrounds the trunk at the bottom.

To the left of this painting hangs a much smaller oil of the same title. Although its surface is merely a spatter of bluish-green pats of paint, the oval shape of the canvas combines with the image on it to strongly suggest the branches and leaves of a tree.  A third standout is Green Tree (1976), a large picture whose centrally-located heavy clouds of bluish-green daubs again suggest a thicket of foliage.

Tabla Rasa Gallery was founded by Audrey and Joseph Anastasi who both have imaginative works in Intimate Forest.  His (an archival print on canvas) occupies a corner and combines trees with an angel, while hers has birch trunks incorporating a human hand. The name of the gallery is also imaginative. Most people are more familiar with the Latin phrase, “tabula rasa” (“clean slate”).  The Anastasis chose the unusual spelling because of its musical sound, perhaps with its associations with the drum used in Indian classical music. “Rasa” also means “taste” in Sanskrit.

The work in Intimate Forest ranges from very abstract painting (by Rodney Dickson) to the verism of photography (Julia Forrest using it surrealistically, while Peter White captures an idyllic group of trees in a field). Other media include sculpture (carved oak and sycamore by Eric Pesso), drawings, cut Tyvek, and graphics (Spring Gold Forest I and II, by Kathleen Hayek, are stand out in this category).

Four painters appealed to me in particular. The small oil entitled Glade, by Thomas Hagen, combines a realistically rendered background in olive greens reminiscent of Corot with dazzlingly abstract foreground brushwork.  Blizzard, a somewhat larger oil by Tom Keough, depicts in delicate whites, golds and tans a tall, graceful tree in a winter storm amid urban surroundings.

Scott Bennett has three good-sized acrylics, each lovingly portraying the trunk of a single tree in a landscape setting.  Paint application is luscious. Forms are large and gracious. Colors are rich and vigorous.  Pansdance has the most humanoid tree trunk, its bluish grays offering a dignified contrast with the riotous green of the field beyond.

Co-curator Knutsson put five of his own pictures in the show, each depicting a single tree or tree stump (no landscape background).  They have twisted, struggling shapes.  Done in black and white, or brown and white, with only touches of green, these pictures look like outsized drawings, but four of the five are acrylics based on drawings.

The artist superimposed clear Mylar with a grid over the drawings, and then, in the traditional manner, transferred the structure of the tree by plotting the outlines on a larger piece of linen. Caucasian Wingnut, a tree in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, must be a favorite of the artist’s as Knutsson has been drawing it since 1992.

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February 20 to April 20, 2013
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 242-7727

The titles of abstract paintings can be important. When Frank Stella named his protractor-based Tahkt-i-Sulayman (1967) after an ancient shrine in Iran, he encouraged very different style of interpretation than did Daniel Buren, who titled one early picture Manifestation 1 – Peinture acrylique sur tissu rayé (1967). Stella, it seemed, wanted to associate his art with Islamic decoration. By contrast, Buren presented a much more literal minded way of thinking about his stripes.

Al Held, who started out making classic Abstract Expressionist pictures, in his later career created marvelously elaborate perspectival constructions. In between, in the 1960s, he did geometric paintings, many of them based upon fragments of alphabet letters. The Big A (1962) is a truncated black ‘A’ with a yellow and blue insert; The Big D (1964), a leftward facing ‘D’ with a black center; and The Yellow X (1965) is a yellow ‘x’, with triangles peeking in on the top, bottom and sides. And sometimes he did constructions whose titles refer to their geometry — Circle and Triangle (1964) is a good example. Held wanted to associate his large geometric abstractions with the most rudimentary general culture- the letters of the alphabet; geometric forms or shapes, Maltese Cross (1964) for example; and cultural figures known to everyone—Siegfried (1966), Mao (1967).

The meaning of abstract painting has always been up for grabs. It can be associated with mystical ‘higher experience’— as Kandinsky and Mondrian wanted; with nature, as for Pollock or Thomas Nozkowski; or with materialism—Malevich and Robert Mangold do this. Held, so his titles reveal, was a surprisingly straightforward, even literal-minded visual thinker. He wasn’t interested in Stella’s art historical references, in Buren’s visual materialism or in allusions to nature; but neither was he a materialist. He wanted to create large, relatively simple, simplified, slightly illusionistic images whose meaning was visually almost self-evident. The letters of the alphabet and Held’s other subjects have no intrinsic scale. And so the danger then, as I see it, is that paintings with these subjects become inert, turning into quasi-minimalist compositions. That’s why their size is very important. In reproduction, these pictures look handsome.  But they hold up on the high-walled galleries of Cheim & Reid perfectly—they have a self-sufficient presence. The Big N (1964-66), almost a monochrome, depends critically upon the small notches of black at the top and bottom of the field of white. Untitled (1965) uses four such inserts at top, bottom and the sides to turn the red field into a floating plane. And Upside Down Triangle (1966)—which is more than four meters wide—seems to twist around the small triangle cut into the center.

Without working in series, or ever repeating, and using simplified means, Held created an astonishing array of varied effects. You feel that he is reinventing the art of painting as he goes.

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Joffe blatantly references the more psychological—and painterly work of —Alice Neel (on view at David Zwirner through June 23) and strongly relates both to the stylized, affectless portraits of Elizabeth Peyton and the faux pornographic work of John Currin. But Joffe uses the canvas as a room of her own to explore contemporary femalehood—not so much the eternal feminine as the external feminine, writ large.

The in-your-face impact of her paintings comes as much from scale as technique. These are big blowups of women, exaggerated and poster-like. There is no visible brushwork or impasto—instead there are obvious drips. It is in these drips, casual yet deliberate, random but not really, that Joffe’s latent expressionism lurks.

Oddly, one of Joffe’s strengths is her sense of purposeful restraint. She is to painting what Raymond Carver is to short stories: an expert minimalist. While employing more detail in her approach to portraiture than Alex Katz, whose legacy she also clearly inherits, she refrains from full-blown realism, implying rather than mirroring reality. And yet she captures something ineffable—a certain mystery that every woman exudes. Who is that blonde clutching her baby as if it is an unwilling fashion accessory, the fingers of its little hand splayed, Neel-like, as if to quote its mother? Or the placid, almost-beautiful woman with the dazzling green eyes and striped shirt, strangely missing any décolletage or cleavage, her sensual lips just a bit too close to her prominent nose?

The two most realized paintings in the show, both done in 2012, are, ultimately, the most interesting: Woman in a Red Flowered Dress, whose commanding presence and disapproving mouth cannot be ignored, and Self-portrait Sitting on a Striped Chaise Lounge, a nakedly honest portrait of Joffe herself, seated on stripes—a direct reference to Neel’s influence in its nudity, composition, and evocative expression that pointedly evokes Neel’s own famous nude self-portrait (on a striped chair) made when she was 80. While the other six paintings suggest an interesting narrative, these two canvases are the interesting narrative.

We live in a Facebook world—that seems to be the subtext of Joffe’s work. And yet even Facebook profiles hint at something deeper than the merely superficial. Joffe’s reductive approach reaches its apex, perhaps, in “Blonde in a Lace Coat,” a pale painting that is nearly pure ephemera, portraying not so much a woman as a wisp. While her minimalism has its uses, in the end it is content, rather than form, that satisfies. Joffe should take an unfashionable risk and imbue her gallery of femme fatalities—everyday vampires of a sort—with more real flesh and blood.

Phoebe Hoban is author of Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) and Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking/Penguin, 1998.)

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