April 3 to May 15, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

For her fourth solo show at Rachel Uffner, in the gallery’s second floor space, Sara Greenberger Rafferty has made a series of mixed media works exploring domesticity, gender, fashion, and the page/screen. The show’s title, “New Works: Dresses and Books,” creates an immediate connection between the forms and contents of two kinds of consumables. The material combination is striking; Rafferty uses a combination of acetate, Plexiglas, inkjet prints, acrylic polymer, and hardware. Hardware is necessary for holding the work to the wall and is always listed as a material. There is always more hardware than is necessary, pointing to the necessity and the décor of objects.

The 10 works are of varying sizes and most take the rectangular or square shape of the page or screen. Dress (all works 2016), is cut to the shape of a dress itself, comprised of photographic images combined with acrylic polymer. They appear worn behind the glass. The images — vintage undergarments, designer dresses, and screenshots — are simultaneously flattened and thickened (each piece of Plexiglas is a half-inch thick). Rafferty points to dresses and books as generic objects: ones that require bodies to perform them. One of the books in the show — rendered in two dimensions, like the dresses, under clear acrylic — is Recommended Reading. The outline of Dress appears on the cover. A Hélène Cixous quote repeats down the length of the dress; it begins “I am entrusted with the dress,” and ends “I slipped them on to go to war.”

An artist’s book, and Recommended Reading (2016), with a text by Melissa Huber, accompanies the show. Its contents range from advertisements (current and old) to essays to clothing catalogues to collages. Rafferty shows us where she pulls some of her sources. There are drawings of dresses and bodies inhabiting dresses. There is a dress that contains a list to be checked off, with words wrapping around the body:

How do you feel?

CONFUSED
MODERN
NATURE-LOVING
SCARED
IN LOVE
OLD FASHIONED
MOODY
FAT
EXCELLENT
SPIRITUAL
CREATIVE
RESERVED
CYBERNETIC
SICK
EXCITED
DREAMY
INTELLECTUAL
BACKWARDS
YOUNG

ALL OF THE ABOVE

The image of the dress is empty but appears to be inhabited, the way that clothes are sometimes shown in clothing catalogues. The breasts are perfectly outlined and the dress falls to the ground as though there is a small figure inside. Rafferty astutely placed the above checklist on an evening gown-type dress. We inhabit clothing similarly to the ways in which we inhabit words. We know that fashion communicates, but Rafferty allows the stark pleasure of realizing again and again the ways in which consumer culture guides taste, preferences, the ways we feel about ourselves, and therefore the outside world. We can choose any combination from the list (confused, modern, moody?) or all of the above. Conversely, those terms are probably already projected onto the body inhabiting the clothing. Definitely women. Definitely those people in dresses.

In the gallery, Rafferty shows images of dresses and pages and screens; in the accompanying text, she makes visible her thought processes. Her Recommended Reading is simultaneously fashion catalogue and critique, process clue and question mark. There are two pages taken from Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863), a paean to fashion and modernity. We see highlights and underlines (presumably Rafferty’s), including this passage describing “Woman” in the abstract:

[She] is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible.

Placed on the opposite page, over the text, within a yellow square matching the color of the highlighter, is an image of a young woman in a similarly yellow bikini, holding a piece of paper over her torso. The word “women” appears across her eyes, from the section entitled “Women and Prostitutes” from The Painter of Modern Life. Large text stamped beside her reads: ARE YOU OFFICE PRINTER READY?

The post Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s Dresses and Books at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

March 19 to April 24, 2016
2916 NE Alberta Street, Suite B (between NE 29th and NE 30th avenues)
Portland, OR, 503 805 5458

Long before it was fashionable to glue clippings of ziggurats (to intimate exotica) from 1970s National Geographic pages, juxtaposed with some modern trope or other (to suggest time-flux), collage had already enjoyed its heyday. The many cute new versions readily found online have the attractive quality of anything else torn out of time, labeled “vintage” and mixed with contemporary imagistic trappings, but like anything novel for the sake of novelty, this kind of juvenile charm wears off pretty fast.

On the other hand, (there’s always another one) there’s “Totems & Cantos,” on view this month at Ampersand Bookshop & Gallery, featuring a selection of collage work by artist and New York gallerist Scott Zieher, created over the past five years. While wildly juxtaposed (e.g. a single glove standing in for legs), these collages aren’t composed of zany connections but diurnal, sometimes totally banal objects displaced, re-contextualized, and distorted to make for something more decorative, puzzling, strange, and often very funny. Actually, these aren’t superimpositions or replacements at all, they’re imaginary constructions. This characterizes their charm. That the figures are composed of disparate parts, giving them almost a readymade quality, makes them more convincing. But of what?

Marvelous robots and occult figurines wear hats made of images of what appear to be bowls, dishes, thimbles, and crucibles, hanging there (so to speak) on toothy white sheets or else found pages in frames, as if to pose their incipient questions from nevertheless mesmerizing appearances. Some of them have toothbrush and bottle bodies or some kind of marble plinth lower situation. Their compositions often appear to have been made up of parts decided on by pulling from a hat. One form, Wave Pattern (2015), is mostly the clipping of a colorful blue, white, and gold waveform filigree ending in a cluster of spheres (flattened, left within borders of white), while another figure in Totem #2 (2012) is made up entirely of those famous helical stripes of a barber shop’s pole.

When Totem #2, the first in this series of 18, makes its appearance near the Ampersand entrance, its four figures stand waiting like deranged poker players and you’re late to the game. But there’s neither hostility nor friendliness in these visages, nothing personal or alien for that matter, and it’s partly because of this that Zieher’s pictures are so enchanting. It’s this kind of magic within the human imagination that Bertrand Russell writes about, describing a force that comes from far off carrying with it the “vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things.” That’s what these things look like to me anyway. It’s a strange distancing relative to the so-called ordinary that causes the artifice to change a person’s perception with what amounts here to more or less simple cut-up decorations. And there’s always an odd one out. The last in the above-mentioned line of four is caught mid-sway as one of those crazed SkyDancers seen at used car dealerships, only one made of stacked electric hotplates supporting a totemic mask for a head, rather than monochrome nylon. One could posit that this work has something to say about commercial imagery, but should that be done here?

In addition to these dazzling figural compositions, here and there are other forms. Rain Cone (2015) is an ice cream with a kind of hot pink spray paint overlay, and venturing further into the exhibition is a series of multiple forms made up of fragments of type and snippets of collage, aptly called Concretude (2015) (alluding to the shaped language of concrete poetry). Looking long enough at Zieher’s cinematic collages, one begins to consider what that old stage conjurer Georges Méliès was doing when he assembled his magical films a century ago. Through a certain kind of lens, ordinary things (even letters and numbers, not out-and-out strange in their own right straightaway) are put together to make something happen that one didn’t at all expect. In the case of the Concretudes, one can scarcely make out letters at all. These compositions amount to a visual gag, turning the tables on art of the imponderable by way of common objects.

After having seen the exhibition once, a few of these odd little minions paid a visit in two successive nights’ dreams, occasioning my return to them, to guess at the origins of their constituent facets and search for deeper meanings — a totally hopeless task. Seeing this exhibition a second time, Zieher’s works seem, to me at least, to be composed only to delight, taking on the characteristics of dreams. Like some of these compositions, dreams are often cold and at some remove as they occur, but are sometimes unforgettable. Archetypes may be manifested in dreams through familiar and uncanny imagery, and these collages have that same temperament, if such a term can be used for inanimate constructions. Emotions on ice.

Zeiher’s exquisite miniature images are X-Acto’d fragments butted up against larger parts with a scarcity of imperfection, so that when a visual hiccup does appear — such as a white border corner taking a turn to brown or black toward its furthest edge — one has to wonder if it happened by mistake at all. And if not, then are these images, in keeping with their mode of curiosity cabinet on paper, really just here to delight? This is the kind of art that necessitates no further context, history, or other anecdotal information, save for the fact of their creator’s absolute painstaking and considered rendering. This singularly interesting collection of pictures is exactly enough.

The post SkyDancers and Concrete Poetry: Scott Zieher at Ampersand appeared first on artcritical.

February 11 to March 12, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Immediately upon entering the “Pink Palace,” Aida Ruilova’s exhibition held at the Chelsea Marlborough Gallery, one is presented with is an enormous, black, vinyl blow-up thought-bubble form, humming with pressure caused by a machine perpetually filling it with more air. The sculpture seems to transmit a sort of warning for what the viewer is about to experience upon entering the main space of the gallery; it’s foreboding presence imbued with an even deeper omen suggested by it’s title, Rocky (2016). Discovering that we’re not looking at a thought-bubble, but a pair of boxing gloves (perhaps even specifically Sylvester Stallone’s gloves from his iconic movie series) violence, sweat and heavy breathing come to mind.

Moving past Rocky, The observer is then overwhelmed by Immoral Tales (2014), a 25-foot-long video projection of a woman’s plump lips being caressed by an anonymous index finger. The action isn’t merely contained by the rectangular projection; it truly feels as though it is emerging into our reality. Ruilova sucks us into a David Cronenberg-like space by supplementing the film with eerie, eroticized breathing to make the entire exhibition a fully immersive freak fest. Being a voyeur is not merely allowed but inescapable. And there’s a comfort to be found in being told what to do (especially if it’s in a dark room where no one can judge you). But this comfortableness is met with a subdued evil. We have no way of knowing whether the woman being invaded or caressed.

The tension created by this scenario is closely related to the smaller works in this exhibition: vintage film posters of 1960–70s erotic horror. These works are a continuum of the ideas and emotions explored in the films, which is an exhilarating mixture of sex, cruely, and evil. Ruilova has decorated the posters with floral motifs that were cut out of them, revealing black velvet backing. The floral designs read somewhat like the tacky flowers schoolgirls illegally emboss their textbooks with. It’s bad — like really garish and second-rate. And it’s great! One cannot help but wonder if the artist herself was once one of those bookish, misunderstood youths who listened to strange music and engaged in even stranger behaviors. Another trait Ruilova shares with those mysterious young women is a heavy, intellectual side, revealed in the titles of her work. Beyond Love and Evil (2015), for instance, is a direct reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886): a dense, existential breakdown of the problems regarding freedom and morality. The image is of a beautiful woman lying on her back, ass-forward, with her knees pulled to her chest. A human skull rests on what would have otherwise been revealed as a vagina, accompanied by two cutout flowers adorning the sides of the skull. It’s a curious combination of sex, death, humor, poise, and awkwardness that points out toward the breadth of human experience. Yellow Flowers. Grave. Procession (2015) holds onto a similar energy. Here, the side profile of a woman with little yellow flowers sprouting out of her face reminds one of Shakespeare’s Juliet or Ophelia — there’s a theatricality that clashes with the flower-cutout hovering over her face.

While some of the posters unpack a more complicated meaning, others are just plain silly and pornographic. Pleasure Seeking Nurses (2015), sports a pair of lubricated breasts with a prodigious flower-cutout right between them. I don’t think we’re expected to think too hard about the significance of this piece — and that’s OK too. Erotic horror is a form of art, similar to Surrealism or metal music, which gets at the banal, animalistic side of human nature. It can be a deep, healthy, and even cathartic experience to engage with. It can also be used to say “fuck you” to groups of people who wish to homogenize society with their ideals (i.e. mega church pastors). Pleasure Seeking Nurses, while possibly fitting into the cathartic category, is a fantastically base “fuck you.”

There is a particular, homegrown brand of strange present in this exhibition that we don’t often experience in other varieties of deranged erotica. And one major reason why “The Pink Palace” is successful is that Ruilova doesn’t objectify female sexuality — even though much of the source material does, the intent sublimates through the source. The femme fatale trope and other, similar depictions so often work against women’s liberation because it turns sexuality into a weapon — an object. This exhibition however is about experience as a whole. It’s the observer and his/her response to he heavy breathing, naked bodies, black velvet, flowers, etc. which completes the work. Because this show depends more on the public to piece together a narrative, she was free to be less explicit than in some of her previous, more comprehensive works, which can even be claustrophobic at times, as in life like (2005).

While weird and intense, the works present are clearly not intended to put anyone down or in a box, but to assert sexuality simply as such; a fun, sometimes strange, sometimes fearsome or complicated extension of humanity.

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November 1 to December 20, 2015
131 Bowery, 2nd floor (at Grand Street)
New York, 917 409 0612

“Very Long Fingers,” on view at Simone Subal through December 20th, is a three-person show with the figure as its central focus. The show is dreamy and portal-like in the emergence and reemergence of the figure in the form of a clown, an ampersand, a sphinx, and a bird, among others. There are 14 works, and each is screen-sized and shaped, and feels quite easy to crawl into. Or, rather: it seems as if the figures/fingers might pull the viewer into the larger and longer world inside. Julien Bismuth’s two silent videos, hanging on opposing walls, ground the show in the sad-clown-psychedelic. Tomasz Kowalski’s collages present elongated, creepy figures in funhouse positions. Autumn Ramsey explores the humanness of the animal figure — Red Sphinx (2013), Swirling Bird (2015), Conspicuous Cat (2014), Orange Shape (2014). The artists approach the figure in separate but equally creepy-enticing ways.

In the 160-minute video La Variation Continue (2013), Bismuth presents a silent application and reapplication of clownish makeup on a woman’s face. The screen hangs perpendicular to the wall at slightly below eye-level. The actress’s face is large and present and hands, which apply the makeup, appear and reappear. Across the room, Bismuth’s Willy Billy (2013), hangs on the wall. Whereas La Variation Continue has a dark, backstage-like background, Willy Billy happens outside in daylight. Two men, one in a suit and tie, one in a green jester outfit, apply makeup to one another’s faces. In both of these videos, repetitive, covering/uncovering actions feel absurd and hypnotic. A suitcase rests on a white chair from which the men pluck the makeup products. In Willy Billy, as in La Variation Continue, the figures are foregrounded and displaced. I’m not sure where I am, except that there are clown-figures. But then again, clowns are just people with clown suits/makeup on, right?

Kowalski’s collages are all untitled and all from 2015, save for & (novelty), which depicts an elongated figure stretched into an ampersand. In all of his works the figures are stretched and hypnagogic — creating a lovely tension between pained and comfortable limbs. One collage features what appears to be the same figure seen through many doorways: leg, shoulder, and head poking out. The rest of the body is hidden behind the wall. The figure becomes smaller and smaller and feels reminiscent of a funhouse mirror, only emptier and more disconcerting. The figure bent into a suspended, skinny ampersand appears in two of Kowalski’s collages. In thinking about Kowalski’s work in relation to the title of the show, a figure with very long fingers might be just as curious about the viewer as the viewer is about him. I’m thinking again about the figure in the many doorways, peering out of the paper.

Just as curious are the animal figures in Autumn Ramsey’s paintings: Red Sphinx, Swirling Bird, Little Bird, Conspicuous Cat, Orange Shape. The eyes in these five paintings appear expressive in a human-animal way. In Orange Shape, the outline of a human figure sits next to a resting animal (a cat? a rabbit?) and one human eye looks out from an orange paint cover. Are these paintings of animals or are these paintings of humans in animal suits?

“Very Long Fingers” plays with the amorphous, changing qualities of the figure — the possibilities of melding, projecting, and ongoing processes of revealing and hiding the human body. Presumably, the human body is present in Ramsey’s anthropomorphic animal paintings, Bismuth’s clowns, and Kowalski’s stretched out figures. The figures hide in plain sight, as in Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece I (1969), where performers carry elongated mirrors in front of their bodies on stage — at times revealing their own bodies and at times flipping the mirrors so that the audience members see themselves. Bismuth, Kowalski, and Ramsey hang together in a space where double and triple takes are foundational. Things are what they seem and then they are not what they seem. Finally, they are what they seem. Repeat. There is a figure under the maquillage. This show asks questions. Or, maybe, this show presents riddles? As in the Jonas’ Mirror Piece, “Very Long Fingers” points back at us.

The post Point at Something: “Very Long Fingers” at Simone Subal appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: Tell me about Melilla.

CARLOS VEGA: I grew up in this little place in North Africa. It’s been a Spanish city since 1497. In order to safeguard the coast of Spain, Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand took this little piece of land on the Moroccan coast that is next to a natural harbor. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, it became a hub for mining in the Atlas Mountains, and suddenly became a prosperous place with a multicultural community. A lot of the Sephardim from Morocco and Turkey, who had left 400 years prior, came back to do business, and there was a very wealthy Indian community and of course a very large Muslim community. And I lived there for my first 20 years.

And it’s always been Spanish?

It’s been Spanish for 500 years, and my family has been living there for 100-plus years. Growing up, I had friends who were Muslims, who were Jews, who were Christians, and in a funny way I was not aware of how unique this was because that was my reality. When you come to New York, you find that’s common in American metropolises, but it’s very unusual in a city of 60,000 people.

Can you talk about the historical moment that inspired this body of work?

While studying the history of Spain I learned about the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was a theologian, a doctor, an astronomer, a religious mystic—

He was radical in his time, wasn’t he?

Today he is a pillar of Judaism, but in his time his own people persecuted him. Then there was Averroes, to whom we owe the proliferation of Aristotelian thinking, and the idea of achieving the knowledge of God through reason. Then, King Alphonse the Wise had the idea of creating this encyclopedic compendium of all the knowledge of the world. It was a time of prosperity, and they all got along together more or less, though there is a lot of myth about that. This opening lasted only briefly and then the world collapsed from within. Feudal mentality allowed that you were only as powerful as your land holdings were big, and how much you had inherited. Today, it feels like we are in the same crossroads — what to do with our future.

Your materials even seem to have a historical bent. How did you come to use lead in so much of your work?

I think that we humans have been in love with lead for thousands of years because it’s soft, easy to melt, easy to carve.

Lead has such a specific feel to it. 

Doesn’t it? It has that coolness, that pliability. I think the idea of alchemy still plays on lead. By applying color to it, by puncturing it, it’s an act of enriching the lead, in a metaphorical way. I find it very satisfying. There is that contemporary wariness about lead because of danger of poison but growing up I used to melt lead pellets with my brother and then pour the liquid in a sink filled with water and watch the beautiful flowers and explosions erupt.

How long does one of your lead-based works take to complete?

I approach like an engraver. Because although you can fix your first imprint, once you subtract material you’ve already done injury to the virgin lead plate. Sometimes things are very fluid or very organic, but because of this profound idea of permanence or precision it takes time for me to find the courage to begin. I have worked on pieces for up to two years. I don’t have a large production; I don’t do more than 15 to 20 pieces a year. And with the best of my abilities I try to impregnate those works with a whisper to the viewer, to make them a vessel for thought.

What has drawn you to using postage stamps?

My feeling is that we are better people than our parents, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. We are more compassionate and more accepting of difference. I use the stamps as a reference because stamps make a quotation between today and the 175 years since they first came into use. You can see how the stamps evolve from Queen Victoria, kaisers and kings to social ideas and aspirations, humanitarian causes, popular culture, the arts. And although they are so humble, stamps are really ambassadors of our aspirations and hopes; and at the same time they are becoming extinct.

I think they are beautiful time capsules, and it sounds funny but I spend hours in front of them just trying to make connections. I find them in the flea market, on eBay, or friends give them to me. I rarely pursue them in a scholarly way. I think it would take away some of the ludic act of the collage, putting one next to the other, playing with color, playing with genders, playing with random association of ideas. I want to leave that story untold, so the viewer has that act of discovery.

How much do you plan out a work, or is it an intuitive process?

When I approach something representational normally it’s very meditative. I need to gather courage, or do a bunch of studies and transfer the drawings to the lead. I’m still learning how to attack, and am trying to be looser and more spontaneous because sometimes it places me in a very uncomfortable psychological place. The act of creation sometimes makes me question everything. In a funny way, this exhibition is one where I feel that I am freer and more accepting of my limitations, embracing accidents and playing with chance. I think what’s happening in this show is a large step forward because there is not only lead, and the stamps, there is work on paper, there is canvas, there are freestanding pieces. It’s been a year and a half of personal growth and planning what I want to be when I grow up, as an artist. How much suffering I want to do, and I want to stop suffering.

I don’t blame you for that. When you are working on a piece for so long, how do you know when it’s finished? Or do you know?

That’s where the suffering comes in!

[laughs]

Has spending time with, and meditating on this intersection of Alphonse, Averroes and Maimonides influenced your own spirituality? 

I think that now I’m at a point where the big question is the survival of consciousness, of awareness. It’s an important part of what I’m searching for in my dialogue through art. How can it be done without being preachy? Are we done when we die or does the soul, our self inside of us, survive? But I think that’s the ultimate, eternal question — the last frontier.

The post The Eternal Question: Carlos Vega on the ecumenical sources of his new work appeared first on artcritical.

July 22 to December 19, 2015
1230 5th Avenue (between 105th and 104th streets)
New York, 212 831 7272

Framed, perhaps unavoidably, by the artist’s predilection for mixing graphic and painted methods, Rodríguez Calero’s “Mártires Urbanos y Santos de Nuestros Días,” on view at El Museo del Barrio through December 19, 2015, is an exhibition that announces something more than Calero’s remarkable ability to mix media. Though her layering of techniques is somewhat unique and decidedly complex, there is really nothing unprecedented about them, which only proves to be one of the many reasons why her work is extraordinary — it embraces contemporary painting’s limitless possibilities yet transcends the unfortunately popular and futile search for the next new thing by taking a higher road.

Here are images of mostly solitary figures that are more than the dizzying array of visual sources and picture-making methods used in their creation. Though each panel is a composite of photo collage, stencils, embossments, painting, drawing and applications of metal leaf, what comes across in nearly every instance is a stately elegance — I would even say a genuine and rare beauty — the source of which is undoubtedly the artist’s commitment to images that address human dignity, furthered by a gift for design, color and especially nuance. As layered as the surfaces are, and as readable as each pictorial construction remains upon completion, to focus exclusively on their process, which I admit is tempting, risks missing both the vision and the ambition of their maker.

Only the second in the museum’s Women Artists Retrospective Series, (the first was an exhibition of Marisol’s work late last year) more than a hundred examples of Rodríguez Calero’s paintings, collages and acrollages (a term she coined to represent the more complex of her techniques) fill a long, narrow space in the main gallery that aptly resembles a nave. The sacred connotation this brings to the room is superfluous but certainly consistent with her highly effective use of sacred and iconographic tropes. Many of the images echo traditional representations of saints, but without making too much of the connection. In fact, it is her ability to fuse the sacred with the secular, and sometimes with the slightly profane that keeps a viewer’s focus trained on the stubborn spirit of each panel’s unique persona.

As they are rather complex images, a more austere example might serve as the best overview. Saint Anthony (1999), is built outward, so to speak, from a single photographic fragment cut from a magazine depicting the head of a young bearded man cradled in a high-collar sweatshirt. Added to this image is a hand and arm from another magazine clipping, and at the bridge of the man’s nose, yet another magazine fragment, in this instance revealing a woman’s eyes, tilted slightly against the axis of the male jaw that subtly emphasizes the benevolence of her gaze. Surrounding this gender-aggregated head is a nimbus of pale gold, painted in a manner similar to the decorative rubbings that overlay the painting’s deep liturgical red ground with decorative motifs. The pattern repeated in this particular motif is reminiscent of stamped sheet metal tiling that once covered ceilings in older New York tenement buildings.

Obviously not a purely traditional representation of the 13^th century Paduan monk, it is instead an assertion of the living metaphor St. Anthony embodies — a sympathetic archetypal figure that one could imagine seeing, as the artist apparently does, in the face of stranger on the street. It is this vision of living memory that Calero maintains so effectively in her work. Generally what comes across is the artist’s informed familiarity with, and an affection for, Nuyorican street culture filtered through the somber gravitas of the Spanish Baroque, the delirious fecundity of Picasso’s early decades and the manic inventiveness of Kurt Schwitters — all of whom are mentioned by the artist as significant influences.

The textures and rubbings that draw each composition into a coherent vision form a theme that runs through many of the larger panels. Yet their symbolism is delimited by their opulence, which is apparently the result of intuitive selections, each informed only by the graphic possibilities they offer. The tin ceiling reference may be interpreted as a visual trace of a NYC tenement, but in other panels, such as a riff on Catholic Sacred Heart imagery in The Apparition (1994), more mundane studio detritus functions much the same way, specifically in the figure’s crown, made in the shape of those extruded wedges that come attached to art store canvases — their dark silhouette offset by a flaming red nimbus encircling the figure’s drooping head.

As with all the larger panels, the focus is always on a figure enveloped in an ethereal, magical or hallucinogenic ambiance, the range and variety of which is stunning. But these represent only half the exhibition. The rest is devoted to examples of Calero’s more modestly scaled and more spontaneously fashioned collage work, much of which seems more attentive to a hip-hop than to a votive premise. These figures dance, bend and pose in gestures that recall imagery from advertising and music videos, although a few, such as Exotic Dancer (1994) use totemic imagery that reminded me of paintings by the late Emilio Cruz. Others, like Silent Scream (1997), echo notes typically struck by Francis Bacon.

Art historical connections fly of the pictures like sparks. Gustav Klimt came to mind as I stood before the majestic and mysterious Virgen Maria (2004), an experience I must report demands a visit to the exhibition. Its reproduction does little justice to its color and delicacy — a criticism, I hasten to add, of just about the only flaw in the show’s beautifully designed bilingual catalog. My only other gripe is the choice of a distracting yellow for the walls of the room where the collages were hung. But aside from these minor aspects, it is one of the most impressive retrospectives of a living artist I’ve seen in a long time.

The post Holy Hip-Hop: A Rodriguez Calero Retrospective appeared first on artcritical.

In 1977 Nina Yankowitz suggested I attend a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft for a preliminary discussion about the fourth issue of the Heresies Collective entitled Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics. We sat around in a circle and each of us was asked to speak about what she was interested in. When it came time for me to speak, I said nervously with my little, low voice, “I’m interested in why so many women made collages.” At the end of the meeting Miriam Schapiro came up to me and said, “I want to work with you on that.” I thought, “Oh my God she is going to swallow me up — this strong, forceful woman!” But actually at some later point in our collaboration, she said to me “Melissa, do you think you could keep quiet for a minute so I could get a word in?” During one of our meetings, Mimi had a phone call with Grace Glueck and they came up with the name, “Femmage.”

I feel lucky to have met Mimi. At the time, collaborating with an older artist was important for me, while she also appreciated and benefitted from my perspective. We had a lot of fun as we worked on our research and writing, and her energy and committed work ethic was contagious. It was a wonderful moment for both of us, personally and professionally. I am happy that I could participate in conceptualizing and developing ideas that would remain valuable to Mimi and to myself. That “Femmage” has been anthologized and is still relevant to students and artists is a testimony and lasting memory to the art and character of Miriam Schapiro, as it is to the groundbreaking and exciting context in which we wrote it.  MELISSA MEYER

The post Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled — Femmage appeared first on artcritical.

Protocol at Chimera-Project

January 29 through March 6, 2015
1072 Budapest Klauzál tér 5.
Budapest, +36 30 768 2947

From the top of the stairs leading to the mezzanine of Chimera-Project on Klauzál Square, the visitor could just make out Róbert Németh’s glowing trompe l’oeil curtains Untitled (2015), painted in a commandeered storage closet. Much like the theme of the exhibition “Protocol” (29th January through March 6th), the drawing disappeared on closer inspection; dissolving into darkness and incomprehensibility when one drew too close — highlighting the often ambiguous and transitory nature of the once precisely defined genre of drawing. Németh’s gesture was effected with a UV light and a motion sensor, but the work of the five other artists in the exhibition runs the gamut, from intensely literal — such as Péter Koppányi’s iridescent graphite pseudo-photograms — to a very loose interpretation of line itself, as in Delphine Pouillé’s performances in the streets of Taipei.

The Post-it-based sketches of András Wahorn are points where “Protocol” oscillates nicely between randomness and intentionality. Wahorn created a body of drawings on Post-it notes while based in Los Angeles from 1994 to 2001 and has retrofitted them into larger works that play off and expand on the simple or iconic spontaneous imagery of the yellow squares. Whether or not the Post-its are doodles is immaterial: the extreme ephemerality of the medium forces any art based on this medium into a spontaneous and transitory category. Wahorn then utilizes the drawing fragments as inspiration for a larger works. Here he presents the Post-it/doodle as a spark in for Meditation (2001), where a serpentine figure kneels before a Gauguin-like fetish, and Something Inside the Head (2001) in which a Post-it Homunculus has taken up residence in the head of a screaming giant. Erika Baglyas’ works are almost too narrative and representational to quite fit among the other works. She presents a very graphic visual equation: a lump or puddle of color or, as in Training Camp 3 (2014), a large arrow, which is then assimilated into a composition with smaller non-descript figures. The imagery is vaguely angsty and political but lacks the bluntness or the quirk of the other pieces.

A flat-screen display featuring seven brightly colored raincoat-clad figures marching through the streets of Taipei marks the periphery of the realm of drawing claimed by “Protocol.” The female figures are connected by tubes from one individual’s mouth to the back of the hood of the preceeding individual, and while the performance touches on issues of expression and verbalization and freedom of movement/expression, or lack thereof, the actors very literally form nodes along the length of a line. While they move, the tubes bend and stretch and one of the most basic elements of a drawing, a line, is modulated and transformed according to the topography of the city blocks and sidewalks of the urban fabric. Pouillé’s six-minute-long video Umbilical Parade (2012), bridges the space between an experiential, body-based performance while jerry-rigging together all the niceties of a well-made diagram or graphical interface — color, visual interest, representation of data, environmental input and the resulting behavior expressed by the performers/vehicle of graphic representation.

Outside of “Protocol,” Umbilical Parade might not have been read as a drawing, but starting with silhouettes and building up our tolerance for the unexpected with Post-its, motion sensors, and ball bearings, the expanse of the genre of mark-making is substantially and happily extended to fill much of the new territory opened up by ever-developing genres.

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Analia Saban: Interiors at Sprüth Magers

February 27 to March 28, 2015
7A Grafton Street
London, +44 20 7408 1613

The tradition of paint on canvas can act as a provocation to contemporary artists, who may do without either the liquid (e.g. Binky Palermo’s cloth) or the ground (e.g. Lynda Benglis’s pours). The Los Angeles-based Argentinean Analia Saban doesn’t just challenge the conventional role of paint and canvas, she also undermines the “on” with her hybrid painting-sculptures. Her first London show, at Josh Lilley in 2010, featured Acrylic in Canvas with Ruptures (2010): paint was stored in bags of canvas, with some of it bleeding through laser-cut holes while most of it dried into sculptural substance. Saban explained then that she wasn’t looking to oppose painting but to enable the viewer to appreciate the elements in a different way by demonstrating how much information and structure they hold. ”It’s a dialogue,” she said, “not a fight.” Saban adopts fresh strategies for each project, but her questing yet playful way of thinking remains a connecting thread.

Saban’s latest solo sees her upsize — indeed, she shows across all three floors of the gallery’s quasi-domestic space — but without reducing the commendably perverse metaphysical wit with which she pushes her materials further than they can be expected to go. The townhouse location plays into the theme of “Interiors,” such that Saban gleefully ignores distinctions between not just painting, sculpture, and photography, but also furniture and design. This fertile show contains, by my count, nine different strategies for making a painting of sorts, none of them what a traditionalist would expect.

Claim (from Chesterfield sofa), from 2014, looks at first sight like a settee with a painting resting on top of it. A closer inspection reveals that the painting is joined to the chair, and that the chair is actually part of the painting: Saban had a custom-made couch covered in canvas, leaving enough fabric for the excess to be pulled clear over stretcher bars. This teases any collectors who might want a painting to match their furniture, as well as challenging any po-faced definition of the difference between art and design — and their relative values. And what’s the painting on? A chair?

Draped marble (Fior di Pesco Apuano) (2015) sees a substantial block of stone draped over a wooden sawhorse as if it were a towel or, in Saban’s skewed world, perhaps an abstract painting hung out to dry. (What’s it on? The line.) Here the refusal to accept conventions takes on the natural assumption that marble is inflexible, and slyly suggests through the historical resonance of its central material that the art of the past can also be interpreted more flexibly than we might assume.

The two Bulge paintings here, both from 2015, are a spin on — perhaps even a deconstruction of — Saban’s earlier acrylic-in-canvas works. The wall seems pregnant with a protruding bag of paint; but there is no canvas or other container. The skin results from using encaustic, which dries to a solid and glossy finish. That evocation of the body, by the way, can also be traced through Saban’s work. There is a palpable physicality to her processes, distancing her from drier conceptualist approaches.

Saban has also won an award as a photographer. That may seem a strange way to introduce a series in which she paints on canvas — but, of course, her 2014 Markings series doesn’t do that in a straightforward manner. Saban took photographs of variously colored paint cans stored on shelves, had them developed as large C-types and then poured boiling water on the surface so she could scrape away parts of the images. She then used those scraps of color to make an abstract collage attached to the photograph. These diptychs, then, make a photograph of paint, and then paint with the photograph. Paint, once more, is Saban’s subject and object, but not in any orthodox sense her medium.

Saban, then, is a humorous conceptual artist who plays around with the structures of representation. If that sounds like a description you could apply to John Baldessari, fair cop: Saban happily identifies herself as a former student and still assists him, though as she explains, ”There were no rules there — he is not at all dogmatic, and was always pushing me to do whatever I wanted.”

“Interiors” is most enjoyable, but is there also a serious point beyond the ingenious fun? I’m inclined to read Saban as opposing categorization: the sheer number of ways she finds to confuse the distinctions between mediums accumulates into an argument that the very idea of such classifications is unstable and inappropriate. And if that’s true in art, might it not read across into life? We should be far more reluctant than we are to pigeonhole people according to superficial characteristics. I emerged from Saban’s show thinking: we must be pluralist, multi-cultural and non-judgmental. Art may not change the world, but it’s nice to think that, if it could, it would be for the good.

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“Nothing is usually opposed to something; but the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something; and so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing.”
-G. F. W. Hegel

“Occasionally a painting calls out from beyond its surface and asks us for our attention. The asking is polite enough, like a meeting between two strangers.”
-Eric Sutphin

Hegel is not necessarily the kind of philosopher that comes to my mind when I look at or think about art, nor have I ever heard his arguments used as the subject of a conversation during an exhibition opening. However, at the opening of “Null Komma Null” — the German painter Detlef E. Aderhold’s first solo show in New York — the term “aesthetic” circled within the gallery space. When used in more common, quotidian sense, “aesthetic” usually applies to a statement that is “concerned with beauty, art and the understanding of beautiful things,” or describes something that is “made in an artistic way and beautiful to look at.”[1] The notion of “aesthetics” consequently connotes a positive perceptual judgment (as opposed to its negative sibling of “anesthetics”) and evaluates a surface, form or arrangement that our eyes can linger on. Aderhold’s colorful paintings — which merge figuration and abstraction, and display a rich, often quite ambiguous texture and tactility — are surely beautiful to look at, yet most of them speak through a quality that calls from beyond a linen surface stretched onto a frame. They are aesthetic not in a common, but rather natural sense of the term.

When Hegel presented his ”Lectures on Aesthetics” in Berlin between 1820 and 1829, he grounded his subject in “the wide realm of the beautiful,” which he restricted to fine art, and understood aesthetic not as a qualitative statement, but as the science of sensation and feeling; while art presented the means to portray the human essence, at first in a physical form, and later “a more spiritual form.”[2] In his view, art consequently reveals or embodies ideas — things intangible and abstract by their very nature. Independent from whether one agrees with Hegel or not (not to speak about whether one fully understands him) there is something genuine in both his notions of aesthetic and art, and therefore they closely relate to Adernold’s paintings and artistic practice, because Aderhold’s work seeks an encounter that is based on visceral and sensitive understanding — preceding judgment and preconceptions.

The exhibition’s title has its origin in a small square painting recalling a fragmented female face. A pair of bright red lips, slightly off-center and enticingly opened to reveal the tips of an upper row of teeth, is joined by a single, dislocated eyeball staring from the upper right of the canvas. There are no lids, not even a hint that could ease the viewer from this constant gaze. However disturbing this impression might be, it is simultaneously calmed (or distracted) by overlapping, translucent patterns that fill the painting’s remaining space. Washed out swathes of mint green, soft pink and lemon yellow are joined by cloudlike formations of black and grey. This well-orchestrated visual chaos, of seemingly no end or real beginning except from the boundaries of the canvas, can be understood as a metonym for what Adernold’s work touches upon — affects — and is further emphasized by the work’s title. Null Komma Null (2011) translates as “zero point zero” and emphasizes Adnerold’s conscious decision to deprive his viewers of any linguistic and therefore logical or intellectual point of reference.

A similar kind of felt, visual noise is present in two other artworks. City 2 (2008) and Makes My Eyes Rain (2014) are large paintings of geometric forms that recall cityscapes, fragmented maps, perhaps even ruins. Even if Makes My Eyes Rain is more figurative in its nature, both images depend on and are ultimately held together by their dripping, fluidly colored backgrounds. The layers, stains and marks dissect, highlight and conceal, and thereby allude to a state of precariousness like a fading or incomplete memory, or the residue of a dream. The Force Take series (2012) instead confronts the viewer with lines and layers of color deprived of any figurative symbolism or “objective” representation. According to Eric Sutphin, who curated the show, affective states are the unifying conceptual principle in Aderhold’s practice, materializing through the formal element of the stain. These stains are often made of coffee or thinned paint, that appears to be acrylic, watercolors and ink— they emerge like diffuse bodies and bubbles, obliterate and allow new (two-dimensional) connections to be drawn, or rather seen. A notion of the psyche resonates within these paintings and ties into Adernold’s background as a psychotherapist.

In fact, Aufriss (2007) is a large collage taken from charts, graphs, illustration and notes, each of which originally provided maps of the human mind by documenting studies on how memory changes or is affected by the experience of negative and positive life-changing events. Considering the work’s systematic arrangement of numeric and textual sequences, its grid-like structure, as well as its use of information as aesthetic material, Aufriss recalls the work of Hanne Darboven. However, this complex drawing fulfills a kind of key function, not only for the show, but also for Adernold’s practice: the signs, numbers and schemes ultimately display not unrelated forms, but affective states that are reduced to or are encoded within indices. The surface then becomes a fragile façade for indiscernible chains of information, for something that is held within, somewhere between the mind and the guts.

[1] http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/aesthetic_1

[2]Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), xiv, 3-4.

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