September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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February 18 to April 2, 2016
525 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

The work of New York painter David Row has been labeled “conceptual abstraction” but the unabashed physicality of his work—of which 15 choice examples are on view at Loretta Howard Gallery—suggests “calisthenic abstraction” as an equally apt designation. This exhibition’s checklist spans the promised 40 years, from 1976 to the present, and every painting is as much a material presence as it is a pictorial conundrum.

Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” is recognizably the source for the vertical, zigzagging motif in Koloph I (1986), implying that it might imaginatively extend beyond the top and bottom edges of the canvas. A pictorial field that seems too small to accommodate the figure—that is, in which the boundaries of the canvas or panel appear to crop the image—has long been crucial to Row’s compositional strategy. Variously reiterated, it yields all manner of spatial displacement and disjunctions. But this instability is carefully controlled, meticulously planned—another paradox that only deepens the pleasure this stunning show affords.

If the truncated figure/cropped ground is the exhibition’s through-line, the clearest evolution from Row’s early years to the 1990s is coloristic. Whereas Koloph I makes its point with just three hues—a brooding blue; a dense, cold gray; and black—the surface of Split Infinitive (1993) is scraped and repainted and scraped again, producing complex optical blending. Roughly approximating mustard yellow and blue-black from a distance (and in images), the surface is streaked and flecked with pale cadmium green, teal blue and a tamped-down alizarin crimson. The painting features concentric ellipses, a signature device that emerged in Row’s work of the early 1990s. The artist’s take on the ellipse—a foreshortened circle—is described by band of unvarying width, and thus both does and does not occupy illusionistic space.

At 7½ by 12 feet, Wind Cools Itself (1996) is still more chromatically complex, resonating in both major and minor keys. The wind in question is no balmy zephyr, but a gale that howls through the painting, rattling its shutters. Across a black ground smeared with white and green a great coiling band unspools through a scraped and squeegeed zone of underlying Popsicle orange, candy pink and lime green; qualifying its dominance is a vertical panel (more oranges and greens!) in which screened grids of tiny dots buzz. It is the most unhinged painting in the show, teetering on the edge of chaos. Row admires Indian painting; this work’s title might refer to a well-known Basohli gouache-on-paper work from 1730 in which a parti-colored cleft in the rocky Himalayas encloses a swarm of serpents, and trees with dot-filled green blobs for foliage. The deep space beyond—the heavens?

A grid of rather larger screen-printed dots is way up front in Here and There (2003), laid over an interlacing of flat brushstrokes that resembles a nightmare freeway interchange seen from high above. The grid reads as a pixelated scrim, with orange on the left half, green on the right. As in other works, bifurcation suggests two sides of the same coin; “Here” might be the picture plane, “There” the middle ground into which the brushy figure recedes.

The gallery’s walls feel crowded, but it is pointless to quibble over any specific inclusion; Row’s trajectory has been rich and varied, and the gallery is not enormous. Among the surprises is Omega (1991), in which concentric ellipses in charcoal and ink are distributed across the top sheets of three intact, contiguous watercolor blocks—an unconventional use of a traditional material. It echoes the three-canvas structure of the closely related Split Infinitive, which hangs nearby. Row’s work in fresco merits mention also, particularly Dean Street Special (1990), a somber study in brick red and olive green. The eccentrically rectilinear support’s chunky thickness almost—almost—eliminates the window-like illusionism of the picture’s face.

In recent years, the artist has worked on irregular polygons with (usually) six or seven sides, of which none is perpendicular or parallel to the edges of the framing wall. This family of shapes relates to the silhouettes of the artist’s smallish, cast-glass “Lighttraps” sculptures. But an understated horizontal/vertical axis, keyed to the painting’s center, anchors the work’s equilibrium—in Elektor (2013), it provides a spectral, yellow-orange ellipse another compositional structure to confront.

The familiar claustrophobic tension of ellipses expanding outward to press against a polygonal boundary is present also in Joule (2016), but its surface (it is oil on wood panel) feels significantly less worked-over; it is fresh, even lively. A smoldering red-orange peeks out from between the inner, blackish ellipse and its whitish surround; stirred up here and there, turning pink, are traces of this underpainting, which also resides in a diagonal incision slicing across the panel from top to bottom. The humming visual energy of Joule is quite unlike that of the strenuous Wind Cools Itself, or the workmanlike problem solving of Split Infinitive, or the radiance of Elektor. Each is unmistakably Row’s, and each reveals a different side of this artist’s restless intelligence.

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September 29 to November 14, 2015
81 Barclay Street (between Greenwich Street and West Broadway)
New York City, 212 220 8000 ext. 3013

“Diphthong,” a group exhibition of 17 artists curated by participating artists Stephen Maine and Gelah Penn, offers an axial slice into process-oriented abstract art being made today. By focusing on work that involves procedure and improvisation, touch and distance, this show raises intruiging questions about unpredictability and intention

The artists here are performing openly, making work that materializes physically in ways that remain apparent to the viewer. This can be a kind of misdirection, with “nothing up my sleeve” yielding something surprising and mysterious.

Distant descendants of Surrealist automatism, many of the works here are made free of conscious control. All the artists — who are working in a wide range of modes — are heir to Process Art of the 1960s and 1970s and more recent conceptually oriented painting that uses process as a meditative or exploratory practice.

The works organize themselves into degrees of directness of method and feeling. And while everyone here shares a highly charged visuality, they differ in the qualities of human feeling that they embody. This sense of “the ghost in the machine” is a kind of haunting in work that has its origins in the purely concrete.

At one far end of the spectrum is work that suggests a kind of fictive “painting machine,” with the artist as the operator. In the compelling paintings of Anoka Faruqee, for instance, pigment is furrowed by a custom-made trowel into moiré patterns. The effect is to see math made material, in a system set to a default mode of repetition and obsessiveness, all the while acquiescing to the inevitable glitches that arise in production.

In a parallel register, Stephen Maine confronts us with the residue of process, a material memory. He has layered a series of off-printings from floor mats and extruded foam to create his complex painting. In high-key green and magenta, the canvas has a kind of psychedelic, ruined glamour, making a painterly virtue out of the necessity of loss. It plays with our continual impulse to find a meaningful signal in the perpetual noise.

John Zinsser’s Nebraska Night Driving is a devastating painting, achieved with six tracks of blue roughly squeegeed on black, and an errant line of paint escaping, like a wild arrhythmia. The whole effect of this work is inexplicably moving.

There are two artists in the exhibition whose process is strongly improvisational, but each with their own emotional valence. Gelah Penn’s large, wall-mounted drawing employs Yupo (a synthetic paper), lenticular plastic, acrylic paint, graphite, and monofilament with photographic imagery of installations, this last element managing to implicate the viewer in the very process of memory. Six angular sheets of translucent Yupo articulated with folds, parts of a fractured whole, each bear an eruption in plastic and paint, suggesting a series of ruptures, both physical and emotional, in the precinct of art’s formal serenity.

Also in the improvisational mode is a rather hilarious work by Denise Treizman, Who Let the Stripes Out?, that sprawls from wall to floor. With her painted ceramic elements and found materials including a duster, matting, tape, foil, and colored sand, she has made something improbable, a multi-directional sculptural party, full of color and high spirits.

Of the works that incorporate a sense of conscious making, notable are the stitched canvas paintings of Rebecca Ward, which actually entail a subtle kind of unmaking. Deconstructing areas of the canvas into the threads of its vertical warp generates a kind of scrim. The result is to have the simplified, quilt-like field dematerialize and reveal reality beyond its bounds.

For a number of the artists, their process is one of accumulation — Leslie Wayne building and then depicting glowing cairns of discarded paint, Rosemarie Fiore collaging the residue of fireworks, and Michael A. Robinson assembling an all-black installation, comprised of a desk with objects, including a laptop displaying images that are also in black.

For the three sculptors in the exhibition, process becomes an idiosyncratic method for creating expressive forms. Kara Rooney’s digital collages use images of her sculptures, which are made by casting manufactured materials into cryptic black and white fragments. Julia Klein’s five sculptural elements, wrapped and plastered, are tall, spindly presences, funky, tree-like, and somehow animated. Susan Still Scott’s sculpture in painted canvas seems to hide a human presence, like the Venus de Milo in shrouds.

The painters include Elizabeth Cooper whose flows and gestures of paint suggest emotive uprisings, and Michael Brennan with hallucinatory, icy monochromes. Jaq Chartier’s dispersions of color have the quality of scientific, photographic documentation. Carrie Yamaoka and Thomas Pihl are the most minimal of the painters here, Yamaoka with reflective fields of color on mylar, Pihl with glowing expanses of finely grained color.

Artists have a knack for taking the art in their orbit and crystallizing it into intriguing exhibitions. In curating this show, Maine and Penn have gathered work of widely divergent methods, impulses, and poetics, signaling an open-ended, generous process of looking and relating.

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