What with finessing the installation and a checklist of 41 artists (who are also editors, writers, interns and staff at artcritical and/or guest speakers on The Review Panel) I managed to forget to secure the services of a photographer. Luckily several guests had cell phones to hand, and extra shots have found their way to us via social media. An ad hoc arrangement which fits nicely with the collective and impromptu nature of the show.

Click on the photo below to launch the slideshow.

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September 9 to October 11, 2015
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
(also on view at 237 Eldridge Street)
New York City, 917-861-7312

This author hereby posits the existence of a Cult of Painting. Its adherents don’t call it that, or think of themselves as cultists, necessarily. But it operates akin to the manner of the ancient mystery religions. The insiders engage in arcane discussions. They both revere and debate the tradition, hoping to squeeze new insights out of it. There is pleasure and pain, if only of the visual kind. They practice metaphorical or actual drunkenness as a sacrament. I could name several high priestesses – Jackie Saccoccio, Carrie Moyer, and Elisabeth Condon are among those whose works I have contemplated   – but on the occasion of her current exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, I hail the highness of Kyle Staver.

When I recently wrote a TIP for artcritical.com for her show, saying that not since Lester Johnson had anyone gotten such mileage out of mythology, I had no idea that Johnson was Staver’s teacher at Yale. Johnson spent much of the 1960s incorporating classical imagery into his work, including several treatments of the Three Graces. I’m no oracle, but we aspirants (I’ll admit to membership in the cult) sometimes get impressions through mysterious channels. I think of Lennart Anderson painting beautifully despite the aging of his eyes. Staver is a longtime friend of Anderson’s and has sat for him regularly. She’ll inherit his mighty powers, as disciples are said to receive a guru’s by supernatural transmission.

Not that she paints like him. Her style harkens back to Bay Area Figuration, in particular the triumphs of David Park. One canvas from 2011 at Steven Harvey, Releasing the Catfish, shows a woman in a bathtub-like rowboat giving the day’s catch back to the lake as seagulls loom in the foreground. Park’s work went from intimiste to iconic over the course of his heartbreakingly short career. Staver has long felt compelled to retell her family’s stories, iconically in their way, but not so much as to defeat all the specifics. At the same time she brandishes what I regard as the mark of a true colorist: her luminous grays – such as the slate-colored water, the shadows on the gulls, the fish’s scales, and the boater’s bikini – appear as full-blown hues, not mere tints of black.

In her more recent paintings, mythology supplies enough storyline to give her figures, soaked in a vat of Cubism just long enough to become delightfully rubbery, something to do. Alexi Worth’s catalogue opens with a quote from the artist, “Oh no, none of that matters. I don’t care about mythology.” Worth protests, “…it’s clear that Staver does care about these ancient stories, cares passionately enough to re-imagine them again and again.” I counter in turn: take her at her word. Her Leda (2015), far from depicting a seduction or a rape, is a moonlit scene of post-coital bliss with a handsome waterfowl. They even put a checkered picnic blanket down. Staver, like Park in his late years, felt a need to escape domestic subject matter, and legends provided her a way forward. They otherwise retain the deliciously lazy atmosphere that characterizes her pictures from the 2000s of couples bathing and hanging around the house.

In the work of Johnson, mythology carries dire psychological urgency. Staver draws sweeter water from the same well. The cartoon-like elegance of her rendering  retains its carefree joy even when tackling the subject of Ganymede (2015), for which she produced a magnificent canvas of a gigantic eagle dangling a youth who elongates in a royal-blue sky full of cottonball clouds. It’s vertiginous, but the boy’s expression is coolly bemused and the eagle’s is, at worst, cranky.

A simultaneous and revelatory show of Bob Thompson (whose influence Staver acknowledges) and the madcap Louis Eilshemius at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery prompts me to wonder if there’s a mythological-modernist tradition that we ought to consider more thoroughly, with Staver as its current chief practitioner. While some curator works on that, the painters continue their contemplative rites. Days ago I witnessed a conversation between fellow painters on social media in which Shaun Ellison said that “all art making is like exorcism” to which Frankie Gardiner recalled words of Philip Guston:”The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.” Peter Shear then added wisdom from Picasso, “If we give spirits a form, we become independent.”

And all these are truths, as far as the Cult is concerned.

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University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
February 5 to March 23, 2013

The exhibition was shown in two parts at:
Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410 6120

Asya Geisberg Gallery
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, 212-675-7525
April 24 to May 24, 2013

We may one day recall 2013 as The Year That Abstract Painting Came Back. Historical exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925) and the Guggenheim (Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960), as well as Loretta Howard Gallery (DNA: Strands of Abstraction) and Cheim & Read (Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s). The year has also been a notable one for contemporary shows: Paul Behnke at Kathryn Markel, Jennifer Riley at Allegra La Viola, Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, to name a few, with Sharon Louden coming to Morgan Lehman in October. And that’s just considering New York.

Add to this list POUR, an exhibition that showed simultaneously at Asya Geisberg Gallery and Lesley Heller Workspace after originating at Florida Atlantic University. Curated by Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, POUR established that the desire for good abstract form, achievable by way of liquid paint, is a perennial concern. In Chaim Potok’s 1972 book My Name is Asher Lev, abstract painter Jacob Kahn says to Asher, “I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.” We’re well on our way. Moreover, we seem to be doing so having settled a debt to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg goes largely unmentioned in the catalogues, criticism, and conversations surrounding the aforementioned exhibitions. Helen Frankenthaler’s name comes up in the POUR catalogue (this is a show about pouring paint after all), but so does Rubens and Chinese scroll painting. Finally, we can have a show of abstract painting in New York without it turning into a referendum on Greenberg. When someone turns it into one anyway, as John Yau did on behalf of Thomas Nozkowski in his March 2013 review in Hyperallergic, it sounds dated and beside the point. Greenberg has taken his rightful place in the cosmos and we can choose to navigate by his light, or not.

It now seems possible to draw a line from Carrie Moyer’s lesbian activism to her formidable shape-making, and think it only natural. Moyer, who was made a Guggenheim fellow this year, co-founded Dyke Action Machine! in the early ’90s and designed the group’s  agitprop. Her painted images have long combined elements from political posters, Tantra drawings, and a vocabulary of abstraction derived from Morris Louis. The last of these influences has come to predominate her work in recent years, as she keeps experimenting with painting techniques. While plenty of splatters remain on her canvases in the state in which they landed there, Moyer seems to have enlarged certain incidents of gravity and viscosity until they form flat, opaque arcs with the graphic fortitude of industrial signage. For added visual heft, she paints in subtle shadows around the edges of some of these shapes. The total effect is both delicate and arresting.

The “pour,” as presented by Condon and Prusa, takes one of two forms. The first is the revealing pour, the one with which we’re familiar from Jackson Pollock – paint as the manifestation of itself, the literal trail of evidence made by the action of colored liquid on a support. There is a distinctive grid, irregular and rounded, that appears when you tilt a canvas with a dripping swath of paint on it along one axis and then across it. This drip-grid appears in work by both Jackie Saccocio and Carolanna Parlato. Saccoccio, working handsomely in a vein first opened by Jules Olitski, is emptying out otherwise busy abstractions with a high-value, neutral color poured generously into the center.  She uses the drip-grid to integrate the figure and the ground, by breaking up this central shape at the edge and allowing the more saturated colors there to show through. Parlato, in contrast, uses  the drip-grid as a design element. In Drizzle (2009), areas of viridian, fuschia, and scarlet have been given the same treatment, one layer after the next, and she tops them off with a lemon-over-green coat that is itself allowed to drip, locking in a diagonal that composes the canvas. Angelina Gualdoni used an analogous technique to create Opening the Gates (2011), but the paint was tilted every which way, and she dosed the broad, black pathways thus formed with chalky violet while they were still wet. The interpenetration of the two colors results in luminosity.

The other form taken is the hiding pour, in which the force of the falling paint removes evidence of the human hand from the application, leaving the viewer to wonder how the shapes got there. David Reed’s No. 611(2010) is painted in oil and alkyd on polyester, using dripping, squeegeeing, and masking of translucent paint on the slick surface, producing an abstract calligraphy of blue across an elongated six-foot rectangle. Carrie Yamaoka’s works on reflective mylar, coated with colored gloss that has been allowed to pool across the supports’ bending surface, are so limpid and so devoid of evidence of their manufacture that they may as well have come from outer space. Roland Flexner’s moody, diminutive landscapes of liquid graphite form from controlled accidents of surface tension on paper. Their appearance is a wondrous collision of an abstract contact print with a Sung Dynasty forest scene. Ingrid Calame’s Pop-bright whirls and scrapes of enamel on aluminum may look improvised, but in fact are the product of meticulous tracing in the urban environment.

Later in My Name is Asher Lev, Asher and Jacob conclude a satisfying day of painting with a walk on the beach. Gazing at the sea, Jacob remarks, “Sometimes I think all water is blood. It is a strange feeling.” No more about it is said. Among painters, no more would need to be said. But I might elaborate this way: liquidity is vitality. The artists of POUR have made this beautifully clear.

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April 13 to May 15, 2011
54 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, 212 410 6120

Imagine if you could speak several languages, switching from one to another to suit your thoughts, inside of a single sentence. You might begin in English for the sake of clarity, then change to Chinese for an apt metaphor, then over to French for color and texture, then to Italian for a bit of structure. Elisabeth Condon can do this, in paint.

Hello, Yellow (2010), a four-foot-wide canvas built around pourings of lemon, gold, and umber,  evokes the history of stained abstraction, Frankenthaler and Louis especially. But certain passages look tie-dyed. They upset the reference and move it into psychedelic territory. Upon them she has painted a stack of gray shapes, outlined in darker gray, through which a white ribbon runs.  It is as if she took mountains from a Giotto, paved them, and divided them with a cubist roadway, going nowhere except into itself. The scene is dotted with precise squiggles. Neil Welliver might have doodled such shapes as he recalled a long day spent tracing.

This painting shouldn’t work. It’s a pastiche of four styles. The colors are weird. The abstract portions won’t settle into their abstractness, and the figurative portions don’t amount to anything recognizable. It looks like it was painted by committee. And yet the painting is working. If there’s a committee, it must be made up of gifted artists, each the product of a different training, living together as an integrated whole inside of Condon. Hello, Yellow rolls over  my objections like a tractor.

Condon’s work takes in the landscape – whatever form it takes,  real or imagined.  Paintings hide beneath paintings in each painting. The surfaces build from stain to film to opacity. The imagery crosses from east to west coast, and east to west hemisphere, with the ease and speed of ideas.

The artist is a voyager. Schooled in Los Angeles and Chicago, based in Brooklyn, her itinerary has included China, Spain, Miami, Tampa, and Saratoga Springs in the last two years. It seems that everywhere she stopped, a local influence took up residence in her psyche. By the time she returns to the studio, they all want to come out at once. Thus Autumn Sprinkles (2010) looks at first blush like a straightforward forest scene from upstate New York, until one notices the fan shapes and axe-cut strokes that typify Chinese landscapes. And then there are rose, rust and peach oblongs sprinkled on the surface. They’re not attached to the tree. They’re not attached to anything. They have escaped from the early Op paintings of Larry Poons and are now fluttering all over the sky to remind us that this is art after all.

Contemporary art comes with a promise of freedom. The old narratives are dead, say its spokesperson-philosophers. The categories are as blended as the breeds of street dogs. All things are possible, and few are impermissible. But it is hard to use all of that freedom. Constraints are helpful because they narrow the infinitude of choices an artist has to make. This is what I admire most about Woke Up to Find it Missing (2011). If it has constraints, it’s hard to say what they are apart from the six-foot rectangle. Over a luscious background of pastel stains, Condon has painted mountains. These mountains are striped orange and white like traffic barrels. She allows darker stains, indigo and violet, to come into the foreground. At the bottom edge the shapes flatten out into opaque areas of black, purple, and brown. It is a surrealism and Pop sandwich between two slices of lyrical abstraction, served on a hard-edge plate. The complexity ought to result in a disastrous mélange, but it’s lovely. The colors are pleasing. The composition holds. It makes no sense, it may even be silly, but the defiance of explanations only adds to the magic.

No less surprising is Yaddo Trees, Autumn (2010). From a hill of blue splashes, spattering the white canvas of the lower right corner, a tree grows. Its last leaves of the season are cranberry red, each with a blobby outline of cotton-candy pink. The sky is teal behind a mountain of stained green. The sky is a more substantial layer of paint than the mountain, which tells us something about the poetic nature of this world. While in residence at Yaddo in 2010, Condon met Jane Hirshfield. “They lie / under stars in a field,” Hirshfield once wrote about green striped melons. “They lie under rain in a field. / Under sun. / Some people / are like this as well – / like a painting / hidden beneath another painting.”

Please click HERE to read Jane Hirshfield’s poem in full

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