Inspired by meeting John Cage in New York in the 1990s, after pursuing cello studies at the Oberlin Conservatory, Theresa Chong’s early work incorporated chance/random aesthetics and musical notation into elaborate and elegant ink painting. Now, midcareer, Chong returns to an abstraction that skirts Asian traditions in ways that are deeply original: small marks on exquisite paper hold their own between highly worked, nearly textural embellishments and a fine sense of overall composition. The small paintings, usually with top and bottom bands framing the composition, occupy that hybrid, Asian-Western territory that after the length of a generation has now reached the point where bridging two distant cultures has become a critical cliché. This does not mean that Chong’s efforts in this area are to be faulted; instead, it seems that the practice of appropriation has become so widespread as to lack the visual punch it once had.

But Chong’s double reality has little to do with the theft of one style or the other. Instead, in her work we come face to face with a stylized treatment of abstraction built upon gouache brushstrokes and colored-pencil markmaking. Areas are constructed from darker and lighter shades of black and gray, so that the lighter domains feel very much like islands in a dark sea. While the first impression of the artist’s efforts is that they are primarily abstract, over time they take on the suggestion of natural effects — of what exactly, we are not sure, but they do seem to imitate nature. The realms are not tied to a classic grid pattern; instead, they are resolutely organic in both small forms and the overall expanse of the composition. Chong points out a general direction for interpretation by naming her works according to entries in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese manual for the practice of divination. Titles such as Following or Gathering Together form a visual commentary on a literary text with a weighted philosophical orientation.

The patterns in the works correspond to rubbings of Chinese stone markers, as Lilly Wei points out in her catalog essay. The myriad small, fine lines represent duration, the passing of time, while the lighter sections of the drawings correspond to passages in which the stone has dwindled, the result of weathering. No matter the specific cause of the image, these drawings are resolutely beautiful, confirming a generally Asian perception of the artist’s hand as it faces nature. But Chong does not necessarily stop there — it is important to realize that despite the static nature of drawing and painting, her works embody the notion of change over time. In K’UN (Earth) (2014), horizontal rows of very small vertical lines mass into two darkly painted organic shapes that look like lakes surrounded by a land mass. Two black bands, on top and below, frame the composition. The feeling is one of earthen weight — the image corresponds nicely to its title. And despite the small size, the feeling of density is very much alive in this piece, likely the result of the intricacies of the drawing’s surface. The delicacy and large number of the short lines shows how a small surface can be loaded with weight thanks to the technical prowess of the artist.

The feeling of an imagined landscape is taken up in Lu (Walking Carefully) (2014), although nothing specifically belongs to a rendering of nature. A high number of lighter areas complicates the painting and gives it a variable density. These areas range from quite small to relatively large within the composition, which is nearly 12 inches square. Two broad black bands of paint contain this small scene, at once abstract and figurative in its suggestions. Huan (Dispension) (2104) consists of a large, relatively white light area of crosshatching, with miniature points of white. Three smaller islands, composed of the small, darker lines, drift in the open sea of cross hatching, while a rough, dark triangular area dominates the upper right of the picture. The feeling is that of a still pulled from a film.

Collectively, these drawings of consummate skill and precision form a sequence that will remind Chong’s audience of an album of Chinese ink paintings. While they lean toward abstraction and, as their titles imply, the portrayal of ideas, the pictures also abound with natural themes. Chong’s combination of approaches indicates that nothing is entirely abstract or completely figurative. Discerning the similarities and the differences is a source of compelling pleasure.

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March 21 to April 19, 2014
511 West 22 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 223 2227

The ocean and bay beaches of the South Fork of Long Island (the Hamptons) are prized, respectively, for their surfing and swimming, but one East Hampton public beach ought some day be a place of pilgrimage for art lovers too thanks to the four decades of aesthetic communing with its genius loci of the painter Connie Fox.  Sammy’s Beach (previously known as Sammi’s Beach) is her Mont Sainte Victoire.

Far from local children throwing pebbles at this American Cézanne, however, Fox is a highly respected member of the artistic community of East Hampton.  Married to sculptor William King and living in the area since 1980, she first discovered the Hamptons at a guest of Elaine de Kooning, her teacher at the University of New Mexico and a lifelong friend.

Her current in-depth show at Danese/Corey, mostly of works from the last few years and the near-nonagenarian painter’s first with this gallery, unites three distinct groups of work extrapolated from this motif: rich, painterly, complexly lyrical and compositionally meandering canvases; austere yet robust black and white striped constructions in acrylic on paper; and dense, detailed, scatological yet calligraphic drawings in ink and charcoal (her Weeds series).  These highly distinct bodies of work, bouncing from observation to constructivism to automatism, are united not so much in sensibility as intensity of engagement with a sense of place. The search feels less for form than for association.

Fox is a sophisticated, intellectually fearless artist whose aesthetics and career are disconcertingly disparate, for she brings a postmodern sense of disruption and questioning to what remains essentially an abstract expressionist vocabulary of gesture and touch. In the vaguely gridular Sammy’s Beach XIV, 2014, for instance, a painting that is at once fleshy and atmospheric she confounds expectations of balance and scale in the treatment of localness and all-overness, in speed and detail, in gestalt and deviation.  While there are passages in her works that can recall Philip Guston (SB, XIV), Charles Burchfield  (SB, III), or Cy Twombly (the Weeds series), her touch, very much  her own,  feels somehow rooted in – or perhaps just more relevant to – a  more recent painting mindset.

Flesh and atmospherics in Sammy’s Beach XIV could signify bathers, perhaps, but her responses to the beach where she swims and walks every day nonetheless remain the opposite of topographical.  Instead, her environment is a trigger for complex reveries taking the artist back to her childhood in Colorado on the edge of the dustbowl.  As her biographer Joyce Beckenstein has written, “She remembers the warm sun turning that dust into a magical orange glow. She remembers the land, the river, the distant Rocky mountains, not as landscape, but as the bony structure, the architecture of the place.” As Fox has indeed devoted another memorable and extended series of paintings to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one could describe Sammy’s Beach not just as her Sainte Victoire but her madeleine.

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November 7 to December 14, 2013 at Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 West 26th Street?, New York City, (212) 695-0164
January 10 to February 8, 2014 at Danese/Corey, 511 West 22nd Street,  New York City, (212) 223-2227

If these shows of early and recent Larry Poons were the opening and closing rooms of a full-on career retrospective, they make a convincing case for organizing one, argues painter JILL NATHANSON

While each of these shows is a visual powerhouse, taken together, Loretta Howard’s December showing of Larry Poons’s early geometric and dot paintings and Danese/Corey’s exhibition of the veteran master’s latest works allow us to experience Poons’ devotion to radical experimentation with color in its unique, mercurial nature

Superficially, the two shows looked so different, the grid-based, controlled, flatly painted shapes on equally flatly painted overall fields of the works from the 1950s and ‘60s contrasting with large recent works made entirely of small painterly finger-and-brush marks, touching, scumbling, sparking, glowing in myriad random-seeming ways.  But Poons’s long painting life makes sense of this, going ever deeper into the pure craziness that is working with color.

The Dot Paintings at Loretta Howard looked fuller and more complex than I remembered after having seen them reproduced for decades as ‘60s icons.   The show also included many Geometric Paintings that had never been shown before, a selection of preparatory pencil on graph-paper drawings and a 1964 video interview with Poons.  In the video, and in conversations with me over the phone, Poons spoke of those days when he was seeking his way out of the prevalent Abstract Expressionist idiom.  He had spent a couple of years at New England Conservatory studying music composition before transferring to The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In his early days in New York City, encounters with two other artists would help him to find his direction.   A show of Barnett Newman at French and Company in 1959 “blew me away…they were like Beethoven”.  Poons says of these paintings that “they weren’t static, even though there were very few elements.  You’re not looking at a stationary object.”   They set a new standard: a pure painting space that would look vast and non-static, that would change–as Poons says all great painting does each time you look at it.  Another powerful experience, in the same year, was seeing Frank Stella’s paintings in Sixteen Americans at MoMA.  From Stella he received the sense of necessity, of how little is necessary to make a space unique to painting. Stella and Newman became his friends, helping him to secure his commitment to disciplined non-illusion.

Poons’s last geometric painting, Florentine, (1958) allows one to follow his path as an experimenter.  It has a jagged  “lightning bolt” lay out.  In this flat two-color painting shapes connect points from sixty-four small grids.  His planning was apparent in the nearby pencil drawings.  After Florentine, however, he eschewed big shapes.  The painting that followed used only points on the construction grids, without connecting them.  The geometric shapes gave way to unconnected points set as if moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise.  These points, painted on a 56” canvas in close value on a high-keyed solid ground, set up a pulsing color structure:  the first ‘Dot’. “The pulsing was a door prize; it was not the point, but it didn’t bother me so I left it”.  An early ‘Dot’ at this size was in the exhibition.  Subsequent paintings got very big, fast.

Large Dot paintings from the mid ‘60’s at Loretta Howard had a good deal more coloristic variation among the dots.  One can see how colors were repeatedly changed, like orchestration transformed, during the painting process.

Looking at The Dots from a few feet back, and given a minute or two of focus, dots hum, fields fluctuate due to simultaneous contrast and after images, ellipses zip around – their direction determined by clockwise or counter-clockwise orientation.  The buzz and movement is a matter of specific color and value relationships.  With all the zipping, the wholeness doesn’t give way to internal sub-plots but  just keeps integrating anew.

Over the years, I’ve thought of these paintings as embodiments (not illustrations) of quantum uncertainty: paintings in which the energy of color gets to look and act (on us) as energy, getting as close to the underlying nature of matter (us included) as painting can get.  On talking with Poons, I found that modern physics was not on his mind, but I maintain its significance, which bears on the importance of these paintings as works about color and the strangeness of painting.  They’re certainly not like other works of Op or Color Field paintings.

Poons moved on from the “Dots.  In subsequent work, pigment — material color in tension with color as light — became the way to generate movement and unity.  From the 1970s to the ‘90s Poons threw paint onto walls of vertical canvas and let it cascade, color building on color, the compositions “found” afterwards through a cropping process done over weeks.   The cropping rigorously avoided familiar compositional devices in favor of color’s leading role.  In the 2000s, Poons left off throwing and began constructing with small marks, building the painting through color-on-color accretions.

These new works integrate Poons’s mastery of counterpoint construction, developed through the Dots and subsequent decades of painting.  I would suggest that no other painter is able to mentally/visually construct color relationships across a huge canvas and through the duration of the working process like Poons.  Without relying on underlying pattern, system, design, composition or narrative, he keeps the eye’s responses to hue, scale and saturation in play using value to amplify intensity.  Shape never overshadows the starring role of color as broken light.

Prior to the current show I had sometimes felt Poons’s new work to be less radical than what came before.  The brush and finger marks seemed more familiar than the cascades or Dots.  So many colors are used, including many outside the bounds of my own retro-tastefulness.

Perhaps I looked harder at this exhibition, but the works in this show all hit me as intensely pleasurable experiences of a place quite new.  Each small area of color interaction seems visually crisper and more specific, while the softer modulations of color/light have become more insistent. This especially comes across in the way small marks interface against larger areas of modulating, glowing light, wrangling with randomness while integrating weight-defying, interactional dynamics. The openness to using all colors results in amazing mixtures and events.

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Jene Highstein died April 27 at his farm in upstate New York.  He was 70.  The cause was lung cancer, diagnosed this past January.  A postminimalist sculptor of elegance and idiosyncrasy with a keen interest in architecture, Highstein was part of the storied alternative space 112 Greene Street in the 1970s.  He went on to show widely in the United States, Europe and recently in Asia.  Following his well-received exhibition of towers and elliptical forms at Danese Gallery in 2011, Highstein’s  most recent exhibition was of drawings from Cape Breton at 56 Bogart in Bushwick this past winter.  An exhibition of early works is now being planned at the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan.

A tribute to the artist will be posted here later this week.

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The abundance of self-anointed anti-establishment shows reminds us that nothing in the art world is sacred, least of all art history. We’ve been served notice; taboos will be busted, idols smashed and sacred cows slaughtered. Sculptors will challenge our outdated notions of painting, installation artists our outdated notions of sculpture, and performance artists our outdated notions of installation. In the noisy crescendo of art that screams at us to rethink things on its terms, one message rings loud and clear; the canon is under fire!

So what are we to make of this curious industry in which the path to success seems so heavily greased by its practitioners’ insistence that they are a challenge to its authority? What is the meaning of a world in which the very rejection of its values seems as clear a path to acceptance as any? Is there a parallel world in our society that mirrors that of the contemporary art world as seen through the eyes of Chelsea? Imagine a law firm vying for your business by claiming a particularly irreverent attitude toward the law, or a politician cultivating votes on a platform of autocratic rule. To be sure, questioning our value systems is one of the chief roles of an artist (if he or she, unbound by the directives of others, cannot speak the truth, who can?), but it seems that we’ve arrived at a point where the act of questioning has become the greatest currency of all. Cézanne’s re-examination of painterly perception was a game-changer with implications about how we see the world (as were the developments of the Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists), but much of contemporary art seems unconcerned with real world implications. Art that adopts a full-blown revisionist take on the art-historical canon invariably fails to resonate beyond gallery walls. Take for example the show of Fahamu Pecou’s paintings at Lyons Wier Gallery, which “questions the concepts of inclusion and exclusion within the historical constructs of fine art,” by “appropriating famous images from the twentieth century and reinterpreting them through his own self-portrait prism.” In a painting titled The Treachery of (media) Images: After Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the artist’s cursive phrase “Ceci n’est pas Fahamu,” accompanies his self-portrait. While the appropriation is obvious enough, the reinterpretation remains unclear.

It’s been a while since Duchamp displayed his urinal, Rauschenberg erased his de Kooning, Warhol made his ready-mades and John Baldessari commissioned sign painters to create work for him, sign their own names to it, and present it as his own. Kehinda Wiley’s reinterpretation of 18th- and 19th-century history painting has become so familiar that it is now more surprising to see Jacques Louis David’s white and sallow-cheeked Napoleon atop his war steed than Wiley’s African American stand-in.

These conceits all served in various ways to challenge notions of creativity, originality, and authenticity. Each was also interpreted, in its own way, as a sort of “joke on the art world,” the most recent iteration being the Banksy film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Here the street artist makes a documentary about his would-be documentarian Thierry Gueta, who in Banksy’s narrative is transformed from cameraman to street artist to art-world darling himself. The work produced by Gueta under his street name Mr. Brain Wash is pretty lousy by nearly everyone’s admission, but the fact that it sells well at a show in Los Angeles is presented in the film as the ultimate joke on the art world. But is it a joke? In a telling moment, Banksy’s dealer Steve Lazarides chuckles nervously, “I think the joke is on . . . I don’t know who the joke’s on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

If there is a joke it has little meaning. The film suffers from a sort of self-imposed impotence. The breadth of its meaning is a function of its scope, and in putting one over on the art world, it has few implications for the world beyond. The group show “Entertainment,” currently on view at Greene Naftali, offers a sort of litmus test of the resonance of art inspired solely by art world reference. Rachel Harrison’s piece Zombie Rothko, is a free standing block of sculpture splattered with vaguely Ab-Ex paint and topped by a doll’s head. From the press release: it “suggests an embodied version of painting (a kind of “walking dead”).”  Next to this is ITEA (International Trade and Enrichment Association), Michael Smith’s fake trade show booth “parodying the synergy of arts and business collaboration.” It works as parody, but nothing more. This is the affliction of the navel-gazing worldview: it’s a bite we’ve grown accustomed to.

Thankfully, we still have that second stack of press releases, those that make no claims to historical revisionism. Instead, they correspond to a different kind of show, where the work on display feels altogether more comfortable with itself. Rather than trading in art-world reference, this work opens itself up to reference the world at large.

Take two sublime shows of painting currently on 24th street, those of Lynne Woods Turner at Danese and Rudolf Stingel at Gagosian. Each artist creates work imbued with an emotional maturity that allows it to stand autonomously and remain open to interpretation. Woods Turner’s paintings rely on their own narrowly defined formal parameters to present a luminous world that remains accessible at its core. Stingel takes the self-assuredness a step further. Employing silver and gold (and what could be better fodder for a revisionist re-evaluation of our cultural mores?) as the primary materials for minimal paintings of maximal visual appeal, the lasting question Stingel poses to us is one that artists have asked for centuries: can you imagine anything more beautiful?

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on view in her exhibition of new work at Danese through December 20, 535 West 24th Street, 6th Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 223 2227

Santibañez has a touch that is expressive in its very restraint. Her design sensibility is highly ordered, whether serial, symmetrical, or algorithmic. Yet there is always the feeling that she has built her images through linear elaboration rather than having an a priori idea and then filling it out. It is as if the artist has internalized the growth patterns she depicts, which makes sense of the tribal or primitive feel that animates certain images. Her work occupies a place where observation and abstraction meld, recalling the natural order at the origins of decorative pattern.

This was an artcritical CAPSULE in November 2008.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 15, 2007

The oeuvre of Larry Poons represents a case of painterly bipolarity.  It is hard to think of an artist who veers towards such extremes of serenity and chaos, prettiness and vulgarity.  As if to dramatize the split, the early work was characterized by flatness and finesse while subsequent developments included such wayout thickness and integration of alien textures that his garish canvases achieved extraterrestrial weirdness.  One possible point of comparison would be with his fellow second generation (post-painterly) Abstract Expressionist Jules Olitski who also oscillated from “ineluctible flatness” to use the phrase of the two artists’ critic-champion Clement Greenberg to loony impasto.

In his new body of work, Mr. Poons seems to enjoy some measure of equilibrium.  There is thickly churned swirls of paint, but there is also a new-found lyricism that recalls the seductive charm of his early flat abstraction.  The title of one of the works, “Could You Love Me One More Time,” (2005) almost seems an appeal to early formalist enthusiasts to forgive the romantic excesses of the intervening years.

The palette and brushstroke are consistent through this exhibition of generally large, busy canvases.  There is an underlying range of organic hues – browns and greens – accentuated by generous dolops of contrastive pink and blue.  These colors inevitably bring the late landscapes of Pierre Bonnard to mind, although the artist whose color range they more closely resemble is fellow American Louis Finkelstein.  While completely abstract, there is a sense of narrative as the eye reads the canvas as if a calligraphy scroll in a way that recalls Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” (1943).  Bizarrely, however, the agitated sexuality of these paintings mostly brings to mind a younger contemporary of Mr. Poons’s with whom one would not instinctively compare him: Cecily Brown.  These paintings look like Browns with the figures and old master references removed.

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Michael Brenson, Martha Schwendener, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Su-en Wong at Danese, Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham and Thomas Nozkowski at Max Protetch.

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“Ying Li” at the Painting Center until February 28 (52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-343-1060). Prices: $1,800-$4,000.

“Marc Quinn” at Mary Boone Gallery until February 28 (541 West 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-752-2929). Prices: $125,000-$140,000.

Jackson Pollock famously answered an inquiry about his influences with a belligerently short shortlist: Picasso and Albert Pinkham Ryder. A valid description of Bill Jensen – who is himself an eloquent and impassioned supporter of the maverick American romantic – would be a synthesis of Pollock and Ryder.

Like Pollock, Mr. Jensen is blessed with lyricism of line, a kind of suprapersonal calligraphy that is nonetheless intensely his own. But his brush is always tempered, questioned, energized by awkwardness: He is like the young Pollock in temper, mature Pollock in fluency.

Which is where Ryder, with his oxymoronically dark luminosity, comes in. Although Mr. Jensen’s palette is nothing like Ryder’s-the American master was a reckless experimenter with bitumen– it has something of hisspiritual weight. Mr. Jensen’s more recent work – some of which is hanging at Danese Gallery – reveals newfound chromatic boldness. This show brings together two series of works, both from last year: a densely colored and textured set, “Duo Duo,” worked in egg-and-oil tempera, and “Drunken Brush,” a predominantly black-and-white set whose appropriately Zen-like title signals a close affinity with Oriental calligraphy.

A “salt of the earth” quality to Mr. Jensen’s color still reinforces the sense of his rootedness in nature, however. He seems at times to be willing himself to become an agent of nature, refusing to settle for being a mere transcriber of its surfaces. He replaces some of the intellectual ambition to be found in Terry Winters (an artist he sometimes resembles) or in Thomas Nozkowski, with an innocencenot to be found in these more canny practioners.
His achievement, however, is to embrace the spiritual without going gooey.

In eloquent denial of William James’s distinction between tough- and tender-mindedness, his forms and touch reveal traces of both. [no break]In similar vein, he collapses the dichotomy of fast and slow: The movements he describes and embodies seem, like geological forces, at once wayward and inevitable. They evolve at a mind-numbingly gradual pace yet suddenly jerk forward cataclysmically.
To my eye, Danese has overhung Mr. Jensen’s dense, tense, and exhaustive paintings by around 30%, which will mislead cursory visitors with an impression of repetition and sameness. To the converted, however, this testing hang is an added incentive for repeat visits.

For a more traditional but no less spirited pursuit of the lyrical in landscape, be sure to catch Ying Li’s show at SoHo’s Painting Center before it closes this weekend. Eighteen works reveal bewildering diversity both of influence and of pictorial ambition.

She has a touch to die for in terms of bravura painthandling and innate good taste. In her best works, she manages to endow brushstroke with the power of metaphor. Different brushes and their tips sometimes converge in a single canvas in a Dionysian orgy of painterliness.

Often, in works that look to Turner or Boudin or to more contemporary examples like Louis Finkelstein or Stuart Shils, Ms. Li is inspired to gorgeous but familiar effects, to a comfortable expression of the pleasures of landscape. In other works, she pushes further towards abstraction, almost offering a pastiche de Kooning, for instance, in “Riverstroke #1” (2003), but with no less tasteful a result.

Only in two or three works, however, does a restlessness reveals itself, an indication that jouissance is not enough. “Vermont, Deep Fall” (2003), for instance, shares the frenzied logic of Soutine to suggestthat expressiveness and a sense of structure need not be mutually exclusive. Ms. Li’s best paintings pulsate with emotional and pictorial complexity.

Marc Quinn has always been one of the more thoughtful of the “YBAs,” the notorious band of young Brits collected in the 1990s by Charles Saatchi. True, Mr. Quinn went for the jugular with “Self” (1991), a self-portrait head made of 8 frozen pints of his own blood, but his work is usually richer and more historically layered than that of his shamelessly shallow and opportunistic peers.

His current show at Mary Boone finely balances the poignant and the prurient. He has had 11 carvings made of people with missing or deformed limbs, victims of birth defects or misadventures. These enervatingly literal carvings have the deathly dullness of the neo-classical Bertel Thorvaldsen. But by finding models of a certain readymade modernity, Mr. Quinn can be said to have married the academicism of that dreary Dane with the biomporphic oddity of Henry Moore or Arp – a fusion typical of Britain’s young neo-conceptualists.

Mr. Quinn was shortlisted for a competition staged at London’s National Gallery recently for a work for the empty pedestal in Trafalgar Square. He chose to depict Alison Lapper, a thalidomide child, now grown and in an advanced state of pregnancy. He argued that it complemented Horatio Nelson atop his column on two counts: overcoming handicap is as heroic as fighting for one’s nation, while the admiral is famously missing a limb and an organ.
Seen alone, Ms. Lapper was indeed heroic. But amassed in a whole Valhalla of the deformed and the maimed, Mr. Quinn’s project begins to seem a little sick. That said, the figures are of handsome, strong, and athletic men and women, dignified in the titles with their real names. If they inspire some viewers to confront their own squeamishness and preconceptions about beauty and wholeness, they will have achieved something.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 26, 2004

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October 5 – November 3

Danese
535 West 24th Street
between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City
212 223 2227

Shirley Kaneda’s paintings feed on contradiction, ambiguity and surprise. They are lively and even decorative but also deadly serious and tightly controlled.  They are beholden to modernism – especially, as she indicated in an earlier exhibition, to Jo Baer, Frank Stella and the Paris-based American painter, Shirley Jaffe – but Kaneda’s paintings have post-modernist aims. They anticipate every question, are willful and dryly calculating in their effort to define the historical moment and are also didactic, indulgent and earnest. These are all good things.

Kaneda grounds the work in a reach back to late modernism – a generally agreed upon historical location – and through impersonal labor-intensiveness.  The catalogue for the exhibition has an opening photographic image of the artist holding her wrist while she places a brushstroke with the other hand.  In an interview in the same publication, she states that she is interested in the “feminine”. Her praxis, based on a social reading of the feminine, is remarkably similar to Emily Dickinson’s: imaginative freedom within extreme restraint. The laborious working process illustrated in the photograph points to the studio as a theatre of self-identity.

The imagery that she works with is plucked from the virtual world of the computer and processed through its myriad resources, then transferred by traditional mechanical means onto the canvas. The overall effect is that of the canonical white rectangle submerged in a bitform approximation of liquidity. As the long virtual brush dips into the digitalized ground, computerized bubbles float to the surface and colors appear.

In Elegant Disorder (2007), for example, the flat puckered wave starting on the upper left modulates from fuchsia to lipstick red. As the eye moves through the space, an apparitional architecture of broken plastic bubbles takes on color before dissipating. Kaneda also modulates the paint to produce her version of aerial perspective, a kind of background fuzziness upon which the foreground “events” can float. Another section a little further down the canvas, has the kind of painterly move we associate with Jonathan Lasker. A flesh-colored relief area, built up in broken pieces of paint, has a course of linear illusionistic brushstrokes running over its dried excrescence, obviously brought in a later point. 

Elements are brought together during slow improvisation, culminating in the achievement ofall areas being of equal interest, a goal Kaneda appears to share with Ingrid Calame, who was showing nearby.  It also reminded me of the current exhibition of mostly late de Kooning’s that is currently up on nearby 21st street, where the master displayed his pictorial aplomb in bestowing a legacy of abstracted broken synapses depicted by the strokes and scrapes of Windsor Newton hues and frosty whites within the picture plane.

Kaneda occupies similar territory in replicating a kind of loopy wasteland.  Her wholesale stylization of this same painted space implicitly criticizes painterly abstraction. Kaneda’s paintings use sweat equity to underline her belief that loose gestures cannot convey authentic expression. Multiple, contradictory meanings are deliberately built into the work.

I found Passive Vigor (2007) – the sparest and most classical of the group – almost beautiful. An icy white atmospheric band opens up the center, fading to a pale lime sherbet on the right and faded grape stain on the left.  Kaneda’s strange paintbox ukiyo-e broaches hang near the perimeters. The weather here is cold, but not crystalline, and melting. It seemed most clear that this painting was constructing a moment.  All the paintings are like battles won through sheer determination. Their saving grace is that that is not the point.

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