May 26 to June 25, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 647 1044

Karen Arm burrows into essential formulae of nature. Her motifs have been few, but comprehensive: tree branches, water droplets, spider webs, smoke, stars, and waves. Or rather, her motifs are distilled from those sources, broken down into constants and variables. From here she reassembles a vision of nature truer than optical transcription. Her spare, articulate images of restless seawater, for instance, probe beneath the surface, beyond the moment, to capture its fluid drapery. Her work bears superficial similarity to that of Vija Celmins, particularly the water images, but in contrast to photo-based drawings by the latter — uncanny ghosts which provide only the tease of nourishment — Arm really wants to shows us how water works.

There are two motifs in exclusive rotation at Arm’s current show at P.P.O.W.: “suns,” being centripetal accumulations of small circles into enormous ones; and “wavy rays,” in which numerous bendy lines radiate from a central point. The painting Untitled (Yellow Wavy Ray on Brown Red) (all works 2016) is the best of an impressive bunch. Here the radiating line motif, flexible and exact, can be read as a gathered topknot of angel hair, perhaps, or the pulsating rings of a pebble dropped in a pond. If the exquisite dry precision of Arm’s works on paper often eclipses the glazed depths of her larger canvases, in this superb painting the layers of acrylic mix richly, projecting graphic energy forward with wriggling intensity. The complex method of Arm’s color is left for the viewer to contemplate on the dripped edges that fold back to the wall like photochemical rainbows at the bleeding margins of pre-digital art prints; here one sees that the painting’s basic two-color scheme is woven from many strands.

The wavy rays recall Bridget Riley’s Current, and thus of Philip Taaffe’s tribal re-enactments of her imagery. The central burst has also been a device of Mark Grotjahn and an occasional motif of James Siena and Marsha Cottrell. These artists, along with Daniel Zeller, Jacob El Hanani, the late Lori Ellison, and many other participants in the thriving afterlife of linear abstraction, think algorithmically to some extent — most notably Siena, whose gamesmanship is steadily electric. But to a greater extent than most of her peers, Arm is oriented toward the singular, concentrated image. Her true forbear may be Agnes Martin, whose horizontal lines hover above specificity, in search of pure spirit.

If picturing was anathema in a previous age of linear abstraction, artists working in that vein today take inoculating sips of scientific illustration, decorative and shamanic arts, Op and Pop, 19th-century engraving, the animism of Paul Klee, comics, comix, and other pathogens that the scrupulous Riley and the wise Martin steered clear of — as does Arm in her own way, her steely eye always striving to build a convincing image, not a quotation or diagram, out of persistent studio ritual. So it is with the second motif in the current show, the suns, which began some years ago, an order of magnitude more distant, as “globular clusters” — galactic-scaled works that were comparatively dispersed, pinprick stars against unknowable void. In the new work, we are far more quickly drawn into dense gravity. Incalculable accumulations of tiny, concentric bursts of color thicken, in some of them, to haptic hallucinations of pebbly skin or bubbling tissue at a thermonuclear center.

Biographical information is irrelevant to interpreting such formally driven work, but as Nancy Princenthal points out in her biography of Martin, it nevertheless helps to know that her subject grew up in the sere plains of Saskatchewan, and that she was at times overwhelmed by mental illness; perhaps for Martin (as for Ellison) the balm of abstraction was a vital necessity. Arm nowhere puts forward the fact in titles or press releases, but she is personally frank about a long and difficult fight with breast cancer, and it is hard not to see that the suns are breast-like, and subject to a cellular logic bound to run amok — the ineluctable logic of supernovae and black holes.

As serious as these works are — as obsessive, cosmic and, possibly, autobiographical — they are full of lively questions about color and touch, compositional freedom and strategy, and the contours of taste. Untitled (Yellow and Red Sun on Blue) pushes things almost too far, into an excessively hard-won illusion of sphericality. It is as gaudy as an encrusted Lucas Samaras box, and in its own remarkable way, as mystical and gorgeous.

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Bruce Pearson: Paintings & Drawings” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts until June 14 (31 Mercer Street, at Grand Street, 212-226-3232)

It takes a real pro to pull together a group exhibition that identifies a significant trend in contemporary art. That is what veteran curator Maurice Tuchman (formerly of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has done in an important show, High & Inside, which closes this weekend at Marlborough Chelsea.

The ostensible commonality binding these nine artists, according to catalogue essayist Judd Tully, is “mapping, scheming, surveilling and plotting.” Each artist in his or her way balances the yin of the microscopic and the yang of the telescopic – although how quaint these scopes now seem in an age where DNA and satellites define our horizons.

However much they respond to the notations of geography, geology, sociology, or cell biology, these artists, who mostly emerged in the 1990s, are anything but a throwback to the systems-obsessed 1960s and 1970s. (Unless, of course, they are intent on adding a layer of retro-reference to already dense stylistic configurations: the peel-on readymade abstractions of Brad Hampton, for instance, simultaneously satirize the artistic formalism and techno-gimmickry of the 1960s.)

The artists in this show are post-conceptual in their concern to reintegrate the cerebral and the optical. Even the two flow-diagrammists among them, Beth Campbell, who makes tree of life configurations out of terse statements of variable outcomes to simple life situations, and Mark Lombardi, with his persnickety conspiracy-theorist constellations analyzing international monetary investments, avoid the anesthetic anti-form drudgery of vintage conceptualism. Their handwriting, their touch, has formal significance that integrates with the (superficially) predominant “message” or narrative in their work.

Others in the show veer in an opposite visual direction, towards overload: It is not form giving shape to information so much as information rendered as form. Steven Charles, for instance, paints gaudy, pseudo-psychotic contour lines that glow in enamel paint. In a meltdown of layers and categories, manmade roads and geological strata splice into one another.

In “High & Inside,” artists make raw form out of cooked information. In semiotic terms, they turn signifieds back into signifiers. You could argue, of course, that is what collage has been doing since Picasso and Braque discovered it. But here it is not just objects but systems that are being abstracted. Lisa Corinne Davis and John J. O’Connor make pretty patterns out of ugly data: racial stereotyping in her case, disasters and social vices in his. It is left to Fred Tomaselli and Daniel Zeller to force an equation between method and madness, making a magical connection between density of data and the zaniness with which their work is crafted. With Mr. Tomaselli, this has to do with the trance-like effect of his psychadelic collages, where high and inside are psychological states as much as depictive prospects. With Mr. Zeller, the nutty banknote-engraver obsessiveness of his renderings of aquifer retention maps unites form and content, as both bring to mind desperation and dryness.

***

Bruce Pearson’s new show at Ronald Feldman makes something truly sumptuous out of semiotics. Like the High Insiders discussed above, he comes out of an aesthetic investigation of language and systems. In terms of reduction versus complication, he and his peers are to conceptual art what Baroque was to the Renaissance. Put a better way, they put back with a vengeance the opticality shunned by conceptual art.

Mr. Pearson came to public attention in an important group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art project room in 1998, in which Mr. Tomaselli was a co-exhibitor. He is also part of the Williamsburg scene where the trailblazing gallery, Pierogi, exhibits Messrs. Charles, O’Connor, and Zeller. In Mr. Pearson’s work, however, it isn’t mapping but language that is deconstructed to head-spinning and eye-dazzling effect.

He appropriates wacko statements from the mass media. These have gotten tamer recently but a suitably off the wall example from the current show is “Cybergasm machines and male hysteria.” The typography is subjected to computer-generated distortion (not enough, regrettably, in some recent pieces where legibility threatens the balance of power between texture and text.) From these patterns, letters are hot wired in Styrofoam. The eventual carved and contoured surfaces are painted in scorching fluorescents and other funky hues.

His modus operandi and how it influences our view of what he is doing may seem to have a whiff about it of the kind of art for which you need to know the process to understand its point. But the first and last impression of a Pearson is sensual, not cerebral. Mercifully, in other words, there is madness in his method. There’s a compelling, psychedelic otherness at play in what could read as lunar landscape or nuclear fission.

One has to go back to Jasper Johns to find a visual artist so intently locking horns with type as a visceral, physical presence. It is almost tempting to read Mr. Pearson’s project as a riff on Mr. Johns, sending up the grayness and monotony of the older artist. But unlike so much art of the last few years, this isn’t conceptual art with a smile. Rather, there is a sense of something much bigger: the reinvention of abstract painting.

The key to understanding Mr. Pearson’s achievement – and that of the best among the “High & Inside” artists – is to realise that language and system and mapping are at the service of form, not the other way around. In a way, the semiotic and the systemic are to their abstraction what gesture was to the first generation New York School: something at once arbitrary and personal, determined yet unconscious, circumscribing yet unpredictable, and equally about structure and chance.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 5, 2003

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