Stuart Shils: Works on Paper
Davis & Langdale Company, Inc.
231 East 60th Street
New York City
212-838-0333

No other medium has watercolor’s blend of luminosity and directness, and none requires so sure and responsive a touch. With larger watercolors, it becomes even more difficult to maintain a spontaneous effect. Big dimensions, however, obviously present no problem for Susan Shatter, whose immense landscapes and seascapes at DFN Gallery show both a formidable technique and a remarkable freshness. These works are confined to two motifs: Southwestern desert canyons and rocky Maine shores, and they contain virtually no trace of human, animal, or plant life. Because of their downward point of view, only small strips of sky occasionally appear at their upper edges. This concentration on the elemental, though, allows a vital, organic exploration of whole environments.

Ms. Shatter works from preparatory studies, but even her largest watercolors have the fluidity and breadth of first-hand responses. Forms are confident and hues clear—even in shadows with multiple layers of color—so that the great masses in the six-foot-wide “High Desert I” (2005) sort lucidly into buttes and valleys spreading below one’s gaze. Orange and burnt sienna washes become a dramatic projection of rock in the foreground; its sides drop hundreds of feet to a rocky plain captured in darker washes of ultramarine, cerulean and crimson. Scarlet ranges of hills and green and pink valleys draw the eye, point by point, to the horizon of this inhospitable world awash with color.

The depiction of vast, exotic spaces in this watercolor and in its only slightly smaller companion “High Desert II” (2005) is dazzling, and yet I prefer the dramas of her seascapes. In four large works in the gallery’s main space, sea and rocks occupy approximately equal amounts of paper, so that their compositions resound with the penetrating entanglement of the two. In works like the nearly ten-foot-wide “Crash” (2006), Ms. Shatter maximizes the contrast of fluid and faceted worlds: the translucent depth of the sea, rolling with blues and greens and crested with white ribbons of foam; the prismatic array of warm, compact lights and darks. The visual collision invokes the sensation-saturating rhythms of the real thing—so startlingly that one struggles remember it’s only diluted pigments on paper.

Don’t overlook several small seascape studies in the gallery’s viewing room. These have every quality of the larger ones except the physical dimensions. If they’re less impressive technically, they show a wonderfully intimate, one-to-one correspondence between nature’s gestures and the artist’s responses, with that immediacy available only in watercolor.

If Ms. Shatter pursues wild expanses, Stuart Shils mines the nuanced and diminutive.

His recent monotypes at Davis & Langdale depict scenes from his hometown of Philadelphia as well as from trips to Ireland, Israel, Vermont and Indiana, but like his oil paintings they explore a relatively narrow niche: small, simplified compositions rendered in evocative, atmospheric strokes of color. All these prints measure about six inches square and date from 2006.

Mr. Shils’ painterly textures would seem ideally suited for timeless subjects, but in “From Guy’s Balcony, Ahad Ha’am Street #1,” he vigorously tackles the crisp, modern geometry of a modern, multi-story Tel Aviv building. Here, hues energize a straightforward composition. A vibrant deep blue sounds the shadowy cleft between two buildings, one of them partially covered by a lighter gray that has just the right pressure of a shadow cast by the other building. Above them, Mr. Shils’ masterful textures—brisk, but sensitively tuned—lends the sky a humming depth.

As is sometimes the case with his paintings, Mr. Shils’ monotypes can be over-reliant upon such textures. For instance, the approximated shapes and location of colors in “From Emek Ha Matzieva” leads to a certain slightness of effect, as if the artist were content with just invocations of atmosphere.

Hanging next to it, however, “Along 33rd Street, Strawberry Mansion, North Philly,” has a brightness of rhythm to match its hues. Here, colors not only shift restively about—moving in this case from the vibrant orange-reds of sunlit brick facades to the sky’s spacious cobalt blue—but also build with intense, concise sequences. After the march of orange-red brick, a shadowy violet cuts back abruptly across the buildings above the punctuating note of a tree. A deep blue diamond of roof, weighted by its location and color, provides the essential separation of buildings and sky.

On another wall, “Rooftops, Night Descending” is a true gem. With Turner-esque élan, Mr. Shils places a building in the mid-distance, so that its front, illuminated by late-afternoon sun, glows against the contrasting darks on its every side. A particularly dark blue plunges in space to one side; in it, a slender tower rises, the print’s lightest note, addressing us from afar. Small ragged notes of white—bits of the paper showing between strokes—attest to the energy of ink application, matched in this case by a dynamic conception of the subject.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun on October 26, 2006 under the title “Watercolors Wild and Tidy”

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October 9 – November 13, 2004

Giorgio Morandi: Paintings, 1950-1964” at
Lucas Schoormans Gallery
508 West 26th Street, Suite 11B
212 243 3159

December 4, 2004

A version of these reviews was first published in The New York Sun, October 14, 2004.

By MAUREEN MULLARKEY

The ghost of Bartleby the Scrivener hovers over Albert York, contemporary painting’s best known recluse. On view at Davis & Langdale are 25 paintings, all created before 1992, the last year the gallery received a canvas from him. This exhibition also includes 9 recent drawings abruptly submitted by the artist earlier this year.

Born in 1928, the painter came of age with Abstract Expressionism. He staked his place vis-a-vis the modern movement with passive resistance to its defining imperatives, much as Melville’s Bartleby countered demands with “I would prefer not to.”

While Ab Ex heralded its own significance on over-sized canvases, Mr. York preferred panels under a foot square. Pressure to make noise-pump it up, abandon representation-was quietly met by Mr. York’s bias for the visual world: small-scale landscapes, a pot of flowers, sometimes a cow or a memento mori. His subject matter is so ordinary as to be almost inadmissible. But it is ordinary in extraordinary ways.

Skill with the fabric of paint plus a refined palette combine to shift his renunciatory simplicity away from the margins inhabited by Sunday painters and eccentrics. The quality of his color marks him as a sophisticate whose modernity knows its own roots.

His greens, derived from French landscape tradition, are delectable. Spare compositions divide into light and dark zones, the drama of contrast made more intricate by subtle blending of foreground and background color into the motif. While values remain distinct, admixtures of pigment harmonize the counterpoint.

“Two Pink Carnations in Glass Goblet” is a luscious example of his deceptive realism and the improvisational confidence that binds him to the moderns. A goblet of blooms is set, deadpan, in a meadow as if it had grown there. The foreground green is worked into the carnations, reducing the tone almost-not quite-to a middle gray. The optical effect is of a warm, dark pink with anything saccharine denied.

Entries for Albert York are scarce in the annals of modern art; yet every serious painter in New York knows his work (so do collectors). For good reason. He raises simple sights to the dignity of painting with an imaginative el n that strikes the viewer as something deeply felt. In a 1974 essay, Fairfield Porter wrote that it is his empathy that attracts. That, and modesty. Legions of artists pummel us with the weight of their ideas. Albert York would prefer two trees against the sky.

A more illustrious celebrant of a private world is Giorgio Morandi, lodestar for other painters and a poet of the familiar and unexceptional. Now on view at Lucas Schoormans are 6 stunning paintings plus two works on paper in a loan exhibition that was several years in the making. It concentrates on work from the last fifteen years of Morandi’s life, his most mature and exquisitely nuanced.

Volumes have already been written about the formal structure and spatial organization of Morandi’s painting: the distilled architecture of homely items compressed on a tabletop, each adjustment finely calibrated to break the monastic silence of the whole. The same household objects repeat like mantras throughout his work.

No middle ground exists for the audience. One is either captivated (as I am) or bored by his seemingly narrow range: penetrating distinctions so unassuming that you have to work at observing them. Too see the world in a grain of sand or an arrangement of bottles and boxes is an acquired taste. A decision. Everything depends on one’s attraction-or none-to Morandi’s subtlety, a dynamic attentiveness that, were it not for the physicality of paint, comes close to an act of prayer.

The word “contemplative” is overused in relation to art in general and to Morandi in particular. Contemplation of what? and for what end? Your tolerance for these two questions shapes the nature of your response to the work. It helps to know what motivated Morandi’s mastery; it was more than paint.

Morandi was an ardent reader of Pascal, a 17th century mathematician, physicist and passionately religious man. The painter took heart and direction from a man (credited with originating the theory of probability) who lived what he proclaimed: “Let a mite be given to him [the reader]. Let him see therein an infinity of universes.” Morandi had no need to leave Bologna. Infinity was there on the Via Fondazza.

It is commonplace to label Morandi a precursor to Minimalism because of the severity of his methods and materials. But art-historical pigeonholing misses the animating core of his originality. Morandi’s painting embodied his convictions. For these, look to Pascal, not academic categories. The spatial ambiguities and linear evasions of these still lifes emulate Pascal’s refusal to fix the finite: “Let us not look for certainty and stability.” There is nothing minimal in Morandi’s affirmations of material uncertainty.

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Stephan Balkenhol at Barbara Gladstone Gallery until May 31 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-9300). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices

“Tony Oursler: Recent Works” at Metro Pictures until June 6 (519 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-7100). Prices: $45,000

“Bruce Gagnier: Sculpture, 1989-2003” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art until June 13 (50 E. 78th Street, Ste. 2A, between TK, 212-439-9605). Prices: $6,000-$12,000

Anyone who takes an interest in sculpture can’t fail to notice the yawning gulf between “public” artists and their art-world peers. You can be fêted by museums, collectors, and the press and yet never get a bite of the commission cherry. Yet those who *do* often crave the recognition of gallery shows and reviews. Harry Roseman is rare in this split profession: Respected within the art world, he just completed a 600-foot-long frieze at JFK’s International Air Terminal. Millions will breeze past “Curtain Wall,” like it or no.

I haven’t seen the piece, but on the evidence of his current show of related materials at Davis & Langdale, I’m tempted to book Kennedy next flight – Newark man though I am. Mr. Roseman invests his curtain motif with formal and psychological depth. From photographs, the Kennedy commission, characteristically circumspect for this artist, looks to be rich in metaphors of arrival and expectation, theater and homeliness: a Statue of Liberty for the postmodern age.

Mr. Roseman’s curtains reference old masters – Schongauer’s engravings and Piero’s paintings – as much as the drapery of medieval carving. But he also “draws” – with a camera – from life. Exhibited alongside his sculptural reliefs are perceptive but unpatronizing observations of drapery surreally at play in the world: Louche, bordello-red window dressings in a French café thêatre; incongruously high-chroma tarpualins amid old-world rickety farm equipment. The netting around a crop of tobacco in Connecticut becomes a canvas, making what’s behind seem painterly.

Unfortunately, too much is crammed into this show for its own good. Davis & Langdale is an ambitious gallery in pokey premises. The photographs and a harassed-looking wall drawing over-determine how the sculptures are to be interpreted. Their true marvel, especially in the non-colored reliefs in clay or gypsum, is a subtly harnessed anthropomorphism that needs space to flutter.

Stephan Balkenhol’s latest show of free-standing sculptures and carved reliefs closes this weekend at Barbara Gladstone. The German sculptor, who lives and works in rural France, is internationally and deservedly renowned. Marshalling incredible technique with understated force, he can be thought of as a young sculptural counterpart of Alex Katz. There is an aloof poignancy common to them that is at once tough and vulnerable. They similarly reconcile opposites: Awkwardness and fluency, bruteness and sensitivity, economy and detail.

Rough and smooth cohabit effortlessly in a Balkenhol. Sometimes he seems, literally, to draw with an axe, and even where he obviously is using a more delicate implement, he manages to balance tender specifics – especially in hand and face gestures – with an all-over robustness. A couple of large architectural reliefs that depict Chartres cathedral and a castle balance intricacy and consistency in a way that’s worthy of Canaletto. Mr. Balkenhol likes soft, blond woods like ply and wawa, which he keeps fresh-looking with bright paint, rough finish, and pentimenti.

Another relief, this time of a “man in space” from 2003, places the figure in a deeper register than the “ground” – outer space – creating an energizing optical ambiguity. Often his carving technique leaves behind burr, making the chippy surfaces at once vulnerable and animated, like the mortals he depicts. Mr. Balkenhol is alive to the meaning of his means to a degree unprecedented in the current scene.

Tony Oursler is showing a couple of doors down from Gladstone, at Metro Pictures. Like Stephan Balkenhol, he has a trademark style, but comparison of the two artists is an object lesson in the distinction between originality and novelty. It’s the American, with his gimmick worn thin, who comes across the loser.

Mr. Oursler’s contribution to the world of forms is the “video effigy,” a projection of faces onto abstract sculptural objects. In this new body of work, in contrast to the looser, more ghostly puppets familiar from earlier in his career, the knee to waist-high supports are solid structures. These include a donut and various balls and biomorphs. “Coo” (2003) arranges two smaller egg shapes on a bigger one beneath to read like a Mickey Mouse head (an apter metaphor for his artistic project than was perhaps intended). Three separate videos project – in disconcerting misregistration of a mouth and eyes – a person in green makeup squeaking away in plaintive baby talk. The pinkness of a salivating orifice and the whiteness of teeth and eyeballs aid and abet the surreal nastiness of the piece. Technically clever, moderately amusing, and easily forgettable, Mr. Oursler’s is the mannerism of an art-world moment.

Speaking of mannerism, what on earth is to be made of the sculpture of Bruce Gagnier, showing in a packed installation at Lori Bookstein? Mannerist in an art historical sense, this work brings to mind the bodily contortions of the later 16th century. There is also something of the grotesqueness of the modern American painter Ivan Albright: Mottled surfaces read literally as gruesome skin disorders.

If Mr. Gagnier were exhibiting in Chelsea or Williamsburg, might the veteran sculptor be mistaken for a young protégé of hot button appropriationist John Currin and master of the abject Paul McCarthy?

It is a subversive thought, but also a misreading that falls away with calm appreciation – which, for all their weirdness, these pieces compel. Underneath the existential angst of Mr. Gagnier’s disconcerting surfaces and deeply awkward anatomies, a genuine classicism yearns to break free. The real fusion here is of late Roman bronzes and Giacometti.

This article first appeared in The Sun, May 29, 2003

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