Exhibitions considered in this review: Joyce Kozloff: Social Studies at French Institute: Alliance Française, February 25 to April 25, 2015; Joyce Kozloff: Maps + Patterns at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25; Mapping Brooklyn at BRIC, February 26 to May 3, 2015 and at the Brooklyn Historical Society, February 26 to September 6, 2015

Maps have always sought to express more than mere geographical information. In ancient Assyrian carved stones, traditional compass-based cartographic inferences sat alongside pointers to more epic, mythic realms at the very edges of the earth. In medieval mappaemundi the contorted shapes of Europe, Africa, and Asia appeared pockmarked not just with major rivers and cites but with biblical events and monstrous races. In the maps of the modern period this same terrain was re-imagined as a political geography, with emergent states and historic empires battling for prominence across documents that drew cultural borders and affirmed legal assertions to territory. Today, even, Google Maps allows us to pepper the ground beneath our feet with personalized information of our own or of our peers: routes and recommendations layered atop of streets in a manipulatable, ever-evolving cityscape.

These ideas of subjectivity and fiction make maps particularly fertile ground for those contemporary artists who, like cartographers for millennia before them, remain invested in both expressing and re-shaping the world around them. Perhaps foremost amongst them is Jocye Kozloff, whose work appears in recent exhibitions in four spaces across New York City: at DC Moore Gallery, the Alliance Française, BRIC, and the Brooklyn Historical Society.

First rising to prominence in the early 1970s as an original member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff became known as much for her politics as her work. She advocated against the dominance of a predominantly painterly, male, and overly-conceptual art world, arguing for the patterned and the decorative – with its sense of craft, femininity, repetition, triviality, and a more colorful or traditional “beauty” — as a foil to this status quo. As Kozloff wrote in her 1976 statement, “10 Approaches to the Decorative,” (a withering rejoinder to the Minimalist “negations’l” of Ad Reinhardt et al.), work must be: “anti-pure, anti-purist, anti-puritanical, anti-minimalist, anti-post minimalist, anti-reductivist, anti-formalist, anti-pristine, anti-austere…” In place of these negations Kozloff affirmed the “subjective, romantic, imaginative, personal, autobiographical, whimsical, narrative, decorative, lyrical…”

It is not hard to see how the cartographic, with all its intricacies, subjectivities, and imagination, might become incorporated into such a project. Formally, the tessellated, patchwork blocks of pieces like Hidden Chambers (1975-76) or the more recent If I Were An Astronomer (Mediterranean) (2014) recall plan views of cityscapes or the repeated contour lines of geographical surveys; and materially too, her ceramic floor and wall mosaics, such as An Interior Decorated (1978-79) or Tile Wainscot (1979-81), evoke the sixth-century map of the Byzantine world set into the floor of the church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan.

But more often, historical maps are deliberately knitted into her two-dimensional works, recreating and then reworking them in a number of different ways. Two of Kozloff’s contributions to Mapping Brooklyn (BRIC and BHS), Waves (2015), rework maps of the borough with her trademark patterns that serve to draw focus onto or away from particular aspects of the original cartography: swirling patchwork rivers lead the eye towards the monotone land, or streets blocked out in green washes and red tessellated stickers ping out amongst otherwise white street grids. At the Alliance Française, collaged octopi stretch their tentacles portentously over classroom maps of Europe; the didactic qualities of geographical and historical knowledge merge with a playful air of schoolchild fantasy that the contents of textbooks enjoy amongst their intended readership. Elsewhere in her work, the recent The Tempest (2014), beveled squares of traditional South Asian maps act as a backdrop for appliqué figures with a more political edge. Masculine military figurines — the sort of guys with a tendency to carve up and dominate the mapped land beneath them — abound in cut-out roundels, while counteracting these, the hemispherical domes of halved globes rise from the canvas, maternal and breast-like, their brass-embossed spinning tips transformed into pointed metallic nipples.

The political and the decorative remain intertwined in Kozloff’s work, the urgency of her social commentary never far from view. This is felt most keenly in one of her largest and most affecting works, Targets (1999-2000), a sculptural arrangement of 24 curved canvases into a nine-foot walk-in globe, the centrepiece of Mapping Brooklyn. From the outside, the cartographic sense of a constructed world could not be more apparent. A structural, wooden, rib-like shell, is held together by exposed bolts to create a definable yet insistently fictional sphere for the viewer to enter. Upon stepping through a removable segment into the shape, stooping one’s way to a sonically muffled space, one is struck first visually by the surrounding canvases: abstract (but not minimalist), the segmented and patinated blocks appeal to an aesthetic that runs throughout Kosloff’s work, bright tones and wiggly bands of contoured color creating a patchwork sense of stepped and enveloping depth. Yet upon closer inspection, the markings on the maps are not only abstract colours and more typical cartographics — city names, roads, compass points, and weather signals — but also the hatched vertical and horizontal notches of a target scope. Red pinpoints of heat seeking missiles and the coordinates of radar grids shift perception from the artistic to the militaristic: each location represented is in fact a site of major US military activity since the Second World War, their unnervingly close-cropped focus in this pre-9/11 work a prescient foreshadowing of the Drone Wars of today.

The appearance of Kozloff’s art in happy coincidence across three contemporaneous shows seems to mark a moment of reflection on a career stretching back over forty years. But if anything, the simultaneous presence of her work across the city serves to emphasize Kozloff’s consistency, and her constitution for a change in world perceptions: not just a reclaiming of the mapped geographical world, but of the art landscape too.

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March 26 to April 25, 2015
535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor
Between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 247 2111

Alexi Worth’s latest solo exhibition at DC Moore, “Green Glass Doors,” consists of six paintings tied together by similar size, content, and a Coke-bottle green palette. The theme of the show, as implied by the title, involves glass doors that appear to be the entrances to condominium buildings or boutique shops. The exact identity of the doors is ultimately unimportant, as Worth seems more interested in their formal qualities: his paintings are, like the doors some of them depict, simultaneously transparent and closed.

Worth uses non-traditional supports and techniques in his work. Painting with airbrushed acrylic on nylon mesh or Mylar has the effect of layering illusionistic space on top of the painting’s actual, material space. In areas where the surface is translucent, the stretchers and the wall behind the painting can be glimpsed. This gives each painting two sources of space: the illusionistic space of the painted image and the space behind the painting that can be seen through the mesh. These perspectives often clash with each other, such that perspectives cannot be synchronized to create a coherent sense of spac

365 (all paintings 2015) presents the strongest example of this, with a head-on view of a glass door and the various opaque notices and work permits taped to it. The door is a convincing example of illusionistic painting verging on trompe l’oeil. The painting’s literal interior space, seen through the translucent mesh, presents another perspective that contradicts the painting’s illusionism. Looking through the painting, the depth of the stretchers is inconsistent with the depth of the illusion. 365 isn’t a mere anamorphic trick: there is no magic spot where the viewer can stand to make these viewpoints snap into place. On the contrary, the painting flips back and forth between illusion and reality, never settling in one position for very long

Voyeurism — the perverse joy of seeing what one isn’t supposed to see — is another recurrent motif in this show. In fact, all of the works on view have some voyeuristic elements, whether in terms of content (a hand reaching under a fig leaf) or material (an inventory number written on a stretcher bar). The painting Green Bedroom shows the entangled bodies of a couple in flagrante delicto, each groping under the other’s shirt. With their heads outside the frame and their bodies devoid of personality, these lovers are anonymous to the viewer. They could represent a consequence of living behind glass doors: the desire to be seen and the need to frustrate the act of viewing.

Faced with a locked glass door, one can peek inside, but sooner or later there is a wall that cannot be breached without permission. In Worth’s paintings it is the literal wall behind the canvas that frustrates the surface’s illusion of depth. This frustration prevents the paintings from resolving into architectural studies or green and white erotica. In the places where the wall is visible through the mesh, the painting ceases to be a flat canvas and becomes a veil that hangs between two ways of seeing, between the real and the illusionary, between painting and the world.

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Jane Wilson, who died January 13 aged 90, will be remembered for majestic, multilayered, shimmering paintings of land, sea and sky inspired by the coastal topography and weather of the East End of Long Island.

Her paintings are a testament to a lifelong engagement with the history and substance of painting, with its potential to simultaneously reflect the world and make a universe entirely of its own. Every inch of her canvases is oxygenated and alive, evoking the experience of sensing undercurrents beneath the surface of a still pond. In Time Change (2011), for instance, Wilson’s characteristic low horizon line anchors the canvas, and we can perceive what she described as “looking for the color behind the color.” Suffused with horizontal bands of peach and pink of varying widths and delicate facture, the painting rewards us for attentive looking, revealing a range of overtones of scumbled color that pulsates and recedes. In paintings that “aim for moments of strong sensation,” as she put it, Wilson belongs to a tradition of transcendental American landscape that includes Albert Pinkham Ryder, Martin Johnson Heade, and Joan Mitchell.

Born in 1924 on a family farm in Iowa, Wilson knew the sequences and consolations of a life lived close to the land. “Growing up on a farm…you lived at the bottom of a sea of weather,” she told landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. She attended the University of Iowa just as visiting artists such as Philip Guston were transforming the art department with the energy of the New York art world. In 1948, with an M.A. in painting, she married fellow student John Gruen, the writer and composer, and they moved to New York. Their daughter, Julia, was born 10 years later.

In 1952 Wilson became a founding member of the Hansa Gallery, one of several artist-run art galleries that opened in the early 1950s in New York City. Endowed with a striking, natural beauty that evoked Modigliani, and that endured to the end of her life, she supported herself as an artist by working as a fashion model. When a dealer told her that she wasn’t handling her career properly by modeling, she responded, “Well, tell people about my years in academia.”

Over the next several years she moved away from an early abstract style influenced by Gorky and others. “I found myself in one of those lucid moments that occurs every twenty years and I realized I wasn’t a second generation Abstract Expressionist,” she told writer Mimi Thompson. “I looked at the ingredients of what I was painting and felt an uncontrollable allegiance to subject matter, and to landscape in particular.”

In 1960, when she joined Tibor de Nagy, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her painting The Open Scene. She and John bought an old carriage house with a hayloft in Water Mill, Long Island, where they found themselves at the fulcrum of a community of artists, composers, and writers. The mercurial ocean light and expansive terrain that had drawn such predecessors as Thomas Moran gave Wilson a mutable subject that she would address for the next forty years. The Water Mill house became a Long Island Rue de Fleurus — a spirited gathering place for some the most important artists and intellectuals of the mid-20th century. A white wicker couch on the patio served as the set for Gruen’s group portraits, whose lively subjects remind me of the civic officers in Frans Hals’ banquet portraits — only tanned and happier — in their Lilly Pulitzer print sundresses and Ban-Lon polo shirts, holding cigarettes and iced beverages. John’s photographs document the halcyon days of camaraderie among creative friends, lovers (and rivals) including Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Stella Adler, Fairfield and Anne Porter, Frank O’Hara, Cornelia and Lukas Foss, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Miriam Shapiro, and Paul Brach. For a while the two Janes painted together — facing each other, each doing her own work — in a bedroom in a rented house on Flying Point Road. Also born in 1924, Freilicher died the month prior to Wilson.

I love Wilson’s deceptively simple titles; they are saturated with meaning, and never contain more than they need to. The titles have a sonic/rhythmic pulse as they play with figures of speech. Call it a Day, Electric Midnight, and Torrid Day signal movement, and sum up twenty-four hours of weather or demanding work in a few choice words.

I worked with Jane Wilson at the National Academy where she served as president from 1992-94 (she was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters). In 2011, at her first exhibition at DC Moore’s downtown space (she had joined the gallery in 1999) I asked her how she felt about seeing her paintings in the bright halogen light of a Chelsea venue. Straightening her back at this question she said, “Well, Rebecca, your paintings have to stand up in any light!” Jane was genuinely interested in my own work and we talked about the challenge of painting things that were fleeting — atmosphere, for example. Now, whenever I pass the Pine Barrens on the Long Island Expressway and turn off at Manorville toward the Montauk Highway, it is forever a Jane Wilson sky.

Rebecca Allan is a painter. She will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Fjord/Mountain/River, at the Herron School of Art at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, April 3–29, 2015. She is represented by Patricia McGrath in Bridgehampton.

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Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

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February 9 to March 17, 2012
535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor,
between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 247-2111

Janet Fish, the veteran realist, is known for an opulent palette and masterfully free paint application. This show of a dozen of her luminous still lives spanning the decade from 1999 to 2009 has all the feminist clarity that has made her a touchstone since the 1960s.  Her essays in domestic focus – everyday glass and plastic wrapped fruit, borrowed antique textiles, autumnal branches, souvenir toys – are at once poetic and political. Combining defined movement with detailed arrangement, Fish’s still lives mirror her reality: shelves of glass and pottery, both in the artists Soho and Vermont studios, reflect many years of collecting. She has the ability to infuse the ordinary with hallucinatory beauty.

Fish is the product of an impressive artistic lineage: her grandfather was Charles Voorhees, the American Impressionist, while her mother Florence was a sculptor and potter. Janet was raised in the Caribbean and her uncanny dissection of light might indeed reflect her island upbringing.

The works in this show recall the grand scale of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant artistic movement during her formative years. At Yale in the sixties she studied with Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein; her early examinations of everyday domestic objects introduced new subject matter to still life. Her work evolved from monochrome beginnings to the evocative tableaux of the present with their passionate palette and personal context.

In Blue Decanter, Polka-Dot Bowl, Suzani, (2009) the poppy, wild lily and lupine bouquet may well have been picked from the artist’s verdant Vermont garden. An anchoring green Fiesta pitcher, replete with voluptuous reflection, could be a treasure unearthed in a local yard sale. The playful wooden figurines in Russian Dolls, (2009) are juxtaposed with ruby glass cups and an opalescent blue bowl. Tassels of an embroidered fabric provide a vibrant frame, and the inclusion of lushly blooming roses echoes the handcrafted fabric. A reflective blue glass tabletop is the magical unifier.

There’s a   seductive randomness to the complex celebratory summer scene of the show’s largest piece, Balloons, (1999).  Light infused pastels evoke a clear hot New England afternoon. People are an uncommon delight in Fish’s work. The frolicking children in the grass are no more beautifully detailed then the perfect facets of an empty cut glass bowl. But Fish is a meticulous, if organic art director.  Landscape, arranged objects and figures, all amplified by Fish’s unswerving brush, create a dynamic, hyper-realistic harmony.

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February 3 to March 12, 2011
525 West 22 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 247-2111

In January, DC Moore Gallery relocated from Fifth Avenue to more spacious premises in way trendier Chelsea. This was a savvy move on the part of the gallery’s principal, Bridget Moore: the new galleries, that look to be twice as big as the former gallery with ceilings twice as high, affords a grand and serious space.  Six recent paintings by Robert Kushner and a presentation of his amazing “Scriptorium” series, comprising hundreds of renderings of blossoms, plants and leaves inscribed on the pages of antique books, inaugurates the new space, along with a smaller show of Romare Bearden collages in the project room.  Kushner’s Scriptorium has occupied the artist’s complete attention for more than a year. It only serves to confirm me as a deep admirer of an under-celebrated artist often penalized for his devotion to beauty.

“Scriptorium: Devout Exercises from the Heart” takes its title from the room in medieval monasteries where monks copied out books by hand. The work provides compelling evidence that Kushner, for whom drawing is a spiritual as well as an artistic discipline, has become one of our most accomplished as well as original draftsmen. His study and practice of Chinese brush painting and Japanese calligraphy and his extensive, dedicated, seasonal observations of nature underlie the notable finesse of this of this delicate yet colossal work.  Hundreds of individual drawings and paintings are pinned simply to the wall with dressmaker pins. Never installed in the same way twice, this flexible tour de force of extremely varied approaches to depicting flowers and plants marries the diversity of the botanical world to antique artifacts of world literature.  The latter is represented by various pages from discarded and damaged books and manuscript pages—often foxed or even charred on the edges—retrieved from French Christmas poems, pages of Noh plays old, handwritten letters and other such sources.

On each sheet a flower, a branch or a leaf reanimates lost texts and forgotten images.  Healing the hurt pages, Kushner reminds us that nature remains the foundation of beauty. Each of the sheets is being sold separately—at reasonable enough prices, in my opinion, to allow a collector to reassemble a smaller version of this installation of their own choosing.

On the other walls, six large, recent paintings are unified through pellucid, melting backgrounds of cerulean blue, sometimes buttressed with panels of gold leaf or oxidized copper leaf. Each is a painting of different seasonal wild flowers. Observed from June through October, the arrangements seems to float against a perfect summer sky. From Hawkweed to Queen Anne’s Lace, Kushner has given his plants a gaiety and grandeur that such humble wildflowers and weeds are usually not awarded. Their radiance defied the cold grey light of a season of ice and snow.

Alexandra Anderson-Spivy is a critic who lives and works in Manhattan. She wrote the monograph, Robert Kushner: Gardens of Earthly Delight, published by Hudson Hills Press (1997).

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Carly Berwick, Michèle C. Cone, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review El Anatsui at Jack Shainman, Damien Hirst at Gagosian, Yvonne Jacquette at DC Moore, and Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim.

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The clever paintings in Alexi Worth’s third show at D.C. Mooreappear at first glance to be organic abstractions.  On closer inspection however, they reveal themselves as wittily constructed close-up views of white collar scenarios, like the old-fashioned “brain teasers” in kids’ magazines.

Several paintings directly address the world of art professionals. “Monograph,” (all works 2008) is a further installment of the adventures of Gerberman, Worth’s balding art critic alter-ego familiar from previous shows. “Examples,”offers an art historian-eye view of slides on a light table that rhyme with distant filing cabinets.

And then there is the embarrassed crotch-shot voyeurism of “Eye To Eye” and “Thumbs,” so vulgar, yet he (or the viewer) can’t look away. This red-faced eroticism is further sublimated in works such as “Half in Hand,” “Arranger,” and “Speckled Pyramid” in which the comically and metaphorically sexual close-ups of fruit are subjected to a patterned abstracting treatment that disconcertingly resembles that déclassé pop trickster, M.C. Escher.

“Tear sheet,” a crumpled fashion ad conjures both Juan Gris’s Cubism, in its trompe l’oeil effect, and – in its staring paranoiac eye and tactile eroticism — Surrealism.

This is all great fun, and yet the total effect is not entirely humorous. After all Worth, who has for a number of years pursued a parallel career as a public intellectual (writing for “The New Yorker” and ArtForum among other publications) is known to be the serious sort.

For one thing, they are well painted.    The grainy, opaque paint surfaces and austere earth palette bespeak an unfashionably non-ironic desire to produce ‘quality’ paintings.  And there are learned references and quotations from art history and photography.    Worth has written memorably about Manet and photography, examining the flattening effects of quasi-photographic “frontal lighting” found in Manet and also relevant to Worth.  “Light areas bleach, backgrounds go dim or black…” with the effect of bringing the viewer nearer, he has written about Manet in a way reflects on his own imagery.

Except that, in his own painting, the deco-like stylizations and coolly finished surfaces tend to push the viewer back, despite the breezy narratives. In the end, well made as they are, the paintings sidestep a serious involvement with either expressive painterly transcription as  understood by Manet or the power of stand-alone abstraction, both so suspect in many art world quarters today.

He is in fact, even more unapolegetically a narrative painter, in his images about the image, than that other ironic realist to whom he has often been compared, John Currin.  By the reckoning of the current scene, this puts him on safer ground.

But maybe this is making unduly heavy weather out of things, and .like the comics Worth is known to admire, these works are –as they appear- simply fun  If so, that is not really such a bad place to be.

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JOE COLEMAN
Jack Tilton until October 4 (8 East 76 Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212 737 2221)

The girl in Alexi Worth’s “Beautiful Unfinishable Magazine” (all works 2006) crouches in a moulded plastic Eames chair, flicking through an exotic travel section, her features partially obscured by the looming shadow of a man, perhaps the artist before her.  Together they make an odd couple, as is the norm for an entire show where, despite the title, not a single couple is depicted, side by side, Arnolfini Marriage-style.  As with Van Eyck, though, masterful testing of the limits of depiction is the order of the day.

Stylistically, the magazine reader has a foot in two epochs.  Her left foot, nearest to the picture plane, is classically rendered with academic finesse; the other is roughed out and distorted, altogether more modernist—although, equally, it is reminiscent of Renaissance Mannerism.  (Jacopo Pontormo and Fiorentino Rosso join Phillip Pearlstein and William Bailey as protogenitors of Mr. Worth’s touch and vision.)

This foot in two camps stands as a metaphor for Mr. Worth’s strange enterprise.  He manages at once to relate to a contemporary sensibility, recalling the absurdist distortions of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, and a prevailing fascination with the language of the comic book, and at the same time to be genuinely old masterly. Despite rare actual citation of historic paintings, which when they do occur are unironic, his work is blessed with a genuine fascination for the oddities of seeing and depicting that belongs to an earlier, more innocent aesthetic order than our irony-filled postmodernism.

As a critic and scholar, Mr. Worth has long been fascinated by the impact of photography on painting, lecturing and writing, in particular, on Manet and photography.  A large black circle dominates “Lenscap” revealing a kind of amor vacuii; pinching finger tips confirm it to be the object of the title.  In the right corner, deliciously rhyming with the cap and fingers, is a detail of Titian’s Adam and Eve from the Prado, the matriach’s finger’s surrounding the forbidden fruit.  It is an elaborate allegory of painting’s fall from grace with the advent of photography, but it’s also a cutely observed contemporary museum moment.

Part of his endeavor, as a practionner, seems to be to discover subjects that only painting can reach —photorealistically probing areas that, actually, can only be painted.  “Double Sip,” for instance, captures a goofy, delicate moment of first date connectivity, when each party, taking a gulp of wine, spies the other, distorted within the glass, doing the same thing.  The result is a pretzel pile of multiply reflected, distorted, and overlapping fingers.  Requiring time to decode, the variously concentric and overlapping circles of bowl, stem, and base form a Venn diagram of surreptious intimacy.

Again, like the magazine girl’s feet, the couples fingers are back and forth between recognizability and the kind of artifice which actually arises through fastidious attention to the real.  In “Key Entering Lock” the reflected digits in the mottled brass plate, while feint and distored, are more naturalistic than the drastically cropped, finger and thumb squeezing the key, on the viewer’s side (it could be your fingers and key—one wishes the painting were hung lower to capitalize on the conceit) which seem schematic, if not abstract, although on closer thought you have to acknowledge that that is how it should be depicted.

There are more trompe-l’oeil antics in this show where the viewer is teased to identify the second half of the couple.  “Head and Shoulders” looks at first like an early twentieth-centurypersonage: the shiny, wavy black hair to the left, vinyl-record smooth, resembling a Léger woman, the weird vaguely phallic arrangement to its right a chess-piece from a Magritte.  But then the egg-like shape registers as a male bald pate face-down on the identically colored, and seemingly joined to it, woman’s shoulder.

Like Mr. Worth, Joe Coleman is an artist who collides the language of the comic book with Renaissance painting, although the result could not be more different. A painter, performance artist, musician and actor, Mr. Coleman enjoys cult status in the underground comic book scene, while a painting of his was included in a contemporary section of the 2001 Hieronymous Bosch exhibition at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, alongside Ensor and Dalí.

His works, as catalogue essayist Steven Holmes argues, recall the northern renaissance tradition of paintings created for domestic devotion that highlighted martyrdom and suffering.  As in comics and martyrologies alike, darkness pervades—quite literally in this exhibition, where the windows are blacked out, the lights focused exclusively on the painted panels.

His sensibility is decidedly gothic. He paints portaits that surround the person with vignettes from their life, other people who impacted their story (ancestors, adversaries), episodes, and related heraldry and symbolic figures.  There is a lot to look at, and read, in each picture, as with nutty, micrographic obsessiveness he envelopes images with stylized verbal legends.  Subjects are chosen from the dark side of modern history and Americana.  The titles reveal a cast of bandits, murderers, or artists—like Mr. Coleman himself—who are drawn to such personalities: “A New York Pirate (Albert Hicks), (1997); “Old Man Brown (John Brown)”, (1995); “Public Enemy Number One (John Dillinger)”, (1999); and paintings devoted to George Grosz, Henry Darger, Harry Houdini.   Other works explore personal narrative, filled with phobias, and probing inner recesses of the artist’s imagination.

In addition to 33 panels, each of which could demand hours from a dedicated viewer just to read, let alone savor, the artist has created a mini-installation of his “Odditorium,” a menacing, ghoulish collection—murder weapons, Manson memorabilia, examples of taxidermy, a vintage model of a gallows—that perhaps serve as still life motifs in his painting, or simply as inspiration.

Despite its extreme nerdishness – heavy metal album cover meets tattoo parlor occultism – these verbally and iconographically dense and intense images are strangely compelling, and somehow feel like a genuine throwback to the medieval imagination that fuels them.  The labor intensity and organizing mentality required to pack in these words and images, maintaining symmetry and urgency, sustaining dark, variously satirical and pathetic moods, can exude a sympathetic magic to many kinds of viewers, whether they are enticed, repelled or even merely bemused by Mr. Coleman’s nighmare visions.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun,  September 7, 2006

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The paintings of Yvonne Jacquette are at once immensely likeable and seriously odd.  There is a compelling sense of presentness in her density of color and form, quirky and chirpy, and yet they are weirdly alienating precisely thanks to the same manic qualities. Such dichotomies in Ms. Jacquette ultimately relate to a single contradiction at the heart of her enterprise: She is a realist who loves artifice.

You sense the artist’s hand in the personal, invested manner in which the picture is crafted from myriad little marks, for instance, in forms drawn with awkward feeling, and yet there is a peculiar perfunctoriness in the delivery, a depersonalization in the unrelenting alloverness, an outsider-like compulsion to fill.  It is as if she has a horror vacui that leads her to pack her surfaces, and yet in her addiction to spatial complexities and fearless social explorations of land usage there is almost the opposite, an amor vacui.

Wheter painting urban or agrarian locations, day or night, crowded or vacant, Ms. Jacquette is an empiricist.  Her studio paintings are built up from pencil drawings made in situ.  Her calling is the aerial view, gained from a skyscraper or an airplane.  She dips the viewer into familiar urban landmarks like Times Square or Philadelphia’s Logan Circle, but at such a novel angle, and with a relentless democracy of the flattened picture surface that admits no hierarchy and treats everything seen with equal attention and exactitude, that these scenes are defamiliarized. Or the opposite can happen: She will take on anonymous strip malls or efficiently farmed fields, but in discovering readymade abstractions in the arrangements of lights and the demarcations of spaces the banal is rendered exotic.

Her relentless feathery marks have something of the gorgeous nuttiness of Van Gogh, with whom she also shares a genuine orientalism.  This comes across in the way she captures panoramic spaces without submitting to western conventions of perspective.  Instead, as in “Lower Manhatten and New Jersey, with Water Towers II,” (2005) , she achieves a sense of convincing volumes in deep space through geometric patterning.

The naivite in Ms. Jacquette might have something to do with a handwriting: it is as if she writes in single letters that don’t join up.  Her touch—restrained but firm—has character without being emphatic or expressive.  Her notation also varies across a picture, and between works, as in “Above Times Square,” (2003) where it can convey different materials, like concrete, drapery, metal or brick.  There are local improvisations to do with texture in contrast, say, to the Seurat’s pointillism, which is consistently about sight, suggesting that the tactile is as important to Ms. Jacquette as the perceptual.

The surface isn’t ethereal and smooth, and yet it isn’t impastoed and painterly either.  We don’t see through the medium to the scene being depicted, but nor does the surface really have a life of its own.  The real and the artificial are kept in permenant check and balance.  Nathan Kernan, writing in the catalogue, notes the strange double life of her brushmarks.  They are true to themselves, retaining individuality rather than losing themselves in a painterly meld.  And yet they often seem like things other than paint marks, whether recalling embroidery threads or the linocut gougings.

It is printmaker’s marks such as these that directly bring early Twentieth-Century interpreters of the city like Ludwig Meidner to mind, adding another layer of complexity to her images, giving a period feel to clash with their contemporaneity, making her at once fresh and sylized (again, in a very Japanese way.)  Ms. Jacquette loves to use her linocut-like “grooves” to depict artificial lights on wet roads, as in “Third Avenue (with Reflection) II,” (2003) where car lights compete with road markings to define the streets.

Ms. Jacquette is the widow of the photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and it has often been noted how her all encompassing yet dispassionate composed slices of the real are influenced by photography.  A more striking affinity than the poetic Burckhardt in these latest paintings, monumental as they are alike in scale and scope, are such contemporary panoramic photographers as Andreas Gursky and Robert Polidori, with their awesome balance of detail and totality, their way of finding a hidden order in human accumulations.

Aerial perspectives, naturally more dramatic in an airplane, as in “Napa  Valley Composite II,” (2005) give Ms. Jacquette unprecedented potential for what should be contradictory qualities in a composition: expansiveness and cropping.  The edges, accentuated by the odd angles at which she sees the uneven, undulating ground, seem arbitrary and sudden, and yet there is a vast expanse contained within these intrusive boundaries.  It gives a highly contemporary sense of magnitude to her vision.  But then, within that macroscope her peculiar system of notation disconcertingly draws upon the microscopic.  She can achieve through touch what photographers require technological precision for: a weirdly displaced sense of intimacy that only serves to accentuate remoteness.

The way in which, in painterly terms, Ms. Jacquette “builds” or “grows” her pictures directly mimics the actual architecture or nature she depicts.  The ziggurat skyscraper in “Above Times Square” for instance looks almost as if each stroke is a masonry block; they join together in a hand-crafted kind of way giving the kind of undulating wobble to the structure that puts the viewer into an almost primitive state of sympathy with the built envirnonment.  This might explain how it is that the paintings can seen naïve and yet have an incredible sense of the real that would be lacking in more photorealist precisionism.

The most recently completed painting in the show, “Walmart and Other ‘Big Box’ Stores, Augusta ME II,” (2006), is the most real and the most artificial at the same time, and in that respect is true to the grim unreality it depicts: the inane, gormless sprawl of suburban shopping outlets.   One might guess that as a Buddhist, an artist, and a longtime summer resident of Maine, Ms. Jacquette’s heart must sink at the despoilation of her adoptive state, and yet, perhaps, true to her faith and calling, there is a nonjudgemental discovery of hidden orders of meaning in her motif.  The synthetic colors and complex abstract grids imposed by brash neon and burgeoning parking lots are spread on ground that pulls up vertically to the aerial gaze like a canvas on which artifice and reality merge.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 23, 2006

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