May 19 to June 13, 2015
530 West 25th Streets, Fourth Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 646-230-6655

Deborah Rosenthal is a painter deeply engaged in dialogues between past and present, between the world within and the domain beyond the studio. “Geography: Recent Paintings,” her current exhibition at the Bowery Gallery, encompasses familiar motifs from the past decade of her work, and introduces new lines of investigation spurred by her ongoing exploration of the nature of time, landscape, family bonds, and metaphors of sight and sensation. This expansive exhibition coheres readily on the walls while lending itself to unhurried contemplation of individual works. The body of work on view is unified by many of the influences that have shaped Rosenthal’s thinking: the spatial and temporal investigations of early modernists such as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and Paul Klee, as well as an interest in Romanesque sculpture and 17th-century French landscape painting.

Rosenthal often emphasizes the metaphorical power of framing. Doubled Landscape (Familiar Sights) (2011) and Paired Scenes (2013) are each structured by meandering, scalloped, and angular lines that activate the borders of each canvas/world, and further enclose interior scenes that contain figures, houses, and landscape elements. This compositional device evokes the flags and fabrics of vintage French circus tents, whose billowy stripes entice spectators to approach and peek at what’s inside. Landscape in the Studio (2014) gives us Rosenthal’s signature M-shaped mountains, and then pops the ground plane forward (note the grisaille cast shadows) with a riot of spectral-colored forms that merge Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows of 1912 with Jean Hélion’s Mannequinerie en solde (1978). Rosenthal, incidentally, is one of the most learned writers on the work of Hélion, having curated an exhibition of his paintings in New York in 2012 and edited Double Rhythm, a collection of his writings on art, published in 2014 by Arcade.

Rosenthal is perpetually concerned with the “what-ifs” of the painting process. She considers the velocity with which our vision moves across a painted surface as well as the relationship of the center of vision to the periphery. Her attention to facture is evident in paint surfaces that are texturally rich and varied. I have always appreciated how Rosenthal arrives at the colors that we perceive. Look closely and you will see, as in Pierre Bonnard, that what appear to be shapes of solid color are actually shifting strokes, daubs, and veils of various hues that coalesce in the upper layers. This is particularly evident in Country Matters, where passages of scumbled black are actually mixtures of dark blue-violets, red-oranges, and greens that read as freshly-tilled soil — a possible reference to the artist’s familiarity with the rural landscape, and changing seasons of New York’s Sullivan County.

The Three of Them ties together a couple in classical profile looking in on an infant, in a triple-pendant of chartreuse greens, greyed pinks, and citron yellows. This boisterous baby inhabits her own bubble — a vortex that exerts a centrifugal force — as she stretches arms and legs against the boundaries of her enclosure. June, or What I Thought I Knew contains a figure whose regal, Roman head is clearly delineated and whose body — a loose arrangement of pale grey lines — dissolves within a milky white form that could be water, sky, or glacial crevasse. Another figure (a twin, or foil?) emerges from a cleft in the landscape, moving beyond this place with a more deliberate gesture.

Just as books open upon multiple narratives and surprising conclusions, and maps unfold to reveal enticing destinations, Deborah Rosenthal’s paintings, it seems to me, offer many points of departure from which to view our surroundings and our lives.

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Before there was Philip Guston there was Jean Hélion.  Well, of course, there was also Kasimir Malevich, André Derain, not to mention Pablo Picasso, but the sheer élan of Hélion’s 180-degree about turn from abstraction to figuration stands on its own. As the war clouds beckoned in 1939 this sometime pioneer of purism, co-founder with Théo van Doesburg of the Art Concret group in 1930, embraced a new spirit of humanism, seeking to connect his art with “the life around us.” Schroeder Romero & Shredder have brought together two dozen paintings and works on paper to survey five decades of the neglected French master’s works.  It can be predicted, however, that, just as happened with the fine abridged version of the Pompidou survey brought to New York in 2005 by the National Academy Museum, this selection will do more to bolster the unity of this remarkable artist’s oeuvre than enforce the sense of rupture of his stylistic switcheroo.  The exhibition coincides with republication of Hélion’s moving and influential 1943 memoir as an escaped prisoner of war, “They Shall Not Have Me,” with a new introduction by Deborah Rosenthal and an afterword by the artist’s widow, Jacqueline [Arcade Publishing, $24.95]

Schroeder Romero & Shredder, 531 West 26th Street, April 26 until June 30, 2012

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There’s a paradox at the heart of how we experience art. While we may take pride in being art-literate, we absorb much of our knowledge of art (as for life itself) in unconscious fashion. Scrupulous study and debate may guide our understanding, but these are no substitute for the education we continuously and unknowingly receive through our eyes.

This is a very particular kind of education. Eyesight may be no more than the recording of countless ricocheting electromagnetic vectors, but it permits a startlingly rich connection with, say, a tree; the act of looking is a miraculous mapping of another miracle in the natural world. It’s an experience unknown to a person born unsighted, who may otherwise acquire every bit of knowledge about history, science, and human nature.

It’s no wonder that over a quarter of our brains are involved in processing visual stimuli, and that it takes new-born babies months to fully see. And no wonder so many great artists said they wished they could see like a child. Seeing truly, without habit or bias, was crucial. Many an artist could muster a sense of style and technique, but the masters surpassed at something more intuitive and unique to painting: the ability of giving pictorial momentousness to a figure’s gesture, or an apple’s location. Thank your eyes, then, and that quarter-part of your mind, if some mysterious power in a Titian, seen in the flesh, moves your sensibility in ways that defy your intellect.

This is an aesthetic not well suited to our time, when communications too often resemble talking points: fast, smart, exchanges that are instantly transmittable and promise quick mastery of a subject. We settle for very imperfect substitute-images in print and computer screens. Rather than asking ourselves if we are really seeing, we tend to seek new analyses of what we habitually see.

All of which highlights the indispensability of exhibitions like “Nature is the Teacher” at The Painting Center. “Nature lies in the faithfully observed motif and equally in the analytically invented form,” reads a sentence from the unsigned essay accompanying the show, and indeed the work of the four participating painters—Simon Carr, Stanley Lewis, Thaddeus Radell, and Deborah Rosenthal—argues cogently for the interdependence of visual awareness and artistic tradition. Connecting this diverse group of artists—and having become acquainted with each of them over the years, I can attest they are thoroughly different spirits—is the common urge to re-create nature in the language of paint. But their styles vary tremendously, and their diverse pursuits of narrative, symbolism, or process make for an exceptionally handsome installation.

Carr’s scenes of subways come the closest here to traditional realism. His heightened colors, however, lend remarkable robustness to figures, locating not just their physicality but their character. In one lushly scumbled canvas, the dramatic depths of a subway car interior, viewed from one end, encompass a nuzzling couple, kinetic drummers, and a distant LED sign, with colors somehow imparting independent life to each. In another, commuters bustle across a subway platform, but the scene centers about the yawn of a single child. In Carr’s canvases, all means of description and technique ultimately serve humanist ends.

Though his landscapes also depict real scenes, Lewis’ narratives concern the processes of observation and painting. Pictorially, the artist risks the most of any painter in the show, working with a kind of steady ferocity to rebuild appearances in fragmenting marks and planes. Weighted color and line yield poignant truths: a tree, thickly encompassing space among its branches, presides above a yard with a toy cart; totem-like structures punctuate the unfolding panorama of a public garden.

Radell’s surfaces, too, have the quality of weathered layering, but in more luxuriant, affirmative fashion. The artist constructs figures in arabesques of looping black outlines, with interior pinks set off by luminous blues and green-grays. The matte depth of his wax medium and his feathering colors conjure an idyllic atmosphere, with actual volumes mattering less than sensations of movement, light, and depth. Though identities are unclear—the figures might be warriors or shepherds—the paintings hum with the impulse to leaven modernist idioms of painting with echoes of tradition.

Although the most abstracted work here, Rosenthal’s compositions of organic, geometric forms and calligraphic marks abound with intimations of lyrical events. Peaked shapes, lofting across the upper portions of “Uphill and Down” (2011), might be distant mountains or sheltering tents. Exact significations are less clear, and less crucial, than the sense of a poetic journey and its attendant tribulations. The canvas is one of the artist’s two largest in the show, which both use color especially effectively, their varied, deep reds sounding against subdued violets and jolts of vivid green.

Time was, painters learned through their eyes, just as musicians did through their ears and dancers through their bodies. Due to the sheer complexity of nature, and the infinite possibilities of paint, it was a lifetime education. “Nature is the Teacher” reflects these four artists’ shared commitment to this learning, and reminds us how the one faculty of sight can lead to very different truths.

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February 27 to March 24, 2007

“About Borromini,” an exhibition of prints and drawings by Deborah Rosenthal and text by Jed Perl, had an almost curative feel to it. To look at these pieces and to read the accompanying prose was like sipping some clarifying tonic. Anyone who’s seen Rosenthal’s’ work in the past will know that feeling, that fusion of free-ranging immediacy and hard-won durability. Her shapes have a playfulness to them. Yet they also feel inevitable, as if they’ve been cut into the world.

The show, which one suspects will find eventual incarnation as a book, is about the making of metaphors, about the way an artist absorbs the forms she sees around her and transforms them in her own imagination, x-rays them down to their essences. As the title suggests, Rosenthal and Perl took the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) as their inspiration. The artist and writer (who are married) followed their fascination with Borromini during their walks around Rome one springtime not too long ago. As Perl writes in one of his passages, “The dream of a high modern Borromini—that’s what D and I are pursuing.” What is it about Borromini in particular that draws the two of them?

It seems to be his blend of classical firmness and idiosyncratic extravagance. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Borromini’s famous rival, once called the younger Milanese “an ignorant Goth who has corrupted architecture.” The Gothic influence which so appalled Bernini, the penchant for flights of exaggeration, is precisely what interests Rosenthal and Perl. Here’s Perl again: “Borromini is the master of a somber rococo, a luxuriant asceticism. He can be witty but marmoreal, and of what other artist can that be said?”

One answer to that question might be Deborah Rosenthal. Looking at her drawings and prints, you see both the sculptural immovability of the forms and the quicksilver playfulness of the artist’s mind in motion. For example, an ink drawing called “Standing Angles/Study” (2006) shows a series of  anthropomorphic forms, much like dancers bending at the hip. The formal fascination here seems to be with angles, with those vortices at which energies shift and then recoup their force. Rosenthal’s shapes recall the severe turns in Borromini’s bannisters, for example those that run along the balcony at San Carlino. But you don’t need to know Roman architecture to appreciate this work. Rosenthal has so fully absorbed these forms in her own, high modern imagination that the allusions appear as traces of inspiration, and not influence. Whatever  strands she’s taken up from Borromini, they’ve been threaded into the specifics of her own facture. There’s real pleasure, for example, in observing the subtle alternation between dry point and rouletting in “Twisted Column” (2006), or the playful tangles and swerves of the linocut, “Graffiti” (2006.)

One of the most impressive pieces in the show is “Diana of Ephesus” (2006.) Here there’s a central oval, intersected by a series of cone-like shapes. This could bring to mind the ovals that Borromini favored for his windows and domes, as well as for the escutcheons that bedeck his facades. The title points us in a different direction, toward the many-breasted Diana, an incarnation of the Greco-Roman goddess that recalls Indo-European fertility myths. But you don’t have to be an erudite classicist to appreciate “Diana of Ephesus.” These forms of Rosenthal’s are not limited to their subject matter, just as a current is not the water that flows through it at any given moment. Rosenthal’s achievement lies in her ability to create metaphors, to envision structures in which various forces fuse. She’s a literary artist, and yet her work never falls to illustration or to mere essayistic cleverness.

Her work doesn’t need explication, yet it’s a pleasure to have Perl’s accompanying text. Even if he gives some helpful background, he too has embarked here upon his own, artful investigation of his form. Perl’s prose itself ranges between an almost casual pliancy and an acute attunement. Take the first two sentences of his text. Here’s how he begins: “Stars, zig-zags, angles, ovals, edges, curls, curves, flames, flowers, shells, breaks, bursts, echoes, accents, repetitions, reversals, reunions—these are the sights and sensations, each sharply etched in the imagination, that I recall from our Borromini walks, in the streets of Rome, one spring not too long ago.” After that exuberant rush, Perl gives us this simple statement: “Borommini is the master of a somber rococo, a luxuriant asceticism.” You might say that Perl, like Borromini himself, can do both extravagance and starkness. If and when this book comes out, we’ll be treated not only to superb art but also to one of the finer prose styles of our day.

A New York poet who saw this show was heard to remark, while looking at some of Rosenthal’s lino prints, “Linoleum never had it so good!”  There’s something genuinely relevant to that humorous quip. The workaday, domestic sound of “linoleum” may seem hemispheres away form the baroque world of Borromini. And yet the ordinary and the otherworldly come together in Rosenthal’s facture, and in Perl’s sentences. The combination of skeletal simplicity and dreamworld departure is appropriate to Borromini, yet in the end it remains Rosenthal’s own imaginative intelligence that cuts into the lino blocks. The poet was right: linoleum never had it so good.

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