The Islanders at Galerie Mikael Andersen
January 9 to February 21, 2015
Bredgade 63, 1260 Copenhagen, Denmark

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the renowned institution 25 miles north of Copenhagen, has recently mounted a string of ambitious shows of figurative painters with an often psychologically pointed, symbolist bent: Philip Guston (the late work) and Emil Nolde were on view there this past summer, and a retrospective of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker continues there through April 6th.

A related expressive spirit infuses Galerie Mikael Andersen’s “The Islanders,” where four English painters of different generations explore the continued possibilities of figurative painting done from imagination and invention. Rose Wylie (b. 1934), 2014 winner of the John Moores Painting Prize, is the unlikely elder statesman of the group, which also includes Billy Childish (b. 1959), Ryan Mosley (b. 1980), and Tom Anholt (b. 1987).

These artists share an interest in intuitive image making, ostensibly rejecting preconceived plans or directly observed models — with the exception of Childish, whose The Great Banks After Wilkinson is a fairly direct copy after a 1936 work by English painter Norman Wilkinson. The show’s title seems to refer not only to the artists’ shared birthplace, but also to the exoticized subject matter of Peter Doig, an art school peer of Childish and likely influence on Mosley and Anholt. The best works here veer away from such calculated idiosyncrasy, offering a more immediate sense of weight and humor.

The whimsically enigmatic quality in Rose Wylie’s work seems to emerge from her asking very literal questions, rather than grasping deliberately for the odd. As she wrote in Frieze Magazine in 2014, “Another route to particularity is to make a written description of a person (or tree), and then to illustrate that list in the painting.” Her fragmented use of text, at first suggesting elusive phrases such as “With Go Imps,” pivots upon closer study to reveal more mundane descriptive purposes, as in the monumentally frumpy, “With Gold Lump.” (In another version of this show’s Gold Lump (single), Wylie attached an image of the Queen of Sheba, resulting in Queen of Sheba with Gold Lump.)

In a large work on paper, Wylie makes a written reference to a straightforward piece of advice from Ingres: “Never in drawing a face omit the ear.” Obligingly, a large yellow ear appears above on a very simplified profile. The humorous implication is that Wylie’s selection of detail has a matter-of-fact logic to it, even while she seems at times like a rogue camera, accidentally zooming in on an odd prop or the back of a head. Her use of scale to humorous effect recalls for me the cartoons collected in Roger Price’s 1953 Droodles, in which not-quite-readable, minimal images are explained by caption, and often revealed as extreme closeups or distance shots; for example, a vertical line and two triangles is described as a man with bow tie stuck between elevator doors. I could imagine Ack-Ack paired with a caption involving eggs or soccer, but it eludes easy reading even after its title has been deciphered as an off-translation of the German “acht-acht,” a common name for an anti-aircraft gun used in World War II. Wylie’s images resist tidy punch lines, reveling instead in the strangeness of figuration itself, and the possibility that something ambiguous or even illegible can, by explanation, become an authoritative representation.

While Wylie’s work also occasionally brings late Guston clearly to mind, as in The Man from London (film notes) (Thanks to Bella Tarr), her work feels forcefully individual. Her simple color choices take on an emblematic punch at a large scale, as she covers expanses of canvas without equivocation.

Satisfyingly direct paint handling takes on a different inflection in Tom Anholt’s paintings, another highlight of the show. His smaller works’ concentrated physicality and variety of mark-making bring to mind Brooklyn-based painter Katherine Bradford, as figures emerge out of layers of misty underpainting. A crust of paint built up on the panels’ edges provides a matter-of-fact record of working as well as a purposeful decorative element. At its best, as in Irish Family, this peripheral appearance of paint- as-itself has a tangible impact on the painted space within the image.

All four of these painters have been prolific producers, and their energy comes through in the work. While the works representing Mosley and Childish feel more forced in their kitschy oddity, Wylie and Anholt make a strong case for the pleasures and freedoms of working indirectly, beginning with what Wylie calls a “sideways jump” into the paintings.

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Peter Doig at Michael Werner London, 22 Upper Brook Street, September 27 to December 22, 2012
Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, October 5 to November 17, 2012

A confluence of events made London the place to see art this October, with the opening of three New York galleries in Mayfair at the same time as Frieze Art Fair. News headlines like “The Americans are coming” and “US art dealers invade London with massive new galleries” sounded almost nervous.

Why it makes market sense for international art dealers to come to London now, and why elegant properties in prime areas are suddenly affordable is easily explained by things like the world economy and where new rich buyers want to live. More interesting is the ascendancy of painting at all these venues.

David Zwirner opened in a five–storey Georgian townhouse with a show of paintings by Luc Tuymans; Michael Werner opened around the corner from the Dorchester with paintings by Peter Doig; and Pace has taken over what was once the Museum of Mankind – behind the Royal Academy – and opened with the late black and grey paintings of Mark Rothko juxtaposed with stark, dark photographs of water by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The juxtaposition took the edge off both artists, and the general mood was altogether too black.

Peter Doig’s exhibition, on the other hand, was filled with strong, perhaps Caribbean, color (the Scottish-Canadian artist left London for Trinidad ten years ago.) As a longtime admirer of Doig, I have to report that the show was a disappointment. Whether the huge price tags on his work have become an inhibition – White Canoe, a fabulous painting from 1990, was sold at auction in 2007 for an extraordinary $11.3 million – or whether Trinidad is not stimulating him, something is missing.

In place of the old vigor, with the visceral use of paint and hint of menace in the subject matter, the work now seems passionless and thin. Poolscapes, colonial cricket pitches, a naked, long-haired figure riding through the sea on horseback, a boat floating past a cave – these may be a real part of Doig’s daily life on the island, but within his paintings these are still in the realm of romantic ideas that don’t seem visually or culturally digested. If– as they seem to be – the figures are self-portraits, there is something too comfortable and too easy about them. In the past, Doig’s palette has been awkward in a good way, as if referring to artificially created color, but the liberal areas of bright orange and yellow in the new paintings just feel fake and noisy.

A delightful, quirky exception is the small canvas, Lion in the Sand (2012). It could be a tricolor flag with aquamarine sea above the humanized, prancing lion and burning red below. Although I was later told that the drawings in the upstairs gallery were not supposed to be part of the exhibition, I was happy to find small, untamed works on paper, some of them sketches for the canvases below, which suggest the old vitality is not entirely lost. (The horseback rider in the sea, however, should have been scotched in both forms.)

There is an odd interaction between the exhibitions of Doig and Luc Tuymans, whose new series of paintings, Allo!, casts an ironic eye on colonialism and the much romanticized story of the painter who went to live on an island. Doig, who has been accused of doing a Gauguin, says he remains an outsider on the island and that his work would be much more romantic and myth-based if he were Trinidadian.

Luc Tuymans arrived late, bleary-eyed and grumpy for his press preview at Zwirmer, and used the occasion to slag off the “fucking Brits” for being “half-hearted Europeans”. He seemed reluctant to talk about his art that day: the quotes that follow were taken from his interview at Frieze Art Fair a week later. But the Belgian painter is viewed with such respect that he can get away with crass behaviour – and he certainly knows how to silence an audience. When questions were invited at the end of the Frieze talk he interjected: “Only intelligent questions please.”

The paintings in the first gallery are a preface to Allo! (a quote from the parrot which inhabited Tuymans’ local bar): washed out and distanced from the viewer as if seen through a fuzz of talcum powder or on a dim TV screen. Quiet as they are, they grab the attention. Peaches (all works 2012), for instance – a pyramid of bleached, sickly green spheres, which look a bit like cabbages and a bit like scoops of ice cream caught under a fluorescent light. Or Technicolor – a bouquet of flowers seen from above, aglow in a murky haze.

The Allo! paintings are based on stills from a 1942 Hollywood film – which is based on Somerset Maugham’s book, “The Moon and Sixpence.” The story of a middle-aged English stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to become an artist in Tahiti, it is in turn a romanticized version of Gauguin’s life. In the closing sequence, the film moves into Technicolor, showing fake, kitschy “Gauguins”, and this becomes the source of Tuymans’ paintings.

With thin washes of scarlet and blue, hints of yellow, smeared edges and areas of canvas left bare as if overexposed, there are a lot more luminous grays in these paintings than color. They are more about the crude technology of early Technicolor, broken down further by being screened on television, photographed and enlarged. The result is paintings that are complex and subtle.

Tuymans photographed the film stills from the screen with his iPhone, catching reflected images of himself at the same time – which add a lurking element of autobiography. A lot, indeed, lurks in these strange, sinister paintings. The nostalgic beauty of floating female figures and Tahitian fabrics; the lonely prowling figure of a man in a hat who watches, cut off from the action; suggestions of a violent interface between primitive and colonial, and the violence in each.

Transparent as these works are – the pencil drawing is left visible and there is no feeling of change or cover up, just loose, light, searching brushstrokes – Tuymans says that for him the first few hours of a painting are an agonizing struggle. He also says that painting is all about time and precision, that a good painting is never finished and that it remains a one-to-one experience. He is a hard act to follow.

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Ken Johnson, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to review Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, R H Quaytman at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery, and Mary Heilmann at 303 Gallery.

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In side by side exhibitions this summer at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the reputations of two painters who have come out of a British context were aired before a French audience.  Despite the considerable difference in age and ‘genre’ between Riley and Doig, their juxtaposition fruitful.

Riley, the older artist of the two, has achieved a central status not only as an abstract painter but as one who is identified as the op artist of post war pop culture.  Black and white works such as Fall and Metamorphosis from the mid sixties use shape and line to create kinetic optical illusions. The picture plane is not a flat, stable, surface here but is curved and undulates in an illusion of movement as the eye moves across the canvas. Even though, at least to a British audience, the later colour work is familiar and highly acclaimed, the inclusion of her student work throws up some surprises. Post-Impressionism rather than Cubism engineered her relationship to abstraction.  A group of early drawings are marked by the influence of Seurat, not as a pointillist but for his graphic chiaroscuro. The palpable product of this influence was her classic black and white optical paintings of the 1960s.  The presence of Cézanne and Pissarro are also felt in the early paintings, particularly in the proto-divisionist brush work of landscapes made as a student which look forward to the later colour paintings like  in the High Sky series. Riley’s link to Seurat bought to mind Duchamp’s interest in the same artist.  For Duchamp, the pointillist project created a circuit of spectatorship where the viewer activates the work, with the final mix made in the eye and in the act of beholding the work so that the spectator puts the painting to work.

A sense of profound relationship to several modernist challenges was the overwhelming impact of this exhibition.  That she has been able to sustain an engagement with painting in terms of particular objectives and limits is the major achievement here.  Subsequent series maintained her ambition, looking fresh today, not only as paintings but as conceptual devices.  A room of preparatory sketches and drawings was very informative as to how the works are produced (or performed) in their transitions from schematic ideas, on ruled paper, to robust painterly objects where the optical phenomena are integrated into a relationship with the painting’s physical structure.

Peter Doig’s engagement with painting appears to be very different. From an early image of a long distance truck traversing a landscape to images of paradise in the later paintings, it is possible to tick the boxes that set up Doig as a latter-day romantic negotiating an ever-shifting relationship between the figure and landscape.  Yet this seems to be just half the story and at times even a subtext. The snow paintings like ‘Blotter’ in the middle section of the exhibition tend toward a lyricism which feel somewhat simplistic, in contrast to the work in the opening and later sections in which a conjunction of painterly qualities and their impact as images saw Doig at his best.  The series of paintings made after a visit to Le Corbusier’s  Unité d’Habitation apartments in Briey-en-Forêt in France  is an intriguing set of images producing readings that for me, mark Doig out as having invented within a genre.Here, he is not just simply carrying the transcendental flag to the next post.Concrete Cabin I and Concrete Cabi II from 1991-1992 foreground a forest. The eye moves through the dark traceries of branches and foliage to the white façade of the Unité in the background, reflecting bright sunlight in its woodland clearing.  Qualities of light and dark transform into shifts of readings across an axis of nature and culture.  Nature here is not a simplistic trope  but is put into tension with the Unité.  The forest does not overcome the ‘cabin’, or vice-versa, instead they both find their place in the compostion.  Similarly the later works show a spareness of execution and a sense of image that pulls him clear of the clichés he was slipping into in the mid nineties.  The ghosts that haunt Doig’s work , besidesVuillard and Bonnard who are obvious touchstones, include Gauguin and Matisse.  Matisse comes through particularly in the lightness of touch of works such as ‘Man dressed as a Bat’ where countless erasures linger under the surface and where there is a hard-won graphic resolution.

Seeing these two painters successfully sustaining the echoes of a modernity marked by Post-Impressionism, yet with such dramatically different results, was both surprising and instructive, coming as they do,  from opposite poles of representation and abstraction. Doig as the younger artist  potentially has much time before him to develop and transform this already impressive body of work.  However with Riley there is in addition, the sense that she may astound us with something more – as unexpected and yet as conclusive as the late works of Monet or Matisse who like her, gradually built up a body of work reflecting a life time of research and application to a practice.

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