November 3 to December 18, 2018
490 Atlantic Avenue, between Nevins Street and Third Avenue
Brooklyn, 490atlantic.com

The paintings of Scott Williams are both deadpan and subtly poetic. If the wastelands of Brooklyn and Queens have a poetry, Williams is their laureate. I never realized how many succulent varieties of asphalt and concrete and rusted metal the boroughs have to offer, never fell for the charm of their frowzy canals and desiccated wharves until I saw these paintings.

The nine plein-air cityscapes in this show demonstrate an intensity of observation that for many viewers will recall the panoramas of Rackstraw Downes, but where Downes’s gaze warps gradually and inexorably across the canvas, Williams organizes his views around separate focal points, like Piranesi’s views of Rome in which you look simultaneously down two streets plunging into the distance at different angles.

In the foreground of Williams’s From the Roof, (2018) Jackson Avenue and 47th^t Road intersect at an acute angle, flanked by massive buildings. Along the split perspective, your eye encounters a series of tiny dramas of street life–micro-events like signage, a cement mixer, parked cars–revealed in detail that manages to be meticulous without being mechanical. It’s enough to reward a longer look but not to stop the eye from navigating the rest of the intricate topography. But it isn’t the quantity of detail that makes the pictures memorable—stuffing a painting is easy–so much as the organization of incredibly complex parts into a convincing, unexpected order.

Williams has a gift for light, a perfect pitch in transposing the vast scale of daylight into the narrow tonal range of painting. Controlled richness of facture keeps his surfaces sparkling. The melding of light and surface reminds me of Ruysdael’s Quay at Amsterdam, Vermeer’s View of Delft or Corot’s The Belfry of Douai—paintings that share Williams’s fascination with vision and devotion to urban space. The exactness of Williams’s color allows him to reduce the glut of fact into a coherent mosaic that communicates precisely where things are and what the light is doing to them there.

Working outside is key to the specificity and richness of this light. A photograph inevitably flattens the interplay of direct and reflected light and the power of deep pictorial space. Of course, many great paintings have been made from photographs, but the result is different than working directly from life. That being so, why are ambitious plein-air paintings of this kind so rare? For a start, the artist must contend with the elements, with a painting you’ve been slaving away at blown on its face or soaked in a squall. And then there are the kibitzers: dogs, children, property owners, opinionated spectators. It takes a stubborn zeal to keep working in the teeth of these problems, but the payoff, at least for Williams, is a powerful sense of being present, immersed in the world.

Honestly, I don’t usually care for this kind of painting. Detail for its own sake is deadly, and diligence as an artistic goal is irritating, like watching someone try to solve a problem arithmetically that should be solved with algebra. But Williams beguiles you with the prosaic, makes you want to study the banal, patiently teaches you to see it his way.

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Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

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Social Ecologies: Curated by Greg Lindquist, at the Gallery at Industry City

December 10, 2015 to February 21, 2016

A contemporary landscape painter himself, curator Greg Lindquist offers in this important exhibition an array of strategies to address the notion of environment, ranging from simply acknowledging a deep connection with the earth to documenting eco-destruction to making art that ventures remedies to the crisis. “Social Ecologies” comes out of Lindquist’s interest in the “intertwined relationship between humans and the natural world [that has existed] for centuries,” as he put it in an essay in the November 2015 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, stressing that we now face an existential crisis brought on by runaway climate change. In fact, humans have been significantly altering the biosphere since the early hunters wiped out the big fauna and agriculture began its slow degradation of the soil stock of the planet. There is no Garden to go back to; humans must create a balance with nature never before imagined or achieved.

The 1970s saw artists exploring new ideas of their relationship with nature.   Robert Smithson introduced an investigation of art and place – and how each informed and identified the other. He took the work of art out of the gallery and located it in an outdoor setting, and at the same time he put a signifier of the natural site into the gallery, thus demonstrating what he called “non-site”. He located his art not just in a natural setting but in the earth itself, penetrating soil and water.

Charles Simonds is represented by enlarged stills from “Birth,” a film in which he symbolically gives birth to himself out of the earth – specifically, the pit in New Jersey where Simonds has for a long time extracted the clay to make his art. Simonds’ art is about culture from the ground up; the ground is essential for the building of culture.

British-born Rackstraw Downes declared he had no “New World sense of the antithesis between unspoiled nature and human culture; a landscape to me is a place where people live and work.” (Quoted by Stephen Maine in “Rackstraw Downes: Infrastructures”, Art in America Nov. 2010.) His pictures are horizontal scans of a view, including finely-tuned details, that construct pictorial space with curved lines creating a picture that feels distorted compared to traditional landscape painting. We are clearly shown that the human vision of nature is anthropocentric. Downes simultaneously makes a passionate pitch for objective empirical reality as he paradoxically displays its biases by curving space to establish the artist’s viewpoint. An art that successfully combines these “oppositions” pins viewers with a double vision that puts the onus on us to form our own understanding of what is going on.

Mary Miss and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artists who also started working in the 1970’s, represent the land art movement and feminism, both of which critiqued earlier notions of art making its “mark” on nature and instead took a receptive, integrative stance. Along with a younger artist, Ellie Irons, they put their work at the service of natural topologies and human systems. Laderman Ukeles, since 1977 the artist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation, is represented by her Sanitation Manifesto, 1984 in which she writes poetically as artist, feminist, wife, mother about the responsibilities of “maintenance.”

Miss has built a long career of public sculpture that marries art, nature and humanity, and working collaboratively, an example of which is the South Cove Project at Battery Park. It’s challenging to conveying Miss’s work in a gallery setting, but the small schematic drawing here of a site in Indianapolis does the job nicely. The project employs mirrors and beams of red light to visually connect inhabitants with their streams and waterways. Miss takes in a work site experiencing its geological features, history and surrounds to create a vision that amplifies and harmonizes with Alexander Pope’s conception of the genius loci. Miss has written that Broadway is the “native American ridgeline” and intrinsically important to the experience of Manhattan.

Irons transformed a corner of the gallery into a “sanctuary for weeds” collected from native Bushwick plants.   A helpful booklet explains Why Weeds?: “Co-evolved with humans, they are well-suited to do the tough work of greening a heavily altered anthropogenic landscape.”

Alyson Vieira’s environmentalism lies in her choice of materials and her historicism. She employs baled post-industrial plastics to build giant forms that suggest archaic ruins. Making art using the industrial vernacular material – recycling the recycled – posits a culture that is constantly being built, decaying and then rebuilt. “Natural resources” are no longer timber and stone but plastics that can never break down – themselves by-products of modernity’s life-blood: carbon in its solid, liquid and gas forms.

Alexis Rockman’s Loam, 2008, is a witty painting that can be read both as a cracked tooth being mined by ants in which seedlings are taking root – and a painting from Morris Louis’s Veil series. This is art about layered ecologies: human host, plant and animal parasites – except, it could be asked, who is the ultimate destructive parasite on the planet if not, ironically, the only one capable of making art?

Soviet period bath building, Tsakltubo, a photograph by Georgian artist Gio Sumbadze, examines the recent past showing a crumbling Soviet building overgrown with new vegetation. Soviet-era architecture in an exhibition with these themes might have us thinking Chernobyl and accounts of driving for days through dead forests.   Yet the hopeful note of verdant wild growth pushing through the crumbling concrete in this photograph offers a post-eco-apocalyptic vision akin to Margaret Atwood’s fiction. One is allowed to imagine a future welcoming back the forest and building on the ruins of the old world in an egalitarian, human culture integrated and interdependent with nature.

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October 15 to November 14, 2015
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11h avenues
New York City, 212 331 8888

In her final show at Mixed Greens (this much-valued gallery is, sadly, closing) Joan Linder trains her lucid, maniacal drawing practice on a notorious environmental disaster close to her Buffalo home. This 1970s toxic phenomenon known as “Love Canal,” a name that must have made Burroughs, Pynchon and DeLillo giggle, confirmed an emerging environmental zeitgeist, fed by revelations of governmental fecklessness verging on murder. Linder documents this original superfund wasteland –– from which working class families were finally removed after unheard-of birth defect and cancer rates, and which remains fenced off forty years later –– by recording with her indefatigable pen, across the folds of accordion notebooks, seemingly every chain-link and blade of grass of the full perimeter. Displayed on wrap-around shelves, these encyclopeadic landscapes include indications of the site’s surrounding ecosystem of weeds and highways, telephone lines and old tires, much as in Rackstraw Downes’s deceptively neutral vistas, or analogously, in the household clutter of Dawn Clements’s panoramic interiors. In addition, Linder’s circumambulating drawings pack a punch as a group, as a project, that has something to do with Gordon Matta-Clark’s or Peter Fend’s subversive mappings of ideas hiding in plain sight –– or rather, site.

You could argue that in the past Linder has commented obliquely on post-feminist discourse, by rendering a colossally unwashed pile of dishes; and that the antiseptic delusions of science were slyly addressed in her exhaustive drawings from the inner sancta of biology and pathology labs. But with the Love Canal project Linder raises the political ante. Inaugurating a pure research vector, the artist displays in glass-topped vitrines neat rows of official reports and memos, blown leaves from the disaster’s decades-long paper trail –– or rather, they are illusionistic pen and ink renderings of such documents. Text has been caught before in Linder’s observational web, but in situ, casually strewn along with the books, signs and scraps of paper of a larger still life. The new document drawings for the first time take an overt angle of attack, and without giving up an inch of empiricism.

There is intention in the laboriousness and redundancy of the artist’s pilgrimage across these typewritten cover pages, fuzzy photographs, and charts and graphs, which are clearly the tip of a file-cabinet-and-microfiche iceberg. Linder’s stubborn simulacrum of bureaucratic paralysis means to cast a dispiriting pall –– but also, a fascinating one. A weird sort of fun, even, develops out of Linder’s characteristic obsession with every trompe-l’oeil detail of her quarry, including the mimeograph burn, feedback distortion and document decay of the “originals” –– which seem, in fact, to be xeroxes of xeroxes of xeroxes.

Each typed letter of each hall-of-mirrors document is rendered as legibly as the source allows. For those inclined to dip in, the rewards get more Kafkaesque, with chains of inference that run beyond mere corporate greed into shameful state secrets: ultimately to the infamous Project Sunshine (Linder’s exhibition title), an Atomic Energy Commission program that snatched bodies for the purpose of studying long-term health effects in the event of nuclear war. At the very least, Linder shows that Hooker Chemical, Love Canal’s toxifier, was a deep player in the military-industrial complex, like any large rustbelt concern. The limitless electrical capacity of Niagara Falls, into which Love Canal drains, is what put the region at the epicenter of the environmentally oblivious Cold War economy, before it plunged. Perhaps there’s something in the water, as Linder’s artist colleagues at SUNY Buffalo, notably Steven Kurz, have put a research-oriented, activist stamp on art from the area, to which Linder is in the process of making a necessary contribution (the Love Canal project is ongoing). Mark Lombardi was also from the region, Syracuse being a few stops along the Erie Canal; and it is worth pointing out that Linder’s research, like Lombardi’s, is not conspiratorial, in that the art is built entirely from public records –– known facts –– released documents.

Some conspiracy theories, however, turn out to be true: for starters, there’s the still-partly-classified Project Sunshine (yet another name, like Love Canal –– or Hooker Chemical, for crying out loud –– that would put a dystopian black humorist to shame). And Linder alludes, with a few cover pages of meticulously redrawn bureaucratrese, to a far worse government conspiracy: a local adjunct of the Manhattan Project, it seems, that was run out of the University of Rochester. The title of this report includes the phrase “CHANGES IN BODY TEMPERATURE IN RESPONSE TO URANIUM INJECTIONS,” and presumably is related to known U.S. Government programs in which deliberately misinformed, unwitting prisoners, chiefly minority, were irradiated for “science” –– sometimes fatally. Which is not all that far from concurrent experiments by Nazi doctors on concentration camp inmates (although these, at least, ceased with the war’s end; the Rochester document is dated 1946.) What Linder seems to be asking is: How many pages of obfuscatory memoranda does it take to get from there to signing off on building housing and schools on a known toxic waste dump?

Exhibited along with the documents and the accordion landscapes are two large, grandly luxurious color ink drawings, meticulous delineations of the interweaving patterns of weeds in an unkempt backyard –– presumably in Niagara County, maybe even on the overgrown site of Love Canal itself. (For that matter, in that locus of poisons it can’t matter very much which side of the superfund fence the ground is on.) Where pebbly dirt peeks through, the ink is shades of brown, contrasting with the green weeds above, which are outlined strategically with black. This consistent division of color from top to bottom layer makes for a crisply vibrating visual texture that at a distance approaches the richness of a William Morris endpaper design or a chinoiserie folding screen. Up close one sees the slight waver of a tireless hand, drawing a plot of ground at actual size, as if that inch-by-inch attention might bring, to scorched earth, a measure of remediation.

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October 26, 2013 to January 20, 2014
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

David Hockney’s “A Bigger Exhibition” is expansive and multifaceted, driven by Hockney’s unflagging curiosity about picture-making and his relentless rhythm of production.  Organized by the de Young Museum in cooperation with his personal curator, Gregory Evans, it follows up on the artist’s European show, “A Bigger Picture”, and features over 250 works in new and old media, many of large scale, completed since 2002.

Like Claude Monet, Hockney works in series; his paintings address time and optical truth, and they expand into large-scale decorations. Like Monet, he ignores the constraints of monocular perspective, and, just as Monet grew more ambitious over the turn of the past century, so Hockney aims to redefine painting for the digital age. Central to the show is his gallery of four nine-channel videos of Woldgate Woods near his home in Britain (2010-11) – a contemporary Orangerie, where viewers can follow, virtually, the road depicted in many of his paintings. A triumph of technology based in Renaissance optics is here displaced onto thirty-six different “eyes”, allowing the woods to unfold in different seasons in spectacular arrays of moving images. Viewers are forced to enact the multiple scans that make up our stable image of the visual field, much in the way Monet forced them to combine the retinal stimuli that supply its color.

Hockney questions not just the fixation of Western art on the single vanishing point but the look of “reality” it engenders. His “Great Wall”, a project from 2002 reconstructed in the exhibition, juxtaposes color reproductions of European portraits from 1300 to 1900, tracking the emergence of lens-based vision. Documenting painters’ experiments with the concave mirror and camera lucida, Hockney demonstrates the extent of its influence on painting and, he argues, on contemporary mass culture. In his own paintings here, he continues to move away from the photographic finish of his early portraits. Marks and gestures predominate, enlarged and stylized, the legacy of van Gogh, who sought to wrest a personal vision from direct encounters with his subjects.

Hockney likewise bases his work on direct observation, from pocket-size sketchbooks to the large, composite canvases completed on special easels outdoors. They call to mind the more restrained but intensely rendered panoramas of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes, who explores the curvature of the perceptual field with a photographic level of detail, but eschews the camera and technology in general. Hockney, on the other hand, relishes his enlistment of the iPhone and iPad in subverting the Western version of reality. His digital drawings extend the urbane informality and witty observations of his sketchbooks into uncharted electronic territory, where they can be animated and enlarged. Displayed on screens, they’re magically luminous, their dematerialized calligraphy sometimes dancing disconnected from the image, sometimes reinforcing it with emphatic highlights and shadows. Animated, they reveal their successive transformations; the process of revision is open-ended, and the “true” look of the world is always subject to reinterpretation.

Hockney refers to these works as drawings, perhaps to acknowledge their provisional status, yet they also involve their own sensibility, a tension between intimacy and detachment. There’s something similar in Chuck Close’s use of the photograph as a tool in his portraits, employing the gridded image to structure his expressionistic mark making and keep it detached from the sitter. The iPhone portraits bring Hockney closer to his subjects, eliminating the respectful social distance he maintains in his paintings, and they encourage freer mark making, yet when presented on screens or in high-resolution prints, these exploratory marks, the fluid strokes and linear scribbles that can lend them surprising density, remain in the virtual realm. Similar marks in the paintings are more physically immediate, even if they become increasingly stylized in his larger landscapes.

Hockney presents two suites of iPad landscapes enlarged into multi-panel compositions, where they assume a different character, like Alex Katz’s enlargements of his sketches into sharply focused images that celebrate their own artifice. One series of “tree tunnels”, related to the multi-channel video, documents the everyday beauty of nature, but their high-keyed colors, reflective mud puddles and stylized splashes of raindrops seem imported from Japanese animation. In the second series, images of Yosemite veiled in clouds allude to Chinese landscape paintings, and the enlarged gestural marks bring wondrous intimacy to the sublime vistas of the valley. Like both Monet and van Gogh, Hockney finds in Asian art, with its calligraphy, free use of perspective and flat areas of color, a means to liberate painting from Renaissance conventions.

Well before these digital experiments, an exceptional expansion was underway in Hockney’s landscape paintings. Beginning with his return to Yorkshire in 2004, his gestural marks become more urgent and also more differentiated as he tackles roadside vegetation and the close-up articulation of trees. There’s an increasing stylization to the large paintings, as though in groping for the look of the landscape he’s drawing on his experience in set design.  Tree tunnels, compositions with groves of trees in reverse perspective, and fantastical spring blossoms are increasingly regimented, clumped together, with differentiated colors for branches and leaves, and dots and hatches for ground cover and bark.

The largest work in the show, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty Eleven), Version 3, further isolates and stylizes the marks representing different sorts of leaves and flowers. Like the backdrop for a ballet, it also recalls the Symbolist landscapes of Maurice Bernard, as well as Japanese screens and William Morris’s wallpaper designs. Hockney aims for visual immersion through sheer scale, but its flattened shapes still keep us at a distance and don’t engage us as fully in virtual experience as the high-resolution videos.

In terms of immersion, it’s difficult for the hand to compete with electronic media. Technology is enormously seductive, and the receding landscapes of Hockney’s videos generate effects reminiscent of video games; could viewers be offered their own controllers? For all its ambition, Hockney’s exploration of electronic media remains at a relatively basic level, open to the everyday viewer – as opposed, for example, to Peter Campus’s slow-motion renderings of changing, pixillated colors in what amount to digitized neo-Impressionist paintings, or to Bill Viola’s rendering of Pontormo’s “Visitation”.

Engaging the audience is Hockney’s subject in A Bigger Message (2010), a thirty-panel reinterpretation of Claude Lorrain’s “Sermon on the Mount” (1656). Implicit is Hockney’s own sense of mission, his call for “wider vantages”. Everything centers on Christ on the distant crest, around which multitudes assemble for access to the “message”. His progressive re-workings of this painting recall Picasso’s riffs on earlier masterpieces. There’s even a cubist version, but Hockney doesn’t press it very far; he’s more about expansion than about compressing multiple views into a single image. With increasing exaggeration in color, the later versions take the painting in his own post-photographic direction. The scene becomes a stage set, a psychedelic media event, with a vermillion mount, and whimsical fortifications arising in the middle distance. If in Claude’s era, oil painting served to make visions of distant times and supernatural events convincingly real, here painting is absorbed into a larger spectacle.

Coming of age in the heyday of Warhol and popular visual culture, Hockney inhabits a media-saturated world and assumes a populist stance: if there’s no truthful image, just multiple views, our world image must evolve through broad cultural participation. As poet Charles Olson observed, “polis is eyes”.  Rethinking photography opens a field for individual play, and Hockney makes a case for painting, liberated from monocular vision, to assume an important role. Like Dziga Vertov, who created a Cubist cinema in the 1920s, Hockney proposes that we also use technology in a radical democratization of image making. The Jugglers (2012), an eighteen-screen projection near the end of the show, provides a model of playful and inventive social exchange, with its ongoing interplay of random displacements and boundary crossings. Hockney’s appeal, arising from his appreciation of nature’s attractions and his empathy with friends and society, is ultimately sustained through this empowerment of his audience.

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Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
click any image to activate slideshow

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

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British-born artist, teacher, editor and writer Rackstraw Downes will speak on “Thoughts of a Painter” April 30. There will be a reception at 5:30 p.m., and the lecture begins at 6 p.m. at the Cosmopolitan Club at 122 East 66th Street in New York City. Tickets are $50, and a portion of the proceeds benefit the Archives of American Art. Checks or credit cards preferred. Club attire: jackets and ties for gentlemen.

This was an artcritical PIC in April 2009.

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Greg Lindquist: Industry
Elizabeth Harris

Landscape painting is usually a vehicle for observing the effects of weather, light, and space – in short, for thoroughly traditional goals that might seem sentimental in cutting-edge circles today. In a pair of Chelsea exhibitions, however, two contemporary painters, born 40 years apart, revitalize the venerable genre in completely different ways.

According to painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), his upbringing by actor parents cured him of any interest in theatrics, and the presumptuous claims made for abstract painting drove him towards representation. Drama of another kind, however, abounds in his intense, peculiarly non-picturesque scenes of urban and rural sites. Beneath his exacting technique lie original perceptions and ferociously focused thinking. His nearly 20 recent paintings at Betty Cuningham have a kind of straitened exuberance; they impress as radiant craft, but are moving, ultimately, for the independence and determination of his investigations.

Mr. Downes’ subjects tend be unbeautiful, overlooked scenes galvanized by their spatial extremes. The broad vistas of Texas scrublands stream across several canvases with very wide formats; elevated highways and bridges soar through others. Executed on site after numerous preparatory sketches, these paintings amount to portraits of spatial configurations rather then strictly of objects. Mr. Downs’ meticulous technique makes these marginal and forgotten sites seem elegant, almost crystalline in their detail, but their most compelling aspect lies in the way his “uncompromising empiricism,” as he calls it, leads to vertiginous renderings of space.

In the small painting “A Stop on the J Line (Alabama Avenue)” (2007), the sweep of an elevated subway line fills the breadth of the canvas, its curvature exaggerated as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. The naturalism of the midday illumination and the plethora of details – down to the rivets on some girders – vie with the extravagant proportions of the structure, which dwindles drastically towards either side of the canvas, slipping away from us like a rock falling down a sunlit well.

A similar drama animates the striking, nearly six-foot-wide “The Pulaski Skyway Crossing the Hackensack River” (2007). This painting, too, combines an Eakins-like fidelity of light and detail with vertiginous accelerations of space towards the sides. The elevated highway’s main span is not quite symmetrical on the canvas, giving rise to new intrigues: a shelf of land at the lower right corner edges towards the closer section of the span; a power plant, perched at the far shore of a shimmering plane of water, leans slightly as it reaches towards the bridge’s vast arc.

A photograph on the cover of the exhibition catalogue provides intriguing clues into the artist’s working methods. It depicts what must be the very same canvas, mounted on two French easels anchored side-by-side to the ground with guy-wires. (“Plein-air,” in this case, involves full-force wind.) Overhead arcs the Skyway, neck-twistingly high and close. Upon minute examination, every detail in the photograph – even a bent wire protruding through the foreground cement – reappears in the painting.

In his eloquent writings, Mr. Downes argues that such paintings are truthful records of perceived events. He has a point: Our eyes can focus on only one point at a time, and large portions of our brains are devoted to joining these separate perceptions into seamless, practical experiences. Linear perspective is, after all, a graphic convention, not a physical law, and it breaks down for wide-angle views. (To prove this, stand in the center of the gallery’s larger space, facing one of the long walls. Its horizontal top edge pitches downward as it approaches either corner – a pencil held horizontally at arm’s length demonstrates this – which means that a drawing of the entire wall must connect these opposing angles in a broad curve.)

Four very long paintings, 15 inches high and eight to ten feet long, depict a racetrack in the Texas scrub desert. There are no people in these dirt-blown scenes, but much evidence of human activity in the posts and railings dotting the barren vastness.

From about eight feet away, the paintings demand our physical engagement; we must turn our gaze to connect the multiple diagonals of tire tracks crossing the plain. At about four feet, we’re absorbed into an enveloping, shrub-by-shrub, plotting of the surface.

Like all of Mr. Downes paintings, they reflect a unique combination of aggressive conception and passive elaboration. Fervent perceptions of space enliven their broad outlines; details follow, filling in the story of each site exactly “as is;” colors add atmosphere and light. At various points in the exhibition, his colors provide something else: a compositional urgency of their own. In a 2007 painting of Atlantic Avenue, for instance, evanescent yellow-grays poignantly convey the sweeping, overhead weight of the AirTrain cement guideway. In a canvas from 2006, the tiny glimmer of flood lamp reflectors, and the escape to a pinkish sunlit wall through a doorway, vividly punctuate the somber hues of a huge artist’s studio. And in that painting of the Alabama Avenue subway station, masses of color dramatically build as the central knotting of girders perforated by notes of sky. Mr. Downes’ non-hierarchical compositions tend to preclude the interaction of drawing and color – with impulses of hue conditioning as well as responding to the forces of drawing – but at points his paintings hint at what Corot so wondrously achieved in his early studies of Roman aqueducts and Mount Soracte.

At Elizabeth Harris, nine paintings by Greg Lindquist (b. 1979) share this fascination with forlorn spaces. The desolation of his cityscapes, however, has a more romantic aspect – and, it’s soon apparent, an overarching political purpose. His distilled forms and subdued, almost mordant palette impart a wan massiveness to the crumbling hulks of abandoned factories and warehouses in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Red Hook sections. Most of the paintings describe the paler notes of the sky or the East River with metallic paint, which glimmers quietly over the sagging buildings and through skeletal structures. Plant life, such as it is, appears as stringy, khaki tufts at the edges of empty lots. Construction cranes, not humans, populate these worlds; in one painting they loom above a jagged wall like prison watch towers. Only the occasional corner of an apartment building or a splash of graffiti hints at living, human traffic.

The metallic paint, plus the 2-inch depth of the edges of the paintings, emphasizes the materiality of the work. The scenes feel ethereal rather than leaden, though, as if aerated by an otherworldly, radioactive wind. In “Decay of Industry, Industry of Decay” (2007), licks of metallic paint, showing through strokes of an unnamable gray, neatly sum up the effect of rippled water beneath building and vacant sky. In “The Similitudes of The Past and those of The Future” (2007), a broad streaking of yellowy gray – a forgettable note in any other context – convinces as the ground plane stretching tautly across the painting’s width.

As for those prolix titles: these add a political earnestness not immediately apparent in the brushstrokes themselves. They reveal how every work in fact involves an argument about urban development. The sardonically titled “Red Hook’s Residuum (New Products, New Ideas, New Designs)” 2007 depicts the soon-be-completed IKEA megastore with the same rawness as the decaying factories. “East River State Park (Endangered Site for Preservation, Nest Egg for Luxury)” (2007), a rendering of a Greenpoint construction site, makes clearer still the “green” message behind these grayed tones. The fervent political engagement vies intriguingly with the eerie desolation of the images, in which a new IKEA warehouse and abandoned sugar refinery can seem equally exotic.

Both Downes and Lindquist ply a route between the traditional and the postmodern. Neither has much use for the “composed” look of most art prior to 1960. Downes’ panoramas employ an all-over, all-encompassing space that may be his only borrowing from Abstract Expressionism. Lindquist’s strong suit is atmosphere and a social conscience. The two artists also share a decidedly non-postmodernist trait: a conviction about their goals.  Both aim unabashedly for something nobler than the elliptical irony of much of today’s art.

And in both artists’ paintings, sequences of colors sometimes impose their own character on simple events. My favorite moment of the two exhibitions occurs as a judge’s tower rises above the arid earth in one of Downes’ racetrack paintings. The humble structure – a welded steel armature topped by corrugated metal – faces us squarely across the parched landscape, its ridges caught in the raking light. This delicately striated square becomes the sole, resolute interruption of the relentless horizon. Nearby, three elements chatter: the roof of a spectator’s shelter, which hovers, a sliver of absorbent blue, above the raw tones of earth; its shadow, a even deeper, darker note beneath; and the purple-gray mass of hills miles away on the horizon, less regular in shape but equally anchored to the earth. The three pressures converse across a mysteriously vast distance, expanding its space more radically than the tire tracks plunging towards the horizon. What better evocation of the realities of color and line?

Downes until March 1 (541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-2772).

Lindquist until March 8 (529 W 20th St, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-9666).

This article was originally published as two separate reviews at the New York Sun in February 2008

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Ken Johnson, Maureen Mullarkey, and Jerry Saltz joined David Cohen to review Justine Kurland at Gorney, Bravin and Lee, Richard Deacon at Marian Goodman, Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham and Pipilotti Rist at Luhring Augustine.

The post October 2004: Ken Johnson, Maureen Mullarkey, and Jerry Saltz with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

With Rackstraw Downes, the clichés happen to be true: Time does stand still. His paintings capture a moment. You feel you’re literally there.

He can seem disconcertingly ordinary at first. But when you start to think about the way he paints you realise that he doesn’t fit into received conventions: he is neither photographic nor old masterly. Odd things happen with the horizon lines, as he refuses to follow the rules of perspective, but there isn’t the expressive naivité that comes from someone awkwardly making it up as they go along.

“Years ago I read a beautiful letter that Stendhal sent to his sister, giving her advice on letter writing. He said, choose subjects you care very much about, but when you put your feelings into words, do it as if you didn’t want anyone to notice. When I read that, in the seventies, I thought, that’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t want anyone to notice the style.

“Of course, they do notice, that the horizon are curved, and that there are tilting verticals and so on, but in general, the brushstroke- I don’t want it to draw attention to itself. I don’t want someone to say, Oh look at that gorgeous chunk of yellow. It should be the grass; you can have the chunk of yellow be gorgeous too, but first it must be the grass.”

This plain look-of paintings packed with detail that aren’t fussy-is hard-won. He will only work in front of the subject, which is usually urban landscape, taking months to complete a painting. And there are copious drawings and oil sketches to get through before he can fix his subject. His commitment to specific light means that as he nears the end he only has precious half hours to work. His first New York painting show since 2000, which inaugurates the new Betty Cuningham Gallery in Chelsea, is a remarkable body of work: thirty canvases beaming with clarity, precision and freshness.

Do they need corresponding time and energy to appreciate as they do to make, I asked him. “I think that would be a rather diva-ish demand,” he replies with a characteristically impish chuckle. “Alex Katz once said, ‘All you can expect from the audience is seven seconds’.” Mr. Katz was one of his influential tutors at Yale where he studied in the early 1960s. Contemporaries there included Richard Serra, Chuck Close and Nancy Graves. At the time, Mr. Downes was abstract, and his principal teacher was Al Held.

“I remember going to the Whitney Annual before my style was at all formed, and thinking that a good painting is one that has a quick come-on, that beckons you very forcefully from across the room. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting to make a painting that would be totally plain, ordinary and quiet, but if you spend time sniffing around you find endless stuff that would keep revealing itself.”

Although he resists any label of himself as a maverick, as against the times, his willingness to court the margins with slow, plain painting indicates the kind of tough, bloody-minded individualism that comes across from his work.

“When you look at a Breughel you can find ten thousand stories in it. Someone with an eye for iconography will find ten thousand more than you knew were in there because they know the contemporary proverbs Breughel was illustrating. And I like that. It’s a quality that I aspire to have in my own painting. Aspire I say” he adds with due modesty and a chuckle.

I’m fascinated to talk with Mr. Downes about the time element because his images work, and are worked, at such varying speeds. His current show focuses exclusively on the finished paintings, but earlier this year, at the New York Studio School, he showed the extended series of drawings with which he finds his motif, and fixes his all-important vantage point. He also makes quick, spontaneous oil sketches which have a life very distinct from the fastidiously worked-up canvases. He doesn’t like to mix up these different kinds of image in the same show. “It introduces problems. People get distracted: Is the sketch freer, the color fresher, than the finished work, or else, has the new painting made the little one look inconsequential. They don’t go together, sketches and finished paintings, except in a didactic show.”

It occurs to me that the major works of John Constable, a painter whose influence he has acknowledged, have suffered in reputation as a result of the modern fetish with spontaneity: people say the sketches are better than the finished “machines”. “I don’t endorse that view: I like them both. They are two sides of the same man, and they both should be there. We love a bit of flamboyance, someone at a dinner party making an outrageous remark, but we also like it when someone makes a very considered and thought-out statement. I don’t see them as contradictory and I’m not interested in that polarized way of thinking.”

“One thing that is not quite understood is that although I might stand at a site for three months to finish a painting, certain aspects or bits of that painting may be very spontaneous. A car comes through the painting and you say, ‘That’s the right color car’ and woosh, you dash it in at incredible pace.”

“I’m interested in thoroughness, in a sense. One of my favorite paintings in New York is the Theodore Rousseau in the Frick, *The Village at Becquigny*. A collector commissioned three painting of such and such dimension, any subject he liked, but didn’t get them to the day Rousseau died. He kept them with him all the time. I adore that painting: it is so realized, so coaxed into fullness of existence.”

What keeps Downes so long at his subject is a whole range of barely graspable phenomena that have to be right, in an unsentimental way, and according to empirical vision, but without resorting to tricks and conventions. Light and scale are what keep him busiest.

“I can’t proceed unless I feel I have grasped the scale of the scene. By that I mean that the brushstrokes should be the right size in relation to the canvas, and that the telephone poll should be the right size in relationship to the bridge. So it is internal representational scale and scale in the structure of the painting.”

But what really draws him to a subject? He talks a lot about the practicalities of fixing his vantage point. “The drawing is the way you find out where you are going to settle down and work. You don’t want to stand on a very busy street corner, especially where trucks are going to park in your way.” But this doesn’t explain the more existential-or is it more of a formal-decision to paint the kind of odd, plain, prosaic subjects he is drawn to: the new Millenium Park in New Jersey, with struggling, newly planted trees in the foreground, towers in construction on the horizon; or a forlorn looking baseball field in Red Hook Park on an overcast day; or ventillation ductwork in an attic in Snug Harbor, a site that has afforded several paintings series, including its disused music hall. Knowing something of his politics-his concerns for the environment, his Ruskinian disdain for modern technology-I wonder if there is something political in his preference for public over domestic interiors.

“I don’t think the political impulse is overt but it is probably built into my system. I’m not very interested in the idea of comfort. I rather believe that there is a tremendous amount of discomfort on this planet, and it is not equally distributed among the population. And some are able to purchase their way out of that kind of discomfort.” He once told me that after a whole series of drawings of the golf range on Chelsea Piers he abandoned the idea of painting the subject because, with the season change, lots of yachts began to moor, and he was put off by their sense of luxury.

“Interior is an interesting concept: you tend to use the word to mean a bourgeois living room. Which is nonsense: there are endless types of interiors which you can paint. And I have not, as you may have noticed, got involved in bourgeois living rooms.” The opportunity to paint vacant floors at the World Trade Center provided a roof over his head for the first time in twenty or thirty years. “In interiors I’m intensely interested in scale- those theatres at snug harbor, that’s an extraordinary volume of air. They are internal vistas, and in many ways they have a similar scale to the landscape paintings.”

Apart from early work of the 1970s, Mr. Downes rarely paints people, and yet there is always a sense of human presence. * His Texan landscapes feature water-flow monitoring installations on the Rio Grande, or substations along the power grid. It is an unsentimental view of the landscape. It isn’t nature as the unspoiled Garden of Eden of the Hudson River School by a long shot. Is human intervention incidental in his landscape vision, or integral?

“Absolutely integral. I partly think it is a national issue: I’m British, and we don’t have much in the way of wild nature. Dr. Johnson has some phrase for it… ‘naked nature.’ He and Boswell got to some Scottish island and that’s all they found, so they got back in the boat and returned to the mainland. They weren’t very interested in ‘naked nature’ and neither am I. Whereas to Ansel Adams it was the ultimate desideratum. But the problem with Adams is that he was standing there with his camera, so come on, Buddy. And that camera was using metals and chemicals from highly sophisticated, industrial, technological society.”

Earlier in his career, Mr. Downes lived for some year in Maine. “Many of us moved there because there are beautiful hills and mountains and cows and streams and so on. But when we build a house we call up the cement-mixer man who comes from a gigantic quarry where they get all this rock to make cement out of and pulverize it and turn it into cement. That is part of your life too. And I wanted to acknowledge that. I didn’t like the idea of landscape being an escapist genre, which it has the tendency to be.”

But his attraction to the real and the redolent doesn’t lead to painting that is didactic or critical. His mentors in seeing, he says, were Fairfield Porter and Rudy Burckhardt: “The two artists who looked at the world without editorializing and without emphasizing. They were unemphatic observers.”

So, by being unemphatic himself, by slowing things down, is he engaged in a kind of philosophical investigation into the act of seeing? He doesn’t like this, and points to the example of Alex Katz. “His accuracy is bingo, like the first shot of a pool player who sets up his shot. You can’t run after the ball and rethink it. The process is as different as night and day, but his is seeing, as much as mine is.”

“My mother, who went to the Slade, tried to teach me the rudiments of perspective when I was a little boy, and also of lighting, of chiarascuro. And she said, the light source must be either to the right or the left. But one day I was painting in Maine, and I looked ahead, and I saw that the shadows were coming in from the right and converging with shadows from the left. I thought, from which side of me is the sunlight, Mom! I turned round and saw that it was right behind my head, and therefore the shadows converged. It was quite an important moment of discovery for me, in life.”

He thinks he has been able to resist the received conventions of realist painting-perspective, which to him is just “a very brilliant mathematical reconstruction of the world,” chiarascuro, or building up a sense of space through color-because he was trained as an abstract painter. Ironically, abstraction freed him up to see more freshly, more honestly.

“Rackstraw Downes: New Paintings” through October 30, Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 242 2772.

* The original article stated, incorrectly, that he “never paints people.”

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