April 15 to June 10, 2016
18 East 79 Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, (212) 734-6300

In Acquavella Galleries’ panoramic view of Jean Dubuffet’s mindscape we are in familiar territory, immersed in sand, oil emulsion, butterfly wings, tobacco leaves, tar and gold. Dubuffet used terms like “Anticultural” and “Art Brut” to characterize his vision, in homage to an underground world where the “sap is richer” and where art is dedicated to madness. Dubuffet believed children, the uneducated and the naive are able to immediately “hit the bull’s-eye” and arrive at something visionary in their art making.The detritus and random objects of urban streets represented a diminishing horizon, for him, between high and low art.  Aquavella’s knock-out exhibition of judiciously selected works from the 1940s through the early 1960s illuminates the philosophical roots of his pictorial language.

Dubuffet’s vision blossomed in the wake of the Second World War, times of despair, daring and survival. He was keenly aware of the changed philosophic climate had occurred after the Great War with its polarization between the classical tradition and what the Nazis would call “Degenerate Art.” With the advent of WWII the realization of the innate brutality and barbarism in the human psyche affirmed aspects of Freudian thought. Though Dubuffet spoke against the Western tradition with its penchant for classical harmony, order and rationalism, paradoxically he was well versed in European culture.

The Second World War brought out in him a fierce stance against the acquiescence of the French during the German occupation. Having been a puppeteer and mask maker, he later created paintings of gestural configurations of human frailty and vulnerability in a series of portraits. The protagonists of these paintings openly expose the raw emotions of the post-war period. These portraits are non-portraits in disdain of mimesis and verisimilitude. To him, they were “cooked and preserved in memory.”

Joë Bousquet in Bed (1947), a portrait of the elusive poet disabled in World War One, has the writer almost embalmed in black sheets scribbled with white cuneiform-like script. Dubuffet melds figure and ground into a singular unity, roping his protagonists within a shallow space. He eschews Western perspectival space, possibly as a remembrance of his journey to the Algerian Sahara in the late 1940s. It was a revelation for him to observe non-Western societies that are linked and inseparable from the earth.

In Will to Power 1946, he parodies the Nazi appropriation of the Nietzschean superman as a glob of flesh, hair, a dangling genital and teeth which could be a counterpart to the later de Kooning “Women” series [1952-53]. Dubuffet’s paintings Corps de Dame, Esplanade de Peau and Beautiful Woman with Heavy Breasts, (both 1950), portray flattened pieces of protoplasm, scratched and etched with markings for their orifices and dangling cylinders for arms. They are laid out for inspection as a source of the early beginnings of life immersed in the oil and gravel of the ground. In 1954, in a similar mode to his women, Dubuffet depicted cows splayed in a grassy field. He said that he felt no hierarchies between humans, cows, earth, wind, and water, all of them belonging to the living universe. His world-view was a dismissal of all “Greekeries,” he stated.

In Façades d’immeubles, (1946), his personages begin to exit from their Parisian domiciles like small animals out of a cave. This painting links the end of the war with an “hommage” to the burial of his literary mentor, Max Jacob, who died in the internment camp of Drancy. The landscapes with and without personages of the later ‘40s and early ‘50s clearly reflect his North African odyssey and his observation of the way forms in the desert come in and out of focus as they merge with the surrounding space. In Our Old Land, (1951), a segment of earth tangled with crevices and vegetation takes a dominant position and becomes the prime protagonist, whereas in The Gallant Pursuit, (1953), two small creatures enact an amorous dialogue dwarfed by the enclosing land. The influence of Paul Klee is evident in these images, especially in the way Dubuffet integrates visual signs of the human , animal and vegetable spheres.

Dubuffet took a strong countercultural position by withdrawing from the ”call to order” and the return to old values of France during the two world war years. He was by no means a naïf or unrelated to the European cultural tradition though he championed the irrational, the instinctual and the “anticultural.” He had the French love of “matière” and was a consummate craftsman who mastered the art of preservation for his new materials. He had a vast knowledge of art history including the newly discovered cave paintings, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art, Picasso and particularly Klee as well as his contemporaries Soutine, Bacon and Fautrier. His countercultural friends belonged to literary circles and Dubuffet had an interest in languages, having learned Arabic for his North African journey. He was also a musician and later became involved with Jazz.

His cerebral nature, however, affirmed the visceral reality of organic matter, and instinctual life. He thus intertwined a universe of ideas and physical substances. He considered his personages and “earthscapes” a fictive world of the mind. Consumer culture was not part of his pictorial vocabulary. Dubuffet came to maturity in a time torn asunder by two world wars and a growing knowledge of the non-Western world that gave him a different understanding than ours of comedy, tragedy and the ironic.

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November 13, 2014 through March 8, 2015
144 West 125th Street (between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X boulevards)
New York, 212 864 4500

“Of This Day in Time,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem through March 8, 2015, is the first major New York exhibition of the work of artist Kianja Strobert. In the tradition of Klein and Dubuffet, Strobert chooses to site her artistic practice within the confines of painting, while literally doing everything she can to reconfigure that discipline through a re-orientation of mediums and with an expressionistic yet pragmatic eye.

Like a passage from Aeschylus, Strobert’s Untitled (2010) is a raw and epic cartography of emotion and a historical narrative. The composition is simple enough: a cloudburst of silvers, whites and grays, which is decadent in its simplicity, like the old Bourbon flag of pure white. Applied to the bottom left quadrant, four gold-painted chicken bones embody the artist’s fascination with the “realness” of her media — the idea of expanding her stable of materials to the unexpected and atypical, including crumbled pumice stone, fruit skin, and in this piece, bones. In the face of the silver and white, the golden bones — one is green with gold highlights, seemingly in imitation of the gilded bronze of a classical cast — are suggestive of a reliquary. The whole assemblage speaks of ritual, art of immediate necessity rather than quiet pondering or decoration.

Strobert’s painting isn’t abstract painting but the abstraction of painting. She is on a search for its origins; painting as practical magic, the prosaic made ecstatic, and self-portrait in its most basic sense as a trace of its author. Many of the works bear the insignia of the artist herself, the above-mentioned Untitled (2010) departs from its opulent palette with two red fingerprints — a pair of red dots in a rectangle at the lower right hand corner that stand in as signature, blood contract or even eyes. A series of four paintings, all Untitled (each 2011), follows the format of enclosing yellow border; upper quadrant, or sky, of graphite dust; and a lower half of mostly brown, orange and ochre blots and smudges. Many of the active forms at bottom are marks made with the artist’s hands — finger streaks and thick, blobby prints. Beyond the literal application of paint, the strokes and gestures are at odds with the brush or pen. In this series of paintings the careful, regulating geometry of the precise and crisp straight-edge border, and the repeated texture and ordering of the colors is at odds with the spontaneity of the gesture, merging the genres of abstract landscape, diagram and portrait.

Archaism and Ecstasy (2014) and Taurus II (2014) employ alternative methods to subvert the artist’s tools: the gestures have a troweled-on quality, the strokes again have the singular nature of a finger motion, but almost as if the artist were a giant. The motions are smooth. But, bulked up with the pumice or some other filler material, the gestures are accretive and encrusted: artful while distancing themselves from the smooth artificiality of the brush, but not necessarily jettisoning its delicacy or poise as an instrument.

Often the use of a base — canvas, linen, or in this case, paper — seems so inevitable as to be arbitrary. It falls into a preordained hierarchy, i.e. paper for drawings and canvas for painting; here all paintings are on paper, and the choice is steadfastly self-conscious. Strobert chooses paper in order to torture the substrate, to watch it suffer as with each coating of acrylic, oil and matte-medium-infused pumice dust, the thick watercolor paper strains with the weight and buckles under the varying constraints of mediums that contract to differing degrees as they dry. This is paper that is not allowed to be an indifferent and neutral foundation and it begs the question of why we assume the substrate in a painting must be flat and indifferent to its various layers and coatings. The same holds true for the mediums themselves. The non-traditional materials Strobert employs — powdered graphite, pumice, papier-mâché and glitter among others — all have visual signatures as distinctive as the bulbous shine of oil paint or the transparent skeins of gouache. They very literally represent an earthier side of image making that enlists the grit and sparkle that exists in minerals, dirt and flesh, but that somehow crosses the line of acceptable representation. Strobert’s work inhabits a region outside of the neat requirements of traditional painting, and though her work is across the board contained in perfect box frames, ironically these only serve to reinforce the unpredictability of her use of medium.

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July 21 to October 27, 2013
279 Montauk Highway
Water Mill, NY, 631-283-2118

(Reviewed at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 9 to May 12, 2013)

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Jean Dubuffet (1902-1985) were friends of the privileged collector Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990). Heir to a Philippines sugar fortune, Ossorio lived and worked during his creative life in East Hampton, New York. A gay practicing Catholic, he aspired to synthesize Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut. This exhibition, presenting the three men as peers, aims to reveal the elective affinities of two famous painters, who themselves never met, and, also, to demonstrate what Ossario, who was friends with both men learned from each of them. It includes one large Pollock masterpiece, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist); some important smaller paintings and art on paper; and a number of works such as Collage and Oil (1951) that reveal him struggling. And, in a marvelous demonstration showing how consistent Jean Dubuffet was in the period 1946 to 1958, it presents both his little drawing Corps de dame (Body of a Lady) (1950) and the majestically large Paysage métapsychique (Metaphysical landscape) (1952). Very different, they both are first-rate pictures.

That Pollock and Dubuffet can happily cohabit as near equals is, of course no surprise. What here is up for grabs is Ossorio’s artistic relationship with these two modernist masters. He tends to place figurative elements or shapes not unlike Dubuffet’s in a Pollockesque all over field. So, for example, Perpetual Sacrifice (1949) floats faces in a field of white lines; Crucifix: Seek & Ye Shall Find (1951) deploys a heavily painted field of lines on a shaped canvas, with a crucifix shape giving form to that field; and Martyrs and Spectators (1951) sets the outlines of a crucifixion scene in a framework of black and white. Advent (1951), the best of Ossorio’s paintings on display runs lines of green, red and yellow around a vertical standing figure. He lacks the single-mindedness of Pollock at his best and, also, the very high level of excellence of Dubuffet in this period. You have the sense, rather, that driven by his awareness of the greatness of his friends’ art, Ossorio was experimenting restlessly without ever achieving real resolution. So, for example, Red Family (1951) uses a figure like some Dubuffets; and Head (1951) employs a drawn field akin to some of Pollock’s weaker pictures. But where Pollock mastered a language of personal abstraction, evidenced in his great little painting on paper Number 22A, 1948; and Dubuffet immersed figures in flatted fields, Ossario, a gifted eclectic always remains uncomfortably suspended between abstraction and the figure.

This Eurasian Catholic must have been a fascinating personality. And it must have been tricky for him to befriend and collect two such different and apparently overwhelming figures. But he isn’t a great artist. In the catalog essay Alicia Longwell says that Clement Greenberg, who admired both Pollock and Dubuffet believed that “an artist had to suppress any hint of representation to achieve a level of distinction in art making.” This statement, which is emphatically not correct, misrepresents Greenberg in an unfortunate, very misleading way. What is the case is that a great artist must be single minded. Connoisseurship is out of fashion—it is commonly said to be politically incorrect. Ossario was a well connected artist; an interesting artist; a skilled artist: but what this misguided exhibition inadvertently shows is that he was minor. Successful curators need to be connoisseurs.

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