July 4 to August 2, 2015
4 Fulling Lane
Kent, CT, 917 270 8044

Everyone loves an art movement, and many may feel the lack of any major recent one. But the next best thing is a group of disparate artists all working in the same place — ideally bucolic or exotic. And just in time to quench our thirst for such geographical groupings, and to welcome the upstate summer, comes the exhibition “Cornwall Bohemia,” at James Barron in Kent, Connecticut. This is the first group show at the gleaming new space belonging to Mr. Barron, an infamously modish figure who shuttles between here and Rome, his international profile matching the storied elegance of many of these local artists.

This is a crew, a scene, of truly heady social stuff, whether the ultra-cosmopolitan Philip Taaffe; the reigning royalty of TriBeCa, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham; not to mention leading glossy magazine photographer Todd Eberle; Downtown superstar James Nares; and Duncan Hannah, dandy draughtsman supreme. But quite aside from any such cosmopolitan grandeur these are all artists of true importance, of global caliber, who also happen to have houses and studios in Cornwall, a group of quaint unspoiled villages in Litchfield County, where they spend some of their creative time and energy. No, of course there is no thematic coherence or identifiable shared method,but yes they all make for a damn rich group show, artists of world renown here operating on a smaller, more communal scale. The perfectly proportioned main gallery is not only ideally light and airy, but also deliciously cool — blasting AC always being an accurate socio-demographic clue to a dealer’s status. And the whole space is simply ablaze with local color, from Greg Goldberg’s zingy modernist motifs to Eberle’s outrageously bold mirrored flowers from his Cosmos series, or Speed of Heat (2012) a smooth trademark bright swoosh from Nares. The show seems to move across from a joyously breezy abstraction, including the kick-ass, mica-rich Portrait (Regal) (2015) by Jackie Saccoccio. There’s a sort of refined outlined figuration in Dunham’s comic biomorphic blobs and Brendan O’Connell’s tasty, melting supermarket products, juxtaposed with ideogrammatic Canal Zone cityscapes of Judith Belzer. As if coming into focus, the image itself then solidifies into the recognizable contours of Simmons’s perfect, solitary and spotlit photograph Brothers/Aerial View (1979) and Hannah’s two highly stylized and desirable untitled paintings of cars and buildings brimming with Brutalist chic.

In all this, Taaffe provides a sort of central fulcrum to the movement from abstraction to realism, with his Strata Nephrodium (2014), a thicket of primal pattern, whose fern shapes and bold brightness could be read as an homage to Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/ Trail with daisies and barley/ Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

Kent is known for its widespread public sculpture – not least thanks to the notorious neighboring Morrison Gallery. But Barron has wisely included only one example, Nozedone (2013) — a sinister yet sensual work by Carl D’Alvia, a sort of Maltese Falcon built from cast resin licorice curlicues, looming in a back perch.

The Cornwall area has a long tradition of artist residents, including Alexander Calder, James Thurber, Marc Simont and Alexander Lieberman; and this exhibition is a welcome addition to such proud regional history and, ideally, perhaps an annual tradition. As Barron notes, “Cornwall has always enjoyed a rich intellectual and artistic heritage, which is especially remarkable given the town’s tiny population.” In fact, so creatively rich is this county that one could easily pitch a Litchfield Biennale, though this is no place to play the “why not so-and-so” game.

If there do seem some obvious omissions from this exhibition — such as watercolorist Adam Van Doren or sculptor Tim Prentice — clearly not everyone could be included without losing that generous, big, calm hanging that so distinguishes this show. The only two Cornwall artists one might have liked to seen together here are Seth Price and Emily Buchanan, a perfect pairing, ideal demonstration, of the town’s wide artistic diversity: a celebrated conceptualist and a renowned traditional landscape painter who recently created the White House Christmas card.

For any British critic, or indeed follower of European Modernism, there is the added irony that the original Cornwall, in England, was site of one of the St. Ives School, one of best known of the 20th century. This was a genuine movement. more than causal geographic coincidence, bringing together Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth as well as several subsequent generations of artists, such as Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, who all shared a distinct aesthetic approach to depicting their common landscape. Likewise, one does suspect that some of these artists in the “other” Cornwall up in Connecticut, should get together to work in a similar aesthetic vein, sharing studios, ideas and materials. Then at last we could have an actual new, live art movement. It only takes three to make one, as well as a welcome weekend country set. Perhaps they just need a name: the “Cornwall Oddballs” or the “Litchfield Color Field Crowd.” Something suitably snazzy can surely be found.

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on show at Turtle Point Press through Friday
233 Broadway 212 945 6622 www.turtlepointpress.com

This was an artcritical PIC in February 2009.

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Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens joined David Cohen to discuss Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, Nancy Spero at Galerie Lelong, Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons, and Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art.

The post February 2006: Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

AUGUSTIN FERNANDEZ
Mitchell Algus until July 16
511 W. 25th Street, 212-242-6242

GOOD VIBRATIONS
McKenzie until July 30
511 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-989-5467

The Pre-Raphaelites still have a lot to answer for. The cult of wan Ophelias, Madonna-vampires, and socialite sirens that began with Rossetti and Millais reached its apogee in Munch and Klimt, only surviving at this stage in history as a kitsch parody of itself. But a new show at Bellwether suggests the reign of sultry and sinister lovelies continues unabated. “Idols of Perversity” is a portrait gallery packed cheek-by-jowl with killer damsels.

If dead critics could be resurrected for the purpose of reviewing contemporary art, this show might be the occasion to disturb the slumber of Max Nordau, as it is an almost willful vindication of the vituperative anathemas expressed in his notorious 1892 polemic, “Degeneration.” The title of the show comes from Bram Dijkstra’s illuminating, level-headed analysis of fin-de-siècle artistic misogyny; ironically, Amazon’s “customers also bought” list for Dijkstra’s book is topped by Nordau.

John Currin, the best-known artist in the show, is by no means the sickest or silliest — a sure indication of the general level here. His fusion of schlock taste and appeal to tested academic technique does set a standard tactic, however, which others in this show follow or aspire to. His “Chewy,” a bald-headed rococo dame at her morning toilette, about to choose her wig for the day, has a tame finesse out of keeping with the company it keeps (or the artist’s own norm).

More in line with the standards of curators Thomas Woodruff and Becky Smith is Christoph Steinmeyer’s high-artifice, greased-up “Dryade” (2003), which derives its mild, nerdish intensity from a relentless symmetry. The contribution of Graham Little (an artist paired with Mr. Currin in a shared room at MoMA’s 2003 drawing exhibition, “Eight Propositions”), a portrait on gesso of a supermodel in suede boots and brown jacket, seated against a vaguely Old Masterish neutral brown ground, is brought to life by an exquisitely rendered face and gaudily Klimtian Lycra leggings.

This show brings together artists of different intentions and skill levels. Many make obvious and familiar jests about art and kitsch. A vulgar pastoral of a nymph and a spaniel by Catherine Howe, a Currin wannabe, falls between the stools of Rococo and Dada. A double portrait in contrastingly smooth and impastoed finish by Pieter Schoolwerth is essentially an academic warm-up exercise. Others look like genuine strays from tattoo parlors (June Kim, Mel Odom), prison art programs (Sas Christian), or the art departments of publishers of sci-fi books and heavy-metal albums (Ted Mineo, Lori Earley).

Yet there are also displays of genuine artistry. Ben Blatt, Ray Caesar, and Mr. Woodruff himself have the formidably obsessive and inventive skills of 16th-century Mannerists. Julie Heffernen could have been drafted to keep them company.

The emphasis in this show is on the idols, not the perversity. With the exception of a tattooed, moderately hirsute gent in a leather jacket, one or two extremely convincing transvestites, and a smattering of prepubescent schoolgirls, every other model on display, even the ones with horns and tails, could get a job at a Playboy Club. Most of the artists, in other words, may be ironic about style but are earnest about their — and our — libidos. The mild porn-quotient ensures a work’s status as kitsch, thus making it respectable as an iconoclastic gesture. The problem–as Dada fast approaches its centennial–is that such a gesture is no longer in the least perverse. Idolatry is an orthodox article of avant-garde faith.

The fault line in this show isn’t between irony and earnestness: The best kind of mannerism of necessity has both. The redoubtable Duncan Hannah, represented by four works scattered around the show, makes works steeped in enigmatic, fey awkwardness. His trademark Balthusian languor, knowing amateurishness, and wistful, obsessive heroine worship remind us that, long before Degeneration came along, there was good, wholesome Melancholia.

Viewers with a real taste for the painterly perverse should check out Agustín Fernández at Mitchell Algus. Mr. Algus is renowned as the champion of older artists battling artworld indifference or memory loss, a brief amply met by the valiant Mr. Fernández.  Born in Havana in 1928, trained at New York’s Art Students League and the subject of some success in Paris Surrealist circles in the 1960s, the artist has lived in New York since 1972 without staging a single solo exhibition prior to this one.

He did enjoyed some exposure, though, when a canvas from 1961 was used as a prop in Brian de Palma’s 1980 movie, “Dressed to Kill” (the still graced his announcement card).  The painting in question, “Développement d’Un Délire,” (above left) is actually a tour de force of fantasty and invention.  Rendered with a luscious painterly containment that looks like a cross between Yves Tanguy and Carravagio, its ambiguous personages are at once erotic and menacing, compelling and otherworldly.

This tastefully installed  historic overview demonstrates stylistic and iconographical diversity but consistent aesthetic concerns: like Matta, Bacon and Balthus, Mr. Fernández’s imagery does service to the kinky without giving way to the kitsch.  He has ways to convey an idealised sensation of bound flesh and penetrated orifice without being anatomically explicit.  At the same time, he has a private vocabulary of armor and heraldry that achieves high artifice without being camp.  A memorable set of square canvases of abstracted but teasing finesse (the three canvases stacked at the center of the right image) consist of fleshlike forms which pucker to expose a hole at their center, over which hover suggestively an object Mr. Fernández’s background encourages one to read as Havana cigar.

“Good Vibrations” at McKenzie Fine Art surveys the recent, widespread revival of Op Art, the abstract style from the 1960s that played psychological games with image cognition— close-knit lines, repeating sequences, and jarring chromas that serate your vision. Like Seurat’s pointillism, Op Art leaves the final mixing of forms and colors to the viewer’s brain.

This show focuses insistently on contemporary work in the Op Art field. The only veteran of the original “perceptual abstraction,” as Peter Selz named the tendency in a famous Museum of Modern Art exhibition, is Julian Stanczak. The younger artists tap the “retro” appeal of the scientific optimism of the original movement but bring fresh and disparate influences: mysticism, primitivism, acid trips, screensavers.

Susie Rosemarin’s technique is redolent of Mr. Stanczak’s: slight variations on a strict lattice to induce a blurry sensation of movement. Only she uses the technique to induce the illusion of a Cross of St. Andrew pulsating against a white Iron Cross, a sort of visual pun on “visionary.” Sara Sosnowy’s intense, obsessive drawings, combining Op Art and Australian Aboriginal painting, recall James Siena. Tom Martinelli induces a familiar buzz from the simple misregistration of one colored ball superimposed upon another. And Barbara Takenaga plumbs exquisite depths in her mind-numbingly fastidious concentric arrangement of little blobs of diminishing scale, inducing the mystical sensation of being sucked into a vortex.

The cheery palette and compositional fizz of “Good Vibrations” might seem a perfect palate-cleanser after the fetid decadence of “Idols,” but in a funny way it is a chip off the same block. Bellwether’s idols and McKenzie’s vibrations both trade in the frisson of revival, after all, require fastidious skill, and make appeal to basic bodily experiences, whether libidinal or retinal.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 7, 2005

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“Duncan Hannah: Stolen Moments”
JG/Contemporary until March 6 1014 Madison Avenue at 78th Street, 3rd Floor, 212.535.5767

“A Triple Alliance: de Chirico, Picabia, Warhol”
Sperone Westwater until February 21 415 W. 13th Street, between TK and TK, 212-999-7337

“Now Is a Good Time”
Andrea Rosen Gallery until February 21 525 W. 24th Street, 212-627-6000

I seem to have fallen in love. Teresa Ann is a prepubescent blonde with a luminous complexion. Her coyly vacuous gaze belies the provocativeness with which she lifts her skirt to reveal tender thighs and white stockings. But there’s no need to call 911: It’s not this Lolita herself I’m smitten with, but her creator, Duncan Hannah.

Mind you, for a critic serious about painting to fall for Mr. Hannah is plenty perverse enough. Here is a painter who pushes deadpan to the point of necrophilia. He seems to will himself into Sunday painter mode.

Most kinky of all is his anglophilia, an idyll of clipped and cramped Englishness: “Brideshead Revisited” meets Enid Blyton meets the quirky, tonal aloofness of Walter Richard Sickert. Mr. Hannah’s touch is as bland and affectless as English weather and English cooking combined. His twin shows at the uptown and Chelsea premises of JG Contemporary are titled, respectively, “Stolen Moments” and “The Spell of London.” (The tender portrait of Sickert in the latter show, incidentally, is Mr. Hannah’s riposte in paint to the balmy blood libel leveled at Sickert by “Ripperologist” Patricia Cornwell.)

Mr. Hannah’s retro style and pre-war subject matter are derived not so much from fine art as period illustration, particularly the advertising for film noir. -like Nova Pilbeam, the Hitchcock starlet-rendered, like Picabia’s cinematic paintings of the 1940s, in that kitsch shorthand that denotes glamour and sensuality. Politically tainted period pieces are coyly referenced: “The 39 Steps” is playing at Mr. Hannah’s 2002 Gaumont Cinema, while a pupil of Miss Brodie is portrayed in “In Her Prime,” (2001).

A political reading is bolstered by a striking resemblance between the glowing yet frigid portrait of Pilbeam and R.B. Kitaj’s ambiguously sexy, iconic portrait of Unity Mitford from 1968. Both painters are midwesterners for whom London is, or has at some point, proven a locus of romantic nostalgia.

The enigma of Mr. Hannah is that he has made a remarkable body of art out of unremarkable individual pictures, discovering the marvelous in the mediocre without having to resort to the uncanny. This description makes him sound like just another iconoclast, a “bad boy” of painting in the mold of the younger John Currin. But Mr. Hannah isn’t simply striking a pose: He has discovered a genuine source of visual poetry in wilfull nerdishness.

Mr. Hannah is a metaphysical painter in direct descent from de Chirico and Magritte. To paraphrase Dalí on madmen, the difference between him and a Surrealist is that he is not surreal.

His genius is to meld oddity of vision and execution. There is a kind of earnest irony in Mr. Hannah, in which painting becomes a “boy’s own” adventure. His images of youths masquerading as adults, not to mention of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, present an allegory of alienation, in which painting itself refuses to grow up.

Others have noted his striking resemblance to Hopper in terms of unexpressive painthandling and period setting. The affinity goes deeper, to a poetics of boredom. In both painters (as in Sickert)), ennui pervades depiction and what’s depicted alike.

Ultimately, Mr. Hannah is in a place beyond irony, where the very failures of expression are poignant. In “Regarding Teresa Ann” (2002), a tender awkwardness unites the painter with his invented or appropriated sitter – as if *he* were as ambiguous about painterliness as she is about sexuality.

***

If Mr. Hannah seems to exemplify postmodern attitude in his intentional cackhandedness, a stunning exhibition at Sperone Westwater, , suggests that “Bad Painting” has a long pedigree. “A Triple Alliance” presents Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia, and Andy Warhol as a triumvurate of the nonchalant, aspiring oxymoronically, like Mr. Hannah, towards mastery within the mediocre.

Fun connections abound in this thoughtful kitschfest (for which Robert Rosenblum’s curatorial input has been acknowledged). Visually, Warhol’s abrasive Pop palette and garish commercialism throw the exhibition somewhat out of key, but in such company do we really want harmony anyway? The catalog and hang alike make a persuasive case for linking him with these early exemplars of modern iconoclasm.

De Chirico was notorious for “forging” his own earlier, canonical proto-surrealist cityscapes, and for revisiting mannerist moments in the history of art. Picabia, the one-time pioneer of a Dada machine aesthetic, flirted shamelessly with film-poster realism. Both were forebears of the Warhol anti-aesthetic.

The Warhols include a set of homages to de Chirico from 1982, based on the *Pittura Metafisica* painter’s “The Poet and his Muse,” “The Two Sisters,” and “The Furniture in the Valley.” They look to a discredited late period of the Italian’s career, pointedly so, as a kind of rebuttal to the contemporary efforts of the Museum of Modern Art to tidy up de Chirico’s reputation as a modernist.
Technically, Warhol’s layering of misregistered lines and patches of color on top of photographically appropriated originals marries with Picabia’s legendary “transparencies,” in which an overlay of line drawing that is a bit like the filigree of a stained-glass window at once accents and deconstructs the painting underneath. The absurdist machine aesthetic, common to Picabia and de Chirico, makes a new, occult sense of Warhol’s banal, mechanical hand.

***

If you can’t get enough “Bad” painting, be sure to catch the last days of “Now Is a Good Time” at Andrea Rosen, which closes Saturday. Curated by Dean Valentine, a Los Angeles collector, its floral theme seemed timed to his saintly namesake’s feast day.

Most of the works were apparently made specially for the show. Included are various stars in the firmament of the kitsch and the fey, including Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, and John Currin, as well as more interesting members of the LA scene, such as Rodney McMillian.

Knowing that Mr. Currin was included, and having a rough idea from the checklist where he would be placed, I had a momentary Road to Damascus experience, thinking that I’d spied and been smitten by his entry from 40 feet away. But the creamy, Manet-like gem in an Amédée Ozenfant palette turned out to be “January” (2004) by Maureen Gallace. Mr. Currin’s reassuringly boring pastiche was “Rosebush” (2003), just next to it.

One of the few voluptuous paintings in the show was Alisa Margolis’s “We love you all,” (2003-04), an array of smudged blooms on a dark, almost submarine-feeling ground, redolent of both Rococo painting and Ross Bleckner.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 19, 2004.

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