Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

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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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June 27 to August 30, 2013
547 West 25th Street
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, a ruggedly alive exhibition organized by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, presents fifteen artists who were in their prime during that decade. By focusing on the physical reality of the artworks, and the social reality of this specific group of artists, the exhibition escapes the trap of misty-eyed nostalgia or explicit revisionism. In his catalog essay, Rubinstein discusses the show as a way to disengage the story of abstract painting from the bottom-line narratives that are seen as the “official account” of the decade, in particular the advent of celebrity-styled painters, and the dominance of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, two labels that had more to do with marketing than with painted content. Instead, he offers the phrase “impure abstraction,” a hybrid mode of working between abstraction and figuration, to flesh out a portrait of a painting culture that was not as beholden to the one-critic model of analysis that effected the previous generation in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.

Reinventing Abstraction is more concerned with the transition of painting cultures and the accruing of historical knowledge than it is with the particulars of the decadent decade itself. The back-story to the 1980s begins with the social radicalism of the 1960s, when the majority of the exhibition’s included artists were in school, and continues through the 1970s when they were fully experimenting with their practice in an art world that had largely turned away from painting in favor of the dematerialization of the art object. The off-the-stretcher abstraction being made in the ‘60s and ‘70s had its own moment in the sun with High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, an exhibition organized by Katie Siegel and David Reed, which Rubinstein acknowledges as a guiding spirit for his own show.

A feeling of disengagement from the immediate past manifests itself visually in many of the works on view. It is as if an invisible pane of glass were mounted on top of the canvas to emotionally cool off the fast and loose painted gesture. Jonathan Lasker’s Double Play (1987), a painting in elegant quotation marks, has all its ingredients diagrammed to perfection: a rich brown backdrop, radiating pink bars, and an area of gooey cross-hatched “painting” splashed up against the surface. David Reed’s No. 230 (For Beccafumi) (1985-6) is a vertical monument to the paint stroke, showing off a translucent-matte finish that is as sharp and slick as a silkscreen. In both works these artists are making visible the idea of painting as a compositional force sans the hot-headedness of late night studio labor. Similarly, Mary Heilmann’s exuberant Rio Nido (1987) is a play between foreground and background, between the painting as whole and the painting as parts. Blue, magenta, red, green, and yellow marks set against black are read as shot holes dripping paint, a remnant of an action, and the painting exists as the evidence.

Carroll Dunham’s Horizontal Bands (1982-83), is a Surrealism-inflected painting on pine board composed of alternating stripes of graphically rendered root vegetables, allowing one to see his trademark phalluses just over the horizon. The tentative nature of this early painting reads more as a private sketch than as a full-blown work, a proposition of fresh beginnings that charges many of the paintings on view. Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980-81), a dimensional portrait of a star-like figure, is thickly celestial, like a corner blow-up of a Van Gogh. Gary Stephan’s unromantically titled Untitled (#45418) (1988) is the most overtly mysterious work in the gallery, an image of a dusk-lit landscape divided in half by a biomorphic form that eclipses day into night.

What’s striking about several of the paintings in Reinventing Abstraction is their wall-dominating size. It’s a scale that brings to mind 18th-century history painting as easily as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), and speaks of financial resources and passion to burn. The lavish variety of surface textures and oil paint mixed with other media makes today’s abstract paintings seem especially anemic when it comes to materials and scale. Even the smallest work in the show, Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (630) (1988), radiates a deeply felt engagement with the largess of history and psychic space.

In comparison to the work on view in High Times Hard Times, the majority of artists in Reinventing Abstraction make their radical choices within the framed space of the traditional rectangle, putting an exquisite pressure on the pictorial possibilities of abstraction. A notable exception is Elizabeth Murray’s Sentimental Education (1982), a painting of conjoined parts whose scale and rapturous energy speak to the colossal task of painting as both action and object. For all its obvious labor of construction, the work epitomizes the fun aspects of high Modernism.  Her oil on canvas appears as malleable as a Play-Doh construction of cobalt colors and finely drawn zig-zags. In this painting, and indeed her entire body of work, Murray epitomizes the transcendent grace of the art student as grand master.

The paintings in Reinventing Abstractions are all un-mistakenly the work of grown-up artists coming to terms with inherited values while finding new rhythms with which to move abstraction forward. In this sense, the art could be seen as a visual complement to Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a portrait of the decade in which commercial entertainment culture solidified its hold on American society, while also letting in the dreamy, fluent potential of Postmodernism as a way to break free from Modernism’s flight of progress. As a citizen of a tightly sealed, pluralist art world it can be easy to long for this not too distant past. It is important to fight this backward glance, and instead to ask, what does remain? I can think of a few things: the factuality of paint, the presence of art history and mentors, and the still shocking ability of a new abstract painting to dismantle the fiction of linear time, if only for a minute or two.

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Carroll Dunham’s rough canvases, tilting toward aggressive sexual assertion and actions of near anarchy, are catchy tunes of hipster malice. Brilliantly colored, self-sufficient in the confidence of their rhetoric, the paintings are busy with protrusions resembling genitalia, organic forms indicative of other body parts, and a humorous treatment generally of the human body. Comic-book clarity and raw desire figure in major ways in this show of Dunham’s recent paintings, which focus on the back view of a female nude in a stylized landscape. Both the female body and the environment in which it has been placed are rendered in grossly configured terms; viewers experience a kind of overkill, determined by the intensity of Dunham’s hues as well as the sheer frankness of the imagery. It is clear, then, that the artist’s reputation as a bad boy with considerable skill dies hard; indeed, it is more or less evident that this is the way he wants to be seen by the public.

This stance may be well and good on a surface level, but it raises questions and doubts about the work itself. What are we to do with so strenuous an outlaw painter? Assuming an attitude is not the same as painting a painting, although it often appears that, for Dunham, the two activities are pretty much the same. While the artist’s technical skill is not in question—his sense of color and graphic composition abilities are really very good—it proves easy to doubt the stylized stance of someone whose creativity revolves around an adolescent vision of sexual high jinks and comic disorder.  The paintings, both past and present, look like adult cartoons on the order of soft porn; they perform their transgressions rather perfunctorily, as if Dunham himself was a bit bored with an attitude so thick it can be cut with a knife. His eroticism is not necessarily divisive, but it does narrow the expressive range of his formal ideas.

In Tree with Red Flowers (2009), a large mixed-media painting with a thick brown trunk, dark green foliage ending in round-shaped branches given a black outline, Dunham’s simplified rawness works to good effect. There is a rough beauty to the colors and imagery, which include a blue-white sky and a series of red flowers painted on top of the greenery. The composition’s simplicity emphasizes the primal forms it comprises, so that Dunham’s audience can appreciate his deployment of contrasting hues.  But in the “Hers” series, the sexual takes over—in (Hers) Night and Day #1 (2009), we see the naked body of a black-haired woman lying on her stomach. Surrounded by nature—a brightly blue sky, grass, a tree, and purple flowers with a red center—the nude projects her own erotic meaning toward the viewer, complete with big hips and a hairy vagina. Nature takes second place when juxtaposed with the imagistic force of a naked woman.

But there is a problem with the adolescent imagery—like much erotic art, it tends to become repetitively stylized, evoking desire in a way that seems superficial. Dunham’s range of imagery is rather narrow, and he would like to make up with intensity what he lacks in breadth. In Bather (One) (2009), a naked woman is seen from the back; naked, she is bent over, thigh deep in water. An explosion of black hair covers her erogenous zone.  Dunham, meanwhile, constructs a lyricism in the hilly landscape beyond: green grass, trees with coiled foliage, a pale blue sky, and, at the top of the painting, the bottom half of the sun. The figure’s breasts hang freely just above the water line. One is hard put to appreciate the heavily outlined body, which offers viewers access to the primal reality of the cartoon. Formally, the composition is workable, but it isn’t about very much. Dunham needs a new theme to inspire his talents, which here lose out to a rebelliousness that makes little sense.

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The title of the Whitney’s new, “way out” exhibition — like so much else in it — has been borrowed from the 1960s. At a cool moment in the Cold War, the United States military is said to have recruited psychics to envision sites and phenomena they themselves couldn’t imagine. These unlikely personnel were classed as “remote viewers.”

“Remote Viewing (Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing),” curated by Elisabeth Sussman, is a fun, provocative, timely, astute eight-person survey that has its finger on the artworld’s most funky, visionary button. Through the intense channeling of data, or pseudo-data, and intimations of altered consciousness, these artists, it is proposed, conjure otherworldy spaces. “Atomic”!

Actually, “Remote Viewing” ties together several strands prevalent among younger artists. While the curator makes the usual noises about the disparate nature of her group, it being a mere coincidence that seven of the eight are New York based, the show she has mounted actually reflects a specifically Williamsburg aesthetic. Last year, the Brooklyn Museum’s sprawling survey of art made in its borough was overwhelmed by a surprisingly unifying characteristic: So many of the artists were engaged in what you could call fuss and fiddle.

Chipping away in former light-industrial lofts and workshops, these artists turned out to be engaged in painstaking, almost craftsy endeavors. Added to intensity of labor were two other common ingredients: informational overload and psychedelia. The Whitney eight exude plenty that’s trippy and tricksy, and certainly favor density of detail. But they part from Brooklyn drudge with their energy and scope. As with the difference between Hollywood and television, a big-budget mentality produces fearless chroma and sharp resolve.

Yet, to an unprecedented degree for a small-group museum show, the curator risks sameness. The show is divided into separate spaces for each artist, but with multiple cross-viewing opportunities. If you slipped into the show and started at the end (as plenty of museumgoers do), you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a solo retrospective.

Stand in front of Carroll Dunham’s seven-foot high “Green Planet” (1996–97), an imploding pumpkin inhabited by teethy little graffiti robots gnarling one another’s penile/nasal appendages. With the mix of splatter and cartooning, it’s Keith Haring meets Henri Michaux. To its right, in the far distance, you catch a glimpse of a big Julie Mehretu canvas, probably her Caravaggio-inspired, 21-foot wide “Seven Acts of Mercy,” (2004). Clockwise from that you see Matthew Ritchie’s “The Eighth Sea” (2002) whose swirling gestalt closely complements the Mehretu and the Dunham. Then look to another far vista, and you spy Terry Winters’s “Diplay Linkage” (2005), whose thick red curlicues and concentric waves on a yellow ground look like a beefed-up rendering of Ms. Mehretu’s weather-map vocabulary.

Of the artists you don’t see from this vantage, Franz Ackermann, Steve DiBenedetto, and Ati Maier all pursue a similar aesthetic to one another that oddly mixes nervous, worrying detail and a wild, exuberant whole. Alexander Ross is stand-alone in look and execution, though closely allied in intention and imagery.

A subplot of “Remote Viewing” is the issue of remote *making*. Considering the attitude of museums and the techie nature of these artists’ imagery, this is, quite remarkably, a show of the time-honored handcrafted mediums, painting and drawing. All the artists are invested, to some considerable degree, in manipulating their materials. Yet there is a persistent divorce between the way materials are put down and the degree of affect that results.

Matthew Ritchie, for instance, in his trademark way, places his four-part painting “The Measures” (2005) against slick wall decorations made from vinyl-adhesive. These derive their Baroque convolutions from the swirls and skeins of the relatively freely painted imagery within the canvases. The décor becomes a high-tech commentary on the painting, which in turn settles into a subservient relationship to the overall installation. Rendering demarcations even more vulnerable is the black, powder-coated, cut-out aluminum sculpture (a globe roughly 12 feet in diameter) placed in the middle of his space. Mr. Ritchie’s exuberance is as finely calculated an experience as Walt Disney’s.

On first impression Mr. Ross seems to allow greater leeway for local painterly decisions, but his technique wallows in the same slippery ambiguity as his lost in space triffid-like figures. Rather than following his pulp-fiction, sci-fi aesthetic to its logical conclusion in a flat, cool, impersonal paint surface, he actually favors sweaty, succulent, fatty brushstrokes. But this has nothing to do with expressivity in a traditional sense. It arises from his odd modus operandi. Mr. Ross makes sculptural figurines from colored clay, which he photographs under bright lights that cause the sculptures to sweat their oils. He photographs these, from which he then paints. The lush paint is a very literal rendering of minutely observed actual surfaces. His science fiction is pure fact.

Something that’s remarkable about Ms. Mehretu is that, out of seemingly manic complexity, she crafts images of striking resolution. There is a fantastic plethora of informational sources in her work, from aerial views of African urban sprawl to detailed studies of Ottoman decoration, and a corresponding variety in markmaking — ink drawn in calligraphic, precisionist, cartographic, and painterly hands and appropriated vinyl and commercial stickers. This makes for dense, complex, multidimensional images, with a visionary sense of scale, but her chaos generates its own organizing principles. Bewilderingly, her compositions cohere.

In fact, an enigmatic ratio of manic detail to satisfying whole is a persistent trait in “Remote Viewing.” Perhaps it is encouraging for all of us citizens of the information age that artists can strike a new harmony from conceptual excess.

It is probably a sign of success with a “zeitgeist” show that any artist in it can be switched out for a number who aren’t. Katy Siegel, writing in the catalogue, trots out a list of 16 equally plausible exhibitors who would make sense of Ms. Sussman’s hypothesis, and I could add to her list. It actually seems extraordinary to me that “Remote Viewing” could exclude Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli, pioneers of the new intergalactic-psychedelic aesthetic. Mr. Pearson’s tantric manipulation of bizarre, appropriated phrases from the mass media, for instance, resulting in linguistic reliefs that read like lunar landscapes or fantasy cities, would have fit right in here. I would have switched him with Mr. Winter, who seems included in a museumish gesture to give generational gravitas to the group.

While playing the game of curatorial reorganization, it also seems that Ati Maier is an ambassador for the whole Pierogi 2000 stable, and any number of the apocalyptic noodlers who show in that pioneering Williamsburg venue would have done as well. My personal favorite is David Brody, who is showing there now (until June 27). His watercolors, in a Piranesi-like series called “Planet of the Arch Builders,” extend his near-psychotic creations of imaginary cities from intuited, fractal-like variations, But bravo to the group exhibition that has you connecting beyond its boundaries rather than closing in. “Remote Viewing” is an exploding universe. Have a nice trip.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 2, 2005

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“Richard Bosman” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery until November 13 (529 W. 20th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666)

“Carroll Dunham” at Gladstone Gallery until December 4 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh, 212-206-9300

The late work of Philip Guston, so axiomatic to the 1980s, was the harbinger of a new, “Bad” painting. Thanks to an almost insolent expressivity and gauche personalism Guston made a goofy appeal to the primitive, in the forms of graffiti and cartoons, and thereby defined the decade.

Somehow the influence has never gone away: Bad painting was just too much of a good thing. It could be that much of Guston’s importance to succeeding generations of painters had to do with his extreme, urgent expression of a perennial struggle (a kind of romantic-classic opposition) between the formal and the informal, the polite and the brash, felt by every creative painter worth his or her salt.

The winds of Gustonism gust through various Chelsea galleries right now. At Anton Kern, for instance, there is a young German painter named Bendix Harm whose self-portrait even resembles the errant Abstract Expressionist, with sad eyes and Picassoid distended nostrils captured within turned-up lapels. There are shades of Louise Bourgeois and Francesco Clemente in the image, too. The head surmounts a pyramid of cushion-like forms each containing the word “moi” repeated in a child-like scrawl.

Richard Bosman is a natural carrier of the Guston gene: He studied with the master in the 1960s as a pioneer student at the New York Studio School. His other influential teacher there was Alex Katz, who included Mr. Bosman in a group show last summer at Colby College, Me.

Mr. Bosman can compete with Guston – or any artist – in terms of the depths of vulgarity he plumbs. His paintings are like oversized illustrations, shiny and brash. His Americana borders on kitsch, only there’s an energetic ambiguity at play: Equal degrees of earnestness and satire animate his depictions of rural museums, Civil War enactments, historic monuments. He gives us a row of Shaker dresses, a vintage 19tjh-century forge, a barn full of collectibles, Herman Melville’s writing desk, cutout figurines of lumbermen in a way that collides 1980s excess with a timeless American innocence.

Mr. Bosman offers a very different experience of kitsch than, for instance, Jeff Koons, where smoothness and slickness underline machined banality (though, as if to tease out a comparison, Mr. Bosman’s collectibles include toy lobsters like those favored by Mr. Koons.) Mr. Bosman’s painthandling is as ambiguous as his subject matter: The freshness and precision with which he paints wet in wet belies the allusions to painting-by-numbers in his style. The dresses, for instance, recall Wayne Thiebaud in the succulence of their delivery.

Initially so disconcerting, his paintings end up appealing precisely because of their parity of style and motif. His vulgarity has a perverse purism: Though illustrational, his illustrations are original, seemingly derived from observation rather than appropriated photographs or engravings. His images are vulgar in the edifying, original sense: powerfully plainspoken, in a common language.

”]Carroll Dunham is looking more Gustonian than ever, though his new show at Barbara Gladstone is equally haunted by the shade of Picasso. This comes across in broadly delineated, dark scaffolds, filled in with brushy dabs of pink and blue, and with the sense of priapic figures disporting themselves by the sea.

Mr. Dunham revels in the fleshiness of pink – its exposed, sexed, puffed up tipsiness. His forms juggle penile and testicular associations with other body parts and facial features to build up an absurdist portrait of an Ubu Roi type – sometimes we get to see his top hat – luxuriating at the beach. The Guston-Picasso influences come across stronger than in previous shows, despite the fact that his earlier work had more of the gutsy impasto associated with the last, loose painterly splurges of those men. By comparison, these new images are thinned-out, aqueous.

Even though he only really hit the artworld’s radar screen in the 1990s, Mr. Dunham remains a quintessential 1908s artist in terms of scale, speed, and subject: Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring must be counted as influences as strong as Picasso or Guston.

Mr. Dunham paints diptychs, presented here in overbearing frames, with halves differently oriented to emphasize spatial and compositional displacement. Some of the pairings read as the same forms from different perspectives. He pushes to an extreme, in this repetitive series of paintings, the oxymoronic hard-edged messiness of his style, with definitive outlines playing off gratuitous splatter. He is masterful in his handling of these opposing qualities, and they are the key stage effect in his drama.

In the back room, Mr. Dunham displays a set of sculptures in laser-cut steel on rather prissy coffeetable-like pedestals. These are charming enough, at first, in their nursery exuberance. Seeing his forms in cool black metal and three dimensions, however, only serves to emphasize how little intrinsic value there is to his cartoonish vocabulary – a mere vehicle for something profounder and more satisfying in his painting. The whimsy and humor quickly wears thin. The sculptures look like Tom Wesselman playing a joke at Antony Caro’s expense.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 4, 2004

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