June Leaf: Recent Works at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 23 to June 13, 2015
210 11th Avenue #601 (at West 25th Street)
New York, 212 691 6565

Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades at Alexander Gray Associates
April 2 to May 21, 2015
510 West 26^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

The human body is incumbent in the work of artists June Leaf and Joan Semmel, who are subjects of recent shows in Chelsea at Edward Thorp Gallery and Alexander Gray Associates, respectively. Walking into “June Leaf: Recent Works” feels like stumbling upon a secret. Leaf, who has been practicing since the late 1940s, has frequently likened her working process to dance, and something of her physical body indeed feels present in the objects and paintings.

Much of the work included here examines the act of creation. As making anything is an individual experience for each person, perhaps it is not surprising that Leaf’s work puts vulnerability on open display. You can feel it as soon as you walk into the gallery, and are faced with Woman Drawing Man (2014), a sculpture that sets the tone for the remainder of the show. A concave piece of sheet metal stands atop a second piece, forming a sort of proscenium. On the vertical, a painted, nude, male figure stands with his arms outstretched. Kneeling before him and clutching a paintbrush, a female figure, also nude, applies paint to his body. Unlike the two-dimensional man, the woman is a true body in space, made from scraps of sheet metal stitched together with wire. The naturalistic position of her body — one leg cocked back for support, the outstretched arm — conveys a powerful sense of surrender. Of course, a woman’s surrender before a man is uneasy, because it is always loaded with a more disquieting significance. That Leaf’s work is deliberately primitive adds to the sense that this gesture of female subjugation is a timeless quandary.

A meditation on this link between work and submission continues throughout the show. In Figure Running on the Seam (2014) Leaf has appropriated the skeleton of an old sewing machine stand, suspending a curled wire encased in mesh between the two vertical spindles. At the end of the wire is the eponymous figure, which looks as if she is not so much running as she is collapsed from exhaustion. Beside it hangs a canvas, Making #1 (2013-2014), which depicts the sculpture in an incomplete state. The colors consist mostly of muted browns and grays, except for an emanation of crimson that seems to drip from the table of the base into a shocking puddle at the center right of the canvas. It’s a physical manifestation of the blood that is involved, figuratively or metaphorically, with putting oneself fully into a piece of work. The object is made from the remnants of a machine traditionally relegated to a woman’s domain, and a sly, feminist subtext is once again at play here, as the viewer is asked to confront what it means to have a sagging body caught between its gears.

Elsewhere, Leaf grapples with work and the surrender of the body as it relates to the most private realms. In acrylic painted on tin, Woman Carrying Child Up the Stairs (2011) depicts the female figure ascending a staircase, with a child slumped over her shoulder in deep sleep, while in Turning Pages (2012-2015), done in the same medium, an abstracted couple is caught in the act of intercourse. The woman lays facedown, an arm and a leg trail off in quivery wakes of paint that melt into the background and she offers no struggle, while the male figure kneels atop and astride her body. Both paintings afford the viewer a voyeuristic perspective — as though we are peeping through a doorway undetected, spying upon these private moments between intimates and witnessing their momentarily exposed vulnerabilities. In her ability to lay bare these fraught moments of humanity, one is hard pressed to think of a braver artist that June Leaf.

As Leaf’s work is quiet, and slowly unfolds its meaning, Joan Semmel’s paintings are explicit and confrontational. “Across Five Decades,” her recent career survey at Alexander Gray Associates, made clear that Semmel more definitively embraced the tenets of second-wave feminism. However, like Leaf, Semmel has made a priority of the female body. As she has said of her work, “I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women. I was convinced that the repression of women began in the sexual arena, and this would need to be addressed at the source.” This desire is unmistakable in her paintings from the 1970s, like the knockout Erotic Yellow (1973). In a vibrant palette of yellows, greens, and pinks, Semmel captures a nude and entwined couple in the middle of vigorous foreplay. Both of their faces are obscured by the man’s arm, and between his spread legs the woman has one hand clamped firmly beneath his balls.

This is especially pertinent in some of the later paintings, where the artist makes herself the subject. In Centered (2002) Semmel has rendered herself nude before a mirror, sitting in a relaxed pose with one arm curled casually around her bent knee, neither obviously flaunting nor hiding her middle-aged body. With her other hand, she holds a camera up to her eye; like in Erotic Yellow (and several other paintings in the show), the face is obscured. The obstruction of her face is not only arch however, but also emancipating. While she purports to an examination of the self, Semmel simultaneously subverts the viewer’s gaze by turning it back upon them with the use of the camera and mirror. The energy of Semmel’s work is triumphal and celebratory. Where Leaf plumbs feminine experience for its ambivalence, Semmel embraces its power.

June Leaf and Joan Semmel hail from a generation that was peculiar for female artists. Leaf, who was born in 1929 and Semmel, born three years later, came of age when work by women artists infrequently garnered attention, but who both nonetheless established steady working practices which saw them into the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s and beyond. Is it too hopeful to believe that the work of these two veterans, who anticipated later twentieth century feminism, now entering the dialogue, is a harbinger of a shift away from that tired, long-established prejudice towards women’s art? For through their heightened sense of the corporeal, both Leaf and Semmel in different ways are unflinching in their ability to strip bare fragilities shared by all humankind. Looking at their work, we realize we have all been exposed.

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March 12 to April 18, 2015
210 Tenth Avenue, 6th Floor (between 24th and 25th streets)
New York City, 212 691 6565

In her resplendent second solo show with Edward Thorp, of paintings made in the last two years, Judith Simonian demonstrates a genius for color, texture, and the exploration of spatial conundrums. Twenty canvases, worked in acrylic, range in size from a mere eight by ten inches to as much as six foot by five with subject matter that cycles between categories of comparable breadth. There are what I’d describe as optical-illusion still lifes, domestic interiors, travel theme — on earth and in space, and nature studies. It’s a roomy, mixed bag of themes.

In Snow Cone (2014), a good-sized work at 46 x 64 inches, figure-ground elements add up to the representational suggestion of a cake wedge — an illusion enhanced by a bright triangle of frosting at image center, behind which a brightly hued, roughly textured yellow background seems to throw the cake’s decorated layers, and the lower third of the painting, into shadow. The pedestal of a cake stand can also be discerned, where its elliptical silver platter appears to hover over a tabletop. This metaphor of the cake wedge simultaneously alludes to “slicing” and “layers,” terms familiar to most anyone who works with imagery in the online environment. In the physical studio, Simonian often employs collage, in techniques where “slicing” and “layers” are quite literal.

Collage can be seen to contribute to the optical illusions of Fruit on Blue Table (2013). Both paintings, along with others such as In the Rapids and Red Fish Bowl, while accomplished works in themselves, come across as studies where the artist hones her craft for more ambitious undertakings, such, for instance, as Patio Lounge Chairs (2014), a gorgeous tour-de-force of abstraction and illusion. A deep pool where goldfish swim dominates the foreground, while the eponymous chairs, in brilliant vermillion, there are almost hidden behind a black umbrella, which decently shields from view a couple enjoying the tropical ambience of a summer afternoon. The evocation of plant life, a humid atmosphere, and a cooling body of water all induce the viewer to read much more into the painter’s marks than might actually be there.

“Fleshy Pink Room” (2014) is a six-foot-high painting whose lighting effects, layering, and pink and green tones bring to my mind the mannerist master Jacopo Pontormo. A forbidding foreground barrier keeps us from walking straight in; instead, we must find a way to float over a lime green tongue in its groove on our way to the room’s pink flesh, as it basks in the glow of a far blue entryway. This painting exemplifies Simonian’s well-justified reputation as an intuitive painter. To quote from the press release, the artist enjoys turning “colorful scraps of trash” into pictorial compositions that approach “near collapse.” In fact, the bombardment of sensory data that we continuously take in from the world would collapse us without the mind’s capacity to knit it together. Simonian’s paintings suggest the contradictory resilience and fallibility of this process. In so doing, they knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition, along with the senses.

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October 17 to November 30th, 2013
210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City,  212-691-6565

Upstate winters, bleak but electric, have haunted Matt Blackwell’s impressive body of tough, funny, and sometimes transcendent paintings –– winters in which “Light simply gets replaced by cold,” as Russell Banks has written of those latitudes.  Blackwell, though, has been getting more temperate, even tropical.  The radiant vagabonds and costumed celebrants in his new paintings at Thorp are framed in summer landscapes of open road and big sky, or stand in wild gardens gone to seed under the stars.

As with James Ensor’s or Max Beckmann’s demented crowd scenes, Blackwell’s figures are both fantastic projections of psychic roles and notes on everyday weirdness.  The sturdy hitchhiker in Here? (2011) shoulders a tangled burden.  Blackwell paints the wide open spaces around her with an evident appreciation for airy American abstraction –– especially the consummate tact and touch of Jack Tworkov and Richard Diebenkorn and the Zen gesture of Robert Motherwell and Robert Mangold.  Against this tastefulness, however, Blackwell pitches the raw, visionary color of Emil Nolde, as well as the scrawly, scribbly impatient expressionism of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, particularly as this latter plays out in the less conventionally slick sort of cartoon –– from Peanuts to Beavis and Butthead, from Peter Arno to Ralph Steadman.  Blackwell’s hitchhiker’s overhead burden even seems to contain –– barely, like a tussling fight cloud –– the sort of graphic slings and arrows that stand for curse words in the funnies.  Digging into these used-up punchlines, he recycles them into a rich clump of pure painting.

Blackwell’s fondness for the Twilight Zone between high and low is in cahoots with the ambiguity of his narratives.  In Prodigal Sun (2005-2012) a whitebeard in headband and open vest, Willy Nelson-like, strides forth under a crisp orange sun in a too-blue sky.  With the air of a dowser, he carries a slim staff that Anselm Kiefer might have mislaid in these slashingly painted fields.  Or the staff might be a scavenged golf club intended for a hoe, given how the names of vegetables in garden rows are scribbled above the turf (recalling the gesture, if not quite the gloomy spirit, of Kiefer’s ten-ton inscriptions).  Gardener or not, the frantic attack of the painting argues against a pastoral interpretation: the striding hobo leaves speed lines that Blackwell claws and melts à la Susan Rothenberg channeling Giacometti, and a hovering angel’s clarion commands are redacted (“EVERTHING,” “DO NOT … BELIEVER”) by anxious overpainting.  This addled old wanderer seems to think himself a prophet; he might even be one of those kidnappers scouting for young wives.

Blackwell also makes folk art-like sculpture, inventively riveted from found tin ceilings and other salvage into somewhat rougher versions of what you might find at a country trading post.  Typical works in the form of an antique Abe Lincoln penny bank and a bear totem holding a slice of pie are shown here.  In the past, such cute Americana has worked well enough as a cussedly provincial inoculation against the highfalutin museum tradition invoked, off and on, by the paintings.  But while bear-men have long made appearances in both mediums, the current show finds the sculptures and paintings explicitly cross-pollinating for the first time.

The effect is to darken and deepen the mood of both.  At Thorp a sculpture and a painting mutually titled Picklelilly (2013) evidently represent the same tin-woman cook, who wields a spatula while storing canned goods on shelves in her abdomen.  Unlike the Halloween party girls in He Tries (2011) and Lantern Jig (2012-13), the Picklelilly woman is no beauty.  But with her ample food supply and robotic willingness, she’s a drunkard’s dream.  She’ll keep up her end, too: the sculpture Picklelilly, which would make an effective scarecrow, looks thoroughly pickled.  The painting, however, enobles her by placing her in her true element –– the American road, depicted as a buoyantly warped rainbow highway, Edvard Munch meets Yellow Submarine.  Backlit like Van Gogh’s Sower by an ominous sunset, Picklelilly grins robustly and beckons with her spatula to fellow travelers.

Among the tin sculptures, tall, cone-shaped works that Blackwell calls Dunce Caps I-III (2013) stand apart for their careful patchwork skins, as do their malevolent implications: they are dunce caps only in the sense of Grand Dragon regalia.  The paintings are frequented by specters of Philip Guston’s already half-goofy Klansmen (with roots, of course, in Goya’s satiric inquisitors), but the presence of Blackwell’s spooky dunce caps in the gallery inclines every tall triangle, wherever it appears, toward menace.

If the two bodies of work are now converging, the encroachment of sculpture on painting has long been implicit in Blackwell’s collage practice –– though one tends not to notice because he is so at ease with pictorial scramble.  Inlaid and overlaid objects disappear into the tactility of his surfaces, which can range from filmy washes to crusty blobs of dried pigment, as in the small gem, Seeker (2012).  Here a bent-over painter, apparently, hauls the clottings of his palette up a mountain, his path strewn with skulls; urging him forward, a supernova sun burns in the sky –– deftly rendered by means of a collaged seed-packet carnation.

OK’s Garden (2010-2013) is the show’s limit case of painterly assemblage, piling up distressed photographs, sketchbook pages, dried flowers, and scraps of tin around an orphaned figure painting, itself glued down.  Painted figments –– a sunflower, a vaporous Charlie Brown, an upside down Buddha –– are inventoried around a willowy blonde muse crossing her chest with long-stalked flowers, nude but for her armlet and ribbon-tie heels.  Ensor skull and Guston Klansman make their appearance too, the latter as a triangular patch of Benday dots made from press-printed bubble wrap, in the manner of a low-tech Sigmar Polke.  Rosy-cheeked as an ingénue in a vintage Playboy cartoon, the young woman is clearly at ease with her diverse influences –– her baggage –– as she basks in a ragged column of otherworldly, Oskar Kokoschka light.  It is his garden, after all.

click to enlarge

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Katherine Bradford: New Work at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 19 to June 9, 2012
210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City,  212-691-6565

The First Great Depression bequeathed the common culture a pantheon of superheroes now making a spectacular “comeback” – although of course they never went away – in the Second. But as Hollywood slicks up the golems of yesteryear in new layers of spandex, visual artists have a different take on these valiant personages.  In 2012, in two remarkable shows, Superman and Batman stormed Gotham’s gallery scene.

Batman arrived at Frederick Petzel Gallery in January on the cape tails of Joyce Pensato. This artist’s trademark idiom, established over a long career, is the full-blown, angst and splatter rendering of cartoon characters, a style that not only simultaneously critiques and renews Abstract Expressionism but also recalls the shared roots of DC Comics and the New York School.

Superman stars in a show from an artist of the same age as Pensato but, thanks to a late start and contrasting outlook, a totally different generation: Katherine Bradford.  Where the dark knight gets bombast, the man of steel’s ascent is fuelled by fey sweetness.

Indeed, Bradford delivers an oxymoronically saftig übermensch.  But the deflated catsuit and soft limbs are in no way meant to imply an antihero: he is simply a cuddly hero.  Nor in his middle age spread should he be misread as a mere mortal in a rented Halloween costume, a figure – in other words – of bathos. His astral travels are for real as he ascends upon a schematic spiral or hovers in the night sky.  His depiction is of a piece with an overall paint handling that has the angst-free awkwardness of outsider art.  Like the best of naïve painting, only in her case knowingly hard won, Bradford’s images are shot through with effortless abstract harmony and disconcerting observational acumen. The hero’s buttocks and thighs in Superman Responds (2011), for instance, are conveyed by a few loose, carefree-seeming dabs of electric crimson and ultramarine against a generalized creamy ground that nonetheless get across with anatomical precision a convincing if gender-bent voluptuousness.

Everything Bradford paints is shot through with humor: sometimes whimsical, sometimes poignant, sometimes earthy and raucous, other times ethereal, but tellingly, never ironic. Superman as wimp could so easily be a satire of something: masculinity, militarism, even Painting with a capital P.  But Bradford invests the two motifs in her show – the other being ocean liners – with such warmth and evident personal significance as to defeat any such end.

These paintings are big and intimate.  Big in energy, implied scale, the busy way worked surfaces and agitated depths connote imagery found in decisions and revisions.  Intimate in the localness of color contrasts, the rapport with surface, the unfussy finesse of loved details—albeit ones modestly veiled with the appearance of chance discoveries and happy accidents.  This collision of gestures that are at once bold and poignant is what gives Bradford’s work its essential character, its tension.

She is one of those very contemporary artists intent on having her cake and eating it.  There is the peculiar poetic charm of provisional painting – a sense of blah, of nonchalance, of not quite caring about the slapdash, scruffy, Brooklyn-esque “work in progress” look. But, on the other hand, there is also the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting.  The happy marriage of naïveté and abstraction can feel at times as if a Chagall, Janice Biala or Aristodimos Kaldis has been pressed through a de Kooning sieve.  Actually, forget that messy analogy: just recall that Wassily Kandinsky made naïve woodcuts before he invented abstraction. Or else bring to mind the reverse, high-abstraction-to-low-realism trajectory of Philip Guston.

Guston is indeed the logical port of call for anyone making sense of Bradford’s journey to action heroes and cruise ships.  A very late starter, she had begun in abstraction when, in the course of her development, she felt a painterly, rather than existential, need for subject matter.  But ocean liners and Superman, at least as she treats them, are, on two counts, the opposite of Guston’s Klansmen, cigarette stubs, or old boots: her romantic, heartfelt subjects are neither quotidian nor dark.  Similarly, The Moon and Sixpence meets A Doll’s House scenario suggested by her delayed career launch is belied by her anything-but-outsider status as an artist.  Bradford is little short of a cultural heroine to a younger generation of Brooklyn painters making up the phenomenal attendance of her lecture at the New York Studio School earlier this season and the opening of the exhibition under review.

As I say, Bradford’s Superman and her ships are non-ironic and non-satirical, but clearly, the limp action hero and the capsized liner somehow battling on are powerful, fecund symbols of vulnerable strength and strength in vulnerability.  Found in the process of abstract painting, could they in fact be symbols of that very art historical legacy she treasures but also deconstructs: ciphers for painterly explorations that are personal and collective, provisional and heroic, their grandeur grander for being – literally, in her scumble and pentimenti – faded?

This would bridge the gap between the bulky ships at sea and the hero zipping through the sky. It would draw stray images in this compelling show into a gently suggestive lost-and-found narrative of danger and adventure: a Madame-X-like Lady Liberty (2011); a collage featuring the doomed aviatrix Amelia Earhart (2011-12); the silhouette of a ship against a pink sea and orange sky in S.O.S (2012).

Maybe it could even make sense of the cryptic (though neither Kryptonian nor marine) New Men (2011), a mirrored, quasi-palindrome arrangement of the words of its title.  In her lecture, in reference to this work, Bradford alluded to an appreciation of the strong sensitive men  she was starting to notice around her –  bearded Brooklyn Rail-reading metrosexuals flooded this audience member’s mind – perhaps, indeed, the very courtiers of the new order who throng her events.

All I can say is that Bradford is my personal discovery (so far) for 2012.  She makes me optimistic about the future of painting.  I left her show a new man.

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February 25 – April 2 2011
210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor
between 24th and 25th streets
New York City, 212 691 6565

A Judith Linhares painting is in a rush like a hurtling meteor.  When the cosmic matter of archetype and myth burns up in the atmosphere of Linhares’ earthy, wet swipes of vernacular,  streaks of celestial afterimage persist.  In “Riptide,” Linhares’ current show at Thorp, nymphs and satyrs blaze as they plunge to the beaches and woods of what could be Northern California in the ‘60s.  If, like me, you have admired but never quite gotten what Cézanne and Mattise were on about with their fleshy Arcadian bathers, Linhares’ hippie Edenists adrift in nature’s lyric panic may bring it closer to home.

Linhares was born in Los Angeles and has lived in New York for 30 years, but her artistic personality took hold in ‘60s and ‘70s San Francisco, when the Funk and street graphix scenes were colliding with a lineage of painterly abstraction already on strange-bedfellow terms with figuration.  Bay Area progenitor David Park’s troweled, dissonantly luminous bathers are the particular antecedents to Linhares’ choppy, two-fisted but luscious beachcombers.  She surfs Park’s radical bluntness and speed while remelting his volcanic light into a demented fluorescence: frigid arctic greens, Fruit Loop violets, and tropical reds and oranges set off by fertile muds.  In Wave (2010), three nudes cavort against translucent, backlit seas.  The saturated sunset chromatics are capricious –– illusionistic here, expedient there.  One nymph dives in, unabashedly splaying her legs in naturist abandon.  Linhares doesn’t waste her powers on depicting underwater diffraction here, but trusts to the literal overlapping of strokes to gesticulate a higher pictorial mission; if the diving girl’s hair, extending absurdly straight down, suggests Marsden Hartley’s chesty fishermen, whose hair goes straight up, it’s because they are cousins, polarities in sexual and painterly extremis.

Cave (2010) features a goateed professorial type caressed by a nubile blonde admirer in a secluded Big Sur-ish sanctuary.  A sure-handed still life of pineapple and daisy on reflecting pewter plate anchors the foreground (go-for-broke oils and gouaches of sweets and flowers, as well as animal totems, are Linhares sub specialities), while a quilt of many colors expands upon the pineapple’s bristling geometry, echoed also in the murky cave walls.  In contrast, the nudes’ flesh is radiantly sheer, and a purple cast implicates the professor, whom I imagine as Alan Watts after a lecture at Esalen, as a smug bodhisattva.

The flesh of the girl sitting in a tree in Picnic Rock (2008) is even purpler.  It might be the blueberry mud bath, or she might have recognized the Kali within, assisted by Watts –– and a certain late, lamented Owsley.  Like the diver, she opens her womanhood without inhibition to the breeze.  A second girl gets stumbling drunk; not everyone makes it unscathed to enlightenment. (The casualty with the DTs in Drink (2008) hallucinates a wall of accusatory masks, Ensor by way of the ghoulish psychedelia of cartoonist/artists like Gary Panter and David Sandlin.)  A third “Picnic” girl grounds herself in a yogic pose with her legs up a tree.  A similar pose is taken by the main figure in Slope (2011), a sensible enough form of worship among the redwoods.  The wild-eyed “Slope” girl inverts upon a red and white-checked tablecloth that enfolds space like Netherlandish drapery.  Linhares brings off this fractured pattern in crisp, bouncing light with sustained unfussiness; no conventionally careful marks slow down the eye’s liquid journey or the mind’s free play of symbols –– sacred and profane, virginal and vaginal, feral and suburban.

Jerry Saltz once postulated a reverse flow of influence from the wunderkind Dana Schutz to the older Linhares in an otherwise typically astute review.  Schutz is deeply talented but not that talented: she would have needed a time machine to intervene decades earlier, when Linhares established her caustically improvisational, wet-on-wet alternative to the patriarchal presumptions and usages persisting even in then-revolutionary ideas of draftsmanship.  (And if one were to postulate about influence, consider that Linhares’ pioneering example has been no secret to New York cognoscenti and discerning grad students.)  Not to say that Linhares has been anything but a thoroughly engaged participant in recent developments –– her current focus on hippie campers would look just fine in the next museum show of Justine Kurland/Rita Ackerman-type lost-girls tableaus, and minus the readymade ‘60s nostalgia that can accrue; Linhares was there.  Note to Jerry: it does and should work both ways, but sometimes a breakthrough by a younger artist opens the eyes, not just of other artists but also of critics, to treasures already in plain sight.

[Some changes have been made to this article since initial posting.]

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Hilary Brace is showing a series of small drawings at Edward Thorpe Gallery that conjure  astonishing, vast topologies.  At first the eye is fooled – one thinks one is looking at silvery photographs of sublime cloudscapes shot from an airplane above an uninhabited wilderness.  Closer examination reveals the patient, expert mark of the hand, as well as an improvisatory richness of imagination that, while consistently illusionistic, is decidedly otherworldly.  Brace applies a charcoal ground to the matte surface of mylar, which she then selectively erases.  This technique allows her to sculpt with light, teasing from the gray ether all manner of craggy cliff, crater and cavern, each with its intrinsic texture, and even more, an encyclopedic variety of mists and fogs, clouds and semi-opaque, sun-struck vapors.  Brace can seductively melt rock into gaseous flow and back again in billowing, heaving layers.  This polymorphic tractability allows an improvisational logic, where light events — shadows, soft or hard; x-ray translucencies; whiteouts and luminous blindings –can callforthlandscape features, reversing the causal order.  Light becomes the prime mover rather than the slave of mass, liberating the artist from pat, dutiful rendering –and also, perhaps, from the tyranny of earthbound narrative.

That said, it is tempting to read Brace’s work as an opportunistic update on the empire-building formulae of the Luminist sublime –reserved and cryptic rather than grandiose, to be sure, but just as unabashedly crowd-pleasing.  In Untitled (#Jan08) we find ourselves in a womblike cave with soft stalagmites of rising mist.  One column grows through a sunlit hole in the rocky roof, allowing for a tour de force in the articulation of diaphaneity in varying conditions of light.

But on second thought, one is led further up the Hudson River, as it were, to its disturbed source in the maddened excesses of English Romanticism.  In Untitled (#Feb08) Brace depicts a sunken canyon, with ground fog the viscosity of ammonia gas pouring into it from a fissured plateau.  In the distance is a rising swell of heavy cloud that might be coming fast, calling to mind (mine at least) the mushrooming dust of the World Trade Center roaring up Church Street.  The gorgeous pillars of fire and bubbling swamp of Untitled(#Oct08)seem distinctly menacing and toxic, while Untitled (#Sep08) tunnels our eye from a dark foreground through storm clouds above, and an underlit, choppy sea of ridged foamings below, towards a blinding vortical glow.  Such apocalyptic, swirling infinitude was the specialty of the once immensely popular English artist John Martin (1789-1854).  Often called a “visionary,” the term is badly misused; Martin’s grandiloquent art is the exact opposite of the penetrating concision of a Blake or a Turner.  Instead, he is precursory to the cinematic spectacle, in which the whole game is to cross every t and dot every i: architecture of luxuriant detail and huge proportions, casts of thousands, phantasmagorical, cascading landscapes –and no crumb left to the viewer’s imagination.  Yet Martin’s sheer industriousness in wresting palpable space from every shard of his pictures, which rivals, writ large, the miniaturist obsession of his younger contemporaries Samuel Palmer and the patricidal painter of fairies Richard Dadd, places his skeleton squarely in Modernism’s closet.  Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, for example, with its endlessly climbing pictorial field, horizonless and unresolved, has as much to do with Pollock and de Kooning as it does with D.W Griffith and Peter Jackson.

If the apocalyptic landscape tradition epitomized by Martin foreshadows the all-over, Greenbergian imperative, Brace is shrewd to adapt it to her purpose.  She joins a preponderance of artists today who skate as close as possible to the thin ice of the literal, the populist, the illustrational.  The best succeed in not falling through:  by remaking borderline kitsch into abstract pictorialism, the likes of Alex Ross, Sue Williams, Neo Rauch, Vija Celmins and Lari Pittman, for example, get to eat their very different slices of cake and have them too.

Whether Martin’s influence on Brace is direct or indirect, one should note that he worked extensively in mezzotint, a medium of erasure convergent with Brace’s, and that, perhaps consequently, the foggy whiteout and the filmy, light-charged ray, which Martin wielded with an unprecedented symphonic command, correspond to the exact tricks of the trade by which Brace stirs up her images, keeping them from clotting into beach-art Surrealism.  Martin, quoting from The Tempest, once described his aim as showing how “the almighty Disposer. . . ‘between the green grass and the azure vault sets roaring war.’”  Perhaps such poetics seem overwrought to our ears, but Martin’s thrilling fantasias of endtimes weather are nevertheless surely ripe for revival given the imminence of global climate crisis; meanwhile, Brace’s modest, knowing seductions play it far closer to the vest, a contemporary tactic with its own sort of exquisite chill.

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on view at Edward Thorp Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue, at 25th Street, 212 691 6565, closes Saturday.

In medium-sized, digital color C-prints, Meredith Allen exposes the overlooked beauty, right under our noses, of glossy wrappings and veilings.  Close-ups of an opaque white garbage bag with stabs of red cinch ribbons, a shadowy stroller rain flap, and the teasing, plasticky camouflage around a flower arrangement seem to posit an equivalence between hiding, sheltering, and revealing.  It is as if the true meaning of our world, and its only reliable pleasure, lay in the thin gimcrack with which we film things over.

This was an artcritical CAPSULE in November 2008.

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Donald Kuspit, Joan Waltemath, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read, June Leaf at Edward Thorp, Odd Nerdrum at Forum, Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly and David Hammons at L&M Arts.

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