April 2 to May 9, 2015
529 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 9666

Julian Hatton’s painting seems to have been focused for some time on the contention that abstraction, if allowed to breathe in a deeper pictorial space, can maintain visual opulence without drifting too far from its essentially two-dimensional syntax. Among a generation of artists who matured on this side of painting’s pluralist expansion, where each painter’s style, look and touch was far more varied than that of their canonic New York School predecessors, Hatton held to a loose figurative scaffold based on landscape elements both perceived and imagined. Though the iconography in this recent work remains readable — each painting’s horizon is still easy to find — there is, in newer panels such as trouble and scrim (both 2015), a softening of the edges and a swelling of forms that now shimmer behind translucent washes instead of bending, as they once did, into each other’s space. From an optimal distance — coerced from the viewer by the five-foot spread of their frames — their reconfigured cohesion seems to rely less on drawing and more on a spontaneous manipulation of hue and texture.

The resulting airiness is a clear departure from his earlier work, which is reprised in this exhibition by trio (2012-13), an example of his harder-edged shapes, apparently reconstituted during the painting’s many stages of development so as not to diminish the careful co-ordinating of its unique structural invention. To drift from the success of this method is risky, for what’s been so appealing about Hatton’s work until now has been precisely its interconnected complexity. The changes seen in this exhibition may be attributed in some measure to his establishing a new studio in upstate New York. Like Bonnard in the south of France, Ellsworth Kelly in Chatham or de Kooning in East Hampton, a move from city to country will, for reasons not always linked to the landscape itself, reset a painter’s perspective.

A clue to the path taken in this shift between the earlier compositions and these newer, cloudier apparitions may be found in imprint (2014-15), a five-foot-square panel representing the artist’s trials at keeping the structure fixed tighter to the surface. Here, a familiarity with Hatton’s elevated horizon line helps the viewer read the ghost of a landscape that still exists despite the missing diagonals and story-book trees of his earlier work — elements that had once supported Hatton’s penchant for excavating spatial illusion with little cost to a lively surface. Imprint marks the change as its simplified shapes are not immediately recognizable as landscape elements. They also seem unusually tolerant of each other’s position in the composition.

And yet warbler (2014-15), to my eye the most adventurous of the newer canvases in the show, still owes something to the lexicon of the earlier work, though here it seems Hatton’s method has turned to a new and pronounced improvisation. warbler’s surface remains in an agitated state. Not a single section of color is truly resolved. Edges are ragged and makeshift. Translucency dominates. There is even a gestural coarseness replacing what was once a controlled chaos of endlessly suggestive shapes. The color alone in Warbler provides the link to earlier work, being mostly middle tones of contingent primary and secondary hues.

For anyone who has followed Hatton’s work these many years, an effort to catch up to where he is now will require diligence, which I believe is a fair expectation for him to make as his paintings have always appealed to a visually smart audience. Because his abundant inventiveness had constituted as near a legible pictorial language as created by any painter in recent memory, encountering its contraction will demand a real and unavoidable learning curve. The fact that Warbler takes pride of place on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue seems more than a hint that he is unlikely to turn back. Hatton is a painter whose strength had always been his ability to develop variations on a theme. The construction of an intelligent, readable and teasingly ambiguous pictorial image, even in this new looser style, still speaks to a continuity of vision.

Hatton has never been a painter fixated on concocting a new look, and there is no indication here of chasing novelty, nor is there any hint of applying arbitrary effects to avoid comparison with contemporaries. From the beginning his work has been a conscious adaptation of landscape elements knit tightly into compositions that owed a great deal of their cohesion to those compositional properties that as any instructor knows are maddeningly difficult to formulate verbally but can be appreciated in its many variations from the mature Nicolas Poussin to the early Richard Diebenkorn. As art fairs continue to hawk brightly colored things apparently meant for the simpler aim of accessorizing the expansive blank walls that once provided inexpensive working space for New York’s artists, it gives one hope to watch a painter keep to self-imposed limitations, not in spite of, but because there is more than enough room within a rectangle of canvas to address a thoughtful and historically aware sensibility.

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February 7 to March 9, 2013
529 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-463-9666

Although Sandy Walker studied in New York in the 1960s – at Columbia and from its second year of operation at the New York Studio School –and went on to exhibit with some frequency at Grace Borgenicht Gallery through the next decade, his career has mostly centered on the Bay Area where he settled just as his New York career was taking off.  And with the exception of a show of graphic works at the non-profit Wooster Arts Space in Soho in 2004, he has been absent from New York purview ever since.  His current show, therefore, at Elizabeth Harris Gallery has the vibe of a debut, albeit one that pulsates with the accrued energy of a lifelong exploration of his elected idiom, lyrical, representational expressionism.

The show focuses on landscape, but in Walker there is always a triangulation of impulses: the other magnets are the human body in motion and the inherent calligraphic qualities of given mediums (he is equally consummate in ink drawing, oil painting and woodcut).  Just as a typical Walker dancer tends to spawn branches and rivulets, so too his landscapes are anatomical and sexed, recalling the “heaving bosoms and exulting limbs” observed by John Ruskin in the Swiss Alps.

While his exuberantly brushed, improvisatory landscapes veer towards the pantheistic in a generalized evocation of nature, they also seem, and in fact are, rooted in direct observation of actual places to which the artist has deep and meaningful connection, and ecological concerns.  Many, for instance, depict terrain in Washington State, where the artist has a cabin; others were painted en plein air or from sketches in such locales as Arizona. The results nicely balance visceral gusto and pictorial intelligence.

In some works in this show the body-land equation is quite explicit, as in the Milton Avery-like Human Nature III, (2010) with its distended hills/torso in black sandwiched by a green foreground field and blank white sky.  More compelling, however, are the landscapes where jagged hatch work clinging to the horizon constitutes a “recumbent figure” of subtler ambivalence, in IJ Bar Song II, (2011) for instance, or in the hand-like form of the smaller canvas, Mountain Moment, (2011) with its chocolate tones and boldly slathered strokes.

The artist is evidently drawn to wildernesses—to mountains aloof from human habitation, to primal forests.   His style, though indebted to an American pastoral tradition that includes Avery, Neil Welliver and Alex Katz – or perhaps because it belongs so squarely to that tradition, fused with classic AbEx bravura and a respectfully focused understanding of Asian aesthetics – has an air of innocence suggestive of another triangulation, between the virgin landscape observed, the freshness of the marks made, and the repeat “debut” of the returning native.

The post A Pantheist Finds His Place: Sandy Walker at Elizabeth Harris Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

January 4 to February 2, 2013
529 W 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212.463.9666

The abstract collages in Mario Naves’ previous shows at Elizabeth Harris spoke eloquently of a particular approach to image-making, one involving a mixture of the tactical and the serendipitous. Constructed of painted and torn bits of paper, the collages were small in scale, but broad in their explorations. Their ragged contours and repositioned sections of brushwork probed formal possibilities within larger investigations of texture, materiality, atmosphere, and the allusive potential of shapes. For me, his highly tactile surfaces occasionally overwhelmed the formal events within.

Naves’ sixth show at Elizabeth Harris reveals something new: a change in medium, and a more efficient attack that privileges composition over texture.  Although still abstract, the works on view are all paintings with highly orchestrated geometric shapes. Close inspection reveals overpainting of areas of many canvases, but the smooth surfaces minimize the show of struggle. The physically layered depths of his collages are gone, replaced by another kind of depth, one purely pictorial in nature. This movement from suggestive textures towards definitive form brings some notable rewards.

Most gallery-goers will be familiar with Naves’ extensive writings on art, and the formal rhythms of these paintings brim with the same directness and conciseness of thought. Newly evident is his eloquence of color, apparent in measured sequences of hues that run the full scale of tones and temperature, and most of the full range of intensity. Surface rhythms intensify the action of these colors. In Louder than God (2011), for instance, the retiring luminosity of a large, medium-blue plane partially surrounds a disk of a barely lighter, more exuberant purple, turning it into a buoyant punctuation mark. A wedge of heated yellow-brown counters it at the canvas’ opposite edge; shards of lighter hues deploy across the crest of the blue. But the chief competition is a red circle—identical in size to the first but more insistent in hue—that, perched precariously above the blue, seems miles from its secured, purple twin. Together, the pressures of color and shape impart fullness to the rhythms: varieties of scale, necessity of location, contradictions of presence.

This is exciting to someone who, like myself, sees painting as a formal art revealing itself in irreducible elements of color and line. With these ingredients taking the lead, each painting in the exhibition follows a new tack: the deck of cards deals itself anew, so to speak.  In Sundays Only (2012), broad polygons—limpid green, subdued blue-gray, ruddy terracotta, ethereal cerulean— descend luminously from huddling disks at the canvas’ top. (As for most works in the show, the title perplexes, even as the image convinces.) In Outsourcing Picabia (2011), a tower of seesawing triangles lifts a “background” blue, despite the sinking pressure of a dark, orange-rimmed disk.

At times compositions seem driven more by ideas than visual exigencies. The dominant event of “Obscure Reference” (2012), for example, is its horizontal division into planes of deep red-orange and warm gray, with the in-between contour continuously curling and kinking in a long journey to a singular blue swirl at the opposite edge. Though playful in design, for me the curls and kinks simply signify a conversation among elements rather than embodying it through color. This imparts to the canvas a somewhat over-pondered effect. In some paintings, the variety of color slackens when it comes to the highest-pitched intensities.

More typical of this revelatory exhibition, however, is my favorite painting, A Pigeon in Catalonia (2011). Here, variously inclined shapes—pure white, heated rust-red, a pale, absorbent gray—commune noisily at the center before launching an ochre-and-cerulean wedge to the canvas’ edge; a small, sedate package of triangles observes from above.

The full impact of such works, however, eludes words.  Best to see them in person, in the flesh, where they speak as only colors and lines can.

The post Surface Rhythms: Mario Naves’s Rewarding New Direction appeared first on artcritical.

September 6 to October 6, 2012
529 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-463-9666

Carolanna Parlato’s recent show at Elizabeth Harris marked a huge shift in the abstract painter’s working method from the last two decades. Her new palette of warm, murky, and earthy oranges, yellows, browns, and blacks is a distinct shift from the acidic pinks and blues of her previously Pop-inspired spectrum. But more significantly, Parlato’s trademark pours and puddles now take the backseat to various techniques which bring her hand back into play: painting with brushes, sanding areas down, spray painting. Paintings are heavily worked; sometimes, perhaps, overworked.

These kind of accretive and reductive processes mean that the movement of the artist’s hand and speed of gesture are visible, becoming integral to the way this work is read. Where Parlato previously relied on chance in the forms and lines generated by tilting and turning pools of paint on the canvas, in this new work, forms that obliterate and consume each other have dematerialized into a mélange of marks and atmosphere. No longer are organic forms bumping up against one another to claim space and assert their force; instead the artist herself is the force. Fast linear brush strokes parallel the edges of the canvas emphasizing the ubiquitous rectangle of the picture plane. Where she once engaged the painting as an object, she now engages it primarily as a surface.

Previously, each color acted like a dancer in the orgy happening on the canvas. While works such as Dark as Day (all works 2012), Parallel Shift, and Mirage, manage to carry over the wonderfully vibrant, physical force of her earlier work into her newly expanded vocabulary, too many pieces in the show lack tension between the embedded forms. Parlato’s forms were the protagonists of the drama now lacking in her images.

High Summer, one of the boldest and surest paintings in the present show, featured front and center upon entering the gallery, capitalizes on her use of a bright and sunny yellow covering more than three quarters of the surface. But in many works here, orientation seems happenstance. Despite directional drips and splatters, there is lack of gravitational pull. Certain marks seem decorative and inconsequential. These paintings seem more like representations of nature’s aura or the spirit of nature’s energy, rather than the force of nature per se, as the press release assert and many of Parlato’s titles reflect. These pictures feel like a Rothko-making machine has broken down causing errors and sputters of erratic color, leaks and drips.

But perhaps showing the chaotic nature of nature’s process is the strength and meaning in her new mode. In which case, Parlato should be applauded for her audacious move away from her tried and tested pours and puddles. This new visual language has, indeed, the potential to reveal a more intimate conversation about the experience of nature. But in the old Parlato, where a “protagonist” could be pointed out in each image, forces of nature were present and performed in the way the paintings were made. Now, as in Orbit, for instance, the viewer finds that forces of nature are represented rather than performed. Where “forces of nature” follow physical laws, these new paintings do not.

The post Bringing the Hand Back into Play: Carolanna Parlato at Elizabeth Harris appeared first on artcritical.

The soft glowing orange of Lindquist’s first wall painting in You are Nature appears to take its slanted oblong shape from a sunbeam, one which must at a particular time of day stretch across the white of one of the gallery’s pillars. Standing marker-like amid the paintings on canvas which make up the better part of the show, the wall-work signals what is for this artist a new and successful engagement with color: evident everywhere in distinctive greens, yellows, turquoises and vermillion. The wall piece is equally emblematic, however, of a pervasive restlessness that runs like a current through the exhibition. Lindquist’s works often suggest origins in a questioning, even uneasy, relationship to the conventions of painting and sometimes even a paradoxical desire to take the traditional attributes of the form somewhere outside the constraints of the canvas altogether. The resulting works feel like active meditations on the nature of the pictorial surface, played out through layered depictions of earth-sites, still-lifes, water-scapes and screens.

Accompanying the new spectrum of color in these works is a broader range of subject matter, and a more varied approach to painterly execution. Lindquist’s previous work has most often addressed the life-cycles of the urban landscape, the processes of construction and decay visible in the landmarks and anonymous buildings of our human environment. Past imagery has focused on factories in ruin, such as those found along the Brooklyn waterfront, depicted with clarity in photo-silhouette,usually from the easily-read perspective of an earth-bound passer-by.

The current exhibition takes the project past the city limits and what feels like off the ground through several outdoor scenarios and underwater vistas. What Lies Beneath (The Galaxy of Space and Time), (2012) is among the most striking works in the show. It depicts, in an almost apocalyptic color scheme (from rusts to day-glo orange) Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. While the iconic forms of the earthwork are unmistakably articulated in the midground of the painting, they are partially obscured by a tempest of brushstrokes in the foreground, and then again towards the top of the canvas in an inexplicable burst of bright – as suggestive of an atomic bomb as the sun – which is left to drip pure whiteness straight down the otherwise recessive space. Two outer asymmetrical bands running alongside the canvas suggest a view from a window, its slanting angle playing against the picture plane. The viewpoint from which this scene is drawn is otherwise uncertain. The scale and proximity to the subject is oddly ambiguous despite a striving for representational rigor and, as in the case of many paintings here, almost disembodiesthe vantage point.

Central to the strength of these works is their painterly experimentation. By this I don’t simply mean a more physical sense of the medium, but more specifically a resonant relationship built between color, application and subject matter – a rapprochement of form to content. The grayscale precision of Lindquist’s earlier work is now, for example, translated into color. This tone-by-tone chromatic amplification yields powerful imagistic presence, as with the mass of coral-yellow in Phosphorescent Cloud (2012) which seems to be actively emerging from a depth of ocean turquoise. Particularly effective is the way Lindquist constructs form through staggered layers of color, as in Meditation/ Mediation (2012), where an entity of unknown identity, perhaps an old wood piling or a geyser seen from above, is built-up from crisply-outlined modulations of the same silhouette. Time Has Fallen Asleep (2012) is a poetic image of a plant in its vertical and reverse form; its delicate branches touching, hiding and interrupting each other in glazes of yellow and purple transparency. This superimposition effect visually references stencil or silkscreen techniques. It brings to mind a step-by-step process of image making, and by extension serves as a reminder of the selective and successive properties of perception. The two paintings of actual screens which appear in the show – one of an iPhone, the other of an airplane TV monitor – figure in this context not as the odd-ones-out in a slate of landscape paintings, but as further exploration into the mediated, even pixilated, nature of so much contemporary visual experience.

A key concern for Lindquist seems to be the expression of a kind of “substance” of depicted space. Light, distance, water and atmosphere are given special care, often felt out in fine spackles which form a pigmented fog. The technique is in itself beautiful, and indicates a draftsman’s concerns with the pictorial expansiveness possible within illusionistic parameters. It can also, however, on occasion lend a sort of “faux-finish” quality to the work, like a polishing touch used to complete a painting. Coming from a skilled, thoughtful painter, this veneer-like aspect in some of the works reveals a sense of vulnerability, a lack of faith in the communicative power of the image prior to its blurring finish.

The various framing devices seen in many of the works – nearly all of which are inventive and formally successful – similarly suggest apprehension about the emotionally direct implications of the face-on picture plane. In Apnea (2012) the mythical image of a free-diver immersed in blue is offset by a darkened half-border, suggestive of a screen-shot or underwater frame. Although the finished work is evocative and resolved, the image unfettered by device might have been more to the point. The cerebral, even aloof, quality of much of Lindquist’s work is alternately distancing and intriguing, as it seems to be indicative of a skepticism of the form built-in to its own execution. It’s a crucial issue for a dedicated painter to address, and the strength and charge evident in the current show suggests very good things will come from its resolution.

The post Past The City Limits: Greg Lindquist Breaks New Ground appeared first on artcritical.

Victor Pesce, the painter of quiet, patient, simple still lifes, died on March 28, 2010 in his home in Sharon, Connecticut after nearly a year’s struggle with lung cancer, aged 71. He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Harris, at whose gallery he showed his work. When I first met Victor at an opening I asked him what mediums he used in his paint. I was a graduate student aware of his work through one of my professors. Victor excitedly and generously explained how he would dab globs of regular oil paint on his canvas with a palette knife, brushing from the center out, like a mason applying grout.

Victor completed his studies at New York University, where he studied with Milton Resnick, in 1966and went on to develop an abstract style whose thick impasto recalled Larry Poons and Albert Pinkham Ryder. It was during the late 1990s and early 2000s that Victor developed the intimate still life idiom for which he is critically acclaimed. When Roberta Smith described these works in a New York Times review as “equally inspired by Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes and Brice Marden’s monochromes,” there was a recognition of Victor’s penchant for synthesizing historical and contemporary ways of seeing. David Ebony detected in Pesce “the emotional impact of late Manet still life.” Ken Johnson, also in the Times added that “As with Morandi, a main source of inspiration, Mr. Pesce’s objects look slightly anthropomorphic,” a quality shared with objects painted by Philip Guston, an artist Victor greatly admired throughout the course of his career. Many artists own Victor’s paintings, including Scott Richter and Janet Fish, and his work has influenced painters of younger generations as well. He had a close circle of artist peers, including Jim Clark, James Bohary and Charles Parness.

While preparing the catalog essay for Victor’s winter 2010 exhibition at Elizabeth Harris I was thrilled to see in Victor’s Connecticut studio the hand-made, craggy maquettes, fashioned out of cardboard and finished with oil paint, that appeared in his new paintings. Playfully arranging these objects on his cluttered studio tables I couldn’t help but see the Minimalism of a Donald Judd or Richard Tuttle sculpture. Sharing my thoughts with Victor, though, he obdurately had his own ideas: “I’m a painter not a sculptor,” he insisted in his distinctive Queens accent, a bit annoyed by my art historical associations. “I like easel painting, smaller paintings you can get close to. I’m primarily a classicist, a humanist—I’m looking back to the ancient world. If you really want to know why I started making these sculptures is because I got tired of having to get rid of all the boxes that Elizabeth’s parcels came in, so I just started making things out of them.”

Victor was a funny, gentle and modest guy, much like his paintings. He became a painting mentor to me, often recalling my grandfather as our conversations digressed into stories about baseball, New York and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Victor’s favorite team. He was a friendly person, but was also often shy, preferring to sit behind the gallery desk during openings rather than socializing but always excited to talk with friends and tell stories. And, even though Victor spent much of his time in the solitude of his studio, with the company of his cat, he frequently visited with neighboring friends in Connecticut.

The last time I spoke with Victor was the day before my own exhibition at Elizabeth Harris opened, a week or so before he passed away. He told me in his characteristic sprezzatura not to worry about him, that he’d be fine. Regretfully, I was not able to visit Victor again. However, while visiting Elizabeth the day after his death, she invited me to see his studio as he left it, wishing to show me an unfinished painting on his easel. The painting simply depicted a bed, stretcher frame and a table, which, without legs, eerily floated in a flattened pictorial space. My eyes wandered around his studio. The space still appeared occupied: maquettes arranged, paint brushes in piles, as if paint were still slowly drying on palette. Victor’s studio felt as peaceful as the unfinished painting resting on his easel.

The post Tribute to Victor Pesce, 1938-2010 appeared first on artcritical.

In the front gallery, oil paintings, a baker’s dozen, by Victor Pesce. In the back gallery, thirty small-scale black and white works, some acrylic on paper, some spray paint on canvas, by William Carroll.  Pesce’s oils: all interiors, mostly minimal tabletop still-lives.  Carroll’s acrylics: all exteriors, mostly minimal urban landscapes. Dissimilar artists, yet there is a strange resonance created in this intentional pairing by gallery director Miles Manning.

Pesce’s work brings to mind a long list of modern representational painters, and an ambitious catalog essay by Greg Lindquist does an excellent job of discussing the artist’s visual relationship to a good many of them.  History and possible influences aside, however, it is the works’ quiet but persistent evocation of the uncanny that is most arresting.  Pesce’s paintings are intimate in scale, with the largest only a smidge over 30 by 24 inches and the smallest only 4 by 4 inches.  The objects depicted, usually one or two per work, are equally modest: a paper bag, a paintbrush, small bottle, a flower, or a colored block.  All muted earth tones, the colors favor olive greens, pale yellows, and forest browns.  The paint handling, on the other hand, is immodest in the extreme.  Not bombastic by any means, but thick, viscous, and insistent.  Take for example the one non-tabletop subject in the exhibit, Open Door, 2009.  To describe the image is easy enough: the corner of a room with peach colored walls, a putty olive linoleum floor, maple stained pine molding, a floor board heater in the right corner, and a small square (light switch? thermostat?) just to the right of an open doorway.  The door itself, also a shade of putty olive green, has one of those translucent glass panels common to old offices.  As with the other works, the paint has a thick physicality that suggests that at least a pound of creamery butter has been added to the medium, absurd a thought as that may be.  The physicality of the paint results in a metaphysical that is much harder to put one’s finger on.  Perhaps not surprisingly, on this point Morandi’s work is mentioned more than once in the catalog essay almost as a kind of touchstone.  Yet Morandi’s focus was the elusive space and persona created by his objects, while Pesce appears to be conjuring something else entirely: a palpable longing for permanence.  And it is an effect heightened by the inevitable contrast with the very transitory state of the objects selected – the paper bag, the cut flower, the empty bottle, and the open door.  In life, people pass through open doors, see what is on the other side, close and open them.  In the Pesce’s Open Door, the door is fully open, the space through the door only blackness, and the viewer can feel on a deeply visceral level how every daub of paint is determined to fix these things, not just on the canvas, but in time.

Time is an important element in William Carroll’s work as well, but from a completely different angle.  Diaristic in intent and feeling, the simple black and white paintings – some on canvas, some on paper -document the artist’s long walks across New York’s boroughs.  Landmarks and objects are presented only in silhouette, yet they still convey a subtle detail that is specifically urban, and urbane, which any New Yorker will recognize instantly.  It is worth noting, however, that while the artist makes dozens of rapid light sketches during his treks, the paintings themselves are decidedly not rendered plein air, but recollections aimed at distilling the experiences of a full day’s travels to a few meaningful marks.  Both the canvas and paper works utilize only black, applied in thin layers to a white ground as to produce a palette of grays.  With the works on canvas the paint is from spray cans which, after all these years, can now be referred to almost nostalgically as classic graffiti technique – and again familiar to any long time New Yorker. The works on paper use standard acrylic artist’s paint applied in thin, wet layers.  The limited mediums, in turn, are used to delineate an equally sparse number of ubanscape elements to great effect.  Take, for instance, the acrylic on paper nyc 466, 2009: an arched steel bridge in the background bisects the page as a tug boat in the foreground glides across the water and moves out of the frame on the right.  As mentioned, Carroll has applied the acrylic paint in such thin wet on wet washes as to make it respond as if it were watercolor.  So as with good watercolor technique, the puddles of pigment and staining are used here to deftly magnify and expand the emotional dimensionality.  Somehow, too, there is an undeniable air of not just contemplation, but determination transmitted via the artist’s near ascetic insistence to modulate only the gray scale to indicate distance, material, mass, fluidity, and atmosphere.  Indeed, with the works small scale, stripped down palette, and narrative of wandering, one can almost hear the artist urging us to travel light, look, and move on.  More to the point, nyc 466, with its tug boat forever in the act of vanishing off the page, is the most literal embodiment of the artist’s overall theme: the intimate dance between experience, the passage of time, and memory.

Pesce freeze’s the moment, Carroll celebrates transience, and the two shows together create a deeply meaningful and thoughtful dialogue.

The post Victor Pesce and William Carroll at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

Over the last three decades, Nancy Haynes has developed a body of abstract work that utilizes a painting’s inherent materiality to cause a surface to shift from being a plane that is looked at, to becoming an area that is peered into.  Visually, her work calls to mind Gerhard Richter’s mechanized methods of applying paint to a surface and isolating brush marks, along with Brice Marden’s minimalist sensibility and handling of edges.  With her current show, “Dissolution,” Haynes presents a series of paintings that she refers to as “dark matter.”  In these paintings, darkness becomes a facilitator of light as Haynes employs a palette of terrestrial ores, impenetrable blacks, arctic blues, and steely grays to subtly shift, float, dissolve, and illuminate, all the while coaxing contemplation.

The velvety surfaces of Haynes’ small rectangular works are constructed by overlapping nuanced fields of color thinly painted with a wide, flat brush and straight movements.  In most cases, the color fields hold a directional light that transpires either from left to right, right to left, or from the center outward, with their brushed margins stopping just short of the painting’s edge.  In this way, a void is suggested while the veil of the hovering chromatic plane thwarts one’s entrance.  The effect is similar to peering into a Ganzfeld experiment or a dense fog that has trapped in it the ambient hues of the oncoming night.

In works like Shadow Syndrome (all works 2008), where a crisp glacial blue illuminates from right to left over a sea of piney grays, and Syntax where a smoky green-gold haze fades in and out of a richly saturated background, the separation between the planes of color is more pronounced making these works, at first glance, visually more striking than others in the gallery.  However, this is not a show for the impatient viewer and when given more than a glance it’s easy to become infatuated with the delicate tonal shifts of leaden grays in a painting like Liminal Monologue or the dark light emanating from the temperature shifts in the black on black painting, Echo.

As one grasps the combination of flatness, space, and light in Haynes’ paintings, the subtleties of her sophisticated palette and tonal gradations reveal a seductive luminosity.  Through this examination one’s mind empties out, leaving oneself in a contemplative state.  Or perhaps better put, one becomes fully engaged in the moment– peering simply into the painting’s surface while marveling at the unique and nuanced light held by each work.

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Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets like Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography—arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit. Among the Dadaists and Surrealists, there were no union demarcation lines between painter and poet preventing wordsmiths from picking up their scissors: The poets of those supremely literary movements made collages and “found” objects, just as many of the visual artists wrote — in the 1930s, during his close association with Surrealism, Picasso devoted much energy to verse.

Is there something intrinsic to the appeal of collage to writers — to moving bits of paper around in startling, revelatory juxtapositions? The coincidence of two shows of collages by writers of markedly different ilk – a sometime poet laureate and a member of the third estate – begs the question. John Ashbery is the subject of a display of collages made from his undergraduate days at Harvard in the late 1940s to a series from 2008 that use chutes and ladders boards as their support. Mario Naves, who is perhaps better known as art critic for the New York Observer, has his fourth solo exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery since 2001.

The coincidence, and the connection with writing, intensifies around the identification of both men with the postcard. Mr. Ashbery is a consummate collector of postcards, and receiver and sender of them, too. Many of the collages in this show use a postcard as the support; they are framed to allow sight of the recto text, appropriately for objects as likely to be collected for their literary as artistic interest — and with Mr. Ashbery, as we are dealing with images and impulses, the distinction between the two is refreshingly fuzzy. Friendship plays a profound role in his collage activities: the 2008 chutes and ladders collages use source materials gifted to him by the late Joe Brainard and are unquestionably an homage to that poetry world artist.

Mr. Naves, who in this show returns to a welcome intimacy of scale, calls his collages “Postcards from Florida,” as they date from his brief tenure as Professor of Drawing at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota.

The types of collage Messrs. Ashbery and Naves favor occupy different ends of the spectrum in relation to the key issue with this medium: the legibility and relevance of the source material. In Mr. Ashbery’s images, the sources are virtually pristine. There are figures and objects cut from historic engravings or old magazine advertisements and then placed in equally intact though incongruous, dreamlike scenes and settings. In “Diffusion of Knowledge” (1972), for instance, a pair of comic strip action heros flex their muscles on a postcard of the Smithsonian Institution. There is a strange misregistering of the buildings in the background, as the familiar tower seems shadowed by a stenciled doppelganger in bright orange. But there is no confusion about the sources, only the encounter.

In Mr. Naves, by contrast, the imagery is entirely abstract, and the source material, which consists of painted tears of crumpled papers, is fabricated for collage purposes by the artist himself. Where Mr. Ashbery comes from the collage tradition of Max Ernst and Braque, Mr. Naves looks more to Henri Matisse’s late great cutouts and Jean Arp. The emphasis is on shapes created rather than figures isolated; it is more an aesthetic of unity than incongruity, and is less subversive.

Paradoxically, it could be argued, each writer tends to the opposite extreme in their visual and verbal work. Complicating this idea is the fact that besides his poetry, Mr. Ashbery writes clear, precise, accessible prose commentary on art and literature, but the work for which he is best known and admired is deeply, notoriously difficult. His collages, on the other hand, are formally bright and transparent, tending towards immediately accessible story lines and inherently attractive source materials.

Mr. Naves, by contrast, a journalist whose opinions are as bright and punchy as any editor could wish for, makes jolie-laid abstract art that is rough at the edges, scruffy, almost nonchalant in its casual disregard for any sense of a central organizing principle. The historic collagist he most closely resembles is the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (whose example also enthused the Harvard undergrad according to Mr. Ashbery) in drawing upon detritus whose desuetude survives the alchemy of its artistic transmogrification.

True, Mr. Naves’s “crap” consists of studio stuff, as opposed to bus tickets and candy wrappings from metropolitan streets, and it was originated by the artist for intended transformation. But the result constantly stresses distress and arbitrariness — papers are crumpled as if underfoot; there is never “pure” color but instead the contingency of splodges and brushstrokes are always manifest. The initial impression of the scarred, battered surfaces of Mr. Naves’s collages is of a segment of billboard where layers of old posters have been stripped and scraped away — a form already made into art by the Italian pop artist Mimmo Rotella.

So, two highly accomplished visual artists who just happen also to be writers? That seems too easy a conclusion. Mr. Naves – in contrast to public perception of him – is an artist who also writes, whereas with Mr. Ashbery, self and public perception coincide around the fact that he is a poet who makes collages, in the Clausewitzian sense as poetry pursued by other means. Mr. Ashbery’s collages, in contrast to his verse, is eminently likeable and legible. Even his coy hints at pederasty are sweetly whimsical. Mr. Naves, by contrast, makes tough, itchy, irksome collages which are strictly for aficionados of abstraction.

It could be said that these are “difficult” writers in very different senses. Mr. Naves is a maverick dissenter as reviled by the art world establishment as Mr. Ashbery is beloved of the poetry world’s. The one is difficult in the sense of being a nuisance, the other in the sense of being brilliantly obscure and impenetrable. Collage presents a means of intensifying his efforts to the one, and of providing gentle relief from them for the other.

Tevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of Mr. Ashbery’s collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally eschewing its touch. His paintings are seamless, sealed-in, and automobile-like in their glossy finesse. But his vocabulary is intimately informed by the aesthetic of collage, bringing together both commonplace and esoteric objects in startling and suggestive juxtapositions. He could be called a conceptual collagist, cutting and pasting within the mind’s eye.

Mr. Winkfield is a natural double act with Mr. Ashbery as, since 1988, works by this expatriate Yorkshireman have habitually graced the covers of the poet’s new publications and reissues. His style is unmistakable: high contrast, high chroma arrangement of forms that are radically contrastive in scale and source executed with the clean precision of a graphic designer. He has associated closely with the poetry world, and twice instigated small but influential journals for poetry: Juilliard, in the late 1960s, and Sienese Shredder, since 2007.

Mr. Winkfield’s aesthetic is essentially heraldic: objects are flattened to the extent that they are not allowed to threaten the two-dimensional picture surface, even as they busily overlay one another. “At the Gates,” (2004) is a triptych that sees areas of pink, yellow, rust, and grays and blue occupy distinct but interconnected zones, with objects as diverse as a metronome, a fan surmounting fluted columns, and a shattered vase holding court in each.

While flatness of overall design is strictly policed, the shadows of individual forms are almost scientifically rendered. Also undermining heraldry is the non-hierarchical nature of his compositions, the all-overness of his spreads recalling abstract, color field painting as much as any historic source.

His artistic origins are actually firmly rooted in a European pop sensibility, and are thus at once formal and literary. He trained at London’s Royal College of Art where students a few years ahead of him included Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield, whose precisionist advertising style set the scene for British pop art. Eduardo Paolozzi, Valerio Adami, and the American Richard Lindner are also points of reference.

In a way, Mr. Winkfield suffers from the fact that his work reproduces too well. He draws on graphic design, and provides graphic design solutions for book covers. But the experience of his paintings in the flesh underlines the richness of his saturated color and the vitality of his paint application, neat for sure but by no means mechanical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 4, 2008 under the headings “Gallery Going:  Bits and Pieces Brought Together” and “Art in Brief: Trevor Winkfield”

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Dore Ashton, Joshua Mack and Stephen Maine joined David Cohen to review Julian Hatton at Elizabeth Harris, Byron Kim at Max Protetch, Alexander Ross at Marianne Boesky and at David Nolan and Tabaimo at James Cohan.

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