John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills

February 19 to April 11, 2015
456 North Camden Drive (between S. Santa Monica Boulevard and Brighton Way)
Beverly Hills, 310 271 9400

John Currin’s current solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills will not disappoint devotees of his signature style. The artist’s sensuous play between lush fabrics, fruit and the female form — while exceedingly literal — is nonetheless striking and seductive. Culling inspiration from Italian Mannerism and the art of the Northern Renaissance, Currin recasts the classical image of the female nude, limning and embracing its current cultural significance in tandem with its historical precedent. Gender and sexuality become the subjects of Currin’s paintings, and while his relationship to art of the 15^th century has been discussed at length, rarely is his work regarded in politically salient terms.

With the exception of three paintings executed in 2013, each work in the exhibition was painted within the last three months. The luscious 2015 work Maenads depicts an alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired sitter in Currin’s Mannerist style. A pink gossamer top traces her breasts and a silk scarf is draped listlessly over her lap. Two ripe apples placed at eye-level mirror her rounded breasts and belly, further emphasizing the figure’s sensuous form. In the background lie two additional women with similar coloring, one with legs splayed open and the other reaching over to touch her. However any contact between the two is obscured by the foreground sitter’s raised knee. The show’s earlier works exhibit slightly more explicit instances of sexuality, integrating what appears to be ‘70s-era pornography as background imagery. However, it serves to mention that the naughtiest bits are always concealed: no genitals and certainly no penetrative sex. So why, after having depicted explicit sex acts for years, does John Currin offer us these references to sexuality without the titillation?

The Storm (2013) similarly alludes to what appears to be an explicit sex act between a man and two women, but Currin’s languid golden-haired nude obscured our view. In this image, like the others in the show, paint is applied thinly and sparingly, the texture of the canvas visible behind his rendered satins and furs. Bust in a Convex Mirror and Nude in a Convex Mirror, both from 2015, present a refracted view of Currin’s female forms, allowing for the delectation of his figures’ breasts and buttocks without interference.

Lemons and Lace (2015) remained with me long after leaving the exhibition. A vaguely historical pastiche, the female figure bares a striking resemblance to Currin’s wife and frequent sitter, Rachel Feinstein. Posed as an odalisque, his subject is dressed in lingerie that refers in equal parts 17^th century vestments and to 1970s adult films, all the way down to her thigh-high stockings and shimmering gold mules. In the background, a snuffed-out candelabra and pieces of fruit beg to be analyzed in art-historical terms — do these props allude to fertility? Integrity? Death? Plays with translucence and opacity abound, a useful metaphor in understanding these new works.

The thread unifying these paintings is a deliberate attention to what’s exposed and what is concealed. The images are PG-13 alternatives to the artist’s previous X-rated works, and by adhering to socially prescribed limits of probity, Currin further demarcates those boundaries, naturalized for centuries via the art-historical canon.

I want to make very clear what I understand as a distinction between the operations of Currin’s nudes and those of other contemporary artists. Now perhaps cliché, Classical and Modern artists have portrayed the pliant and available female body for centuries. Understanding this cultural and historical signification as implicit in any image of a white female nude, artists of Currin’s epoch have subverted the classic trope as a means of illustrating the restrictive politics of gender and visuality. Take for instance the arresting and corpulent nude portraits of Jenny Saville, tellingly referred to as “grotesque” by art critics and historians. Or perhaps Rineke Dijkstra’s nude mothers, photographed shortly after giving birth, stretchmarks and bloated bellies proudly on display. Even pornography, as employed by Ghada Amer, serves to represent the female body as imbued with agency, deliberate and purposeful. Currin’s return to classical tropes then brings ideological markers of taste and class into sharp relief, naturalized for centuries and only very recently challenged by postmodern theory and feminist politics. And, as in the classical tradition, the sensuousness of Currin’s forms is heightened by their relative modesty.

The post Show and Tell: John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills appeared first on artcritical.

Comics With Still Life: Finding The Inevitable Place at galleryHOMELAND
September 5 through October 17, 2014
2505 SE 11th #136
Portland, OR, 402 936 1379

Will Bruno’s new art exhibition launched at galleryHOMELAND early this month to a roomful of guests. Having quit his job to head out on the road, Bruno has returned to Portland from a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. The Center is located on the banks of the Salmon River Estuary at the base of Oregon’s Cascade Head. Created away from smog-choked corners and cosmopolitan saloons, Bruno’s new works suggest keen effect of setting and season where south winds blow cool and flowers perfume the air. Made in flashe, oil, watercolor, acrylic, ink, graphite, colored pencil, and variously mixed media (wood, beach wood, flowers) the works evoke a clear sense of the artist amid deserts, beaches and untamable lands, open to the daily variations of light and landscape, engendering at all times the potential for revelation.

This exhibition of light-filled landscapes, interiors, portraits and still lifes is not without its avant-garde turns, with traditional painterly qualities augmented by wilder intervening abstractions and use of different media (even video). The show’s presentation adds to its variance, with canvas works hung on nails and dispersed, watercolors tacked in rows, comic works set behind glass, and spaces fashioned keenly to showcase installation pieces, both upon floored pedestals and dedicated wall-abutting shelves. GalleryHOMELAND curator Reese Kruse did a marvelous job of leading the viewers through, from work to work, with variations spread about the space.

A cataract of three diminutive dusky aquarelles with a fragmented comic aspect begins the show; entitled Wendy (2014), they share page-space with naturalistic paintings of burnished and slung fruits. Set to deckle-edged off-white papers and behind glass, the latter still lifes are situated below highly finished ink compositions — comic scenes of a people Bruno has named “The Oogleheads.” The recurring characters are a fictive “band of roguish villains that had nowhere to turn after all else in their lives went sour from thievery and inbreeding.” The en plein air elements of these works are wrought in gouache with opaque layers that give a sense of unrestraint and presage the exhibition’s abstraction.

At 42-by-44 inches, the show’s largest painting is Beach Comber With Still Life (2014), hung near the gallery’s entrance. At the center of the composition is a still life of a succulent on a table covered with a patterned yellow cloth, while a candy-striped mock drapery hangs behind it. This flashe-and-oil painting on canvas features the comic figure “The Beach Comber,” who furtively lurks behind the drape with his stylized silhouette repeating in orange upon the yellow tablecloth. The large striped curtain is modeled from a simple, iconic dishcloth Bruno had been using at Sitka. This elemental juxtaposition, with its muted green and white as the perfect backdrop for the brighter paint of the succulent and table, calls to mind the summerhouses and figures of Fairfield Porter, but more sinister, and with none of their pastiche, These are examples of the confluence of mundanity and grandeur, silliness and beauty seen throughout Bruno’s art. The tablecloth and its reappearance have little deeper meaning (a simple texture) but one could discern a deliberate nod to ordinary life in lieu of sophistication.

The still lifes, discursive comic narrative elements, warped landscapes, and mixed media works give impressions of locales found during Bruno’s journeying in Oregon, the Olympic Peninsula, Canada, Glacier National Park, Moab, and a stay in a straw-bale lean-to off the grid in Taos. There are painted dreamscapes that abandon hierarchies of nature, self, and other. There’s the 20-by-16-inch Windows (2014), an iconic three-window oil painting on canvas depiction of, in Bruno’s words, “the perfect gradient sunset,” with which Bruno realized the power of memory to augment the work “when paint’s not working the way I need it to.” This painting is unlike the rest, in that it has the sunset light seen in certain of his aquarelles but instead of a human figure, the architectural triptych of windows serves as the figures, and finely so.

Inspired by Porter, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, Bruno’s greatest influence was the land and working or wandering through it; his signature is the recurrent objects, figures, and combinations of detail seen throughout his career to date. Bruno’s work, while possessing the spiritual sublimity of natural landscapes, resolutely flips the hitherto precious and othering view of nature on its head, with a declaration that “we are the Earth; it’s not a separate thing.” His painted works playfully poke fun at astonished reverence seen in the work of earlier artists, with what he describes as a practice of “ironic sincerity.”

His view of the everyday amid the majestic intends, Bruno says, “to decode life around me.” He asserts that “creating confirms existence, and drawing things I see every day helps to see how they fit together, to reconnect patterns.” On the Pacific Crest Trail in 2007, Bruno found and re-enlivened the old world and common object: a boot, a truck, and a port-a-john, amid astonishing sunrises and a lushness that is quintessentially Western. Such images and objects are found in his new show, but with more of the surprising juxtaposition seen in works like Beach Comber, and the restrained continuity of the comic fragments, all of which differentiates the old-fashioned Impressionistic handling seen here, from the experimental flourishes of the avant-garde.

Correspondences throughout the exhibition offer strange (never weird-for-the-sake-of-weird) juxtapositions and splintered narratives, populating the paintings in the way many of us inhabit our dreams. To Bruno, the fragments are “more like life than linear ones ” seen in naturalistic narratives and history paintings. There’s In The Field (2014), an en media res dog’s-eye view of an old janitor in very large trousers, inexplicably mopping up a fallow, sloping field. There’s no context here but a figure (one who never reappears) in the landscape, and no perceptible reason for the mopping of earth, but the effects are both equanimity and disquietude: the mopping man seems calm in aspect and activity, but the perspective of him and the land are absolutely warped. The acrylic and oil brushstrokes look both fast and slow; and the light is distinctly thunderstorm, rumbling with doomy purples and grays and the chill of a haunting tale.

Images appear throughout this exhibition, and gather the way people do: often spontaneously. There are, visible in the works of Comics With Still Life: crustacean leitmotifs, collections of ephemera set in windowsills, architectural forms, geometric shapes, and old philosopher types fitted together with no reason but surprise. For Bruno, emblems are frequent but remain unconscious and sometimes unnoticed.

A final set of seven watercolors in purple with ink, Windowsill (2014), fills a large portion of a wall at the end of the show, with the white of the canvases furnishing their lights. Figures reappear in this abstract series, with portions painted with the sureness of ink-stroke seen in hanging scrolls by Japanese artists from past centuries. A magnificently plain ping-pong player seen from behind hangs below a still-life canvas with a giant rabbit. Another of the sequence sees the reappearance of a mustachioed giant peering beneath a magic rock: its magic is the addition of salt set into wet pigment to make it glimmer, a technique put into practice a handful of times in this series. Other watercolor-ink paintings in this cycle include a patinated arabesque and a series of abstract grisailles, which, like other works of the exhibition, supremely compliment the consummately diverse mood of the show.

Toward the exhibition’s end are more watercolors of snow-covered peaks, painted during Bruno’s time in Banff. He and his companion visited Canada to backpack along Lake Minnewanka, where “we heard a bear grunting outside our tent and ran the five miles back to the car in the middle of the night.” His ideas about man and nature are by no means spelled out plainly, but a study of the works within galleryHOMELAND show an artist with a congenial place in, and understanding of, nature. Bruno’s plan was to spend concentrated intervals in practice, and carry his tiny still lifes and sketches into new lands. The fruit of his adventuring is a collection emblematic of an inner, as well as outer, exploration.

The post Comic Revelations and Reappearances: Works by Will Bruno appeared first on artcritical.

Palestinian artist Jawad al Malhi watches the activity on the street from his balcony in the Shufhat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, where he was born and still lives. At times it mirrors what he sees in television coverage of events across the Middle East, and it reminds him of his own fervent engagement with politics in the past. Young men on the street, mostly adolescents, stand around nervously waiting for something to happen, for an encounter that will set off an action in which they can participate. When it does, individuals who may not even know each other suddenly come together as a group, expressing their passion and acting as one. But when the event is over the solidarity disappears and they drift apart, uncertain and without purpose.

This fleeting moment after an event — the atmosphere, the body movements, the gestures and facial expressions —is what al Malhi seeks to capture in his paintings, viewing the crowd as if through a wide-angle camera lens, and using large canvases with minimal colour. It must be rather like trying to paint the sea after a wave has crashed, when for a moment the waters seem to have no clear direction.

There is hardly a hint of the environment in these paintings, and a powerful absence of architectural space, just the dust and glare of an exposed public space. The boys seem to be wandering around nowhere. This is in total contrast to Al-Malhi’s previous body of work, a series of panoramic long-distance photographs that show the buildings of Shufhat packed claustrophobically close, and with no sign of people. Entitled “House No. 197,” they were exhibited at the recent Helsinki Photography Biennial, and at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

The youths depicted in his current exhibition, “Measures of Uncertainty,” could be hanging out near the Israeli checkpoint a short distance from al Malhi’s house, but in conversation the artist says that they are not necessarily Palestinian: they could be in Cairo, or Istanbul, or anywhere in the Middle East. Dressed in the generic t-shirts, hooded jackets and jeans of kids anywhere, they live in what he calls “Coca-Cola time,” perhaps meaning a mixture of expectation and emptiness, a mood as international as their clothes.

Coming into the elegantly renovated Al-Ma’mal gallery, a former tile factory, in Jerusalem’s Old City, the bleached, creamy colours of the paintings almost merge into the stone walls and there is a general sense of stillness, suggesting peace and harmony. At first sight, you could be looking at all-male scenes on the fringe of a football or cricket field. But a closer study shows the deep, naked unease in the expressions and body movements of people caught in suspense, floating in a toxic, anonymous haze.

There is a pervading sense of watchfulness. The characters watch each other and us. They seem aware of being watched — by the artist, by television cameras, by the international community. Sometimes a gaze catches the viewer’s eye and creates an emotional link. We find ourselves watching rather than viewing them, but with all this attention, they don’t know what to do. Many of the characters are portraits of people al Malhi knows — boys who work in a local garage or tire factory, for instance — which invests a strong, contemporaneous reality to the work. The characters express confusion and bafflement; they scratch their heads and look around, seem lost, stunned, mildly indignant, filled with trepidation. Each one seems isolated in his own restless dream.

But the dream, says al Malhi, doesn’t exist. What does exist is the huge potential energy, even power, within the crowds on the street. “They are looking for answers,” he says, “but perhaps should be trying to find questions.”

The post “They are looking for answers”: Jawad al Malhi at Al-Ma’mal Foundation appeared first on artcritical.

A cursory glance at Michael Berryhill’s paintings could lead to a mistake on the order of confusing fiberglass insulation with cotton candy. So beware of complacency induced by pastel colors, sensuous surfaces and snarky titles. Something disturbing may be lurking behind the cheerful ambiguities in the nine new paintings and vitrine of drawings in his new show at Kansas Gallery.

Saturn n Son (all 2014), a play on words of the ‘70s sitcom Sanford and Son, is the title of two initially puzzling paintings in Kansas’s rear room. Layered in mostly blues and rusty browns, they seem to represent an indistinct, non-descript figure, which could be a piece of disintegrated statuary, bent over in some kind of activity. Without knowing the title, the activity could range from manual labor to microscopic examination.

However anyone who has a passing acquaintance with art history will immediately recognize the Saturn in the title as the one Goya depicts devouring his son. Which of course makes the figure in Berryhill’s painting discernable as Goya’s wild-eyed, child-eating demon, and Berryhill’s resonances with Goya more obvious. The TV show reference emphasizes a bit of campy goofiness in the Goya seen from the present, despite the horrific subject matter, and conveys a spirit of ambivalence that permeates this work.

Berryhill is not ambivalent about his ambition however. Though modest in scale, the paintings use expensive, thick-weave linen, a high culture archival maneuver that serves to offset some of the low culture references, and telegraphs his seriousness. Berryhill nods to not only Goya, but Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as his contemporaries, such as Dana Schutz. He places himself in an early modernist painting tradition that, despite an apparently abstract affect, is always representational in its ultimate methods.

The major ambivalences in this show concern the perception of the imagery and how important it is to decipher it. Berryhill presents his subjects theatrically with proscenium-like verticals as quotation marks and a shallow horizontal strip at the bottom that stages each event. The grain of the linen, and small, dry brushstrokes allow Berryhill to use a halftone-like layering process, producing a surface of fuzzy colors and figure-ground inversions. The results are images seeming indefinite, corroded, or out of focus.

Like the wordplay of his titles, each of Berryhill’s paintings involves some kind of visual misreading or multiplicity of meaning. Indeed the very title of the exhibition, Beggars Blanket, is an obvious reference to the 1968 Rolling Stones album, Beggar’s Banquet, replacing a humble repast with an inadequate fuzzy fabric (the canvases themselves?).

How we respond then is always dependent on how easily one psychologically negotiates the frustration of not being able to resolve the paintings into coherent images.

Some viewers will simply accept the work as abstract and just appreciate the sensuous, warm and fuzzy mood it projects, which can lead to overlooking a reference to parental cannibalism. But the sustained attention required of viewers to parse partial bits of imagery in hopes of a deeper comprehension carries a risk for the artist. Too much unresolved ambiguity, coupled with a flippant title, like Axis of Easel, might interfere with the painting attaining memorability, and the futility of finding resolution could overwhelm the artist-viewer bond.

Long Long, Gone Gone, a painting with fairly straightforward imagery, is a great ploy to engage one in the work’s hermeneutics as well as a direct statement of Berryhill’s themes. This painting depicts the back of a longhaired person, left hand to brow in a peering-off-into-the-distance gesture, and with a parrot on the right shoulder.

The formal ambiguities are easy to parse, but their metaphorical implications give the painting gravitas. The airy blue background, grading from ultramarine to cerulean, can be either sky or sea, or both, and the blue reappears at the bottom to frame the bust of a figure, who, given the layered hairdo and delicate wrist is probably meant to be seen as female. Or the bottom strip might indicate that the figure is submerged to her chest in water. To her chest that is, if the patterned rectangular shape spanning the canvas is her back, and not in fact the back of a couch. The parrot, as signifier of both imitation and piracy, is depicted as a degraded representation. The searching gesture, which echoes our own concentration of looking, seems futile because nothing can be deciphered from the scumbled brushstrokes that represent the distance.

The title, Long Long, Gone Gone, can represent not only our own fruitless attempts to find meaning in Berryhill’s paintings, but perhaps an elegy for the past itself — a recognition that painting has departed as the major vehicle for conveying cultural meaning. Despite the rigor and purpose that Berryhill brings to his paintings, there is also a sophisticated understanding of that ship having already sailed, and we peer desperately at its surface, trying to understand why it exists, trusting only our own perceptions, Flaubert’s stuffed parrot squawking useless artspeak at our shoulder.

The post Fuzzy Reception: Michael Berryhill at Kansas appeared first on artcritical.

Accola Griefen Gallery
May 23 to June 29, 2013
547 West 27th Street #634
New York City, 646-532-3488

Bypassing a post-modernist disbelief in the sign’s capacity for truth, Susan Bee’s current show, titled Criss Cross at Accola Griefen, announces a sincere love for the image. Bee’s apparent faith in the capacity of the painted figure to truly say something flies in the face of stylish irony and dispassionate conceptualism. I see her practice as heroic: perhaps the devout image-maker in our climate of stagnant disillusionment is a post-millennial wanderer in sea and fog.

The signifying strategies of Bee’s visual vocabulary include sequential narration (i.e. storytelling), a modernist invocation of pure color as the sensual index of emotion, intertextual allusion (Bee uses images from Hollywood and 19th century European painting), and a consistent emphasis on the tension between those modes.  That tension is what accounts, in part, for the confounding beauty of the paintings that comprise the current series.  The story told in Out the Window (2011) can be read and perhaps understood but not entered into: its subject—a flatly rendered, plaintive girl—is behind glass; she and her audience do not share the same present. This painted scene (like many of Bee’s) makes explicit the encounter between the shallowness of the image-as-such and the deep space of lived experience. The story is always agitated by the unruly illegibility of painterly abstraction, which serves as its backdrop.  The deep space of Out the Window—the splotched and dotted background which sets off its protagonist—is a welter of hot, libidinous color and bristling textures; a crisply felt but ineffable present-tense.

Bee toys with the usual implications of the picture frame—to separate art from world, to corral an idealized other-reality and present it as an approachable object in the here and now—in her recurring invocation of the window.  The man in No Exit (2012) looks at us through the Mondrian squares of a modernist mosaic illuminated like stained glass.  The film noir pathos of his expression and the play of hot and cool in Bee’s palette, cast the space before the window—what lies between the character and us, his audience—in a shadowy solemnity.  This gap is both our outside and his, and it menaces.  It is an uncharted space, and the painting has no words for it. This ineffable beyond is re-iterated elsewhere in the exhibition as the turbid blur of the world when viewed from an automobile. In repeated cinematic renderings of people behind the dashboard—for example, Drive She Said (2011), Trouble Ahead (2012), The Trip (2012), Voyage (2012), and Wherever You Go (2013)—Bee envisions the menacing outside alternately as a swirling expressionist vortex, a patchwork of vivid geometric shapes, or a spattered web of aleatory drops. In this work she searches for the visual vocabulary with which to express the destabilizing sense-experience offered by the moving car; a phenomenon which, in the ‘40s and ‘50s (the Hollywood era Bee most often references) required the use of “rear projection” in order to be captured on film. The odd visual incongruity yielded by that technique—between the shaky, washed out external world and the sharper lines of the interior scene—is a glaring reminder of cinematic untruth, pointing to the dark functionality of the film studio. Film has always labored to mask its incapacity to immerse the viewer in airtight illusion; Bee, on the other hand, embraces the expressive potential of a kind of illusion that actively exposes itself.

In her images derived from European painters Caspar David Friedrich and Chaim Soutine, Bee again demonstrates that historical allusion in painting does not amount to an ironic disavowal of the source material, but instead indicates an impassioned wish to identify; a longing to feel and say what a painted character does.  Whereas Roy Lichtenstein’s rendering of Van Gogh replaced the latter’s emotionally-charged brushstroke with the utilitarian blandness of graphic design, Bee’s versions of Friedrich and Soutine re-animate a historical pathos via the aching brightness of her own style. Her paintings have an intensely contemporary feeling, which manifests itself as the straining for words, an effort which both turns toward the past and activates a new and radically particular visual consciousness.

Ruckenfigur (2013) breaks down the smooth narrative surface of Friedrich’s gloomily romantic Sonnenuntergang (Brüder) (“sunset brothers”) (1830) into a striated pattern of vigorous greens, oranges, and blues.  Here the distant sun which captivates the interest of the two brothers, lets spill its warm hues onto the foreground.  The observing figures are thus ushered into the very image they appraise; their wish to comprehend the beautiful object—Friedrich invoked Kant’s notion of sublime longing for the thing-as-such—is, in a sense, nullified, as they are shown to already participate in the beauty they so wistfully appraise. Bee’s painting exposes the false belief that one cannot get inside a work of art. The relation between an artwork and its audience always connotes a certain longing, and the image can ache along with the person, yearning to encapsulate the material of a passing experience that can’t be held.

Bee’s brushwork always articulates an immediacy of feeling troubled by the need for comprehensible expression. It is true that all images reduce the disorder of immediate experience to a definitely limited object. Action painting addressed the problem by favoring experience and rejecting the limitations of the object; Pop Art declared the dominion of the object and the inevitable, thorough colonization of experience. Bee’s work, on the other hand, maintains that the painted figure can resist the tendency to dominate and enclose. For her, the barrier between beauty and the ordinary that is erected by the fact of the frame becomes a glimpsed horizon line, an illusory limit that dissolves when approached.

The post Longing Inside the Frame: Susan Bee at Accola Griefen appeared first on artcritical.