March 30 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, (212) 563-7821

In an early episode in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the novella’s quixotic antihero, Frenhofer, is adding masterful corrective touches to a painting by Porbus for the benefit of the narrator, the young Poussin. “Look my boy, it is only the last stroke of the brush that counts; no one will thank us for what is underneath.” The history of modern art, it could be argued, is a riposte to such certitude. Abstraction, while often making the contradictory assertion that what you see is what you get — that the surface, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, is to be penetrated at peril — actually trades quite aggressively in the values that have been circumscribed. Heroics of elimination and purification might be intimated physically in the form of pentimenti; or else, in works that achieve non plus ultra reductivism, they are conceptually implicit.

Beguiling, enticing even, as the paintings of Nathlie Provosty are, it took this viewer three visits to be convinced by the totality of the artist’s vision. On the first visit, a troika of large, dark canvases, each seven feet high, dominated this sumptuously austere gallery space: West, Gilles and Twice Six (all works cited, 2016). Their declarative restraint established pictorial subtleties with such calm authority that the scattered smaller canvases seemed like intrusive souvenirs or afterthoughts. On a second visit, however, taking on trust the monumental severity of the big three, the eye could adjust to the busier, tightly knotted smaller compositions. These seemed to apply the lessons of their larger counterparts — or, one could equally say, anticipated the breakthroughs, for why assume that less always follows more? Inevitably, the fuller lexicon of colors and textures in the smaller works eclipsed what might seem like neat contained solutions in the bigger ones. But the experience of both visits yielded such satisfactions as to demand a third, which in turn rewarded this devotee with a sense of synthesis. Degrees of reduction or addition seemed determined in each canvas by particularities of emotional ambition rather than mere strategies dictated by size.

The three larger paintings each present a U-shaped black form in glossy application against a matt ground of similar hue. As befits paintings that glide effortlessly over the retina yet draw the viewer back again, the shapes variously resemble a boomerang and a magnet. If the initial impression, from a distance, of black shape against black ground, might recall the reductive late paintings of Alberto Burri in Celotex, that was belied, on closer inspection, by Provosty’s subtleties of texture and composition. Process in these “black” paintings hovers between deletion and accretion. The eye quickly becomes attuned to the survival of obscured, subcutaneous shapes and zones, and indeed colors, without compromising the surface’s serenely achieved sheerness. In this respect, the enigmatic black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, with their cruciform substructures, inevitably come to mind, as do the contingent emerging complexity of Suzan Frecon’s irregular geometries. In Provosty’s case, in counterpoint to the play of glossy bent shape against allover matt ground, an off-kilter vertical axis serves to further destabilize monochrome finality, adding uneven slivers of exposed canvas to outer edges of the rectangle to give resulting shape to what would otherwise have been merely accepted as a given, a field. These are complicatedly simple pictures.

The smaller paintings could equally be viewed, therefore, as models or as elaborations; as studies or as clarifications. Their titles intimate states of contrast in relationship to each other: “Assonance,” “Dissonance,” “Consonance,” “Resonance.” The dislodging of the bisected rectangle (now on both axes) and the misregistration of its segments is more explicit — perhaps, indeed, axiomatic — than in the three big paintings. The coloring of different shapes, and more crucially the contrasts in tone of shapes of the same color caught in axial division, offer clues about what lies beneath that tarmac-like top coat in the “black” trio, or what could result from the evisceration of that surface. Tight busyness results, paradoxically, in greater legibility, although that can be questioned if what the viewer ends up reading was unintentional. In Consonance II, for instance, tapering shapes that could signify shading add the illusion of pictorial depth to an upside-down magnet shape; in Assonance, the fractionally dislocated curves assume a marching limb schematic (bringing to mind Don Voisine and the prints of Willard Boepple).

Ultimately, it is hard to say which body of work is richer. The smaller works are more traditional in their density and the larger ones more modernist in their singularity — they seem, respectively, to evoke avant-garde (pre-war) and institutional (post-war) phases in the history of abstraction. If so, it is the dynamic of the relationship of the two that makes this striking exhibition feel relevant in a moment where Provosty’s peers amongst younger abstract painters are too often driven towards the extremes of rhetorical neo-formalist statement and intentionally irresolvable open-endedness.

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Published this month, the catalogue for “oil painting and sun,” Suzan Frecon’s impressive recent exhibition at David Zwirner, is a fine record of the exhibition and contains a thoughtful essay by David Cohen as well as short texts by the artist that reflect on her process as well as on specific sources of inspiration. During a public conversation held in the galleries toward the beginning of the exhibition, Frecon and Cohen discussed the difficult issue of interpretation through description of her abstract paintings. What follows below is my attempt to add to this by looking in detail at the paintings presented in the exhibition.

Of the eight paintings present, lapis ordering adjacent blues (2015) and dark red cathedral (tre) (2014) are the smallest, both 29 5/8 x 24 inches. The titles, color and scale of the paintings bring to mind Frecon’s longstanding interest in the history of European painting — including Quattrocento panel painting. The half halos, as form at least — here without specific divinity — radiate color. Frecon works on graph paper drawn to scale to establish compositions with colors in mind and then in some instances makes a small painting first. Take dark red cathedral and the much larger book of paint (2015), for example. The compositional similarities are clear; the colors chosen differ however, evincing the intuitive nature of the process. Throughout the exhibition, movement of the brush and bleeds of oil from one color to the next are far from hard-edge abstraction: each change at the boundaries or variation in opacity of the color crucially adjusts a painting’s reading. A painting from 2005, four directions, can be viewed, as the title suggests, in all the orientations available for the painting. Here the painting is horizontal (the only horizontal painting in the exhibition). Its soft geometry interlocks in a maze-like way. Rectangular elements turn and repeat — subtle shifts of scale occur. It is typical that the colors (reds, blues and a green) have weight, and yet resist stasis because of both the musical or architectural stepping of shape and visible brush work. They appear “ineluctably suspended,” to quote the artist, on describing a quality she looks for in painting.

The galleries are lit with natural light for as much of the day as possible, and in the largest one are four paintings — one on each of the four walls. All the paintings measure 108 x 87 3/4 inches and comprise two horizontal, equally sized oil-on-linen panels. In each of the paintings the horizontal line where one panel meets the other is also a point at which there is a change in color. The curved shapes, situated above and below, are horizontally truncated, asymmetrical and specific to the boundaries of the panels’ abutment, which are the external edge and interior passage. The measure and proportions of the paintings — using both the geometry of the Golden Mean and an intuitive searching of relationships within it — determine size of shape, the shapes’ proximity to edge, and color. The size of the paintings insists on an embodied viewing, making it possible for the works to visually enfold viewers standing directly in front of them. The experience is physical, perceptual and meditative; each painting, as it responds to changes of light, incorporates a constant transience as perhaps corollary to the permanent fluctuation of states of being.

DUST (2014), seen obliquely on approaching and entering the back gallery reflects light from areas painted using tube paint with added oil, and absorbs light in matte areas: the relationship of positive and negative space is enhanced. Consequently, light falling onto flat surfaces that have been divided into areas of two different reflective qualities. The passage of light across a given surface is always shifting in Frecon’s paintings, becoming a component part of the paintings’ aggregated meaning. The dark reds and oranges shift tonally, and modulate light as much as the shapes themselves, that recur from one painting to the next.

A horizontal, oblate and earth-colored shape touches three sides of the upper panel of terre verte (2014). In the lower half of the painting, two greens, one lighter than the other, stretch from side to side at its upper edge; a slow curve echoes and inverts the oblate shape above. Its lower edge, a horizontal that, while forming a rectangle beneath, also appears to darken this zone along the base of the painting — like a sky before heavy rain. The idea of color is a key starting point for Frecon, so this change of color range, when compared with the warm hues of DUST, makes the impact of chroma on surface and shape emphatic. Within the relatively simple vocabulary, a variation in weight, complexity and illumination occurs that generates vivid differences. Taken together, Frecon’s work materializes the ideas that generate it — ideas about color, surface, shape and scale — the desire is for painting itself to make a self-referential, visual narrative, that is evocative of, rather than representative of, experience in the world.

In Cohen’s essay, the subject of words in relation to image is dealt with subtly and with regard to the paintings included here, while acknowledging the necessary difficulty encountered in communicating experiential and intellectual responses to some works of art. The role of light and its integral importance to Frecon’s painting is also expansively and insightfully described. Altogether this is a publication well worth waiting for and will contribute to the understanding of Frecon’s work, while marking the achievement of this exhibition.

Cohen, David and Suzan Frecon. Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015). ISBN-13: 9781941701096, 91 pages, $55

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February 13 to March 23, 2013
525 West 19th Street , between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Being in Suzan Frecon’s show at David Zwirner is a bit like entering a conversation unnoticed.  Her small watercolors and painted panels, each holding their own on the wall, banter with confidence.  While they don’t exactly clamor for attention, their loose shapes and lush colors are gently alluring.

The show exudes a variety of sensations: somber and lighthearted, depressed and playful.  Overall, however, bright pops of yellow, blue, and the occasional green keep the muted browns and burnt reds from overwhelming.  With shapes that are neither quite organic or geometric Frecon achieves resoundingly strong composition. red blue blue (2012), for instance, a two-toned, horizontal watercolor, fills its old Indian paper support with ink, conflating common formal binaries such as  background/foreground, positive/negative space, or representation/abstraction.  The orientation and earthy colors suggest a landscape, but the paint application doesn’t contain enough detail to confirm that impression.  For Frecon this is deeply important as she has spoken of her striving to eliminate associations from her imagery—in much the way as the Minimalists did, except in her case the results are not sterile.  I would argue that Frecon has much more emotional breadth than, say, Donald Judd or Dan Flavin, on view at David Zwirner’s new 20th street space.

Compositions like horizontally extended orange (patched) (2011) are unhindered by the paper: the small scale does not negate expansiveness.  Others, however, especially those where colored shapes do not reach the paper’s edge, can seem restrictive.  In any event, thanks to Frecon’s use of old handmade Japanese, Chinese, and Indian papers, no watercolor is overly pristine.  The edges are not quite straight; there are dings and small holes; some are cockled even.  But her paper invariably has a soft, wise character in tune with the spiritual quality of her imagery.

Seemingly loose contours obscure a highly deliberative process. painting plan drawing for a large painting (2004) reveals a premeditated approach to every stage in the evolution of a painting.  A light pencil grid orients the delicate balance of straight and curved lines.  Frecon seems to approach the paper like a canvas.  Instead of allowing the ink to bleed with unpredictable fluidity, she chooses a shape and paints evenly and flat.  Occasionally the ink pools or the paper resists, but otherwise there is no gesture, gradation, or depth.

Frecon tirelessly pursues her restricted lexicon of shapes and strategies.  Within such constraints it is difficult to resist ranking panels over works on paper of similar composition—but this is an unfair bias.  In both formats, Frecon uses a sparse palette of reds and oranges that showcases her nuanced understanding of color.  But on closer examination, a panel like version o, dark to light (2008) actually predates a few wrongly assumed “studies”.

Whether they let you into their conversation or not, you feel contented in the company of Frecon’s paintings. Their purposeful tensions aren’t heavy handed or solemn.  They are peaceful and soothing, even optimistic, as they echo and mingle with one another.

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Greg Lindquist, Barbara MacAdam, and John Perreault joined David Cohen to discuss Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner, Liz Cohen at Salon 94 Bowery, Oliver Herring at Meulensteen, and Guillermo Kuitca at Sperone Westwater.

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Abstract painter Suzan Frecon seems out of register with the tenor of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 75th Biennial: a pair of her exquisitely crafted, subtly allusive canvases in homeground pigment quiver with quiet sensuality. The sumptuous reds in the diptych (above) “embodiment of red (soforouge),” 2009, offer a hot sweet to the pinched sour that otherwise pervades this painting-light, video-heavy sadsack survey of the contemporary spirit. And yet, the understatement and austerity in Frecon rhyme with other exhibits: the pulsating, saturated red, for instance, with fellow veteran Robert Grosvenor’s fiberglass and flocking arched structure, or the playful shifts of perspective with postmodern prankster Tanya Auerbach’s trompe l’oeil effects hanging in the same gallery. Frecon’s curves within rectangles evoke references as remote as the rising sun, Moorish domes, Gothic arches, scimitars. An artist of hovering forms and studied poise, perhaps her essays in suspension are offered by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari as a formal counterweight to the melancholy solipsism of many of their video choices.

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JAMES SIENA
PaceWildenstein until January 28, 2006 (534 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 929 7000)

BARBARA TAKENAGA
McKenzie Fine Art through December 17 (511 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 5467)

SUZAN FRECON
Peter Blum through January 14, 2006 (99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring, 212 343 0441)

James Siena is like a one-man lost civilization. An odd mix of diversity and unity, his work is uniquely his own, yet charged with a suprapersonal force more familiar from enthnographic artefacts.  His first exhibition at his new gallery, PaceWildenstein, offers a dozen new paintings and two dozen drawings that extend a pictorial language he has made familiar in the last fifteen years of complex lattices, at once tight and wayward, and repeating patterns of mesh, of herring bone, or of bento box-like structures of rectangles within rectangles, Russian-doll like in their endless succession. His use of sign-painter’s enamel on metal lends his compelling, enigmatic works surfaces of cool succulence, glowing but distant.

There are numerous shades of other artists and cultures—this viewer is reminded, on the collective side, of African textiles, Maori tatoos and Tantric art and such individuals as Gustav Klimt (his decorative backgrounds), Joaquin Torres Garcia, and the obsessive outsider artist Friedensreich Huntertwasser.  Rather than coming across as referential, Mr. Siena seems something of an outsider himself, plumbing his own depths to arrive at an authentic, primordial intensity.

He couldn’t be less of an outsider, as it happens: a Cornell graduate, a star of the last Whitney Biennnial, and an acknowledged leader of his generation, he’s as clued in as any artworld insider.  But his abstract language has a remarkable freedom from either the old fashioned modernist fusion of disparate primitive and prehistoric influences into a generalized soup of Ur-forms, or a postmodernist deliberate cacophany of styles.  Instead his weirdly exquisite, compulsively detailed, fanatically methodical designs seem disarmingly practical, charged with the kind of energy you might get in a precolumbian proto-computer, or cosmologies from a vanished religion.

This purposiveness is hard won, for Mr. Siena works within stringent rules. Homo ludens—the man who plays—his drawings are elaborations of what he himself describes as visual algorithms.  Each work has its own predetermined set of procedures in relation to which the results both adhere and deviate, as a title like “Coffered Divided Sagging Grid (with glitch)” reveals.  Despite his art having great warmth, charm and empathy, Mr. Siena is, par excellence, a conceptual artist, as he is interested in seeing what happens if you submit your art to the realization of a preconceived idea.

Some pictures, like put me in mind of Mr. Close’s almost occult portrayal of a Svengali-like Lucas Samaras.

The nutty, trippy, transcendentally labor intensive aspect of Mr. Siena’s work places him in the company of a broad spectrum of contemporary artists whose art taps a finely wrought psychedia. Peers in this realm would certainly include Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli. The Whitney Museum’s recent “Remote Viewing” exhibition of painters of invented worlds, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of art that explores the narcotic, “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” point to a spaced-out strand in the zeitgeist.

Barbara Takenaga is a priestess in this cult.  She creates sumptuous decorations of mind boggling complexity that fill you with a sense of awe not just because of the exhilerating cosmos they depict but because of a sense of the heightened consciousness required for such creation. Once the eye adjusts to a sense of gaudy overload, and overcomes the prejudice of feeling you might have seen such imagery on the cover of a molecular chemistry textbook, it becomes clear that she is an image crafter of formidable power.

Each of the fourteen paintings on display, which range from 12 by 10 inches to 70 x 60, a significant jump in size for this artist, must have required staggering feats of patience and mental organization.  “Rubazu” and “Corona #2 (Golden), both of 2005, are spirals packed with vibrant balls of radically disjunctive scale.  At the heart of each vortex are tiny little dots that such the eye into infinite space.

She favors a much tighter, neater delivery than we get in Mr. Siena, with a bright, dense all-overness and dazzling synthetic color.  As a result, we don’t get the sense, as we do in Mr. Siena, of a hand leading directly to mental presence.  But for an art that seems at first to be all about special effects there is a surprising amount of surface pleasure to be had in Ms. Takenaga.  This comes out especially in a play of solid against acqueous paint, which corresponds with a theme of flatness versus depth, as in “Gold + Red” 2005, where the orbs, distributed in an almost Paisley-like spiral, each have a sense of being a contained world, filled with wobbly light.

While Ms. Takenaga complements Mr. Siena’s near-psychotic obsessiveness, his timeless, archaic quality resonates with another remarkable exhibition opening today, also a debut with a new gallery, Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum. She has half a dozen large paintings, three of them in fact diptychs of horizonal canvases stacked to nine foot high by 87-3/8 inches.

Her art can be described, in a contradiction that also recalls Mr. Siena, as hand-made hard edge: Patiently crafted, unegotistical, lovingly carved-out forms whose sense of the definitive feels personally won rather than merely given.

A consumate colorist, Ms. Frecon concocts her own mixtures of oil and pigment, favoring subtly discrepant tones rather than contrastive hues.  “composition with red earth and red earth,” 2005, uses the stacked canvses to posit one tone of terracotta against another, the top slightly more paprika, the bottom chocolate.

While some of the forms are strictly rectangular, a favorite motif is a curved shape of vaguely Islamic reference, somewhere between a turban and a dome, depending whether you read them in positive or negative against their ground.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 17, 2005

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Frank Stella: Recent Work, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue, through June 28, 212-563-4474

Suzan Frecon Paintings, Lawrence Markey Gallery, 42 East 76th Street, through June 14, 212.517.9892

What happens to proto-minimalists when their creativity outspans their spawn’s? Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, veterans of the extreme reductivism of the 1960s, inserted themselves into 101 Art History on the page just before Minimalism. But they managed to outlive – and arguably outgrow – such key minimalists as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. They were both pioneers of the shaped canvas: monochrome in Mr. Kelly’s case, pinstriped in Mr. Stella’s.

Mr. Kelly’s work fills three separate spaces of the Matthew Marks Gallery, with paintings ranging from 1999 to this year and self-portrait drawings from 1944-92. The experience of seeing eight of the shaped and multi-paneled canvases in a grand industrial space is disconcertingly scaleless. One can stand at a similar proportional distance to these large works as a reader does to pictures in a book, and it is in the nature of Mr. Kelly’s depersonalized aesthetic that his monochrome shapes assume the emblematic quality of graphic design. For instance, “Red with White Relief” (2002), a near rectangle of red with a white triangle superimposed at the cut-away top left, reads like a shirt launderer’s logo. Other works, however, are richly satisfying in their subtle perceptual complexity. Not the prim rectangles of clinical color, so much as the more sumptuously colored trapezoids and curved forms. These free-float on the wall and in the imagination alike.

It is not unprecedented for Mr. Kelly or his curators to present works based on direct observation in relation to his severe geometric abstractions. The 1996 Guggenheim retrospective offered discrete rooms of his photographs, linear drawings of flora, and collages. At a banal level, these ameliorate the severity of his abstraction. In the case of the current exhibitions, however, the heightened shape-awareness induced by Mr. Kelly’s best paintings carries across to what would otherwise appear conventional, if accomplished, self-portraits. Harry Cooper deftly argues for such a reading of these self-images in the handsomely produced catalog.

There is an extraordinary range of styles in these drawings- including tight, illustrative realism, modern classicism, and hints of the modernism of Klee, Matisse, and Picasso. One from 1949 recalls the clipped angst of Lucian Freud, who was actually in Paris at the same time. Despite varieties of line-quality, from bold Chinese brushwork to spindly penmanship, and subtle fluctuations of emotion, from boyish aloofness to a suitable nervousness – in 1987, while strapped up at the Mayo Clinic – there is unmistakable unity of purpose and personality in this remarkable body of drawings.

***

If Mr. Kelly anticipated Minimalism, Mr. Stella precipitated it. Where Mr. Kelly strove for the cool impersonality of Byzantine icons, Mr. Stella could coldly assert, “What you see is what you see.” It is not so surprising, therefore, that while Mr. Kelly’s career has glided along its serene path, Mr. Stella’s has been marked by violent oscillations and seeming contradictions. Formally speaking, the smart-assed cerebrality of the early, black-stripe paintings are a far cry from the histrionic graffiti-baroque reliefs of the 1980s and 1990s. But the differing styles connect at the level of provocation..

The new sculptures on view at Paul Kasmin are, by the standards of their immediate predecessors at the same gallery in winter 2001, relatively couth. The aluminum tubes, pipes, and trusses out of which they are made are uncolored – mercifully, as Mr. Stella is a consumate vulgarian in color. One piece from 1998-02, “Die Kurfurstin (The Electoress),” is from his von Kleist series and relates to the joyous extravaganza unveiled at the National Gallery in Washington in 2001. It uses a white fiberglass material to magical spiraling effect, recalling the Russian Constructivists as well as the roofs of various Guggenheims.

In similar playful mood, “Bamboo Trophy I” (2002), evokes the crown on the Statue of Liberty. But while whimsy, exuberance, and invention are in bountiful supply in these generally likeable works, it’s impossible to get too much sculptural purchase on them. In the absence of convincing structure and form relationship, his disposition of effects is ultimately gratuitous. The artist’s claim that his 3-D works are paintings not sculptures smacks of special pleading on behalf of scatter. Overload proves a poor surrogate for complexity.

***

Suzan Frecon brings an intimist sensibility to the genre of hard-edge abstraction. A show of new work, which closes this weekend, offers a painterly antidote to the brutal elegance of Ellsworth Kelly. Even in pared down, minimal compositions, her touch is soft, subtle, and alive. In much the way that Mr. Kelly’s austere abstraction is somehow humanized by his drawings and photographs, appreciation of Ms. Frecon’s is augmented by her watercolors. They are not on view at Lawrence Markey this time, but their quirky deliberated handwriting and vaguely primitive, non-western shape vocabulary find equivalents in theinvested surfaces of her oil paintings and their subtle orientalism. (There are intimations of the turban, the scimitar, and Moorish archways among her new motifs.) Palette has a lot to do with Ms. Frecon’s tenderness: She abstains from the primaries or cool, clinical colors to explore wine reds and terra cottas and pulsating greens. Her painterly touch strikes a gorgeous balance between restraint and sensuality.

This article first appeared in The Sun, June 12, 2003

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