April 2 – May 8, 2015
528 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

A work of art being so much more than its physical makeup, you can’t classify an artist simply by her knack for manipulating materials. And yet, when paired with a nimble poetic sensibility and a fervent desire to plumb the farthest corners of human experience, aptitude can occasionally ascend to genius. Such is the case of artist and poet Etel Adnan, who at the august age of 90 is finally getting the attention she deserves. The show of her work now on view at Galerie Lelong — a tidy selection of paintings, pastels, tapestries, makimono (Japanese folding books), and a single film — speaks to two things: Adnan’s endless fascination with “the miracle of matter itself,”[1] and her unshakeable belief that there is much more to this world than matter, accompanied by a passionate impulse to explore what lives both within and beyond it. Adnan’s art is a love song to the Universe, and it is our great fortune to have been invited here to bear witness.

Adnan’s semi-abstract compositions are compact, often no larger than 13 x 16 inches, presenting patchwork vistas built up out of numerous teeming and opaque parts. They look not meticulously designed but more intuitively improvised, each distinguished by the brusque yet sensitive juxtaposition of thick bands of color. The paintings in particular are very worldly, yet the planet they evoke is not one riddled with toil and grit (as depicted in Adnan’s literary works such as The Arab Apocalypse and Sitt-Marie Rose) but rather a relaxed, clarified version as seen through the eyes of someone who has glimpsed the bigger picture: mountains, ravines, the skyline, the sea, all rendered in a controlled palette of piquant hues. In Untitled (2014), for example, uneven slabs of taxicab yellow, olive green, rich caramel, and tawny are tempered by a stout sliver of bright cornflower blue; the recipe is unusual and arresting. But the mood is, above all, self-possessed. The images elicit a solid, sturdy calm. They do not move, or when they do, it is by a slow surge of coarse abutting forms or sharp diagonals, careful collisions propelled by broad, textural strokes. Like tectonic plates that shift mere inches over thousands of years, peaks growing slowly skyward.

The internal sense of gravity bestows urgency on these small surfaces and turns them into something other, and more tangibly compelling, than mere decorative objects. Adnan applies her paints with a palette knife, and always on a table or flat surface rather than an easel. As a result her images look putty-ish, almost edible, nourishing even, and somehow more substantial than your average spread. Untitled (1989), the oldest painting included in the show, is especially ripe. Where mossy green pushes up against creamy citron yellow, the two colors are rendered more distinct, yet also manage to merge into a dynamic structure that encompasses the whole. Sky blue, crackled black, tan, Kelly green, and a smear of dusty lilac are at once offset and unified by two dashes of raspberry red, an indiscriminate equal sign. The three pastels (all 1970), conversely, are confections scribbled on paper, their many squarish harlequin morsels coming together with “the suddenness of an island in one’s life.”[2] The total image is lovely, but forceful and fluid in the way a single, soft line is, not unlike the inky trails that delineate the unfurled makimono.

The Universe keeps creeping in, mainly in the color combinations, which are pleasantly disarming and never compromise. The tapestries seem to bustle and buzz with pulsating tones of lime green, blood red, and ochre, while the paintings are more poised and minimal: two milky tones of blue cut with hillocks of tender peach and elephant gray. Adnan’s whites are never flat, but dimensional, tinged with the slightest hint of puce or beige. She is a smart, conceptual colorist. Her sense of art, the seemingly impossible act of reflecting the subjective self and the objective cosmos simultaneously, is moored in the future. She is always reaching forward, though not in a spirit of prophecy, but of hope. Her work may share certain aesthetic qualities with that of, say, Arthur Dove or Hans Hofmann, but it carries an attitude all its own. When describing her artistic process, Adnan once said: “What you do is make your composition. You trust your… shapes, your gestures. You trust that something beyond that will come through even if you don’t know exactly what.”[3] This is an artist who dares to push beyond the empirical, adjusting and challenging the maps we’ve made to navigate our selves, our world, and what we think we know about them. The experience, if somewhat troubling, is terrific.

[1] Adnan, Etel. Journey to Mount Tamalpais. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1986. 63.

[2] Adnan, Etel. Seasons. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2008. 30.

[3] Weaver, Kathleen. “The Non Worldly World: Conversation with Etel Adnan.” Poetry Flash, May 1986 (No. 158).

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January 10 through February 22, 2015
60 N 6th Street (between Wythe and Kent streets)
Brooklyn, 718 599 4884

In the event that it ever becomes possible to X-ray the human imagination, the results will presumably look a lot like Susan Bee’s “Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s.” The dozens of small, unframed works included in this exhibition feature hand-drawn squiggles, primal daubs, imperfect patterns, and bleached silhouettes of found materials that reach out of darkness like weeds or the dreamy remnants of a half-formed thought. All rendered within a dense yet fluid spectrum of surprisingly nuanced (if yellow-tinged) grayscale, the images could also just as easily be isolated stills from a tenderfoot animated film or snapshots beamed from some corner of the Universe where the earpiece of a rotary telephone or pair of scissors float amid other random bits of cosmic detritus. A number of pieces are also whimsically hand tinted, embellished by thin pastels and near-neon hues that scrape and bundle their way through an eerie not-quite black-and-white world. Overall, the collection is inquisitive and crisp, containing something of the prime quality W Somerset Maugham once ascribed to rum punch: it has “the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics.”

The works are presented in clusters of series, each marked by its own thematic and aesthetic parameters. One sequence, shown on the gallery’s north wall, is reminiscent of the gangling, angular microbes one might find under a microscope and the patchy cultures grown in a Petri dish; others, on the south wall, evoke Anna Atkins’s botanical impressions of plant life and the Impressionists’ proclivity for employing thick upward strokes to capture the bloom and sway of a vertiginous sweep of lawn. Untitled (ca. 1979) is especially energetic, its many blurred, fern-shaped cross-sections flushed with soft cerise, peony pink, rheumy chartreuse and cornflower blue. Another series, this one pinned to the east wall, is more formal and austere, containing only a few colorless overlapping triangles of various weights and sizes. Here, each photogram focuses intently on the interaction of forms and subtle shifts in tone, not unlike Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series. This attention to relationships between items anticipates the careful relationships Bee now establishes between figures in her current painting practice. One can see the connection, but also the distance travelled. Who knew that addressing how one triangle converses with another, or how two equilaterals act when forced to lean into each other and share a single space, could be so tender, or so telling?

Despite their many differences, these works all have one thing in common: they are, first and foremost, exploratory. Created during and after the time Bee was writing her graduate thesis on the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, many of the images feel like direct echoes of those she studied so intently, made using whatever objects she found lying around her studio. The process has the effect of making even the most mundane office supplies appear ghostly and phenomenal, giving everything from nuts and bolts to tape dispensers and unruly tangles of wire a second life, or perhaps only the shade of a life. Yet their mimicry is not a flaw, but rather the key to their distinction. These works designate one phase in the career of a deeply curious artist who makes in order to understand, producing works that feel kinesthetic and engage in a pedagogic dialogue with their source material. They are tests — then for the artist to make, and now for the viewer to observe. They are a game, an exercise, a puzzle that not only challenges you to ask, “What is that thing?” but then dares you to go ahead and fill in the blank.

In this critic’s opinion, the photogram is a dramatic but inherently limited medium, very much in the line of “you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all.” But here, the singular experience of viewing and time traveling with the artist slices right through the material’s potential shortcomings. These works are the unassuming glimpses of a younger, more uncertain self, the apt pupil who holds the camera and looks right past us and into the future in Untitled (1977). We don’t know what she sees, but perhaps we can begin to imagine.

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