November 3 to December 22, 2017
195 Chrystie Street, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, vandorenwaxter.com

Although Brian Rochefort was born in Rhode Island (1985) and studied ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design, his ceramic sculptures relate strongly to a West Coast tradition—and he now indeed lives and works in Los Angeles. That tradition includes Peter Voulkos, Ron Nagle and Ken Price, and the latter two would seem of particular importance to Rochefort, though Voulkos’ explorations into the deconstruction of functional ceramic objects certainly has bearings as well. Nagle and Price conjure extraordinary surfaces, colors and shapes, broaching both the animate and inanimate in unexpected inventive form, in ways that particularly resonate with Rochefort.

Of the 17 ceramic works presented here, 12 are referred to by Rochefort as “craters” and placed on three white pedestals. The remaining pieces are wall based “relief paintings” (again, according to the artist) and incorporate their painted frames through color relationships: think Bram Bogart’s physically present forms and Jules Olitski’s vaporous sprayed transparencies. The particularly vivid use of color and intricate complexities of organic surface and structure obvious in all these works appear distinctly other within an urban environment—however garish and battered they become. An impression of otherness is, indeed, confirmed on discovering that their inspiration has been gleaned from such unspoiled physical phenomena as volcanic ranges, tropical rainforests, barrier reefs and attendant flora and fauna, experienced by Rochefort on travels in Central and South America and Africa.

The process used to arrive at particular colors and forms is intuitive—clearly, Rochefort is responsive to results at each stage along the way to a completed piece. These include breaking up an initial vessel shaped object of unfired clay, dipping the parts into a mixture of clay and mud, and leaving them to dry and crack. Glazes are then added using methods more or less familiar to ceramic production—drips and splashes, airbrushed gradients of color and pools of melted glass. The firing of each piece is repeated after another new layer of glaze is added.

Jozani (2017), at 18 inches high, is typical of the irregularly conical “craters,” and consists of stoneware, earthenware, glaze and glass. A cluster of material around the top edge—circling the interior space—recalls volcanic activity or naturally transfiguring substances: reacting to each other, bubbling, breaking, separating irregularly, clotting, repulsing. This is not just associative of volcanos, it is what actually happened to the materials during the cumulative process of its making. The surface is cracked, both smooth and rough, matt and glistening. Loose patterns appear like pelts, or rocks in laver flows. The colors are warm—turmeric, terracotta, sand, yellow ocher, pale lemon, violet and white. Jozani is the name of a Tanzanian village. SETI (2017) is composed of the same materials but in different quantities and combinations, and with a different color range of blue, blue green, pink, yellow, brown, and white. This time, marine life comes to mind, coral reefs, the cosmos, and meteorites. Again, color, material and process each contribute to the visual pleasure, haptic delight and imaginative connection of the piece. The title references the organization committed to a search for extraterrestrial forms of life.

The wall-based “relief paintings” engage visually with the possibilities of painting and its presentation or, less obviously, an architectural setting such as a parvis. Relief Painting #4 (2017) is a slab of roughly textured ceramic gouged and modeled, colored dark yellow and placed within a frame. Turquoise in the base and internal sides and pale yellow in the facing edge generates continuity and play between the piece and its frame, rather than using the frame as a neutral device within which to isolate the work. The textured surface catches light in such a way as to make two tones. It looks encrusted or weathered, though this is not due to physical process this time, but is just a matter of appearance. Altogether, with both the “craters” and “relief paintings,” Rochefort has contributed to the expanded field of ceramic sculpture and painting, currently such a vital tendency in contemporary art.

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February 22 to April 28, 2017
23 East 73rd Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, vandorenwaxter.com

Harvey Quaytman (1937-2002) came of age as a painter when abstract painting was beleaguered. The Pop Artists wanted to depict figurative subjects; the minimalists, to work in three dimensions; and the conceptual artists, to abolish the physical art work entirely. In looking rather to traditions of geometric abstraction, Quaytman employed another starting point, one that had been explored by Mondrian and his many followers and, more recently, by such diverse American figures as Ellsworth Kelly, Peter Halley and Kenneth Noland; and, of course, by Carmen Herrera, who recently had a show at the Whitney. Hard-edge abstraction can be very varied. Some of them project utopian models, but they can also model architecture—as in Kelly’s early paintings or social structures, as Halley claims of his art. Quaytman’s paintings were highly distinctive. There wasn’t any political agenda attached to them. Nor were they accompanied by any theorizing—he didn’t write about his painting. And so the critic who wants to place his work in art’s history must look and speculate. In the 1980s when I met him, I got to know a great many abstract painters. Harvey was the happiest artist I had the pleasure of meeting. I think, even if you never met him, you can see that happiness in these paintings— which are consistently exhilarating and visually buoyant. And in our art world, that is a great achievement.

Alternate histories can be revealing. What if Hitler had been assassinated in 1933, if the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor, or if, as Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union proposes, Israel had not survived, leaving many Jews to take refuge in Alaska? A comparable art historical might-have-been concerns the fate of the Russian avant-garde. If the pioneering abstractionists in the USSR had been allowed to develop, our history would be inconceivably different. Malevich’s Suprematism (Blue Triangle and Black Rectangle) (1915) looks disconcertingly similar to Frank Stella’s physically larger abstract works from the late 1960s. And Vladimir Tatlin’s Counter Relief (1914-15) could have been shown seventy years later in a New York gallery devoted to contemporary sculpture. If abstraction had developed early in the twentieth century, then avant-garde art would legitimately be associated with communist politics. But as it is, Abstract Expressionism was the art of the victors. A passionate belief in the compelling power of personal expression made this art possible. Only a culture with enormous self-confidence could create such art. And so then in the next generation, Quaytman could take up the tradition of geometric abstraction, in a self-confident, but less arrogantly assertive manner.

The nine works in this show, which were made between 1983 and 1990, are very varied. One, Union Square, Tantra (1982-83) is a shaped canvas, with irregular top and bottom blue shaped edges, framing a small black-and-orange plaid in the center. Some of them, Jacob’s Coat (1984); Vital Attractions (1990); and also Marienburg (1985), the strongest work in the exhibition, are built around cruciforms. And Hone (1988) is a blue-black and white trapezoid, pressing towards to the left edge. Quaytman’s basic compositional motif involves recognizable deviations from bilateral symmetry. Thus in Untitled (1983) he in effect twists the left bottom corner of an otherwise symmetrical black frame on gray background; in Jacob’s Coat (1984) behind the symmetrical black cruciform are narrow verticals left of center and on the far right edge. And in Vital Attractions (1990) behind the centered blue cruciform is a blue square displaced left of center. The effect of these departures from symmetry is to give energy to the compositions. Genius, so Immanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of the power of Judgment (1790), is “a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given.” To judge art, he explains, requires adducing rules, which cannot be identified in advance “from the product.” And he then adds: “How this is possible is difficult to explain.” This statement perhaps helps suggest why Quaytman’s art is difficult to explain. Some abstract painters of Quaytman’s generation worked in series. And many of his contemporary peers adopted frankly repetitive modes of composition. Refusing to settle down in these ways, he showed that the resources of geometric abstraction are surprisingly rich. Certainly the effect of this group of pictures is visually self-evident—they convey immediate visual pleasure.

The post Hard-Edge Happiness: The Paintings of Harvey Quaytman appeared first on artcritical.

November 7 to December 21, 2012
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City, 212.445.0444

Critics sometimes like to imagine they are entering the picture space of paintings under view. In a justly famous extended passage in The Salon of 1767, for instance, Denis Diderot describes wandering within some landscape scenes by Claude-Joseph Vernet. And in his critique of Clement Greenberg’s formalism, Leo Steinberg asserted: “In an age of space travel a pictorial semblance of open void is just as inviting to imaginary penetration as the pictorial semblance of a receding landscape was formerly to a man on foot.” Normally, of course when viewing a work of art, you stand some  distance in front of that object. But if paintings are used to construct a maze, then you can walk surrounded on all sides by art.  Galerie Lelong Chelsea’s exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables earlier this year allowed viewers to go through a maze at the far end of the gallery which was composed from panels of solid colors—green, blue, yellow, and orange. At the end, you were rewarded with a cup of orange juice. Oiticica intended that Penetrables be a movable penetrable fresco. Shields’ Maze creates a very different effect.

The Greenberg Van Doren Gallery has a relatively large unobstructed display room. And so, filling a large part of it with Maze (1981-82), filled with decorative circles, triangles and rectangles composed of areas of pure color, and some intricate geometric patterns changed completely the way that you experienced that space. Twisting and turning, walking on narrow pathways between paintings hung on frail-looking wood frames using webs of cotton belting, you finally emerged on the far side from the entrance.  The pathway is narrow enough that you need to turn sideways. When you enter, you don’t know exactly where the path will lead. Were someone to enter from the other side, you then would have to back out. At some points, you can see outside, but often when you are within Maze you find yourself immersed in a forest of paintings.

Taught to sew by his mother and sisters, Shields (1944- 2005), became famous in the early 1970s for employing the motifs of 1960s color field paintings in colorful decorative hangings.  He compared Maze to a stage set: “you’ve got walls, corridors, intersections, changes of direction, all directed by a type of architecture within architecture.” The opening for this show featured a performance choreographed by Stephen Petronio “Into The Maze,” set to a piece of music composed by Tom Laurie, which was inspired by a short melody written by Shields. But even without attending, a gallery visitor could understand the power of Maze (1981-82) to inspire these performers. Entering a maze is an essentially regressive experience. Abandoning your normally purposeful walk, you surrender yourself to following the spatial order created by the artist. Color field paintings become walls of a maze – what an unlikely, but aesthetically satisfying fate for an art form that aspired to dematerialize the work of art.

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John McLaughlin: Hard Edge Classicist
Paintings from the 1950s to the 1970s
January 7 – February 13, 2010
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City 212 445 0444

Laddie John Dill: Contained Radiance
January 15 – February 20, 2010
Nyehaus
358 West 20th Street (East of 9th Ave.)
New York City, 212 995 1785

Ronald Davis: Monochrome Paintings From The 1960s
Franklin Parrasch Gallery
January 6 – February 20, 2010
20 West 57th Street
New York City, 212 246 5360

“Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970” at David Zwirner Gallery, curated by Tim Nye and Kristine Bell,  is a must see for anyone who wants to appreciate the creative energy that boiled over in the mid-to late 1960s in Los Angeles.  While seven of the ten artists in this show have had one person shows in New York within the past few years, it isn’t until you see these artists together that you can appreciate the multiple ways in which they shared an L.A. aesthetic at the same time as maintaining easily recognizable individual styles.
Several artists in this show reflect the Light and Space Movement (Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and Laddie Dill) while others represent the Finish Fetish Group (Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine).  However, the boundaries are permeable:   Alexander, whose tall wedges disappear at the top and Bell, whose cubes are both solid and transparent, belong in both groups.

The Light and Space artists make us question the reliability of what we see.  The Irwin room has three works that are best seen in midday light.  Some visitors experience the room as empty when they first enter it.  The large slightly convex almost square dot painting by Robert Irwin (Untitled, 1963-65) is like a fuzzy Josef Albers painting observed from behind a scrim.  This is a slow work where patience is rewarded.  You begin to see a series of soft-edged nested squares that hover on the surface.   Directly opposite it is Irwin’s white formed acrylic plastic convex disc  (Untitled, 1969).  A black horizontal line in the center of the diameter first captures your attention.  After that, the disc became visible and then its sides and bottom edge slowly disappear into the wall surrounding it.  There is visual magic and ascetic beauty here: virtually everyone seeing this work walks up to the wall to look at its acrylic lacquered surface and what lies behind it.

A few steps away in a perfectly proportioned, dimly lit, sterile, white room with white painted floors is Doug Wheeler’s Untitled (1969).  This soft-edged acrylic and wood square box, the same color as the walls, has a perimeter of fuzzy white neon light that provides an experience of a transcendental floating rectangle. In two totally darkened rooms, Turrell’s mastery of light goes one step further.  Projections of light read as solid forms.  Juke Green (1969) appears to be a green cube that is leaning against the back corner of one room.  Gard Red (1969) reads as a solid pyramid that has been chiseled out of one corner wall in the other room.  Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell expand our perception by forcing us to use our eyes, our bodies and our minds to disambiguate what we’re seeing.

A dimly lit room on the way to the Finish Fetish works contains a mesmerizing floor installation by Laddie John Dill, an artist whose in-between location is a bridge between the two L.A. groups.  Untitled (1969) consists of graceful mounds of brown and tan sand that are sliced through at an angle by large squares of glass revealing marble-cake sand patterns.  Smaller pieces of square glass are placed horizontally to the viewer above a row of green argon with mercury lights that are hidden below the sand.  The lights can only be seen in the reflections at the top and fronts of the glass, creating an otherworldly landscape.

The last two rooms of the show are devoted to artists captivated by new industrial materials available to them largely from the aerospace industry.  It is widely acknowledged that these artists were inspired by the glossy finishes used on the fast cars, sleek motorcycles, exquisite aerodynamic surf boards, and alluring billboards around them.  When Walter Brooke advises Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967), “I want to say one word to you… Plastics”, his advice had already been heeded in L.A.  Plastics of all types opened up new options in the realms of color, shape, translucency and size.  But, less well known is that some of these artists (for example, Alexander, Valentine, and Dill) also turned to nature for their inspiration. They tried to capture the transient beauty of sea, sky and sand, a beauty that extended to smog besotted colors.  As a result, some of their works transgressed the boundaries between Light and Space and Finish Fetish.  In this connection, Peter Alexander’s work is particularly interesting because he creates immaculate objects that also have the perceptual concerns associated with the Light and Space artists.  However, when his works merged into their surroundings, he was less concerned with formal considerations than with capturing the transiency of the L.A.. sea and sky.  Two cast polyester resin pedestal pieces, Untitled (Window, 1968) and Green Wedge,(1969) and a tall floor piece (Blue Wedge, 1970) virtually disappear at the top as they become thinner and fade from dark pigment to no pigment.  De Wain Valentine, the acknowledged alchemist of the group, also made resin pieces (some of them vast and weighing several tons) during this period.  In this exhibition, he is represented by Triple Disk Red Metal Flake—Black Edge (1966), a sensuous molded fiberglass reinforced acrylic piece with the speckled iridescent finish of a car, motorcycle, or boat.  In fact, its gracefully rounded forms can allude to a series of breasts or the bows of three oncoming ships.

Helen Pashgian’s two small polyester and resin sculptures (both Untitled, 1968-69) have a complexity that belies their size.  One, a murky crystal-ball shaped work reveals two cylindrical forms that cut through the piece.  The other, a clear igloo-shaped work has two mirror-image half-spheres embedded at the top and near the bottom.  Larry Bell’s cubes are magical.  Placed in the center of the room, several of them reflect the works and the people that surround them.  Others can also be seen as allusionistic, as vessels that capture the L.A. smog. Two are particularly arresting.  The first is a small vacuum coated glass and chromium plated brass cube (1966) that has both bronze and turquoise vertical edges depending on where you stand.  The second, Glass Box with Ellipses (1964), with oval mirrored areas allows you to see yourself and then look inside the piece and straight down for an illusion of infinite depth.  Craig Kauffman used Plexiglas to create sensuous vacuum formed molded reliefs of intense colors with varying degrees of translucency.  Spray-painted on the back, three of these acrylic and lacquer Untitled Wall Reliefs (1968) in seductive hues of green, orange, and blue were attached to the wall. Among the John McCracken pieces are two of his signature polyester and resin planks (Think Pink and Red Plank, both 1967) that combine seductive color and immaculate surface with minimalist rigor of form, while functioning both as paintings and sculpture.

It is important to note that while others in the Finish Fetish group showed in New York in the 1960s, McCracken and Bell were more often included in Minimalism surveys in New York and Los Angeles.   It is perhaps not accidental, given Donald Judd’s friendship with Bell and his trips to L.A. that Judd, in the middle 1960s, began designing boxes and stacks using seductively colored Plexiglas.  The result was works that easily could fit in with aspects of the Finish Fetish L.A. culture.  Indeed, in reviewing a Judd exhibition, Rosalind Krauss observed that Judd’s works were both beautiful and illusionistic, properties that sharply transgress Judd’s own writings regarding what properties “specific objects” should have.  Even more telling, Robert Smithson’s labeling of “uncanny materiality” to aspects of Judd’s oeuvre could easily be applied as a general description of the Primary Atmospheres exhibition.  Indeed, perhaps the increasing use of plastics in New York eventually eroded some of the phenotypic differences between East and West Coast Minimalism, creating what James Meyer in his scholarly essay in “A Minimal Future?” (2004) referred to as a “Bicoastal Minimalism”.

It is indeed fortunate that concurrent with the Primary Atmospheres exhibition, there are three other Southern California artists exhibiting who relate either directly or indirectly to the David Zwirner show.  In particular, the exhibition of John McLaughlin’s work at Greenberg Van Doren is highly informative regarding the evolution of the L.A.  minimalist aesthetic.  His hard-edge reductive paintings created a climate for L.A. Minimalism.  McLaughlin progressively reduced his paintings to allow geometry and color to move from figure to ground, as line increasingly became a vehicle to explore space as pure form.  One could argue that the de-materialization of McLaughlin’s painting from its constructivist roots in geometry of varied forms and color—his “Finish Fetish” phase, exemplified by Untitled, (1952) – leads to his “Light and Space” phase in the 1960s and early 1970s (#8, 1963).  These largely black and white paintings synthesize Western Modernism and Eastern Philosophy.  They resonate with the attempt by Irwin, Turrell, and Wheeler to make the boundaries of their images merge with their surroundings.  In each case, the simplicity, clarity and self-discipline of the void creates a phenomenological experience that allows the observer, in McLaughlin’s terms, to learn more about himself than the artist.

The other two L.A. exhibits deserving of attention are Laddie John Dill at Nyehaus and Ron Davis at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery.  In Dill’s exhibition, we can observe the evolution from his horizontal and vertical pure “light sentences” affixed to the wall to his glass, sand, and light floor installations similar to the one at David Zwirner Gallery.   Light Sentence (1973) was inspired by the changing daylight during an average day in Taos, New Mexico.   While his light and sand works parallel Sonnier’s light pieces and Smithson’s dirt, gravel, mirror, and glass installations, his light sentences anticipate the fluorescent light pieces of Spencer Finch who sets about simulating the light at a specific time and place. The most dramatic piece in the Nyehaus show isDeath in Venice (1969), a large floor piece on the second floor of the gallery that calls to mind the canyon fires Dill experienced in the California landscape.  The red, yellow and blue neon and argon tubes lying on and under the sand create an aura of smoldering heat.

Ron Davis’s monochromatic pastel-colored, shaped canvases have never been exhibited in New York.  Of particular note are two works—the beautiful and majestic Big Orchid (1965), an angular pink painting in two sections and Bent Corner Slab (1965) a diamond-shaped green gold painting that is highly illusionistic with apparent folds in the canvas somewhat like Dorothea Rockburne’s work of the early 1970s.  These “in-between” works are the beginning of Davis’ move from painter to object maker.  Specifically, they anticipate his large geometrically shaped floor pieces (the Dodecagon Series) that use Finish Fetish materials of resin and fiberglass along with new technologies to trap the splatters and abstract forms of his expressionist brush strokes while maintaining the clarity of his high key colors.

These four exhibitions provide a nuanced view of Californian Minimalism that includes some of the most perceptually challenging, technically innovative, and downright beautiful works of the last fifty years.  We still have much to learn about California’s cool recasting of New York’s cold Minimalism, but these shows provide a good place to start.

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February 8, 2008 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr joined David Cohen to review Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, Katy Grannan at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 Freemans, Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy, William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Chris Martin at Michell-Innes & Nash.

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Katy Grannan: Another woman who died in her sleep
Greenberg Van Doren until February 16
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-445-0444

Lina Bertucci: Women in the Tattoo Subculture
Perry Rubinstein until January 5
534 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-627-8000

There is a pervasive ambivalence in Katy Grannan’s portraits: the gaze that returns the viewer’s is a mix of coyness and exhibitionism. The images themselves oscillate between similar extremes, building a visceral sense of the present through precision while succumbing to a remoteness that results from theatricality.

She has two shows up in New York right now, which together with a show at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery constitute a body of work she calls “The Westerns.” This East Coast-born and -educated artist moved to the Bay Area in 2005: a unifying theme of “The Westerns” is the particularity of Californian light, which, in her hands, is intense and dispassionate.

Her Salon 94 presentation features a pair of middle-aged transsexuals, Gail and Dale, while Greenberg Van Doren presents a single protagonist — a younger, woman named Nicole, photographed in gutsy, flamboyant poses over an extended period of time.

Ms. Grannan finds her sitters through ads in local papers, and clearly seeks out people who are itching to share what they imagine others will view as a peculiarity — often sexual — that expresses something vital to their sense of self. Yet, at the same time, Ms. Grannan has an uncanny knack for capturing moments of doubt, cracks in a mask of defiance. Once you get used to the fact that these are big photos of odd people in forlorn places, the real subject that emerges is the negative space between individual and type, introspection and performance.

These photographs are big, typically printed at 40-by-50 inches, but their scale is complex. Through radical simplification of composition and meticulous capture of detail, they have a cinematic intimacy—that is to say, at once up close and enveloping.

In “Gail and Dale, Pacifica” (this series is all from 2007), the friends are caught between introspection and camera-awareness. Gail, a redhead, is looking down with her hand on Dale’s shoulder. Dale’s vacant gaze hovers at a middle distance. She has white hair; they both wear white dresses, and the sand, sea and sky behind them are bleached, all of which gives an abstract, ethereal glow to the image. But the camera manages to pick out highly literal specifics of texture and tone  such as dress fabric or creases of skin. .

In “Dale, Southampton Avenue,” Dale is nude, lying on an unmade bed and casting a long shadow against a cream-colored wall. The pose recalls Goya’s “Majas” in its langor, mixing voluptuousness and indifference. A worn, somewhat frumpy body tells the tale of a struggle to find inner femininity, her hands and face still burdened by masculinity. Transsexuals are perfect subjects for Ms. Grannan as they are caught between states.  Even “post op,” being oneself entails acts of defiance against nature and nurture.

Just when tolerance and technology allow a person born male to transform him/herself into a woman, women of different ages have found boyish ways to be feminine. Dale and Gail are at an age when women sometimes adopt the Senator Clinton approach of short hair and trouser suits, yet these two subjects are compelled by circumstance to cling to anachronistic trappings of the feminine with flowing dresses and PreRaphaelite locks that only serve to reinforce their biological origins.

A common problem among older transsexuals is economic marginalization — they lost the jobs they had as men and spent their savings on surgery — and thus they cannot afford to dress with feminine distinction. The photographs of Gail emphasize this tragi-comic twist in their frumpy vulnerability. This is the odd thing about Ms. Grannan: despite deliberation and composition, these photographs feel like an unsentimental version of the realities of their sitters’ lived experience. In comparison, Nan Goldin’s seemingly snapshot, diaristic, “real” photographs have the glamor of “La Cage aux folles” or “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

Coming to the uptown show from Gail and Dale you might have had to ask the receptionist — as this viewer did — whether Nicole, too, is a transsexual. While biologically feminine, she is no Nicole Kidman. Ms. Grannan’s merciless lense captures every bump and bruise, sunburn and freckle, stretch mark and body hair, on this slightly butch, working-class young woman.

In contrast to the Gail and Dale series, in which the camera sometimes seems to spy on the lives of the protagonists, the Nicole photographs project a more overt, performative collaboration between model and artist. Nicole lolls in a pin-up pose in “Crissy Field Parking Lot (II), (this series all 2006) and in a Madonna-like stretch in its pendant, “Crissy Field Parking Lot (I).” She strikes a body-builder’s pose in “Sunnydale Ave, (I),” looks like she is about to give birth in “Potrero Hill,” and, in “(Afternoon II), Lombard Street,” crouched at the top of a bed wearing heels, a skimpy dress and a white wig, seems to mimic a Cindy Sherman self-portrait photograph in the extremity of her grimace and pose.

In her camp scramble for odd types Ms. Grannan has drawn comparisons with Diane Arbus. One critic named her the “legitimate heir,” an honor she lives up to in “Gail and Dale (Best Friends), Point Lobos” where the pair face each other in matching twin outfits. But these shows, with their mix of theatricality and literalness, beg comparison less with other photographers than with two painters: Lucian Freud and Edward Hopper.

Hopper because of the lonely isolation of figures in washed-out, banal yet observed surroundings (sparse and tawdry) that — in a kind of cruel visual democracy — receive fastidiously equal attention. Mr. Freud comes to mind particularly in the Nicole pictures because of the way forced poses sit uncomfortably with a resigned sense of physicality. Working with a medium-format camera and slow exposures, Ms. Grannan brings out a kind of anxious boredom familiar in sitter’s expressions in a Freud painting from the long hours of posing and his exacting way of painting.

This stretching of time is of the essence in Ms. Grannan. The sitters try to express themselves when they dress up or down and strike their pose, but in fact, it is in the lag between the attainment of persona and sinking back into a literal, physical self that bathos seeps in.  The sitters do their utmost to project difference[end italics], but actually what comes across is a duller humanism, that we are all just people in time and space.

Ornament is crime, according to the Austrian architectural theorist Adolf Loos.  Two culturally prevalent forms of ornamentation that bear out this stricture, arguably, are graffiti and tattoos. But much as they violate the purity, respectively, of buildings and bodies, these ornamental systems have deep roots and cult followings as popular forms of artistic expression.

Lina Bertucci traveled to tattoo conventions around the world making portraits of women between the ages of 19 and 59 (mostly closer to the first figure) sporting wildly adventurous body decorations. Her photographs are likely to engender reactions of fascination and repugnance, sometimes in the same viewer. On show at Perry Rubinstein Gallery, they are also fabulous images: crisp, clean, and resonant. Tinged with voyeurism, and unabashedly “arty” in their adopted poses and settings, they nonetheless attain a documentary precision, a coolness that allows the individuality of their sitters to come through while capturing the ambivalent emotions surrounding the practice of making one’s skin the permanent support of an ornamental decoration.

The prevalent facial expression is somewhere between defiance and resignation.  There is little evidence of humor or delight on these women’s faces, although whether that was on the instruction of the photographer or reflects the general mood of heavily tattooed women is open to conjecture.

“Kerstin, 24, Drama Student / Works in Vintage Shop” (2007) brilliantly captures the central paradox of making permanent a transient taste. The young woman sports an array of tattoos — pinups, Japonism, nautical motifs — on her chest, arms, and right thigh. She wears a Victorian-style bathing suit which is itself decorated in anchors and bathing suits. The wall behind her has a dense black and white floral wallpaper and there is an animal pattern on the ground. The attire and furnishings represent rich, strong tastes that will be outgrown and replaced as they loose their luster, humor, novelty. The tattoos, however, which are all the more tacky and ephemeral, are there for “good.”

“Deborah, 45, Assembler in Machine Shop” (2007) has a finely drawn fan on her back and around her waist and buttock, intricate tattoos representing garters that, on her right leg, hold up an elaborate, gaudy “stocking”. Her flesh is beginning to sag, and with it her bold design. Were she a painting, it would be time to restretch the canvas.

Many of these tattoos are extraordinary in their artistry, wit and imagination, but more extraordinary is the decision to subject the body to a layer of decoration that can hardly be removed. However their moods or outlooks on life might change, the bearers can never strip down beyond the taste or whim of an extreme moment’s ornamental decision.

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November 17, 2006 – January 12, 2007

Benjamin Edwards’s architectural landscapes are at once painterly and constructed, present and absent of human activity. The painter’s third exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is titled “We.” This title, though seemingly simple, derives from a sobering 1920s dystopian novel by Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin, which is just as ideologically-packed as Edwards’s paintings are visually.

Edwards’s previous exhibitions presented similarly process-intensive, large-scale paintings of one-point perspective landscapes, yet crammed with suburban and corporate architecture and interspersed with hovering icons, logos and text. These paintings are synthetic environments, the compositions of which originated in architecture computer software. They were intricately crafted with masking tape and acrylic paint to yield results that are hard edged.  These works were criticized for bearing more of a resemblance to graphic design than painting. “We” marks a return to a painterly use of oil in combination with acrylic elements found in Edwards’s more straightforward urban landscapes of the 1990s. Significantly, the human figure makes an appearance.

Entering the gallery, two atmospheric skyscapes pose the question: what does the world of the future look like to the 21st century eye? The World of Tomorrow (all paintings 2006), a medium-sized painting, captures a Kincadian glow comprised of Modernist-inspired structures in blocky acrylic beneath the thin, painterly atmosphere rendered in oils. The foggy, expansive light recalls the atmospheric effect of George Lucas’s pre-digital matte painted environments of the early 1980s cinema of Star War’s Cloud City.

A painting with a background similar to The World of Tomorrow is Hidden Village,measuring roughly by three and a half feet wide. A composition divided into a foreground of fractured corporate high rises and background of stacked suburban houses, Hidden Village is a one-point perspective skewed and off-center. Strings of text reading “Knights of Revolution,”  “Host” (backwards), and other illegibly fragmented characters bisect the horizon line.  The foreground’s sea of asphalt is filled with bright, bold colors and of a varied surface– textures added with modeling grit and crumbled refuse occupy the foreground. Nestled in this expanse are blocky forms that suggest the silhouettes of people. From a distance these forms coalesce and yet remain not immediately recognizable.

Edwards’s paintings require monumental size to create the vast scale indicated in his one-point perspective worlds. We is a nine foot long canvas painted entirely in oils. Like all of Edwards’s work in this exhibition, the images read at a distance (or in reproduction) as graphic images, yet up close dissolve into layers of transparencies, revealing thin brushstrokes. Symbols, text and shapes float close to the surface or the picture plane, threading through passages of figures and architecture.

Softstream Meadows, measuring three and a half by five feet, shows that use of the figures is most effective when the human presence is implied and not overstated, when the figures are integrated into and not overpowering the surrounding environment. A female figure, rendered in the style of blind contour, appears in the foreground amidst swirling symbols, architecture and broken planes. Segments of her legs, face and arms are painted while her clothing remains undefined. Behind her, figures depicted by silhouettes dissolve into the horizon. The people are as artificial as the environments– video game-derived characters– and have a ghastly, apparitional quality, appearing as mannequins in their cold depiction. The females depicted in this manner also possess an unsettling erotic aura, one that comments on the 21st century male gaze at the computer-generated Venus. These figures are rendered in thin layers of fluid oil paint. In this body of work, acrylic tends to describe the sharp edges of the man-made whereas oil is used transparently and luminously, suggesting an epidermis, a human skin. Here, Edwards’s use of brushstroke reveals the hand of the artist, adding a human presence in contradistinction to the geometric severity of his constructed world.

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“Suzanne Caporael” at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery until February 12 (730 Fifth Ave at 57th Street, 212-445-0444).

“Graham Parks” at Feigen Contemporary until February 19 (535 W 20th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-929-0500).

It seems to be widely assumed that questions about the language of art reached a dead-end at some point in the 1970s, after which anything but structural issues were up for grabs. A number of contemporary artists have put paid to this notion, however, with work that reopens the file on art and language but without reverting to the arid, somewhat pompous posturing typical of the decade when semiotics dominated the way artists thought about, talked about, and made art.

Once again painters are questioning the rudiments of their art — treating brushstrokes, say, or paint itself, or the support, to a kind of linguistic analysis —without becoming reductive or theoretical. They are engaged in what you might call semiotics without tears: Self-consciously laying bare the building blocks of pictorial syntax in ways that actually encourage poetic whim and painterly delectation. This has been true in past work of three artists I admire who are each subject to solo exhibitions right now: James Hyde, Suzanne Caporael, and Graham Parks.

Mr. Hyde is up front about his conceptual intentions and approaches them with insistently good cheer. In some works in his current show at Brent Sikkema, he actually incorporates pieces of parquet and what look like toy bricks — as if to literalize the metaphor of the building block (one piece is actually called “Paragraph” to enforce the linguistic connection). This would have tied in very neatly with the work the other two artists presented in their immediate previous exhibitions at their same current galleries — Greenberg Van Doren and Feigen respectively — but as it happens, each has moved on to less overtly structuralist, relatively personal and expressive bodies of work.

In 2003 Ms. Carporael exhibited a series titled “Littoral Drift,” which represented named estuaries from around the world. She took her cue from John Stilgoe’s book, “Shallow Water Dictionary” (1990). Inspired by the way the author interconnected etymology, natural history, and personal observation, she sought an equivalent in a systematically pared-down range of colors and a set of shapes that, although subjective, had the feeling of being determined by some concrete, empirical measure.

The new body of work, in a show called “Reading Time,” is more diffuse in genre and style, with literal, immediately legible imagery: figures, buildings, trees, sunsets. Though there is more gutsy painthandling, restraint is still her hallmark. She retains her essential, most delectable characteristic: a kind of dispassionate intensity. She crafts grounds that are deliciously slippery (they read more like glassine paper than linen, lending them a slick, designer quality.) Her colors are often teasingly ambiguous in temperature.

Ms. Carporael is conscious of mark the way the best modern poets are of words. Every one she makes seems deliberate and examined, without becoming precious or ponderous in the process.

You could say, actually, that brushstroke has taken over the role played by shape in the “Littoral Drift” show. Sometimes, the artist constructs the image out of lush horizontal strokes in almost caricatural fashion, as in “434 (armless man in green sweater)” (2004) or in various striated cityscapes. Images of a sunset, a tree in bloom, a snowstorm, or a Parisian park recall, in the almost mosaic-like application of individual brushstroke-tesserae, such disparate sources as Nicolas de Stael, Klimt, Alex Katz, and Cézanne.

The strongest images in the current show are the two seascapes where the waves are at once strokes and shapes (the same is true of the snowstorm but the effect there is less taut, more decorative.) In the seascapes, which recall certain Mondrians circa 1909–10, the subject makes depictive sense of the glossy ground. The choppy waves are built up of single-stroke rectangles, hued in a tight range of coolly contrastive blues, purples, mauves, and — inflected by these colors — whites.

The beauty of Ms. Caporael’s waves is that density and direction alone establish dynamic, while the brushstrokes, individual in color, character, and shape, remain inviolate (at once signifier and signified, in structuralist parlance). Works of contained passion, these pictures are, in a profound sense, composed.

***

Graham Parks’s last show at Feigen marked an extraordinary debut, and not just as a Cinderella tale of the arthandler — at the gallery that now represents him — made good. With small, quirky, graphic designerish paintings of delicate poise and precision, he seemed to have hit upon the painterly equivalent of a haiku: poetry that derives from its opposite, the prosaic. By choosing as his motif functionalist architecture at once bland and utopian, he seemed to strike a miraculous balance between image and means.

His new show continues to tease out the unpainterliness of his finely honed craft. The pictures, once again, look more like something else, this time woodcuts or — more precisely, as he actually paints on wood and exploits relief techniques — like inked-up blocks themselves. He has turned his back on the city to explore nature, photographing woodlands and parks in his native Spokane , Washington , and in Kyoto , Japan .

The new images bid farewell to the jazzy intervals and perspectival compressions that were the joy of his first show. There are clever things going on, technically and metaphorically, with games of negative and postive, push and pull, remoteness and investment. But with their newfound intricacy, their dense alloverness of foliage, there is a loss in lightness. Mr. Parks’s haikus have become epics. Still, the show suggests an artist of extraordinary potential who is close to finding his form.

***

Lightness will always be Mr. Hyde’s form. Where both Ms. Caporael and Mr. Parks take finesse to one extreme, Mr. Hyde takes unfinish to the other. He is truly an heir of arte povera, the aesthetics of the artfully down at heel. He is so intimate with the agenda of the French abstract-minimal Support-Surface movement as to be their honorary consul in New York .

This new show puts the brakes (temporary, it is to be hoped) on his recent turn towards sumptuousness, with a renewal of the rough and ready inquisitiveness that marked his debut in the early 1980s. There is no hint of the voluptuous form he had been exploring in the last few shows, where a giant, gallery-sized pillow, filled with newspaper or pumped with air, would support an ethereal, impressionistic painting. Nor do we have his plexiglass vitrines, filled with random-seeming accretions of paint. The new work recalls Richard Tuttle in its precious slightness of means. Painterly gesture is almost absent in this relatively austere body of work.

Although his work is rarely two-dimensional, Mr. Hyde insists painting is indeed his project. And he is no prankster: Within his oddball and quirky means, he explores the most traditional of painterly concerns. In the present show, for instance, this includes light. Surfaces include buckled segments of heavy, plastic sheeting, chromed steel, and vinyl that reflect the viewer, the environment, or found objects in varying intensities. In a departure for Mr. Hyde, a few images use digital prints as supports: One shows a child carrying a torch, upon which a cropping frame of painted masking tape is imposed. It is an enigmatic, and probably not, at the end of the day, terribly profound statement, but it is part and parcel of an inquiry that’s open, liberal, intelligent and fun, and thus welcome on all counts.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 13, 2004

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“Michael Steiner: Sculpture” at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries through January 3 (20 East 79 Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212 879 6606)

“Morris Louis” at Paul Kasmin Gallery, through December 31 (293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street, 212 563 4474)

Sir Anthony Caro is the most prolific and influential British sculptor since Henry Moore. To mark his eightieth birthday, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren has laid on a handsome show, which closes this weekend, of a dozen smaller pieces mostly from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. These include examples of two of his extended series, the often highly engaging “table pieces” and “writing pieces”.

Mr. Caro has devoted a career to breaking rules: first the received ones that greeted his arrival on the scene in the late 1950s, and subsequently the ones he invented himself, often to be followed dogmatically by acolytes. He insisted, for instance, on distancing sculpture from conventional statuary by placing it directly on the ground, without a pedestal of any kind. But then he re-embraced the plinth with aplomb, making the support vital and integral to the sculptural experience.

In the monumental sculptures for which he is best known, Mr. Caro reveals his twin allegiances to the soft modernism of Moore and the hard modernism of David Smith. His language oscillates disarmingly between the brutal and the whimsical, regardless of scale. In these smaller works, however, there is an uncharacteristic degree of expressivity and involvedness. We see him looking over the shoulders of his “two fathers”, as he has identified his mentors, to the common sculptural grandfather: Picasso.

The appropriately calligraphic “writing pieces”, in particular, recall Picasso’s early forays into direct welding, with Julio Gonzalez as his guide. “Writing Piece ‘This’,” (1979) employs as its found elements a rusty saw and some kind of handle or crank. There is barely any sense of “appropriation” in the Pop or surreal sense, but that doesn’t necessarily make Mr. Caro the pure formalist he has been cracked up to be: There are complex language games at play, as components both shed and regain their powers of signification.

These enigmatic pieces can evoke another kind of writing, which also militates against formalism: a sense of narrative. This is not to suggest that specific stories are being told-he is resolutely abstract; rather, the structure and complexity of the pieces denies the viewer the satisfaction of the single take, forcing an extended, almost sequential reading of the different events going on within. “Table Bronze ‘Chemical Box’, (1987) for instance, is an animated grid in the tradition of early Smith, the pictograms of Torres-Garcia, or even the Surrealist phase of Giacometti.

The variety of materials, including not just different metals but, cohabiting in single pieces, the welding and casting processes, all suggest restless inquiry. And yet despite his protean creativity there is a strange aloofness of touch, a lack of overt sensuality. Perhaps this is because so much of the grunt work is done by assistants. But somehow the restraint seems more intentional, an insistence that the true content is the relationship of parts, not the fashioning or finding of the parts themselves. This suggests that with all his dancing around and breaking of rules, Mr. Caro is, at heart, a formalist after all.

***

To the circle around Clement Greenberg, the New York critic who was so instrumental in promoting Mr. Caro at the outset of his career, Michael Steiner was the “white hope” for an American link in the constructivist chain. At the tender age of 18, Mr. Steiner staged his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966, just around the time when Mr. Caro’s ascension was being assured. Of the two, Mr. Steiner now seems more faithful to the idiom of open-form construction.

His current show at Salander’s-lie Mr. Caro’s at Artemis-reveals an uncharacteristic intimacy, in terms both of size and touch. Hardly intimate in mood, however, these grids have the unavoidable connotation of cages. The mottled surfaces, though literally sensitive to touch (they are cast from wax and patinated to look as if they were painted in dollops of tar) are alienating in their sheer oddity.

In a formal sense these works achieve their density through a fugal relationship of one grid misregistering with another (one grid will be on the diagonal to another on the vertical/horizontal, for instance). Large luminous gouaches play on a similar motif.

Other pieces court utility: they evoke machines or boats, with slats, pistons, and portholes, without reading literally as functional objects per se. In their ponderous way, these pieces hint at whimsy, but they are in a minority in this show. The lasting impression made by the bronze jails, with their grim surfaces and austere structures, is of tragic grandeur.

***

With these two Greenberg protégés under your belt, you will want to visit one of the critic’s favorite painters, Morris Louis. Paul Kasmin has a varied selection of large canvases from 1958-60, the years when, quite late in his truncated career, Louis hit his stride.

The artist was a prodigious editor of his own work, often taking his destructive cue from a shake of Greenberg’s head. While this show includes top notch examples of familiar Louis motifs within his stain painting idiom, including “Bronze”, a “veil” from 1958, and “Delta Upsilon,” and “Theta Gamma,” two “stripes” from 1960, the show includes works in which there are dense and, by Louis’s standards, almost brushy expanses of flat color. “Addition VI,” (1959) closely recalls Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountain and Sea,” (1952), whose seminal influence on Louis is well documented.

The chance to see works in the estate of the artist that the artist himself might never have exhibited is raising eyebrows among the Greenbergian “faithful” (I visited the show with a stalwart) but actually it can only do Louis good. The best case scenario is posthumous reinvention. The second best is confirmation that he had good taste as an editor and knew the worth of his more canonical inventions, despite the relative obscurity in which he worked, painting in a suburban dining room in Washington DC.: “Theta Gamma”, for instance, which really belongs in a museum (although American museums have plenty of Louis’s languishing in their vaults).

His genius was to discover forms distinct enough to avoid geometric reduction yet impersonal enough to convey color as an end in itself.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 26, 2003

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