September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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April 21 to May 21, 2016
508 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 0890

Stacked vertically on the page, black-and-white thumbnails of photographs and sketchy drawings survey flat, domestic, suburban environments. Although gallery documentation is rarely more significant than the titles and materials it catalogs, Greene Naftali’s checklist communicates the stakes of William Levitt’s “Telemetry,” in which sculptural installations are shown to be as iconic as two-dimensional drawings. Leavitt has filled the gallery’s first-floor space with a series of works on paper, as well as three installations: the interior of a modern home in Telemetry Set (2016), a crimson-lit collection of contraptions and plants in The Small Laboratory (2015), and French doors opening onto a video of a rotating planet in Arctic Earth (2013).

Drawing influence from an industry that is pure façade, Leavitt’s work is informed by the Los Angeles milieu in which it has developed. The artist’s choice to work in installation is pointed; this medium permits a living space and requests bodily interaction from the viewer, while also denying reality and existing only in simulation. From afar, the forms and colors of these sets suggest an atmosphere laden with familiarity.

The artist is explicit in his pretense, orienting these mirage-like sets so completely towards one angle that they are immediately disrupted by the sight of a wooden backdrop’s unpainted backside or the view of the projectors from the side. As one’s engagement with the works inevitably deviates from the preferred perspective, one approaches an illusion that intentionally falls flat.

Such compositions and details belie the familiarity of these scenes — spaces accessed either on the screen or in real life — and removes illusionism from this world. Leavitt’s sets motion at action without permitting or even tempting use; the stage is not set for life, but for one’s gaze upon it. Leavitt captures the idea of the house that is not a home, an engagement with the familiar that is detached, functioning as a telemeter — a device that transmits environmental readings from afar — to communicate intimacy in distance. The closer viewers approach and the more they yearn to enter the world that Leavitt paints, the more it collapses before that desiring gaze. In Telemetry Set, a slick, modern seat solidifies into a cushion smudged with dirty handprints. A multi-stemmed lamp to the chair’s left is the same kind sold at my corner store. Leavitt furthers the superficial references latent in these articles of furniture with a pointed interest in formal correspondences. In Telemetry Set, the thick boughs and rosy leaves of an artificial tropical plant are mirrored in the branching metal limbs and pink tone of the floor lamp that stands beside it. An analogous correspondence exists between the bamboo posts and a striated cylinder to the far left. These symmetries, immediately evident in color and form, bridge the binary of interior and exterior that these objects contain.

In this synthesis of spaces, bringing the unstable identity of the installation in dialogue with the extant environment of the gallery, Leavitt weaves a collage of locations that is clear in both drawn and sculptural works. In large part, the transparency of this union emerges from the contrast of the elements brought together; the gallery is set in opposition to clear signifiers of home, laboratory, and outer space. The clarity of this spatial fragmentation allows Leavitt to compose pseudo-collages out of partial environments. The exhibition follows the mood set by drawings such as Landscape with Exercycle and Interior (1991), which create conscious confusions within the space represented. In this pastel drawing, three different kinds of spaces are spliced, bringing together a landscape of mountains, a view of a forest, and a curving modern interior. An exercise machine hovers in the foreground, bridging the space between the forest and the interior but belonging to neither. This exercycle cannot exist in simultaneity with the architectural elements and landscape that are detailed beside it. Nonetheless, Leavitt brings them incongruously together to signal the uncertainty of the space in which they exist. The projections in Telemetry Set function similarly, presenting a shifting orientation and confusing the space represented in installation with images of garden plants and ceiling fans.

Leavitt makes no attempt to veil the discontinuities of space: the lights that frame A Small Laboratory are plain to see, the cut-out quality of Arctic Earth is immediately evident. Leavitt’s interest lies in the union of these intertwined spaces, in the transparency of the simulacrum. Arctic Earth directly addresses this discrepancy of time and space, abandoning mimesis for magic and imagination. Raised from the cold concrete of the gallery floor by wooden platforms, slats guide viewers into this pretended space. Both distant and close, a rotating planet is visible through open French doors on a projected screen that is partially obscured by dark, heavy curtains. Behind, the planet Earth rotates sideways on its axis, the sun glinting coldly in the distance. Though the image is compelling and suggests the narrative of science fiction, viewers are never wholly taken in, nor are they meant to be. Leavitt manipulates space as another medium that may bring its own formal qualities to a composition. In spite of their impossibility, these sets also necessarily engage a narrative structure, implying actions that go unfulfilled. In eroding realistic representation, Leavitt returns the set to its purpose as a space in which viewers may suspend their own reality in order to enter one of possibility and alterity.

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John Knight’s current show at Greene Naftali is mostly strong, with some minor exceptions. The video and projection works on view are presented as one unnamed curation. One new piece, described by the press release as indicative of his interest in “Disclosure,” is a series of slides. Each is a dated diary entry in white on a black ground. They recount the artist working on a new lithograph project, but the narrative is told with suggestions of mystery, intrigue, and furtiveness. He suspects the people around him of plotting a large event (the production of a print) as if they were underground rebels or terrorists. He is ambivalent about his own commitment to their cause, and his samizdat notes indicate a desire to inform on them, or to escape. The portrayal may be especially well timed, following on the heels of Trevor Paglen’s documentation of the NSA, which closed in October at nearby Metro Pictures, and with increasingly loud demands from a vocal minority in the US and Europe, demanding more surveillance of neighbors suspected of jihadist sympathies. Knight points to the blind spot nature of paranoia and the heightened anxiety it produces about even mundane interactions.  NOAH DILLON

November 11, 2015 to January 8, 2016 at Greene Naftali Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues.

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March 29- April 28, 2012
508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 463 7770

Jacqueline Humphries, who was born in 1960, works quite free of the kind of anxieties regarding post-Greenbergian abstraction that prevailed when I started writing art criticism, in the early 1980s. Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, so almost everyone said, were the last possible abstract painters.  The anti-aesthetic era of installations, photography and video, so we were told, was at hand.  Painting, and especially abstract painting. were officially dead. Humphries paints as if this history never happened. She has eleven paintings on display, all Untitled, all made in 2012, all but one 90 by 96 inches (one is just slightly smaller). They are mostly painted in metallic silver, but there are also touches of blue, pink and red. Humphries’s robust all-over compositions often are broken at the corners by areas of intruding color.  Her limited palette means that gestural activity alone must carry the pictures, which for the most part it does.

Sometimes Humphries creates rough broad vertical silver stripes. In one picture she breaks that field with narrow green stripes coming in from the lower left corner. In another, small dark areas peeking through break the all-over silver covering the canvas. And in yet another patches of bright red are found throughout the canvas and smaller areas of pink interrupt the silver field. Or, and this is a further option, a field of green on the left edge can be set alongside a body of narrow vertical silver strokes. A vigorous, fearlessly energetic painter, she shows how much visual variety is possible within a limited, seemingly confining format. This ensemble of paintings, hung in the marvelous north light of Greene Naftali’s space, high above Chelsea, resonates together, creating a very happy harmony.

Initially it is perhaps most helpful to characterize Humphries’s art in a negative way. She is not a monochrome painter.  A great deal of recent abstraction plays with geometry, often with reference to computer technologies. That is not her interest. Many abstract painters seek to give meaning to their art via references to nature. Humphries does not. Some distinguished abstractionists allude to the rhythms of the modern city. She does not. Often abstract painters lend historical resonance to their art with art historical tropes. She does not. Her vigorous sensuous gestural style owes a lot to Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, but her color-sense is very different. Humphries owes nothing, I think, to the post-modern tradition of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.  Free from skepticism about the capacity of abstraction to convey feeling, her paintings have a promising ‘bigness’.  If abstraction has now lost its supportive genealogy, for her that turns out to be no real loss. Humphries is a million miles away from the curiously tentative art of the Whitney Biennial, for her proudly beautiful abstractions advance no obvious personal or political agenda. They do not aspire to make the world better, except insofar as they contribute to our aesthetic pleasure. Standing on their own, these drop dead gorgeous paintings show how much life there is still in the grand tradition of Abstract Expressionism.

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The abundance of self-anointed anti-establishment shows reminds us that nothing in the art world is sacred, least of all art history. We’ve been served notice; taboos will be busted, idols smashed and sacred cows slaughtered. Sculptors will challenge our outdated notions of painting, installation artists our outdated notions of sculpture, and performance artists our outdated notions of installation. In the noisy crescendo of art that screams at us to rethink things on its terms, one message rings loud and clear; the canon is under fire!

So what are we to make of this curious industry in which the path to success seems so heavily greased by its practitioners’ insistence that they are a challenge to its authority? What is the meaning of a world in which the very rejection of its values seems as clear a path to acceptance as any? Is there a parallel world in our society that mirrors that of the contemporary art world as seen through the eyes of Chelsea? Imagine a law firm vying for your business by claiming a particularly irreverent attitude toward the law, or a politician cultivating votes on a platform of autocratic rule. To be sure, questioning our value systems is one of the chief roles of an artist (if he or she, unbound by the directives of others, cannot speak the truth, who can?), but it seems that we’ve arrived at a point where the act of questioning has become the greatest currency of all. Cézanne’s re-examination of painterly perception was a game-changer with implications about how we see the world (as were the developments of the Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists), but much of contemporary art seems unconcerned with real world implications. Art that adopts a full-blown revisionist take on the art-historical canon invariably fails to resonate beyond gallery walls. Take for example the show of Fahamu Pecou’s paintings at Lyons Wier Gallery, which “questions the concepts of inclusion and exclusion within the historical constructs of fine art,” by “appropriating famous images from the twentieth century and reinterpreting them through his own self-portrait prism.” In a painting titled The Treachery of (media) Images: After Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the artist’s cursive phrase “Ceci n’est pas Fahamu,” accompanies his self-portrait. While the appropriation is obvious enough, the reinterpretation remains unclear.

It’s been a while since Duchamp displayed his urinal, Rauschenberg erased his de Kooning, Warhol made his ready-mades and John Baldessari commissioned sign painters to create work for him, sign their own names to it, and present it as his own. Kehinda Wiley’s reinterpretation of 18th- and 19th-century history painting has become so familiar that it is now more surprising to see Jacques Louis David’s white and sallow-cheeked Napoleon atop his war steed than Wiley’s African American stand-in.

These conceits all served in various ways to challenge notions of creativity, originality, and authenticity. Each was also interpreted, in its own way, as a sort of “joke on the art world,” the most recent iteration being the Banksy film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Here the street artist makes a documentary about his would-be documentarian Thierry Gueta, who in Banksy’s narrative is transformed from cameraman to street artist to art-world darling himself. The work produced by Gueta under his street name Mr. Brain Wash is pretty lousy by nearly everyone’s admission, but the fact that it sells well at a show in Los Angeles is presented in the film as the ultimate joke on the art world. But is it a joke? In a telling moment, Banksy’s dealer Steve Lazarides chuckles nervously, “I think the joke is on . . . I don’t know who the joke’s on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

If there is a joke it has little meaning. The film suffers from a sort of self-imposed impotence. The breadth of its meaning is a function of its scope, and in putting one over on the art world, it has few implications for the world beyond. The group show “Entertainment,” currently on view at Greene Naftali, offers a sort of litmus test of the resonance of art inspired solely by art world reference. Rachel Harrison’s piece Zombie Rothko, is a free standing block of sculpture splattered with vaguely Ab-Ex paint and topped by a doll’s head. From the press release: it “suggests an embodied version of painting (a kind of “walking dead”).”  Next to this is ITEA (International Trade and Enrichment Association), Michael Smith’s fake trade show booth “parodying the synergy of arts and business collaboration.” It works as parody, but nothing more. This is the affliction of the navel-gazing worldview: it’s a bite we’ve grown accustomed to.

Thankfully, we still have that second stack of press releases, those that make no claims to historical revisionism. Instead, they correspond to a different kind of show, where the work on display feels altogether more comfortable with itself. Rather than trading in art-world reference, this work opens itself up to reference the world at large.

Take two sublime shows of painting currently on 24th street, those of Lynne Woods Turner at Danese and Rudolf Stingel at Gagosian. Each artist creates work imbued with an emotional maturity that allows it to stand autonomously and remain open to interpretation. Woods Turner’s paintings rely on their own narrowly defined formal parameters to present a luminous world that remains accessible at its core. Stingel takes the self-assuredness a step further. Employing silver and gold (and what could be better fodder for a revisionist re-evaluation of our cultural mores?) as the primary materials for minimal paintings of maximal visual appeal, the lasting question Stingel poses to us is one that artists have asked for centuries: can you imagine anything more beautiful?

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October 22-December 4, 2010
508 West 26^th Street, 8^th Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 463-7770

Gedi Sibony was the only artist in the New Museum’s Unmonumental, the inaugural show of its current Bowery space in 2007, invited to create a site-specific  installation for that exhibition.  His corner, behind the elevators, offered a moment of quiet amidst the din of a lot of flashy, trashy art.

Sibony’s second solo exhibition at Greene Naftali is likewise a retreat from the cacophony of Chelsea. The Cutters (2007), a section of bare wall with a doorframe cut into it, and garnished with a simple drape of tawny fabric, stands at the entrance to the gallery. Rather than act as a blockade or a symbol of masculine power, like the brick and steel wall similarly placed at Dan Colen’s solo show at Gagosian, The Cutters frames another installation lying deeper inside the gallery space, inviting the viewer to enter.

Sibony’s constructions are not concerned with facture, or the treatment of surfaces but with the careful arrangement of objects in a space. Architectural details of the gallery such as water pipes snaking across the ceiling and industrial rolling doors are not superfluous but become integral to an installation that employs similar building materials. The industrial and discarded materials Sibony chooses are often slightly decayed, implying a personal history between the found objects and the artist. It is difficult to discern what has been found, made, or altered, but each element is in conversation with the work as a whole. The scraps of wood and framed posters and chunks of sheetrock may be detritus, but they have each been carefully chosen.

Leaning against a wall, draped from the ceiling, or jutted into a corner, the relationships of materials to one other and to the gallery space result in an air of theatricality and romanticism. For example, The Brighter Grows the Lantern (2010), perhaps the most straightforward piece in the show, consists of a swath of white vinyl hanging limply from the ceiling, lit from behind with colored spotlights. The purple and red light slide down the slick vinyl surface, evoking curtains from a miniature stage or a melted Helen Frankenthaler painting. The glow of the warmly colored light seeps dramatically out of the open doorway of the side gallery into the main space, where two installations in tones of gray, white, and browns lie under natural light from nearby windows.

The teetering, half-painted wood structure titled Asleep Outside the Wall (2010), on the other hand, feels contrived and self-consciously artsy. The more labored process involved in the making of this sculpture, as well as a jumbled collaborative installation with Diana Lyon in another back room titled Who Attracts All That is Named (2010), prove the artists’ simplest gestures are the most striking.

It is tempting at first glance to consider the work in terms of Minimalism. Industrial materials and a reductive appearance aside, however, Sibony’s work isn’t cold or monotonous. His materials have been lived with. The surfaces are not fussy, but worn. Because there is a distinctly narrative, romantic quality to these objects, a more apt comparison that suggests itself is with the artists of the Arte Povera movement, who employed everyday materials in a humble condition. And yet, Sibony’s show manages to feel simultaneously anachronistic and extremely contemporary making us less inclined to question the artists’ placement in art history, and more free to enjoy the simplicity and poetry in his arrangements.

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