May 4 to 28, 2017
21 Ludlow Street, between Canal and Hester streets
New York City, centralbookingnyc.com

In Greg Lindquist’s paintings and wall mural, a mixture of coal ash and water—pictured as an immiscible swirl—serves as an avatar for a 2014 coal ash spill that contaminated drinking water in North Carolina and Virginia. Lindquist has addressed this particular spill previously, in exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art and again at The Southeastern Center for Community Change. Those two venues reflect strains of his thought (fine art, social action) that his installations attempt to conjoin.

The Library (curated by Diana Wege)  is a subsection of Central Booking, an amalgam venue that is part-bookstore, part-gallery. Lindquist is doing a lot within it. He has placed his oil paintings on two walls of a large, acrylic mural; the color-separated layers of its “swirl” image give it a graphic, digital effect. On the floor, Plexiglass vitrines of evidential coal ash follow the edge of the wall. An extensive booklet contextualizes the exhibition with interviews, essays by Lindquist and others, documentation of earlier exhibitions, a family history. Be warned, this is an exhibition with a lengthy backstory.

And yet, his paintings are not props by any means. Lindquist paints from projected photographs of the Dan River and Sutton Lake, two sites exposed to arsenic, cadmium, selenium and other pollutants. He’s attentive to the enlarged source images’ pixilation, which he renders here in Monet-like dabs. The colors look blown out and at times inverted, Fauvist for the end-days. According to Lindquist, the greenish color that underlies both mural and oil paintings is a Benjamin Moore finish, “Fresh Cut Grass.” “Toxic” is how previous viewers have described it, he tells me, and I can see why. It gives the paintings a hazy, eerie light. But he is thoughtful, troubled by the premise. “Part of the problem is that we don’t always know what toxic looks like. What is toxic?”

When I meet him, Lindquist is bussing a used tub of paint out to his car, saying he’d just completed the final touches the night before. These late decisions are idiosyncratic—including the low height of the exhibition’s smallest painting; the paper mâché covering a doorknob in the middle of his mural— that make the exhibition feel personal, inhabited. The coal ash vitrines along the floor reference Smithson’s “nonsite,” nature dislocated into the gallery. There is a corrective aspect to this gesture: dislocation is not simply a function of “aesthetic decisions,” as he writes of Land Art in a letter to Smithson in the exhibition booklet, but also political.

“Installation Art” is a short hand way of describing the method by which Lindquist brings his art into contact with environmental politics. I thought of the artist Sharon Hayes, who bends formats of protest, of assembly, toward a poetic-political art. I thought of Thomas Hirschhorn; an earlier iteration of “Smoke and Water” recalls Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument,” inviting community participation. When I bring this up, Lindquist makes a distinction between paid workers and volunteer contributors. That Hirschhorn paid participants in the making of “Gramsci Monument” makes him uncomfortable (although “volunteer” is a fine line from “unpaid laborer,” hardly more ethical than paid labor).

Another, crucial difference is that Hirschhorn lives within the (Kurt Schwitters) Merzbau, collage-logic being the way much installation art has reconciled the conjunction of difficult parts. Lindquist has little merz to him. Nor does he share Hirschhorn’s ra-ra-ra mantra of “energy yes, quality no.” His work errs the other way: one is called in for meditation, or a quiet chat on a serious subject. “Smoke and Water” is admirably un-sensational, which may have less to do with artistic precedent than with Lindquist’s commitment to his subject and a refreshingly sincere conviction in art’s ability to affect social change.

Whether this is compatible with painting is an open question. It’s a premise of his work and a dare. Other disciplines than painting, particularly photography, sculpture, drawing, and video, have adapted with greater success to the Installation format. Painting does not play nicely with others; is not easily assimilated. When it’s simply a sign, it withers. But Lindquist’s paintings are adamantly complex. The most delicate is a small 8” x 10” painting of a coal ash “swirl” made with oil and glass bead. Look for it within the mural–its subtle placement took me close to ten minutes to notice it. The larger paintings are more challenging than beautiful, but full of the kinds of labored decisions that make his use of the space specific. He is a painter who leaves open the possibility of a discovery in paint, a chance encounter. The promise and challenge of Lindquist’s exhibition is the mixture of difficult, maybe impossible parts.

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Social Ecologies: Curated by Greg Lindquist, at the Gallery at Industry City

December 10, 2015 to February 21, 2016

A contemporary landscape painter himself, curator Greg Lindquist offers in this important exhibition an array of strategies to address the notion of environment, ranging from simply acknowledging a deep connection with the earth to documenting eco-destruction to making art that ventures remedies to the crisis. “Social Ecologies” comes out of Lindquist’s interest in the “intertwined relationship between humans and the natural world [that has existed] for centuries,” as he put it in an essay in the November 2015 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, stressing that we now face an existential crisis brought on by runaway climate change. In fact, humans have been significantly altering the biosphere since the early hunters wiped out the big fauna and agriculture began its slow degradation of the soil stock of the planet. There is no Garden to go back to; humans must create a balance with nature never before imagined or achieved.

The 1970s saw artists exploring new ideas of their relationship with nature.   Robert Smithson introduced an investigation of art and place – and how each informed and identified the other. He took the work of art out of the gallery and located it in an outdoor setting, and at the same time he put a signifier of the natural site into the gallery, thus demonstrating what he called “non-site”. He located his art not just in a natural setting but in the earth itself, penetrating soil and water.

Charles Simonds is represented by enlarged stills from “Birth,” a film in which he symbolically gives birth to himself out of the earth – specifically, the pit in New Jersey where Simonds has for a long time extracted the clay to make his art. Simonds’ art is about culture from the ground up; the ground is essential for the building of culture.

British-born Rackstraw Downes declared he had no “New World sense of the antithesis between unspoiled nature and human culture; a landscape to me is a place where people live and work.” (Quoted by Stephen Maine in “Rackstraw Downes: Infrastructures”, Art in America Nov. 2010.) His pictures are horizontal scans of a view, including finely-tuned details, that construct pictorial space with curved lines creating a picture that feels distorted compared to traditional landscape painting. We are clearly shown that the human vision of nature is anthropocentric. Downes simultaneously makes a passionate pitch for objective empirical reality as he paradoxically displays its biases by curving space to establish the artist’s viewpoint. An art that successfully combines these “oppositions” pins viewers with a double vision that puts the onus on us to form our own understanding of what is going on.

Mary Miss and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artists who also started working in the 1970’s, represent the land art movement and feminism, both of which critiqued earlier notions of art making its “mark” on nature and instead took a receptive, integrative stance. Along with a younger artist, Ellie Irons, they put their work at the service of natural topologies and human systems. Laderman Ukeles, since 1977 the artist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation, is represented by her Sanitation Manifesto, 1984 in which she writes poetically as artist, feminist, wife, mother about the responsibilities of “maintenance.”

Miss has built a long career of public sculpture that marries art, nature and humanity, and working collaboratively, an example of which is the South Cove Project at Battery Park. It’s challenging to conveying Miss’s work in a gallery setting, but the small schematic drawing here of a site in Indianapolis does the job nicely. The project employs mirrors and beams of red light to visually connect inhabitants with their streams and waterways. Miss takes in a work site experiencing its geological features, history and surrounds to create a vision that amplifies and harmonizes with Alexander Pope’s conception of the genius loci. Miss has written that Broadway is the “native American ridgeline” and intrinsically important to the experience of Manhattan.

Irons transformed a corner of the gallery into a “sanctuary for weeds” collected from native Bushwick plants.   A helpful booklet explains Why Weeds?: “Co-evolved with humans, they are well-suited to do the tough work of greening a heavily altered anthropogenic landscape.”

Alyson Vieira’s environmentalism lies in her choice of materials and her historicism. She employs baled post-industrial plastics to build giant forms that suggest archaic ruins. Making art using the industrial vernacular material – recycling the recycled – posits a culture that is constantly being built, decaying and then rebuilt. “Natural resources” are no longer timber and stone but plastics that can never break down – themselves by-products of modernity’s life-blood: carbon in its solid, liquid and gas forms.

Alexis Rockman’s Loam, 2008, is a witty painting that can be read both as a cracked tooth being mined by ants in which seedlings are taking root – and a painting from Morris Louis’s Veil series. This is art about layered ecologies: human host, plant and animal parasites – except, it could be asked, who is the ultimate destructive parasite on the planet if not, ironically, the only one capable of making art?

Soviet period bath building, Tsakltubo, a photograph by Georgian artist Gio Sumbadze, examines the recent past showing a crumbling Soviet building overgrown with new vegetation. Soviet-era architecture in an exhibition with these themes might have us thinking Chernobyl and accounts of driving for days through dead forests.   Yet the hopeful note of verdant wild growth pushing through the crumbling concrete in this photograph offers a post-eco-apocalyptic vision akin to Margaret Atwood’s fiction. One is allowed to imagine a future welcoming back the forest and building on the ruins of the old world in an egalitarian, human culture integrated and interdependent with nature.

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Smoke and Water: A Living Painting at Southeastern Alliance for Community Change

November 2014 to February 2015
317 Castle Street
Wilmington, North Carolina

On a cold December morning, I met Working Films Initiative co-director Anna Lee to discuss the documentary Coal Ash Stories and to view Greg Lindquist’s installation Smoke and Water: A Living Painting at Southeastern Alliance for Community Change (SEACC) in Wilmington, North Carolina. Smoke and Water is part of a collaborative project that aligns community organizations and residents by using art to highlight and draw on local expertise. A native of Wilmington, Lindquist’s work reflects his connection to the area. The immersive installation spans across three walls of paintings, photographs, and statements, which provide an intimate glimpse into a community struck by one of the largest coal ash spills in the nation’s history: in early February 2014, officials estimate up to 39,000 tons of toxic coal ash spilled into the Dan River in Eden, North Carolina.[1] It lined the banks of the river for 80 miles downstream from the spill site.

Upon entering, I am impressed with the command the installation has over the small community center. Paint pervades the open space normally reserved for community gatherings, yoga, and meditation groups, setting a reflective tone on the way the environment concerned is simultaneously experienced and imagined. Presenting a multilayered narrative of wide-ranging voices and imagery, Lindquist juxtaposes abstracted impressions of an empty and disconnected landscape with interwoven memories and stories presented as text on canvas.

As if looking at multiple screens open on a laptop, Smoke and Water simulates a space of interconnected thoughts, urgency, and action. The painted walls invite and sensitize its inhabitants to the viewing space — a platform for discussion and contemplation. Warm analogous tones envelope the room. On the wall, painted forms play with perceived edges. Swirls of gray and brown — reflections of the coal ash residue unyoked and spreading across the wall — intersect and overlap large paintings that evoke a still winter along the Dan River. The effect is attention to the organic forms and beauty of the paint’s application on the wall and, at the same time, one is charged by its symbolism.

On the floor, taped and gridded texts, drawings, and photographs direct the viewer to navigate the space in a curious and conscious path. I turn to read the texts painted in muted tones on stretched canvases. The narratives speak to the damage inflicted upon the community, and they pose cultural questions on corporate culpability. Local residents’ expressions of how the spill affected their personal health, relationships, and the community spirit, surface as distinct whispers yet layered voices speaking to an urgent and collective cause.

As a native North Carolinian, I’ve always been drawn to the still and powerful character of our state’s rivers and lakes. I feel an immediate connection to the voices of local residents whose nostalgia and experiences have been displaced by the ruin and waste of industrial carelessness. The spill happened over a year ago. Although time has passed, the impact on our sense of place and purpose remain.

As I turn to leave, the late morning light casts a glow on the walls of the art installation, one that suggests the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm or perhaps something ominous. With this illusion, Lindquist subtly advances the cause. These stories travel beyond the walls from a small visual impression to a much larger and more serious discussion involving social engagement around environmental pollution. Lindquist’s work radiates, igniting both tranquil rumination and a charged call to action. He presents the facts while simultaneously distilling sincere experiences and memories. Smoke and Water lingers, encouraging not only reflection, but also reaction… the storm after the calm.

[1] This is the estimate provided by Duke Energy officials.

The post By This River: Greg Lindquist Paints Against Coal-Ash Pollution appeared first on artcritical.

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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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Shaved Brussel sprout and toasted walnut salad

Half pound brussel sprouts shaved finely on mandoline slicer
Half cup walnuts, chopped and toasted
One cup olive oil, zest and juice of one lemon) whisked in bowl
One quarter cup grated parmesan cheese

Pan seared sweet potato gnocchi with pecans and sage

Sweet potato gnocchi (home made if possible, enough for two portions)
Fresh sage (about 10 leaves, to taste)
¼ cup pecans
2 cups fresh spinach
2 teaspoons truffle oil
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Boil gnocchi in plenty of salted boiling water until they rise to the surface (about 3 minutes for fresh gnocchi, 5 for frozen)

Meanwhile, add the olive oil to a pan on medium high heat. As the oil is heating up, add the whole fresh sage leaves.

Drain gnocchi and add to a hot pan with the olive oil and sage.  Allow them to sit in the pan until slightly crisp on one side (3-5 minutes) Turn them, and add pecans, crushing them just slightly with your hand as you drop them into the pan. Add salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste.

Turn heat down and sauté for a few more minutes, until pecans begin to toast. Add fresh spinach and toss until just wilted.

Serve on plates and sprinkle each portion with a teaspoon of truffle oil (or to taste, but a little goes a long way)

Greg Lindquist: How does your interest in cooking relate to your sculpting and installation?

Suzanne Stroebe: In my studio, I’ve been working with live plants and food in my installations, sculptures, drawings and performances, both as objects and through photographs. Art is an extension of life, right?

GL: Or is art an extension of life, in the sense that your practice is informed by such rituals as eating or growth in the natural world?

SS: I believe artists experience the world through the lens of their creativity, which extends to cooking, gardening, writing, etc. The best cooks are creative in that they experiment freely with new ingredients and methods, and allow for “happy accidents.” The work I make in my studio is the purest form of my creativity, because art is non- functional. However inspiration for my work often comes when I’m engaged in another creative practice, outside of the studio.

GL: And what about our rooftop garden, which really started in my studio, amongst my art making practices?

SS: In retrospect, we began gardening in your studio around the same time when you became more experimental in your practice (i.e. last summer right before you made your first outdoor sculptural installation at Art Omi). More recently, you have become interested in earth art and as the garden as become part of our daily lives, you have begun incorporating potting soil into your sculptures.

GL: Very true. We were talking earlier about whether entertaining was part of our interactions with other artists and the art world. When I suggested that it had little to do with the art world, you reminded me the majority of our visitors were people connected through our profession. Why do you think that is? For me, it creates an intimate setting, but also it’s that idea illustrated by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, that you can learn something about a person by his or her preferences, by how a living space is arranged and activities are performed: Does cooking reveal sociological, economic and politic preferences?

SS: Cooking can certainly reveal political and social preferences, but more importantly I think there can be an instant bond with other people we meet who are vegetarians, locavores, etc., or those who are also passionate about cooking. Social interactions with those in the art world can become more casual and friendly when we discover other mutual interests. It is also a natural way to invite someone into your home, which is automatically more intimate.  After spending an evening over good food and drink with someone in their home or in ours, there is a feeling of real friendship—not so after an evening at an opening, or other professional social setting. People tend to relax and become more themselves while eating a good, home cooked meal.

SS: Do you consider cooking/mixology/gardening to be an expression of creativity?

GL: Sure and it’s an expression of creativity that I think is largely driven by curiosity, experimentation and tastes. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at identifying the tastes of specific herbs in foods and perhaps that’s a little like developing an eye for color mixing.

SS: Do you see a connection between cooking and other culinary experiments and your studio practice? Have they ever overlapped or influenced each other?

GL: I think there’s a sense of alchemy in making herbal infusions in liquors. There is an excitement too for how it’s going to turn out. For example, I was amazed by watching the coffee beans float in the vodka and then, as they became saturated, sink to the bottom of the container and release their dark oils into the clear liquid. Maybe it’s something like in the studio when you have an assortment of objects and materials and even though you can imagine what happens when you put them together, it’s always different when you do it. Cooking or infusing/mixology can be a kind of experimental outlet for art making, perhaps being a place to play when I’m feeling stuck in the studio.

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Is there any material entity in this world that exists without a structure of some sort?  Arguably, the only time we ever truly escape the tangible element of structure is within our subconscious when we dream—although even there, Lacanians would argue, structure persists.  Exactly where the boundaries of the surrounding networks that immerse us lie are often not clearly defined or are so intertwined they shift seamlessly from one into the next.  The group show, “Hypothetical Landscapes,” (curated by Greg Lindquist) exhibits the work of eight different artists who create abstractions derived from physical systems that encompass us every time we open our eyes.  The artists — Miya Ando, Malado Baldwin, Don Gummer, Darina Karpov, Ati Maier, Dustin Schuetz, Rebecca Smith, and Suzanne Stroebe — create paintings and sculptures that carry a potency derived from the convergence of man-made networks with ones culled from nature.

In this exhibition, the grid is often employed to approach this convergence.  In Midnight Audit and View of the Defeated, (both 2009) Dustin Schuetz uses the grid to position an individual outside of the incessant force of commerce.  Inspired by the lighted skyscrapers of Manhattan viewed from the rooftop of his Brooklyn studio, Schuetz paints dissimilar gridded columns of ominous greens and yellows.  The groupings of squares and rectangles have slightly different sizes that slowly reveal subtle shifts of depth.  The paintings align themselves with Sarah Morris’s colorful gridded canvases that reflect the repetitious geometry of modern architecture.  However, unlike Morris, who places you up close and often within the structure, Schuetz’s perspective is at a distance and nocturnal.  This distance creates a sense of voyeuristic isolation as you peer from the shadows at structures of economy, and their interminable movement under the pulse of florescent lights.

Rebecca Smith’s Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica (2006) begins with a contradiction.  At first glance, the latticed network of flat steel bands, painted blue, and extending off the wall about one foot, has an airiness that is nowhere near the bulk and power of its eponymous glacial shelf. However, this grid is a fragmented one and the negative spaces in between Smith’s intersections and twists of metal stimulate contrasting feelings of largeness through lightness and expansion amongst fracture.  Although glaciers are dense and forceful entities, they also possess a nature that is inherently ethereal as they are made from water, float in our seas, and are disappearing rapidly.  The sculpture’s design brings to mind ideas of city planning, infrastructure, and the human movement occurring through these channels (all contributors to glacial melting), yet, as the piece floats by itself off the wall, it is also a disconnected fragment.  Through the use of metal, air, and our understanding of the grid, Smith sets up a system of contradictions to reference a seemingly solid structure, which could vanish tomorrow.

Don Gummer’s sculpture, San Ambrogio over Santa Maria delle Grazie (2004) excavates structural concepts from the past and reinvents them in a contemporary manner.  By superimposing the floor plans of two Milanese Renaissance churches, a matrical network emerges out Gummer’s reconfiguration of old ideas.  The overlapping 3 dimensional grids constructed from painted one-inch wooden rails, form a modular apparatus more congruent with pre-fabricated contemporary architecture than with the Vatican.  Gridded excavation is also utilized in Suzanne Stroebe’s freestanding sculpture, May I (2008).  Here the excavation comes in Stroebe’s collection of discarded objects – mostly fragments of wood one might find at a construction site.  The bits and pieces are upwardly assembled in a linear fashion calling to mind the figure while also referencing a torn electrical duct or a chunk of a building that has been blasted apart.

Two works by Ati Maier, Push (2007) and Level Out (2008), allude to movement amongst molecular structures in surrounding air particles.  Here, nebulous events and explosions burst and swirl above a landscape of colorful gridded planes, reminiscent of an early Atari game.  A confluence of elements between the terrestrial and atmospheric occurs that is coincidental and ceaselessly fluctuating at an atomic level.  Further organic organization intermixes with human activity in Darina Karpov’s small watercolors on paper, Untitled IV (sudden appearances into vanishing) (2008) and The Trickster (2009).  With exquisite detail and soft coloring, Ms. Karpov creates a biomorphic system that creeps and twists across the paper’s surface like kudzu taking over a tree or landscape.  Embedded within her leafy networks are miniscule landscapes, warring figures, and linear sprawls referencing both veins and rivers.  On a scale that shifts from micro to macro, these works speak of the unavoidable marriage between struggle and the structures of growth.

Miya Ando and Malado Baldwin conjure ideas of environments tainted by the synthetic in a post-human age.  Ando’s 04.09.51.38 (2009) fuses a minimalist landscape on a thin sheet of steel by adjusting the metal’s properties through lacquer, pigment, and patinas.  A sharp metallic horizon is formed carrying a carbonous black haze.  Baldwin’s ghostly abstracted vistas lack human presence of any kind except for the toxicity of their unnatural colors.

In this show of supposed landscapes, the question of what constitutes a landscape and where its boundaries are identified comes into question.  The work stems from the systems humans develop to navigate, control, and discern both their physical and perceptual domains as well as how these places intertwine with the design of nature.  In this way, a landscape is revealed where the natural world, the man-made realm, and the space of the mind coalesce.

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Lindquist’s painting is on offer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fifth Annual BAMart Annual Auction, online until 8pm on May 11th, an auction of over 150 Brooklyn-based and BAM -associated artists, also including, Rita Ackermann, Will Cotton, Alex Katz and Kehinde Wiley. Lindquist was the subject of a recent survey exhibition at BAM, and is also, meanwhile, curator of Hypothetical Landscapes, a group show at Janet Kurnatowski until May 31, featuring Miya Ando, Malado Baldwin, Don Gummer, Darina Karpov, Ati Maier, Dustin Schuetz, Rebecca Smith and Suzanne Stroebe.

This was an artcritical PIC in May 2009.

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Greg Lindquist: Industry
Elizabeth Harris

Landscape painting is usually a vehicle for observing the effects of weather, light, and space – in short, for thoroughly traditional goals that might seem sentimental in cutting-edge circles today. In a pair of Chelsea exhibitions, however, two contemporary painters, born 40 years apart, revitalize the venerable genre in completely different ways.

According to painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), his upbringing by actor parents cured him of any interest in theatrics, and the presumptuous claims made for abstract painting drove him towards representation. Drama of another kind, however, abounds in his intense, peculiarly non-picturesque scenes of urban and rural sites. Beneath his exacting technique lie original perceptions and ferociously focused thinking. His nearly 20 recent paintings at Betty Cuningham have a kind of straitened exuberance; they impress as radiant craft, but are moving, ultimately, for the independence and determination of his investigations.

Mr. Downes’ subjects tend be unbeautiful, overlooked scenes galvanized by their spatial extremes. The broad vistas of Texas scrublands stream across several canvases with very wide formats; elevated highways and bridges soar through others. Executed on site after numerous preparatory sketches, these paintings amount to portraits of spatial configurations rather then strictly of objects. Mr. Downs’ meticulous technique makes these marginal and forgotten sites seem elegant, almost crystalline in their detail, but their most compelling aspect lies in the way his “uncompromising empiricism,” as he calls it, leads to vertiginous renderings of space.

In the small painting “A Stop on the J Line (Alabama Avenue)” (2007), the sweep of an elevated subway line fills the breadth of the canvas, its curvature exaggerated as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. The naturalism of the midday illumination and the plethora of details – down to the rivets on some girders – vie with the extravagant proportions of the structure, which dwindles drastically towards either side of the canvas, slipping away from us like a rock falling down a sunlit well.

A similar drama animates the striking, nearly six-foot-wide “The Pulaski Skyway Crossing the Hackensack River” (2007). This painting, too, combines an Eakins-like fidelity of light and detail with vertiginous accelerations of space towards the sides. The elevated highway’s main span is not quite symmetrical on the canvas, giving rise to new intrigues: a shelf of land at the lower right corner edges towards the closer section of the span; a power plant, perched at the far shore of a shimmering plane of water, leans slightly as it reaches towards the bridge’s vast arc.

A photograph on the cover of the exhibition catalogue provides intriguing clues into the artist’s working methods. It depicts what must be the very same canvas, mounted on two French easels anchored side-by-side to the ground with guy-wires. (“Plein-air,” in this case, involves full-force wind.) Overhead arcs the Skyway, neck-twistingly high and close. Upon minute examination, every detail in the photograph – even a bent wire protruding through the foreground cement – reappears in the painting.

In his eloquent writings, Mr. Downes argues that such paintings are truthful records of perceived events. He has a point: Our eyes can focus on only one point at a time, and large portions of our brains are devoted to joining these separate perceptions into seamless, practical experiences. Linear perspective is, after all, a graphic convention, not a physical law, and it breaks down for wide-angle views. (To prove this, stand in the center of the gallery’s larger space, facing one of the long walls. Its horizontal top edge pitches downward as it approaches either corner – a pencil held horizontally at arm’s length demonstrates this – which means that a drawing of the entire wall must connect these opposing angles in a broad curve.)

Four very long paintings, 15 inches high and eight to ten feet long, depict a racetrack in the Texas scrub desert. There are no people in these dirt-blown scenes, but much evidence of human activity in the posts and railings dotting the barren vastness.

From about eight feet away, the paintings demand our physical engagement; we must turn our gaze to connect the multiple diagonals of tire tracks crossing the plain. At about four feet, we’re absorbed into an enveloping, shrub-by-shrub, plotting of the surface.

Like all of Mr. Downes paintings, they reflect a unique combination of aggressive conception and passive elaboration. Fervent perceptions of space enliven their broad outlines; details follow, filling in the story of each site exactly “as is;” colors add atmosphere and light. At various points in the exhibition, his colors provide something else: a compositional urgency of their own. In a 2007 painting of Atlantic Avenue, for instance, evanescent yellow-grays poignantly convey the sweeping, overhead weight of the AirTrain cement guideway. In a canvas from 2006, the tiny glimmer of flood lamp reflectors, and the escape to a pinkish sunlit wall through a doorway, vividly punctuate the somber hues of a huge artist’s studio. And in that painting of the Alabama Avenue subway station, masses of color dramatically build as the central knotting of girders perforated by notes of sky. Mr. Downes’ non-hierarchical compositions tend to preclude the interaction of drawing and color – with impulses of hue conditioning as well as responding to the forces of drawing – but at points his paintings hint at what Corot so wondrously achieved in his early studies of Roman aqueducts and Mount Soracte.

At Elizabeth Harris, nine paintings by Greg Lindquist (b. 1979) share this fascination with forlorn spaces. The desolation of his cityscapes, however, has a more romantic aspect – and, it’s soon apparent, an overarching political purpose. His distilled forms and subdued, almost mordant palette impart a wan massiveness to the crumbling hulks of abandoned factories and warehouses in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Red Hook sections. Most of the paintings describe the paler notes of the sky or the East River with metallic paint, which glimmers quietly over the sagging buildings and through skeletal structures. Plant life, such as it is, appears as stringy, khaki tufts at the edges of empty lots. Construction cranes, not humans, populate these worlds; in one painting they loom above a jagged wall like prison watch towers. Only the occasional corner of an apartment building or a splash of graffiti hints at living, human traffic.

The metallic paint, plus the 2-inch depth of the edges of the paintings, emphasizes the materiality of the work. The scenes feel ethereal rather than leaden, though, as if aerated by an otherworldly, radioactive wind. In “Decay of Industry, Industry of Decay” (2007), licks of metallic paint, showing through strokes of an unnamable gray, neatly sum up the effect of rippled water beneath building and vacant sky. In “The Similitudes of The Past and those of The Future” (2007), a broad streaking of yellowy gray – a forgettable note in any other context – convinces as the ground plane stretching tautly across the painting’s width.

As for those prolix titles: these add a political earnestness not immediately apparent in the brushstrokes themselves. They reveal how every work in fact involves an argument about urban development. The sardonically titled “Red Hook’s Residuum (New Products, New Ideas, New Designs)” 2007 depicts the soon-be-completed IKEA megastore with the same rawness as the decaying factories. “East River State Park (Endangered Site for Preservation, Nest Egg for Luxury)” (2007), a rendering of a Greenpoint construction site, makes clearer still the “green” message behind these grayed tones. The fervent political engagement vies intriguingly with the eerie desolation of the images, in which a new IKEA warehouse and abandoned sugar refinery can seem equally exotic.

Both Downes and Lindquist ply a route between the traditional and the postmodern. Neither has much use for the “composed” look of most art prior to 1960. Downes’ panoramas employ an all-over, all-encompassing space that may be his only borrowing from Abstract Expressionism. Lindquist’s strong suit is atmosphere and a social conscience. The two artists also share a decidedly non-postmodernist trait: a conviction about their goals.  Both aim unabashedly for something nobler than the elliptical irony of much of today’s art.

And in both artists’ paintings, sequences of colors sometimes impose their own character on simple events. My favorite moment of the two exhibitions occurs as a judge’s tower rises above the arid earth in one of Downes’ racetrack paintings. The humble structure – a welded steel armature topped by corrugated metal – faces us squarely across the parched landscape, its ridges caught in the raking light. This delicately striated square becomes the sole, resolute interruption of the relentless horizon. Nearby, three elements chatter: the roof of a spectator’s shelter, which hovers, a sliver of absorbent blue, above the raw tones of earth; its shadow, a even deeper, darker note beneath; and the purple-gray mass of hills miles away on the horizon, less regular in shape but equally anchored to the earth. The three pressures converse across a mysteriously vast distance, expanding its space more radically than the tire tracks plunging towards the horizon. What better evocation of the realities of color and line?

Downes until March 1 (541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-2772).

Lindquist until March 8 (529 W 20th St, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-9666).

This article was originally published as two separate reviews at the New York Sun in February 2008

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Stephanie Buhmann, James Kalm, Greg Lindquist and Jennifer Riley joined David Cohen to review Annie Leibovitz and Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum, Darina Karpov at Pierogi, and Mark Esper at Dam, Stuhltrager.

The post January 2007: Stephanie Buhmann, James Kalm, Greg Lindquist, and Jennifer Riley with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.