February 15 to March 30, 2013
558 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  917.226.3851

The title of Cora Cohen’s first exhibition at this relatively new gallery, The Responsibility of Forms, is taken from Roland Barthes late collection of critical essays on music, art and representation, written mostly during the 1970s, and first translated into English in 1991. Terry Eagleton described these essays as being preoccupied with “…those stray material fragments which elude the embrace of the sign, those gestures or signs which even the most elaborate semiology must fail to formalize. It is to move from text to texture.” This description is very apposite to Cohen’s approach to painting, in which she seeks to allow space for both mind and body, material and meaning, the semiotic and somatic, a common and indistinct border.

Consequently Cohen’s paintings are non-iconographic, by which I mean that they are not concerned with fixing an image for the purpose of exegesis. The visible world that surrounds us and from which of course we are not in anyway separate, is part of the paintings as a specific material quality such as shimmer, instability, materiality. Analogs to things in the world– a tree, some water – are not banished but left latent, like a word on the tip of your tongue, there and present, but not definable.

There are seven paintings in the show.  Powdered earth pigments (the ground of the paintings consisting often of the ground from beneath our feet) and graphite are combined with medium and applied in layers, sometimes as a fluid wash and at other times as dry brushed marks. The paint layers are thin and seem to both emit and trap light, recalling Helmut Federle’s paintings, with which Cohen also shares the use of earth colors. Graphite is preferred to black for its subtle range and its responsiveness to light – the shimmer it produces imparting a sense of instability.  This instability means that the viewer cannot ‘catch’ the painting from any particular viewpoint, the painting changing as the angle, incidence of light and position of the viewer changes.

Take Curtain8 Black, (2013), at 69 by 91 inches the largest painting in the exhibition: flashe, graphite and pigment are used on linen to achieve virtuosic yet unshowy gradations and accumulations of paint in thin layers that leave traces and marks from the artists process.  The orientation is horizontal and the traces vertical, implying a left/right movement. Drawing is always present in this process and is inseparable from the notion of painting, much as it is in a Joan Mitchell or a Franz Kline painting, and Cohen is without doubt at  the same level of subtlety, particularity and independence as these artists. In Small Drop Cloth Drawing 2013 this linear element, as could be expected from the title, is more explicit, but just as rooted in the act of using paint. That the paintings here recall and reference the achievements of Ab Ex is no problem.

Cohen uses combinations of gel and medium to gain a materiality for the paintings as opposed to using thick paint, and this allows the support — a natural linen — to remain visible as texture and color. Gesso is added when more absorbency and light are desired from the support. The gel can act to form shape and surface alike, in part determining whether the support comes to act as source to draw from or something to work against. In the gallery’s back room – if the door is closed, ask to see it – Curtain7, (2013) appears to have gel fingered across the entire surface in such a way that color – when applied in transparent glazes — establishes ambiguous spatiality.

Dirty/clean painting is a term Cohen uses without wanting to define the term – it’s simply a question to ask, nothing to do with hygiene yet everything to do with being embodied.  Dirty painting embraces this, clean distances it and puts a gloss on the world – something this artist clearly has no intention of doing.

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April 26 to May 26, 2012
558 West 21st Street at 11th Avenue
New York City, 917-226-3851

On December 12, 2008 in her ongoing Emailed text piece, “Cockshut Dummy,” Carol Szymanski quoted one of her French banker colleagues as saying “in this climate don’t go pissing against the wind.” This man added, “That’s not an easy one for a girl to understand.” Szymanski admitted, “they had me on that one.” Then, she added, “I said, ‘Oh yea now I get it.’” That conversation gave her part of the title for this exhibition. A visual artist who deals with the literal meanings of language, Szymanski originally was concerned with the smallest units of linguistic meaning. Her charcoal drawings from 1996 contain variations on the word “stand.” And the three brass horns in Him (2001-12) form the shape of that word. More recently, she has expanded her concern to larger units of language, to texts. To understand and describe a way of life, you must understand how people compose their sentences. And because she is interested, specifically in how bankers present themselves, she became a political artist.

When Szymanski started exhibiting, in the late 1980s, Marxist-based art criticism was all the rage. The only legitimate goal of art, so we were told endlessly, was to critique the social order. But since the galleries and the artists who exhibit in them are a very peripheral part of that system, it was always superabundantly obvious that studying art galleries is not the best way to teach you how capitalism functions. To learn that, you need to enter the financial world, which is what Szymanski did. When she became an upscale banker in London, she wrote about that experience, sending to a few lucky friends a series of texts and images (mostly taken with the camera of her mobile phone), which was transmitted by e-mail every evening at the end of her working day. Walking in The City, London’s equivalent of Wall Street Szymanski noticed the Evening Standard form of advertisements, which had catchy and ironic phrases on them to get people to buy the newspaper. “I always enjoyed reading these placards . . . .They were an odd form of poetry for me.” Hence the origin of the name “Cockshut Dummy”: “for the word Evening, I chose cockshut which means evening twilight and dummy for the word Standard.”

Szymanski’s We Want We Said Wanted More (2010-2012), taken from “Cockshut Dummy,” includes many fragments of conversations from her banker-colleagues. (No image accompanies this text.) Like the words in Stephen Mallarmé’s prose poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”) or in Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974), with its juxtaposition of quotations from Hegel and Jean Genet, hers are not easy to decipher. Szymanski’s banker’s world is opaque to us art writers as, no doubt, our concerns are to them. If you want an account in plain English of what bankers are doing, then you should read The Nation. We Want We Said Wanted More is a work of art, which is to say that its relationship to the economic and political history it draws upon is elliptical, subtle and indirect. To fully comprehend Szymanski’s achievement, you need to read and view “Cockshut Dummy.” Soon that cumulative work of art will be completed and published, and so that will be possible. Meanwhile, this marvelously suggestive mini-retrospective, which speaks in deeply original terms to our present aesthetic and political concerns provides a good introduction to the ambitious oeuvre of a great mid-career artist, whose art deserves (and soon will surely receive) close sustained discussion.

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November 3 to December 10, 2011
558 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  917.226.3851

Arizona-raised Charles Andresen – who has been painting under the radar in New York City for the last 20 years – has been given the inaugural show at Guided by Invoices, a new gallery in Chelsea.  The exhibition demonstrates just how deep New York’s abstract painting talent pool is.  Densely packed, colorful, and rhythmic, Andresen’s acrylic blobs jostle for position within each composition of these eight modestly sized paintings.   Including paintings from 2001 to the present, curator Chris Byrne has indexed Andresen’s aesthetic from the raucous to the sublime.

These are tirelessly jubilant gestural abstract paintings.  The excessive pile-ups of thrown paint splats yield so many successful accidents they seem to rewrite the unwritten laws of action painting.  Andresen’s quirky, mediated process can be likened to making an omelet – the base, pigmented gel, is poured on a smooth surface to receive the fixins: streams of colored lines and dots.  But instead of folding the omelet, it is scooped open-face by spatula and flung, creating striking effects and patterns upon impact with the canvas.  Andresen prohibits himself from any further manipulations on the canvas support.  He calls these gooey paint assemblages “Throw Paintings.”

In the Baroque composition Gelb (2007), Andresen’s finely tuned, in-the–moment paint decisions make for an effortless viewing pleasure.  Our eye just keeps sailing in and out of this marbled, greenish yellow surface with blue veining and Polke-esque orange dots.  And Andresen easily demonstrates how gestural surface activity can produce sudden illusions of depth.  David Reed wrote that Dave Hickey told him “Liquidity is the new depth.”  For Andresen, liquefied chaos coagulates to serve an emergent lyrical narrative, within the structure of an allover field.   And in light of the current de Kooning retrospective at MOMA, Andresen’s paintings underscore the ongoing significance of those incisive 1948 black and white enamels, languid paint gushes of the 60 and 70’s, and soaring white cut pastel ribbons from 1981-85.

Andresen also adulterates the material excesses associated with Larry Poons, the bizarrely underappreciated Stanley Boxer and Jules Olitski, particularly his iridescent, taste-bending, luxuriant lathers circa 1990.  In Densities of Intensities (2009), Andresen’s distanced hand and insistently impure process serve to heighten the phantasmagorical nature of this image and deepen space.  Using the weighty physicality of adjacently layered paint blobs to create color contrast, Andresen builds a web that both frames and connects multifocal events.  Peppered throughout, Cheshire stripes and toadstool dots stretch and shrink gesture and space like mirages on a desert highway.  Striated ribboning characteristic of Murano glass pulses through the acrylic paint, injecting velocity, directionality and warped perspective into the forms. Glassy greens glisten, and an enamel-like powder blue punches holes into the sky.   This dense assembly of raucous color, texture and evocative form would make a sympathetic pairing with Daniel Weiner’s riveting polymorphous sculptures were reviewed  here at artcritical recently.

Drenched in rich browns, the tonality of O’odham Rhythm (2001) is a welcome respite from the abundance of color in the rest of the exhibition.  Like a box of assorted chocolates, a brocade of caramel toffees, mochas and swirling dark and milk concoctions spins out from the opulent bilateral draping top and center.  And Bear Dance (2010), likely influenced by the Native American ceremonial dances that Andresen observes regularly, is a vibrant relief of concretions that provide hall-of-mirror distortions and melted glyphs.  That Andresen creates eye candy is undeniable.  In Frozen Jesters (2011) twisting lanes of candy cane stripes that allude to brushstrokes appear to converge with accumulations of gum-splatted, swirling peppermint rounds.

Some of these surfaces seem to want to jump the canvas for a larger one.  I for one hope Andresen finds a way to “throw” a few big ones up as well next time around.

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