Pierrette Bloch’s first New York solo exhibition since 1951 is long overdue, to say the least. Bloch has had a quietly vigorous exhibition history in Europe, mainly in France, for sixty years. She has been seen as a progenitor of the Support/Surface group and was friendly with some of its members, but also kept her distance.  She is also a longtime admirer and friend of Pierre Soulages, the French painter who has made black paintings exclusively for most of his career.

Like Soulages, Bloch has only used black for many years, but unlike his predominantly oil on canvas works that often swell to the heroic scale of Abstract Expressionism, Bloch has shown a penchant for humble materials and more extrapolated formats.  Most frequently mounted directly on white gallery walls, simply but with great elegance, her  signature works consist of horizontally-oriented lines of bound and curled horse hair and a continuing series of strips of relatively inexpensive white paper dabbed or dotted with ink. These have been quite widespread in European museums recently.  In Summer 2007, for example, Le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris displayed three long ink drawings by Bloch, one per wall, that occupied a room in the permanent collection.

Her apparent transversals of standard categories have allowed Bloch to work in a more suggestive terrain, where, as is customary in much French contemporary abstraction, technique and material are foregrounded. The work often appears a lyrical species of notation or calligraphy or even the graphic equivalent of mime, which owes perhaps to her admiration of the work of Samuel Beckett. Recalling  that writer’s strained reports of event and monologue , Bloch’s spare, inky ruminations in black blotches populate sheets of paper like unreadable messages or obscure musical scores.

Her earliest work, once she abandoned student figuration, involved gray, white and black paint applied to found wrapping paper. By the late 1960s Bloch had begun using horsehair, wound in long strands or collected into rectangles, uniting the linear aspects of drawing with the physical reality of sculpture.  One hair sculpture,Sculpture de crin (no. BE7) 1988, in Haim Chanin’s exhibition, telegraphs a cross-associational response, from landscape horizontality, to a line of text, to early weaving.

Bloch has workspace in her studio apartment on an upper floor of an old building in Paris’ 15th arrondissement. All of her exhibitions are meticulously planned in advance. Bloch builds small models based on the proportions of the given environment, and using miniature replicas of all of her work, determines the placement. This was the case in the current exhibition as well. Bloch’s extreme care about how her work is seen overcomes the main drawback of this venue’s very limited space.

Still, there are a good two dozen works that represent the breadth of her output, and give a full yet episodic introduction. It is notable that earlier ink blotch drawings on rectangular paper are included, each with a very individual personality and presence, dating back as far as 1975.  I would pit any of them against any drawing by another artist of this period. They are comparatively terse, and betray a debt to Henri Michaux.  But where Michaux displays an organic continuity, Bloch’s drawings have tension that plays each individual mark off of its ensemble.  For example, Encre sur papier (no.555) 1999 consists of twenty-five very black slippery-seeming ink-marks and one apparently accidental ink droplet. The only row with more than four marks has one that might also be a droplet. In one case a mark runs into another in the row below it. The marks seem fairly orderly, but uncomfortable at their edges, trapped in their own skin as they distribute themselves across the page.

Bloch’s latest series on view are paintings executed on blocks of Isorel board, a kind of homosote, that covers its pulpy, brown surface with brushed black ink.  Once again, the works seem to examine the philosophic dimension of markmaking. Encre sur Isorel (no. 525) 2008, partially covers its ground with long, tilting vertical strokes that reminded me equally of counting off strokes and the way Van Gogh painted rain, as well as a defaced tablet.

The exhibition is a small testament to the efficacies of the late modernist project, and to a kind of reductionism that is not exclusionary in any way but in fact serves to expand metaphor towards a global and historical reach, while remaining communicatively personal and quite human.

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February 22 – April 26, 2008

“Draw In,” the first solo show in New York of Argentine artist Eduardo Santiere, comprised approximately twenty works on paper. Although he lives in Buenos Aires, Santierre is familiar with the American art world—he received his MFA in 2003 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and last year, he participated in a selection of artists at the Drawing Center in New York. His drawings incorporate pencil, colored pencil, and surface scratches, which give the pieces their sense of immediacy and networks of colorful densities. He makes use of a delicate, intricate idiom, in which knobs and knots of color hover in the paper’s empty space. Much of the imagery seems star-struck; viewers have the feeling that they are looking at a kind of intimate astronomy, in which planets and galaxies move about as they build centers of energy. Scratches on the paper add the slightest sense of relief, giving the picture its hard-to-recognize yet palpable sense of depth. Despite the fact that Santiere’s world seems to be cosmic, it is also personal and private; meaning is established indirectly—it is as if the drawings were whispering to his audience, even if from an overwhelming distance.

The drawings are not so much formal as they are inspired. One senses that Santiere’s highly particular visual language stands as the theme connecting one work with the next; however, the works’ idiosyncrasies result in a highly contemporary pastiche of allusions. In some of the pieces, the artist’s audience feels as though they were confronted with a spacelike imagery that relates to celestial objects, their motions, positions, and sizes. In others, viewers may see a map of urban hubs, futuristically referred to as small, round masses of color, whose relatedness seems both random and schemed. Still other references might include a nod toward the microscopic, as if the nodes of color were cells or viruses. There is no central organizing principle, but this is what gives Santierre’s works their random, postmodern effect. The gaps of space, as well as the intricate effects, remain central to Santiere’s art.

The meaning of the works, both individually and in groups, seems to grow over time. Otro fragmento del futuro (2007) has small globules of color—blue, green, and yellow—that connect and disperse in equal amounts, sometimes rubbing up against each other, sometimes fleeing contact. Perhaps the artist is referring to a map of planets we have not yet discovered; there is a buoyancy to the graphite lines and points of color that suggests a subtle euphoria on the part of the artist. It must be said that the interpretations being made here read Santiere’s wholly abstract systems as possessing intentionality, which may force limitations upon a vocabulary intended to run free of specific explanation. But part of the pleasure associated with Otro fragmento del Futuro and other drawings is seeing what kind of sense may be extracted from their stylistic extravagance.

In Bio-construction 5 (2008), the overall pattern might resemble a work by Cy Twombly, but while Santiere scribbles, he also builds up nests of forms. Here the individual components of his knots have an exterior that is a bit like woven cloth; the patterns of line criss-cross in beautiful detail. They are organic in shape and build up pockets of meaning, in which the content may be looked at over time. Given the intensity of their aspect, Santiero’s drawings compel the involvement of the viewer, who both accepts and attempts to make sense of their value as they are. Part of the pleasure of experiencing his art stems from allowing the imagery to float alone in its constructions. The orientation for Boom (2007) is vertical; the pattern of marks, seen from a distance, suggests constellations of stars. Detail reveals conglomerates of forms, which give the composition its scattered density. Perhaps we are watching a galactic explosion; although the piece is relatively small (30 1/8 by 22 1/4 inches), its implications are cosmic. Thus Santiere builds grand visions from bits and pieces of color, which communicate his view of the sublime.

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