April 7 to May 14, 2017
221 Madison Street, between Rutgers and Jefferson street
New York City, reginarex.org

If the first impression of this exhibition is that these are standard monochrome painting that would be understandable. The ten works on display, most of which are two by three feet, are dark gray and harbor nothing we’d call images. But give them some time and they take on a very different aspect, as Haynes orchestrates light and dark pigment to form, as the press release stated, an “investigation into the painted illusion of light”. Most of her canvases are demarcated by a left/ right blended fade between various blacks and shades of gray creating a luminous effect. Brush marks inhere at the top and bottom of the canvas, tactile reminders of her painting process that also function as painterly highlights. With Haynes’s emphasis emphatic use of chiaroscuro the paintings evoke dawn and twilight and exude elegiac, romantic atmosphere.

Nancy Haynes emerged as a painter at the beginning of the 1970s. At that time much was made of the “death of painting” but in distinction to that discourse there was, for a number of artists, the conviction that painting—and its historical mode—deeply mattered. It’s hard to imagine that urgency today but abstraction at that time wasn’t so much a stylistic choice as a commitment with the gravitas of political belief or religion. Like older generation painters Robert Ryman and Marcia Hafif, Haynes keeps the faith even as she reworks the orthodoxies of that most severe form of painting—Minimalist monochrome—to her own ends. This show embodied a fascinating tension between Haynes’s half century commitment to the concrete specifics of material and process connoted by monochrome painting and her own interests in metaphor, poetry, philosophy and pictorial abstraction.

While it is possible to view these paintings as pictures of light, Haynes is also deeply interested in intrinsic material qualities of paint. The sides of the panels are often painted in tune with the picture front. Haynes adjusts the matt and gloss of her painting mediums such that the surface reflects more or less light depending on the angle of vision, generating a phenomenological analogue for Haynes’s rendered shading.

And even as one is persuaded that light is being rendered in Haynes’s paintings, the work never reaches the threshold of a convincing illusion of light. Nor is it possible to say if Haynes’s light is of the interior or landscape variety—indeed each painting is so adjusted, that, like the interchangeable image of the duck-rabbit, Haynes’s portrayal of light alternates between atmospheric gloaming and the deflection of light from architectural surfaces. Oddly, rather than making the light seem general or vague with prolonged observation the light in each painting becomes more particular. In final consideration, the light of Haynes paintings is specific only to her paintings.

Through a metaphysical sleight of hand Haynes’s paintings succeed through their ultimate failure to create illusion or to portray. With the collapse of these pictorial conventions it is the paintings themselves that are left to develop a related but independent vision of light. Haynes exploits the insight that paintings are, in essence objects that variously filter, absorb and reflect light. Haynes signifies light in her paintings even as actual light in the room is required to see them. The specific critical term for this recursion of form embedded with its facsimile is Mise-en-abyme. Indeed, one of the paintings in the show bears that title.

For Haynes light is both the dynamic and the matter of painting: abstraction and concreteness. This has been a long running idea for her, as can be seen with her use of glow-in-the-dark pigment in works begun in the early ‘70s. While those luminescent paintings were firmly grounded in the discourse of monochromatic painting of their period, subsequent works advance a very different form of abstraction, one that Haynes constructs through distilling her observations of light. With her latest show Haynes entwines very different conceptions of abstract painting. We can enjoy at one and the same moment her love of brush and oil paint, her personal poetics and a philosophic reverie on the mechanics of light in painting.

The post Abstract and Concrete: The Monochromatic Paintings of Nancy Haynes appeared first on artcritical.

Over the last three decades, Nancy Haynes has developed a body of abstract work that utilizes a painting’s inherent materiality to cause a surface to shift from being a plane that is looked at, to becoming an area that is peered into.  Visually, her work calls to mind Gerhard Richter’s mechanized methods of applying paint to a surface and isolating brush marks, along with Brice Marden’s minimalist sensibility and handling of edges.  With her current show, “Dissolution,” Haynes presents a series of paintings that she refers to as “dark matter.”  In these paintings, darkness becomes a facilitator of light as Haynes employs a palette of terrestrial ores, impenetrable blacks, arctic blues, and steely grays to subtly shift, float, dissolve, and illuminate, all the while coaxing contemplation.

The velvety surfaces of Haynes’ small rectangular works are constructed by overlapping nuanced fields of color thinly painted with a wide, flat brush and straight movements.  In most cases, the color fields hold a directional light that transpires either from left to right, right to left, or from the center outward, with their brushed margins stopping just short of the painting’s edge.  In this way, a void is suggested while the veil of the hovering chromatic plane thwarts one’s entrance.  The effect is similar to peering into a Ganzfeld experiment or a dense fog that has trapped in it the ambient hues of the oncoming night.

In works like Shadow Syndrome (all works 2008), where a crisp glacial blue illuminates from right to left over a sea of piney grays, and Syntax where a smoky green-gold haze fades in and out of a richly saturated background, the separation between the planes of color is more pronounced making these works, at first glance, visually more striking than others in the gallery.  However, this is not a show for the impatient viewer and when given more than a glance it’s easy to become infatuated with the delicate tonal shifts of leaden grays in a painting like Liminal Monologue or the dark light emanating from the temperature shifts in the black on black painting, Echo.

As one grasps the combination of flatness, space, and light in Haynes’ paintings, the subtleties of her sophisticated palette and tonal gradations reveal a seductive luminosity.  Through this examination one’s mind empties out, leaving oneself in a contemplative state.  Or perhaps better put, one becomes fully engaged in the moment– peering simply into the painting’s surface while marveling at the unique and nuanced light held by each work.

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