In 1980, not long after he moved into his basement apartment below ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, the painter Robert Goldman — who then was known as Bobby G — began a series of monumental figure portraits of the young people who lived in the neighborhood. This artistic vision culminated, in 1984, in a 50-foot-long, 10-foot-tall mural painted guerrilla-style on the cinder-block facade of a burned-out tenement at the corner of Delancey and Suffolk streets (now the site of a monstrous mega-development). The paintings have remained more or less unseen until this month, when a selection went on view at Hionas Gallery in Crown Heights. After more than 35 years they remain fresh and energetic, “portraying the youth of the Lower East Side,” as Goldman says in his artist statement, “with their most powerful inner essence projected out into the world beyond.”

February 17 to March 31, 2018, 1426 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. Open Saturdays only, 12-6 pm

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Rhodes, who began his career in London, committed to New York almost two years ago after years of painting, exhibiting and critical writing in Berlin, Barcelona, and other European cities. His criticism appears regularly at artcritical and The Brooklyn Rail, and he’s also written for Artforum. I met with him at the gallery to discuss the developments in his work over the last few years.

MARY JONES: You’ve titled your show “Between the Days,” which is the also title of one of the paintings, the others remaining untitled, with the date and city of completion listed on every painting. What’s the reference?

DAVID RHODES: The title refers obliquely to time and recall, between one moment and another. And also, as the paintings quite often are completed in a day, between one painting and the next and the next.

You share a number of things with On Kawara: a painting completed in a single day, the use of black, frequent travel, and a consistency of process from painting to painting. Do you feel a connection to his work?

Rhodes: I do feel identification with his making a painting that is clearly about the day it was made. For me, that moment in time is important to acknowledge, and for years I’ve listed the specific date and city on every canvas. I don’t work on pieces simultaneously, so it’s a means of marking time, and although the paintings aren’t about that specific day and place, they’re subject to those circumstances, and because I’ve moved around so much, it’s important for me to keep this in mind.

I found Kawara’s Guggenheim exhibition last year very moving. It was interesting to consider the choices he made in painting the numerals and letters, which seemed to change over time, and in each painting one could see he was making very careful decisions about how they looked. There was a format, but in that format the paintings didn’t remain the same or become stereotypical. Inside the box made for each painting, he always put a sheet of newspaper from that day, so they must be intended to act as metonymic as well. Although they might read as formal and neutral, they’re rooted, both conceptually and by process, in everyday life. There’s a connection to mortality in this passage of time. I can identify with this, in and out of the studio.

One thing that’s very different from Kawara is the scale of your new paintings. How has scale changed your work?

The scale alters the way it’s possible to relate to the painting physically and conceptually. Because the space of the painting has become large enough to enter imaginatively, it makes a very different physical and emotional impact. It’s not a question of more complexity so much as a different kind of intimacy.

Could you describe your process?

The actual process of making contributes to how the paintings appear. There’s a degree of given structure. I make them in a way that allows movement and spontaneity, in that speed — the creation of circumstance — rather like a dance movement, creates something through the way it happens. The way the paintings are taped allows for each section to be made consecutively without too much deliberation. The vertical lines are different widths, but they’re always vertical, and from one section to the next go in opposite directions, like cross hatch. They are usually, but not always, done from left to right, and as each section is painted, the tape is removed, and in response to seeing that the next section is made. There’s no planning it all out beforehand. It’s a question of responding to the relationships as they appear. The reason for this apparent economy is that it’s possible to make comparisons to the repetitions and differences in each painting and from one to the next.

You’ve written about the work of Amy Feldman, and there are some interesting comparisons to be made. Her paintings are also very immediate, spontaneous, and done in a day. Feldman is well known for having many “rehearsal” drawings, a preparatory practice on paper before she approaches the canvas. Is this part of your process?

No, kind of the opposite. It’s important not to know what the outcome might be, and the tension it produces is transferred to the work. It’s a case of making these paintings in the moment and not knowing. But, because of the economy of means and the repetitions, a kind of armature is created for the differences to establish themselves. It’s those differences, the breadth of different emotional values or different formal incidents that makes them interesting. I paint myself out of the paintings.

Feldman is known to sharply edit her work, to allow failure into her process, as revisions aren’t possible. Do your paintings ever fail? Are you able to make revisions?

They do fail, but not so often, and there is a possibility for revision, though in a very limited way. It’s usually an adjustment rather than a wholesale change. If there’s a line that seems superfluous or a transition of space that doesn’t feel interesting, I can paint it out, and hope that it works. But I accept the accidents or failures; it’s a case of “Fail, fail again, fail better,” as Beckett said.

The color black has so many connotations; urban life and industrialization, as well as transcendence and negation. Are you using black metaphorically?

Not exactly, but the viewer will project what they will, and that’s fine. Before these paintings I was using a full range of color, and I felt the relationships that color offered, and its relationship to structure was such a subject in itself. I wanted to work in a way in which color wasn’t about its relationship with other colors. Even though I use black as a color, it’s more about light. In the current Philip Guston exhibition of paintings from 1957 to 1967, he reduced the color to black adjusted by white, so producing grey, and he talked about not wanting to use seductive qualities of color, but to work with light. I feel similarly.

Malevich formulated the black square to signify an absolute rejection of any possibilities for pictorial representation in favor of pure expression. Do you identify with this kind of abstraction?

Indirectly. The paintings have forms in them, but they’re really about relationships, either in time, or in space. They’re about the disjunction of different spaces and different moments and how these impact emotionally, and the implications of this intellectually, and how it might factor in a world view. But these issues arise because of the painting, rather than the other way around.

Can you describe this further?

I feel as if I follow the paintings. They’re not describing ideas that I have a priori, or illustrating something I desire to manifest through painting. I feel that they amount to a dialog, and in this they are smarter than I am. They’re not an expression of my ego: they’re interesting for me; they move me. I find the paintings of interest so I make more, and they surprise me. The relationships they establish and the resonance of the day-to-day world of abstract ideas are also very interesting. The issues come through the painting. They produce a philosophical position and so also reflect one.

Is it important to you that there be a feeling of urgency in your work?

It seems necessary. It’s how the paintings feel. With a different desire they’d be decorative.

How so?

They’d be passive. They could be viewed as decorative if it were in a violent way, as the decorative aspects of Matisse have been described, there’s pleasure, but there’s an urgency also.

The surfaces of your paintings are very straightforward, there’s no enhancement. It’s a surface that identifies its elements; it doesn’t transcend its materials, it underscores them. Is this in the service of immediacy?

Yes. It’s a very specific surface. It’s neither stained for layered, it’s somewhere in-between. It’s a resistant kind of surface, and it’s not a surface that has a kind of “drama.” My paintings don’t have an overt element of craft, they’re harder surfaces. They’re painted like a wall.

Is this a connection to the black paintings of Frank Stella?

When I was at art school, early on I came across a Hollis Frampton photograph of Stella kneeling in front of a painting with a house painting brush on his way to completing some rectangular concentric lines, and it made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t feel at that moment I could enter into expressionism or conceptual minimalism, there seemed to be too many assumptions that I didn’t yet connect to. But when I looked at these black paintings, they seemed to have an emotion, without relying on transcendence or a narrative. They’re pragmatic in their making, and they inspired me early on. I found myself returning to something that has a relationship to those paintings without being imitative, or admiring. My current paintings actually feel like a critique of his work, in the sense in those early black paintings, he wanted to move space out of the paintings evenly, and I would like space to be in the painting unevenly.

How does writing about art affect your practice?

It feels as if it accesses a different energy, and a different aspect of my relationship to the work that I see. In the craft of writing, ideas are produced. Actually, in much the same way as in painting, something takes over to a degree. In writing about say a group of paintings by another artist, unexpectedly different ideas connect, different associations are made that couldn’t happen any other way. It happens to a degree with conversational thinking, but in the isolated form of writing a text, it’s surprising how things occur. The craft and process of writing gives something back. It’s expansive. Also, it’s political in that you choose what you write about and you can support art that you think is worthwhile, neglected or misrepresented. I gave a lot of talks in galleries and museums in the UK before leaving for Berlin because people were speaking about artists I respected in ways that I thought were unacceptable, artists like Blinky Palermo and Mary Heilmann. Their work was important to me and it needed more than just some facts reiterated about the work for the audience.

Tell me what are you reading at the moment?

The collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop; I’m always returning to Proust, and Light Years (1975) by James Salter. I’m reading this last one particularly slowly because I like it so much. His writing is so beautiful, and there’s something about the style that’s moving and provocative. Economical, but also endlessly sensual and thoughtful.

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Despite both coming out of the postminimalism of the 1970s and a close association with the poststructuralists of the Tel Quel circle, French/American sculptor Alain Kirili is at heart a romantic. His aesthetic of “incarnatedness” springs from kinship with the creative principles of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. A student of calligraphy in his young years in Paris, the “drunken” brush has long informed the whirling linear dimension in his work. A spare yet voluptuous three-piece show, one for each room, at Hionas Gallery offers an essay in the notion of drawing in space. To view this installation is to be enlisted as a participant in a freely improvised choreography: a dance to the music of time.

Until May 21 at 124 Forsyth Street, between Broome and Delancey streets, New York City, (646) 559‐5906

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September 25 to October 18, 2015
581 Woodward Avenue, between Menahan and Grove streets
Ridgewood, 718 600 9417

The recent arrival of Valentine Gallery to Ridgewood adds to a growing gallery scene there that includes Famous Accountants, English Kills and Outpost. Fred Valentine, himself an accomplished painter, organizes a program of exhibitions with a bias toward painting, and this, the first exhibition in his new space, presents new abstract paintings by Bobbie Oliver. Though the space is modest in scale its high ceilings readily accommodate larger works. The largest painting here is Teal Daylight (2010) at 63 x 68 inches (it is also the earliest work here) while the smallest, a dark green painting on a sidewall of its own, is Untitled (2015).

Greens are often regarded as difficult colors in abstract painting, but not so for Oliver, nor for the dedicatee of one of the paintings, the much missed Hudson of Feature, Inc. It was in the window of Hudson’s gallery that I first saw a painting of Oliver’s in 2012, a large triptych that recalled the touch and directness of Chinese landscape painting, even from across Allen Street. So, Forever, for Hudson (#1) is a good place to begin contemplating Oliver’s work. It is characteristic of her oeuvre, technically and chromatically. Paint is applied, often wet into wet, and then manipulated using a variety of different methods, some discernable, some not. For example the darker green shape to the left of center appears to mirror its upper and lower halves vertically, though not exactly, as a result of folding of the canvas. Unusually, in this instance, it is a cut piece from a larger work mounted on a smaller canvas, exactly to size. Oliver always preps her canvases with a couple of coats of gesso as this enables a specific surface quality that she desires, and that makes the paintings distinct from color field stain painting that tended to exploit raw canvas. What she achieves is something akin to the immediacy of gouache or watercolor. Avoiding the potential grandiosity of gesture, Oliver imbues the painting with a practical sense of responsiveness, both to the materiality of paint and the fluctuating light of color.

In Teal Daylight, pouring, and blotting off, with newspaper draw attention to the surface of the painting in the way condensation does to a windowpane. Again, Oliver eschews grand sweeping gesture in favor of slow spilling movement, distributing paint compositionally in ways that determine a fluid, shifting pictorial space. The openness of method does not diminish the mystery of the final configurations. There is closely restricted color range, but it would be misleading to think of this as a monochrome painting as there is nothing anti-compositional about the piece. The shapes and tonal play recall shadows and reflections, or clouds and sheets of rain. But these shapes are not literal representations of things, eschewing the tradition of perspective and its assumptions.

Another recurring color choice for Oliver is the red/blue/violet of Under + Over (2012). Acknowledgment of the edge of the painting by cutting off shapes adds an almost geometric contrast to the flows of color across the rectangle. The looseness of painterly facture is impressive when considering how precise the relationships end up being. There is a rightness or dynamic balance that arrives like the sound of a chord in relation to its constituent notes.

We have another opportunity to view Oliver’s paintings at Hionas Gallery in a show that opened October 8 where she has been placed in an interesting pairing with the sculptor Alain Kirili. Both artists bring to my mind the legacy of Jackson Pollock: Oliver, by focusing on the fluid materiality of paint and its possibilities for pictorial space; Kirili by drawing in space in a way that is linear, punctuated and cursive like the drawing in late Pollock.

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David Rhodes: Schwarzwälde at Hionas Gallery

September 8 to October 13, 2013
124 Forsyth Street, south of Delancey Street
New York City, 646-559-5906

The range of effects and the nuances of affect presented by the paintings of David Rhodes would be remarkable enough in an artist who set himself few restraints.  And yet – initially at least – the defining characteristic of this New York debut exhibition of the Berlin-based British painter is the stringency and starkness of its pictorial system.

On raw canvases that follow the same tripartite division, in a deadpan application of one acrylic black, Rhodes arranges three sets of parallel stripes.  These vary considerably in thickness but – in the painting process – the black is clearly worked against strips of masking tape of maybe just two or three widths.  And as (rather like a woodcut) it is the exposed raw canvas rather than the acrylic strokes that registers as the signifying stripe, the variables are like those of barcodes—at once infinite and uniform.

The gestalt in each image resulting from this ubiquitous strategy somewhat resembles a corporate logo of the 1970s: reading from left to right, the three sets go top left to bottom right, back to top right, down to bottom right.  In one or two paintings of sparse population and thin exposed stripe we can almost read “VA” allowing for the absence of the A’s crossbar and the doubling of its and the V’s shared inner diagonal.  But generally his hieroglyph eludes the Latin alphabet, while seeming alphabet-like – a kind of semiotic reverse, in this respect, of Al Held’s Alphabet series, seen last spring at Cheim & Read.  To those of Rhodes’ and this author’s age and upbringing the closest association might be the London Weekend Television logo that, tellingly, incorporated its initials and a map of the River Thames in animation.  These paintings imply movement within insistent stasis.

Art historically the most striking resemblance is to Frank Stella of the period of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor although, again topically, the early grid works of Sean Scully (on view at the Drawing Center) are another apt point of reference.  Rhodes actually occupies expressive territory closer to the later works of both those artists while retaining the formal rigor of their earlier efforts.  Thinking about him this way helps us locate his “minimalism” as proto, or post, in the sense that the restraints of his system serve emotional rather than purely cerebral ends.  His art is one of economy rather than reduction per se (is modernist not minimalist as some might put it).

There is unmistakable warmth to the paintings, despite their pared-down qualities.  This results from what could be dismissed as studio contingencies and yet feels intentional, possibly even integral.  Tolerated rub and burr lend surfaces the feel of (again) woodcut despite the undisguised materiality of canvas and absented tape. But even if Rhodes were able to program a Roxy Paine-like robot to dispatch his paintings for him, several ensuing perceptual phenomena would continue to enrich – to mitigate and complicate – his streamlined modus operandi.

There is the effect, for instance, of proximate bands of black triggering retinal sensations of other colors so that in one painting there might seem to be alternating black and blue.  Then there are the disconcerting twists and tapers, in multiple possibilities, where one set of diagonals jar with another in what New Yorkers might want to call the Flatiron effect.  The differing canvas sizes seen in the close quarters of Hionas’s Lower East Side gallery and the inclusion in the back room of a couple of works on paper bring home the crucial variables of scale and support in determining the impact of this reduced vocabulary.  There is a lot that can be said within strict adherence to a format.

It’s instructive to compare Rhodes with fellow Brit Ian Davenport whose current show of sumptuous stripes at Paul Kasmin is itself fortuitously timed with Ameringer McEnery Yohe’s overview of the perennially scintillating Gene Davis.  Davenport juxtaposes skillfully held-in-check chromatic brilliance with the flourish of exuberantly unpredictable puddles in what nonetheless seem like exquisitely orchestrated marbling as the paint oozes out of his pipes of color.  Returning to Rhodes, after this over the top pop, is rather like listening to Bach violin sonatas after a Baroque opera.  But as with Bach, you soon hear as many voices and as much emotion.

Gallery hours: 1 to 6 pm, Wednesday to Sunday 

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February 21 to March 24, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (646) 559-5906

In her first solo exhibition at Hionas Gallery, in this Tribeca-based gallery’s recently inaugurated second space on the Lower East Side,  Marina Adams confirms her position as a player of significance in contemporary abstract painting.  A baker’s dozen of sassy, sexy, exuberant pictures exude freshness and intelligence in strong and equal measure.

The paintings range in scale from just over six foot square to a diminutive 12 by 12 inches, and in format they bounce around from loosely configured concentric circles to what can be described as close-ups of deflated beach balls.  There are also jigsaws of limb-like forms or of flag-like forms.  Uniting these formats are vibrant color, eccentric geometry, insistently handmade lines, and a kind of good-humored ambivalence between spatial depth and pictorial flatness.  Her relationship to shape is strongly redolent of Harriet Korman but her particular stance as a fuser of soft-edged geometry and angst-free art informel entails a distinct set of pleasures and queries.

Adams has a quietly audacious sensibility.  Her chirpy palette eschews primaries, generally preferring pastels and nursery hues.  While avoiding brash juxtapositions and gently pacing color contrasts across the composition, she enjoys teasing the eye with mild dissonances and skewed tonal shifts.  She has a predilection for games with isolated texture: her surface can get brushy or rubbed in one color segment while remaining smooth in a neighbor, as in 40 Watt Moon (2010).  The combined effect of these tendencies introduces almost trompe l’oeil intimations of perspectival recession at the very instant of enforcing awareness of the support. In Spin, (2010) for instance, two of the six scarf-like triangulated color segments that meet at a center – the pink and the burgundy – each have two tones within them, suggesting forms folding or bending back upon themselves, thus implying flutter (and with it, spatial depth).

At ease and optically generous as these paintings are, they are actually radically cropped because gestalt depends upon something beyond the canvas itself.  The edge of the picture, indeed, rarely defines the composition, even less the boundary of an individual shape. This imparts narrative and metaphor to works that would otherwise want to feel present tense and literal.

Adams’ target-like compositions, like Space Embrace, (2011) are almost programmatic in the way they soften, “feminize” even (her bulls eye is difficult not to read as a breast) that trope of modernist hard-edge.  But even in her more personal and complex compositions there are traces of the hard edge softened.  Her use of texture and sgraffito, the way forms are given a shadow, the pentimento-like continuation of an outline beyond the form it describes – in Coming Through Strange, (2011) for instance, the title piece of the show, a Robert Mangold-recalling gesture – all point to a tenderizing of emphatic or clean cut geometric abstraction.  But rather than suggesting Adams as some kind of soft neo-romantic, these strategies come across more as “post hard,” as if her relationships to Mangold, Kenneth Noland (targets) or Ellsworth Kelly are akin to Eva Hesse’s to Donald Judd.

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