January 30 to March 9, 2019
121 Orchard Street, between
New York Cirty, galerierichard.com

“What are we seeing?” That is the fundamental question that always seems to bedevil us when we look at risk-taking art. We are asked not simply to experience a work but to intuit a whole constellation of intentions: aesthetic, ideological, and poetic. In the case of Dennis Hollingsworth, we have our work cut out for us, in spades. That is not to say that the effort to know his work is a slog – far from it. In these paintings are delights and conundrums, both brain-twisting and eye-popping.

There is an antic, psychedelic spirit at work in the eighteen pieces which comprise this exhibition. Hollingsworth arrives at the derangement of the senses via multifarious stimuli – stylized organic ornamentation, phrases spelled out in large letters, intense patterns, and paint, marbleized and in thick, dripping impasto. These and other motifs are layered in compositions that seem joyful and fraught in equal measure.

The works – primarily paintings, along with two wall pieces, and a sculptural vitrine – share a dimensional quality, both in their construction and their surface treatment. This projective thrust is central to Hollingsworth’s project, a baroque celebration of painting’s capacity to impinge upon our space and our consciousness.

Among the most intriguing of the pieces are the constructed paintings, including So That We Could See (2018), a white convex form, like the sectioned canopy of an umbrella, covered with the words of the title, and thick skeins of paint. The effect is a praise song for vision itself. The same spirit animates Dazzling Treasures (2018), which has ten circular panels, each like a separate screen or a unit of an insect’s compound eye, displaying blossoms, webs, drips of paint, and words, including STARS, SUN and WE.

Looking Back to Look Forward (2019), is quite a production, a kind of theater set of paintings within a painting. Easier to apprehend than to describe, this work begins with an abstract shield-like form, in front of which projects an array of ovoids with thick or flowing paint. Ensconced above the main forms is a miniature version of the painting, like the artist’s original thought presiding over the completed work. The painting’s elements are attached to a wood scaffolding that is curiously neutral and functional  in a work whose elements are otherwise so thoroughly active.

Perhaps the best way to read the built support is to see it in terms of the modernist grid that informs many of the works in the exhibitions. The painting’s title reminds us that Hollingsworth is scanning the history of the past century’s painting, picking up signals from stars, both nearer and more distant: Matisse in the leaf and flower forms, Pollock in the use of paint as its own living corpus, Ryman in the appeal to conceptual rigor, and Lawrence Weiner in the cryptic language.

But beyond any received wisdom, these paintings possess an essential originality and weirdness, in the best sense. They seem to allude to an intense awareness, where touch and vision are at play together. In Deep Body (2018) the crenelated black oval, filled with shivering lines and dark forms, reads like a tantric embodiment of this state of inner harmony. In this heightened condition, building up and breaking down appear as equally desirable. In We Are…Secrets (2018), a field of red and yellow lines has been eaten away, leaving a star-like neural network, behind which is a band of letters, the partially visible title.

The painting Square Cube (2019), is a high-style vamp, with an array of the artist’s favored elements of leaves, words, and elongated asterisks mostly covered by engulfing waves of red, studded with extruded paint that resembles spiny sea urchins. This painting, although recent, seems to hark back to some of the earlier works in the exhibition, displayed in the back gallery – such as Minerva’s Serpents (2015) and Limitlessness and Strange Desire (2015) – with their extravagant, totalizing approach to a continuous field that is continually being interrupted.

There are two possible hints of the direction that Hollingworth’s recent work might open up. The sculptural wall reliefs, Laocoön (2018) and Second Order Revelation (2018), both make manifest the wood support hidden in other works, here functioning like a cross upon which is screwed the living body of looping lines of canvas. A second path is displayed in the painting CMB (2018), which suggests a via negativa, a way of knowing that rejects the material certainty of Hollingsworth’s mostly emphatic works. Here we see what seems to be a truncated mandorla, an almond shape that recurs in religious art, composed of wisps and phantom residues of paint on raw canvas, apparently the result of multiple off-printings of an empty sperm-like form. It is as if a tender, existential recognition has unexpectedly made itself known.

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The Working Title, Organized by Progress Report, at the Bronx River Art Center

March 25 to April 29, 2011
305 East 140th Street #1A
Bronx, NY.
Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 3:00 to 6:30 pm
Saturday, 12:00 to 5:00 pm.
Subway: #6 train to 3rd Avenue/138th Street.

Devise a cohesive fiction, or report the scattershot facts? The nature and purpose of curation is an issue in “The Working Title,” a lively but unfocused exhibition of 32 abstract artists, mostly painters, on view at the Bronx River Art Center through April 29. The show is assembled by Progress Report, the online and curatorial project of Vince Contarino and Kris Chatterson, who opt for fidelity to abstraction’s currently schizophrenic condition rather than identify and analyze a dominant personality. According to the show’s press release, the curators eschew artists who adhere to “the doctrine of romantic sentimentality” — an oxymoron if ever there was one. Otherwise, the connective tissue is stretched thin.

The show is engaging nevertheless, as it includes fine work by both recognized and undersung talents. An inventive and resourceful colorist, Pamela Jorden contributes the shadowy but buoyant Echo Music (2010) in which brushy patches and smears of lugubrious near-blacks and rumbling, pungent blues underscore a dazzling range of scraped, glazed, silver-tinted grays. Jordan does not conceal her pleasure in finding her way forward toward the painting’s resolution, guided by impulse, taste and faith in her pictorial proclivities. If her sensibility isn’t romantic, then it’s very close.

Matthew Deleget’s work resides toward the other end of abstraction’s spectrum as the realization, on a painted surface, of a preconceived procedural idea. The colors in Shuffle (for Grandmaster Flash) (2011) are selected at random—yellow, pink, fluorescent orange and copper predominate—and arranged by means of a predetermined system of recombination within a four-by-four unit grid. Abstraction as perceptual research, Shuffle is an extreme instance of the empirical attitude that underlies much of the work in the show, which is alert to pictorial strategies rather than intent on fetishizing subjectivities.

A sense of architectonic scale arises from interpenetrating rectangles and triangles in black, red, and two variants of yellow in Untitled (very tizdayle) (2009) by Tisch Abelow. Abelow’s handling is flat and graphic but the painting’s space craftily shakes itself loose from rigid geometry to suggest a modernist façade, a cantilevered balcony, a sun-washed portico, or an edifice in the middle distance. Nearby is Joy Curtis’s towering, chalk-white St. Virga (2010), a work in hydrocal, fiberglas, wood and metal in which cast fragments of fluted pilasters dangle like an ungrounded pillar, contacting neither ceiling nor floor and implying havoc and destruction—or at best, impermanence. The piece recalls the work of Lynda Benglis in its precise equivalence of process and image.

In fact, all the three-dimensional works in “The Working Title” relate at least as strongly to pictorial space as they do to physical space. Resolutely planar, Inna Babaeva’s More Than You Think (2011) consists of a half-dozen painting stretchers of various dimensions, hinged together in a free-standing accordion fold and strapped with translucent colored plastic. Letha Wilson weighs in with the peculiar but compelling Double Dip (2009), two thin strips of plywood bent into teardrop shapes, pinned to the wall by their pointy ends, and lined on their inner surfaces with photographs of verdant woodland. A punch line among colors gets a little respect in Stacy Fisher’s Fuchsia Sculpture With Wood (2010) in which a squarish blob roughly brushed with the flamboyant hue is lodged between blocks of lumber stained a plain-Jane brown. Pushing and pulling space even as it hugs the wall, the piece functions like a painting.

That undercurrent of humor is sustained throughout the show. E. J. Hauser’s spaceman (2010) inscribes a discombobulated argyle pattern in red-orange and white on a blue-black shape that reads instantly as the helmeted head of a spaceman—or motorcycle daredevil, or linebacker. Echo Helmet (2010) by Britton Tolliver reprises the domed shape, inverted and approximately mirroring itself, via juicy slabs of waxy-looking paint in quietly radiant tones. While the motif of protective headgear is completely appropriate to such a cerebral exhibition, the presence of all this recognizable imagery prompts the question of how the curators define abstraction. They dodge that task, as (from the press release again) these artists may merely “use abstraction as a starting point.” Ah.

What is clear is Progress Report’s skepticism of the high seriousness with which abstract painters of fifty years ago regarded the existential confrontation with the void of the blank canvas—as nothing less than a search for the self. Oh, well. Now that the self is swept up and bounced around in a proliferating matrix of provisional, contingent relationships, it has no fixity and the effort to locate it is a fool’s errand.

Among the show’s other standouts are Keltie Ferris’s Black Power (2010) with its jazzy, nested chevrons and fizzy spots festooning a meandering rectilinear polygon the color of dirt; Cordy Ryman’s Vector (2010), a studiously clunky low relief of two-by-fours painted serene green-blues (half-hidden, hot orange flare-ups provide chromatic sizzle) gouged with six intersecting grooves that radiate like the spokes of a wheel and allude to the face of a clock; and Dennis Hollingsworth’s maniacally overwrought Todo es Igual (2011) in which—and on which—paint is coaxed into bloom as in a hothouse. Rather than advancing an argument regarding the thrust of contemporary abstraction, “The Working Title” replicates its variety. But with friends like these, who needs curators?

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