Russell: October 21 – December 4, 2010
443 West 37th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues
New York City, 212 967 4972

Hartling: October 15 – November 14, 2010
205 Norman Avenue, between Jewel and Moultrie streets
Brooklyn, 718 383 9380

Whitney: October 14 – November 13, 2010
504 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 243 2663

Like bagels and cream cheese, painterly abstraction is associated in the popular imagination with New York City despite its roots in Old Europe. The idiom’s practitioners are everywhere on earth these days, but the most authentic stuff is still made in our five boroughs. Russell Roberts, Cynthia Hartling and Wallace Whitney are three mid-career painters (based, respectively, in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx) who engage with the problems and pleasures of painterly abstraction. Among the adjectives sometimes applied to this kind of work is “juicy,” and the efforts of these artists exist along a spectrum of juiciness: Roberts apparently juicy but not really, Hartling moderately so, and Whitney having juiciness to spare.

Juiciness implies several distinct components, often present in varying proportions. These include a vigorous, painterly touch, a broad chromatic range that includes a healthy admixture of saturated colors, and a surface that might seem a little ragged to eyes accustomed to the homogenizing computer screen. Juicy painting is open to accidental effects and chance alignments. It is not necessarily emotionally authentic, but it conveys the painter’s enjoyment of the act of mark-making. Joan Snyder’s paintings are juicy, notwithstanding an undercurrent of skepticism regarding the emotional efficacy of pure painting; Jonathan Lasker’s paintings, despite their exaggeratedly tactile surfaces and frequently loud colors, are not. Based closely on preparatory sketches, Lasker’s paintings are pointedly unspontaneous, and spontaneity (or its doppelganger, brushiness) is the juiciest attribute of all.

At Heskin Contemporary Roberts shows 19 new and newish paintings in oil on canvas and on panels in “Pockets of Accumulation,” his lively and long-overdue Manhattan solo debut. Roberts’s signature move is a deliberate, meandering line that blossoms into mutant filigree over membrane-like washes of evocative color. In On Foot #10 (2007, 18 by 16 inches) that filigree is a transparent purple; vaguely biomorphic, it is stiffly brushed across a variegated ground of raw umber and thinned viridian green.

Pockets of Accumulation #31 (2010) compartmentalizes both figure and ground, as Roberts’s meander is broken up into twisting bars of blue, violet, and meaty red that bounce around a hazy patchwork of neutralized secondary hues. A billowing, warm-gray region anchors the composition. The artist’s approach is  essentially Constructivist, as his slow building up of the image is eminently reasonable, savvy about the risks it takes. Pockets of Accumulation #29 (2010), the biggest painting here at 66 by 50 inches, flirts with disaster in its crumbling, amorphous upper left region—but is held in check by a wide band of roughly horizontal stripes that traverse the canvas like a plum-colored cummerbund.

In their veils of pigment, their adjustments and wipings-out, Roberts’s paintings offer the initial appearance of juiciness, but their parsimonious materiality and self-critical heart—their sheer cerebralness—are fundamentally at odds with the sense of (at least provisional) abandon crucial to truly juicy painting.

Hartling’s paintings are moderately juicy, owing to her jangly palette and painting-knife-centric, slathering application. While Roberts insinuates, Hartling declares. Sixteen canvases and numerous small, lovely works on paper form the artist’s third solo at this stalwart Greenpoint venue.

The paintings range in size from under a foot square to nearly four by four feet; most are untitled; all are oil on linen. A 27-by-29-inch painting dated 2007-2010 assembles roughly rectilinear shapes in peach, tangerine and lime green amid burlier, dark reddish hues. The syncopated rhythms of abutting, overlapping shapes hint at the geometric jumble of cityscape, while a curling pale lavender band dominates the top—a touch of kookiness amid the tectonics.

These paintings are playful, knowing and a bit ironic. An 11-by-12-inch painting ramps up the sense of compression: between jaw-like chunks of salmon and mango floats a tiny gold-leaf egg. Hartling’s sense of scale is strong in smaller formats, but her intensity dissipates in larger paintings. An exception is a 43-by-37-inch canvas in which a tongue of clarion-clear blue-green lolls from the top edge, laid on with a knife and surrounded on three sides by raw linen. From it, a spot of gold leaf pigment dispersion drips copiously. A few blackish drips streak in from the left, apparently a felicitous studio accident.

In addition to the touch, palette and surface that comes with the territory, Whitney’s paintings court a fundamental turbulence of the visual field, a fluidity of boundaries between pictorial components. “Dream Feed,” an exhibition of four major works from this year, are all oil on canvas; Quarry, the largest, is 80 by 70 inches; the others are 60 by 48 inches.

Quarry is a riff the theme of bathers. Entwined limb-like forms in pink-to-rose, up to their knees in azure blue, cavort among and beneath woodland greens, browns and oranges. Whitney evidently thins his paint to a syrupy consistency, and paints wet-into-wet, so colors mix directly on the canvas. He embraces chalky, murky, and grayed-out extensions of the classic oil palette which, unlike acrylics, can take on a beguiling richness.

Painterly abstraction often alludes to landscape. Roberts and Hartling counter such associations with an underlying grid structure, which contradicts the illusion of bottom-to-top recessional space. Whitney deals with the problem by not fighting it too hard, and allowing effulgent washes of high-key colors to break through, here and there, the opaque paint he lays over them in bunches, like bundles of sticks.

Imaginary Numerals is a stunner. Both airy and dense, it is a tangled matrix of qualified primary hues—radiant coral, somber violet-blue, pale lemon yellow—stretched across underlying washes of acid green, magenta, and turquoise. The entwined fingers of paint are sustained throughout but not programmatic, so the shallow space feels about to break open. Having nailed each corner and struck a delicious balance between articulating a certain kind of space and suggesting its unraveling, the artist put down his brushes at precisely the right moment. That might sound easy to do, but few things in a painter’s life are more difficult.

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July 9-September 8, 2010
237 Eldridge Street, between Stanton and East Houston streets
New York City, 212) 253-0700

As the title of this exhibition of Canadian mid-century painters Oscar Cahén and Gershon Iskowitz makes clear, Artists Caught in Hitler’s Web brings together two European-born artists who had been persecuted by the Third Reich. Gershon Iskowitzs’ work is deceptively benign. Cloud-like tufts of white, continent-shaped masses of solid mauve and red overlaid with uniform constellations of confetti-like dots of primary hue, dance across the surface of his paintings from the late 60’s onward. Oscar Cahén’s father, Fritz Mark was a diplomat who organized a formal opposition group and published a tract titled “Men Against Hitler”.  After an arrest in Czechoslovakia, Cahén traveled to England to escape persecution but was arrested as an illegal immigrant  and deported to Quebec as a prisoner of war.  During this internment, Cahén’s artistic dash was discovered by the art director of a Canadian news journal, The Standard which began using his illustrations alongside news stories. The public interest in his work led to his early release ,beginning a prolific career as both a painter and a commercial artist.

Gershon Iskowitzs’ path toward recognition as leader in the Canadian avant garde included the most harrowing of circumstances.  After his hometown of Kielce, Poland was destroyed by the Nazis, he was imprisoned in a labor camp only to be transferred to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald.  Reportedly, Iskowitz managed to maintain something of a drawing practice while imprisoned.  After the war, with family murdered and home destroyed, Iskowitz was sent to Munich where he eventually began a study of art.  After a brief stint at the Munich Art Academy Iskowitz took up a period of study with Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka.  In the brooding Late Summer Evening (1962), Iskowitz portrays a dense and moody field of low twinkling lights appearing from veils of sap green, umber and translucent ochre.  The modulation in the brushwork foreshadows Iskowitz’s later paintings.    Iskowitz took a ride in a helicopter in 1967 and became fascinated by the appearance of the Northern Canadian landscape as seen through the patchiness of clouds.  This partially obscured aerial view format crystallized and became the framework from which he continued to work. The largest painting here is Painting in Mauve (1972) which shows a behemoth mass of towering purple encroaching upon two miniscule slivers of silvery white flanking the central form.

Slabs and chunks of teal, scarlet, fuchsia and chartreuse epitomize a fifties palette and seem optimistic despite Oscar Cahén’s dark beginning as an artist.  Cahén’s Traumoeba (1956) epitomizes the Abstract Expressionist movement in Canada.  An amalgamation of action painting, free associative drawing and dense surface, This is a spectacular example of Cahén’s mature style.  There is a central form which dominates the painting, delineated in strong black lines.  Cahén’s painting titled Candy Tree (1952) is a symphonic totem in dusty pink and warm glowing tones.  The format echoes a figure, a totem and contains crystalline segments and prismatic forms reminiscent of a kind of prehistoric cactus.  According to the Cahén Archives Candy Tree was a breakout piece and was exhibited widely earning Cahén critical success.

Cahén moved between aggression and playfulness in his paintings.  In Austin Healey 100 Engine (1954) a tangle of scrawled black lines moves across the painting like tire tracks.  The marks are painted on top of a complex abstract mound in simplified hues of red, blue and green.  Several mushroom-shaped forms are stacked awkwardly at the right of the painting.  In the obsessive black marks there is a feeling of nonsensical mapmaking or graphing. Iskkowitz is the quiet mystic in this show where Cahén stands out as outspoken and assertive.  Having survived horrific circumstances, Iskowitz committed his artistic practice to making paintings that are both melancholy and playful.  Cahén’s early political defiance carried with him in his brash abstractions until his untimely death in a car crash in 1956 at the age of 40.  The show provides a telling glimpse in an obscure but fascinating moment in mid-century contemporary art and reiterates the profound impact World War II made upon the lives of artists.

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