The promotional video shows the five exhibitions discussed by The Review Panel, March 13, 2015 at the National Academy Museum. Scroll down for the media files to hear what the critics had to say. The next panel takes place April 17 when critics Sharon Butler, Noah Dillon and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss the Triennial at the New Museum and the Invitational at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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March 1, 2012 to April 7, 2012
529 West 20th Street
New York City (646) 486-7004

Some new art astonishes us with its audacity. Other new art assumes a more modest stance, arguing that novelty need not be sensational to convey loveliness and expressiveness.  Toon Kuijpers, a native of Amsterdam, offers a tantalizing but moving blend of the representational and the minimal, in the form of ultra-simple still lifes that can trace their lineage back to 17th-century Holland, yet still manage to look at least as  fresh as any display of contemporary minimalist abstraction.

All these oils on canvas were executed in 2011. All are small, ranging from 31.5 inches square to only 8 by 9 inches. Most focus on a single object, occasionally two, and even more rarely as many as four or five.  All these objects find their most natural habitat on a table top, for most are lovingly-rendered antique tea cups, with the occasional bowl or jug or (once in a long time) ceramic flasks.  The last-named grouping is reminiscent of Morandi, but most of the time, Kuijpers is his own man, because his palette is a lot warmer than Morandi’s, because of the radical simplicity of his single objects, and  because of the contrasts between them and their backdrops.  Sometimes these backdrops suggest tablecloths. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, they are usually divided into differently colored halves or quarters, lending an artificially abstracted setting to what are otherwise naturalistically-rendered subjects.

Clearly, these paintings are meant to summon up memories of Holland’s Golden Age, and artists like Heda and de Heem, but nobody painting still lifes in the wake of 19^th century impressionism can escape the slightly less weighty brushwork of Manet,  so what we have in Kuijpers is a blend of traditions, including echoes of Mondrian or even Sol LeWitt.

Nevertheless, it is amazing how many beguiling changes this painter rings on what may seem at first a single tune. He takes his cues from the vast variety of porcelain, lusterware and other types of pottery created in Europe and Asia through the last four or five centuries. Yellow Jug pairs a good-sized pitcher with a small whitish chinois cup, seen in profile, while Versailles depicts a large, French-looking red, white and gilded tea cup and saucer, seen from above. Royal Albert presents, museum-style, four elaborate Victorian cups and saucers, but no other painting in this show attains the perfection of the smallest, Blue Cloth, with its simple, exquisite (though chipped) little bowl, and its sunlight pouring in from the left.

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Amid today’s unlimited range of styles and endless combinations of media competing for art world support,  one of the great innovations of early Western modernism, Abstract art, continues to garner attention, evolve, and in many cases deepen in the hands of some of its current practitioners. Such is the case of veteran abstract painter Pat Lipsky whose career spans three decades marked by explorations in both abstraction and representation, and as demonstrated by her most recent aptly titled exhibition” Color Paintings” she continues to advance the issues of her work.

The grid based format of the nine human scaled paintings in the exhibition is becoming a recognizable trademark structure for this artist, placing her in the company of such reductive, contemplative painters as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin. Five vertical columns of varying widths are sub-divided at midpoints that in cross section appear as ascending and descending steps, which dip down or rise up in the center. In most cases three narrower columns frame two wider central columns that contain her carefully arrived at, in-between, colors within the ten rectilinear blocks, or segments, created by the divisions. The symmetrically deployed colors allow for a myriad of associations such as landscapes viewed through a colonnade, renaissance facades, geometric patterns, ornamental motifs and blocky figures.

In “Proust’s Sea”, 2006, two central columns feature colors that recall sky and earth are framed by three columns of colors that recall earth and sea. Naming the blues, greens, umbers and teals become a fruitless exercise because those names are never adequate to describe how the colors behave in their arrangements. Subtle hue shifts occur within similarly colored segments . One is apt not to notice her mastery of color because it all seems just right. The blues, at once radiant and atmospheric are activated by the somber tones of browns and greens. Credit is due to the handling of her edges for the additional vitality of the work. One could journey quite far simply following the lines, spaces, smudges and blurs that separate the segments. The surfaces are delightfully polluted with traces of life, dust hairs, blobs of dried paint which underscores the fact that these are hand made paintings, and although they may make allusions to an ideal they are full of the irregularities and imperfections of life.

Kim Uchiyama and Barry Goldberg also make work that participates in a late modernist conversation, however, while Uchiyama explores the poles of expansion in her brightly colored banded abstractions, Goldberg mines the poles of reduction in his spare oil and encaustic canvases.

In her current exhibition titled “Strata”, Ms. Uchiyama’s landscape based abstractions come in a portrait format of stacked horizontal bands of colors. Muscular strokes of thick oil paint, in varying widths, span the surface and are interrupted by intervals of segmented color blocks. Her expressive paint handling brings to mind the built up surfaces and rough edged strokes of Sean Scully; however, the space she evokes is decidedly more referential. In  “Untitled “ 2006, saturated hues of red yellow and blue are tempered by occasional off whites and lighter blue hues. Thin lower bands of dark colors seem compressed by the weight, heat and vitality of wide red and yellow bands in the upper layers, serving as an apt metaphor for the effects of time upon landscapes and civilizations.

Barry Goldberg’s  paintings at first seem to be primarily about ground. However, in most of the works on view from 2006, a thin colored frame of buttery encaustic color superimposed upon a field of oil color.  This thin frame seems to delineate a figure within the field thus unsettling and in some cases reversing the reading of what is figure and what is ground.  “City Square in the Rain” 55 x 42inches, brings to mind the rounded shape of a subway car window. A two inch wide blue encaustic stripe circumnavigates the canvas; it’s position, an inch or so from the edge creates an outer frame of remaining olive green ground. Inside, an atmospheric grey blue area recalling a foggy, rain soaked window is streaked with occasional vertical lines, traces left by the sharp edge of the tool as it pulled successive layers of oil color down the surface. At once, alluding to rain as in the title, these hair like marks also describe with considerable clarity the process of how the work was made. The muted color grounds are often activated by the presence of the brightly colored encaustic frame. For example, in “Rysa Szpara” 2006, a scarlet-vermillion frame enhances the reddish identity of the brown field and adds warmth to the cool cream color of the top field.

These three diverse painters made me think of something Agnes Martin once said, “Anything can be painted without representation.”

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February – March 11, 2006

According to light theory, white is the sum of all colors. As a spiritual symbol, white occupies one end of another kind of spectrum; it’s the note of purity beyond life’s assortment of grays. For artists, though, white has a more down-to-earth characteristic.  As a painted or sculpted surface, it’s especially revealing of subtle marks, textures, and volumes. And, as these paintings and sculptures by thirteen very different artists demonstrate, whiteness is an almost endlessly mutable quality.

The exhibition marks the tenth anniversary of Howard Scott’s original all-white show, which included four of the artist’s here. Among the four is Rebecca Salter, whose tall, slender diptych “Untitled JJ1” (2006) seems the embodiment of meditative constraint. Its surface (actually grayish-tan from the linen support showing through) quietly vibrates from hundreds of delicate parallel lines; these minutely irregular marks seem to accrue with a singular, organic regularity. A pale, translucent wash covers the entire surface, imparting an extra depth, and enhancing the effect of humming self-containment.

Vincent Hamel, too, had work in the original exhibition, and if Salter’s work has an otherworldly aspect, his untitled panel from 2005 is all physical grit. Undifferentiated except by texture, his paint has the grainy viscosity of cement, its surface evocatively recording the broad, buttering attack of a palette knife or trowel.

By contrast, soft, overlapping circular forms have been applied to the surface of Robin Rose’s panel, giving it a delicate organic depth. So many of these lily pad-like forms fill the surface that no portion of “Pause” (2006) is flat. Circular stains also dot its surface, but they correspond to none of the “lily pads,” adding to the sense of constant, gentle undulation. (A peek at the panel’s edge reveals its aluminum honeycomb core—a startlingly unyielding support for its melting forms.)

Down the wall, Lance Letscher’s collage subtly bristles, both in its surface and its literary allusions. “White Side” (2006) consists of countless strands of paper, sliced from record album covers (judging from their bits of fractured text), and bound into a regular pattern of arcs. These bundles are mounted on what appears to be an old ledger sheet filled with hand-written entries. Standing out among the fragmented phrases is the single word “Records”—punning, perhaps, on the original purpose of the ledger, the source of the strips, and the way an old ordering has given way to a new, idiosyncratic one.

David Goerk’s three small, wall-mounted sculptures feature strict geometric forms—variations of a cube or box, with segments cut out—but their slightly irregular surfaces lend them a surprising organicness. Their whiteness highlights internal shadows, increasing their three-dimensionality—while at the same time suggesting that they’re actually outgrowths of the gallery wall’s white mass. The inner facets of “#8 (Doorman)” (2006) have rougher, lumpy surfaces, heightening the contradictions between interior and exterior spaces.

A square resin relief sculpture from 2004 by Florence Pierce seems a pale greenish-gray, but on closer inspection it’s impossible to assign it any one color. The untitled relief’s flat surface is translucent, with a faintly iridescent quality. Light seem to infiltrate slowly from the sides, imparting a dimensionless depth utterly different from Goerk’s modeled blocks.

Stephen Westfall is one of the few artists here to animate his work not through physical manipulations of space but solely through the vigor of his design. The light green-blue geometric shapes of his canvas “The Alleluia (For Leonard Cohen)” (2006) seem at first as coolly controlled as his oil-and-alkyd surface, but in a moment, the image warms with subtle pictorial tensions. His large, square composition has been divided into nine smaller squares so that the outer ones increase slightly in size, on either one or two dimensions. Each smaller square in turn has been bisected, just off-center, by horizontal and vertical lines. In turns out that this playful composition consists entirely of shifting tensions, endlessly testing our expectations.

Color is at a minimum throughout the exhibition—of course that’s the point—but this serves only to highlight the varieties of surface, plasticity, and scale. At Howard Scott, the artists’ different personalities are apparent in a startling diversity of means.

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