In his current exhibition of recent work, Joe Fyfe offers two distinct directions.

One room is solely dedicated to a series of rather restrained abstract canvases. Except for one painted piece, all of them are made of oxblood-colored cotton cut outs mounted on muslin. The overall sensibility is minimal, showcasing each distinct shape as sole gestural mark. They are elegant studies of the basic ingredients in art: light, positive and negative space, line and texture. Their impact is immediate and yet, upon further observation they turn into blank canvases for our imagination. As they leave us pondering what larger truths they might behold, Fyfe does not shy away from sharing his own associations by providing simple and interpretive titles, such as “Nun,” “Priest,” or “Door.”

The second room features a variety of paintings that are rich in color and ooze lightheartedness. Here, patterned textiles (a more recent development for Fyfe) are combined with pieces of felt, silk, painted or neutral jute or burlap. The inherent freedom of expression and joy in interrelating different materials bring the art of quilt making, as well as collage to mind. There is a striking looseness in these works that most clearly manifests in two works, Long Curtain and Square Curtain (both 2007). Hung from the wall, un-stretched, with seemingly countless holes, of which some have been filled out with saturated felt or fabric pieces, they contain the poetry of a starry sky and the luminosity of a stained-glass window in the afternoon sun.

While Fyfe has worked with combining more traditional methods of painting with textile collages for years, it is through the overt focus on counterparts in this exhibition, contrasting the more serious with the playful and the reserved with the whimsical, that Fyfe reveals both the diversity of his artistic interests and the extent of expressive versatility he has reached in his work. Much of this maturity can be credited to Fyfe’s extensive travels in recent years. After receiving a Fulbright Independent Research Fellowship in 2006, he spent six months in Vietnam and Cambodia and in 2007, and also participated in a residency program in Switzerland. Particularly in regards to his palette, Fyfe has noted that the exploration of different countries and cultures has expanded his color repertoire and that he accesses “that palette by shopping in a given country’s fabric markets and making my work with that colored material.”

But there also is an increasing sense of physicality in Fyfe’s work, which in the case of Long Curtain and Square Curtain can even lead to a true sculptural quality. This strong awareness of the body and its relationship to an object – and to Fyfe, a painting is indeed a physical object – also might have very well manifested in the very physical experiences a traveler collects. While passing through different time zones and climates, absorbing different voices, smells and tastes (not to speak of the visuals), we certainly test our bodies and senses in new unusual ways. Whatever Fyfe might have found or gathered abroad, he certainly has succeeded in developing a language free of geographical dependencies and without time constraints.

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James Graham & Sons
32 East 67th Street
New York City
212 535 5767

March 14 – April 19, 2008

Norman Bluhm threw down a gauntlet.  He collided the gale force wind of action painting into the figural contortions of de Kooning and plied the result into a baroque schema of High Abstract Expressionism.  But unlike de Kooning, who in the end unfurled his lasso-like line into the airy sublime, Bluhm recalibrated and condensed the energy into an undulating volcanic swell.

The five large scale works on paper from 1984 currently at the James Graham Gallery remind us how Bluhm forged new territory and distinguished himself from the second wave of New York School abstraction.   Bluhm landed in France through the GI bill and, like Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, lived there in the 50’s and 60’s absorbing local color. 

One large 1958 canvas is also on view and typifies Bluhm’s violent gestural slashes from this earlier period. The force of impact as the brush splays against the canvas creates a spraying splatter similar to those of Alfred Leslie. By the 1970’s Bluhm moved from all-over composition to associative-relational design.  Suddenly, swelling, cartoonoid, bulbous shapes, reminiscent of Gorky’s drawing, emerge and nestle in overtly sexualized female anatomical configurations. Bluhm’s penchant for building a wall of curling female anatomy side-to-side and top-to-bottom is reminiscent of Ingres’ Turkish Bath, a connection acknowledged by the poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, who linked a Bluhm title to the work.  In Bluhm’s hands it’s as if Gorky and de Kooning, also admirers of Ingres, collaborated on a new version of Turkish Bath – via Disney. 

Squirmy, steadfast, and biologic in their surging rhythmic climax,  Bluhm’s forms bulge and push up against the edges of his support, creating an explosive pressure. His use of bilateral symmetry heightens this effect.  Untitled Drawing # 3 frames a quivering, gelatinous mass of stacked parts that ascend toward a central dark void silhouetting two ejaculatory sprays of white paint.  In the lower third of the painting, salmon-pink lines carve arabesques into an undulating field of pale orange. A lemon yellow middle section is likewise incised by a curling pastel blue line. Above, Bluhm lays down a stratum of Matissian pink followed by orange.  Given the compact, stacking of intestinal forms articulated by incised, looping lines, one might guess Bluhm must have also admired Mayan paintings and stelae.

In Untitled 1984, floating yellow biomorphs resembling angels co-mingle with other fleshy manifestations. The central focus however is a dark cave-like opening at the bottom, reminiscent of Christ’s decent into limbo by Mantenga or Becafumi.   Lyrical as Bluhm often is, he can blow dark and moody, at times even evoking Munch’s and Rothko’s melancholic palettes, as in Drawing 1 and Drawing 7.  Despite the purgatorial plunge, Untitled 1984 remains decidedly upbeat; Bluhm generously drips whites, pale greens and yellows that pop like light filled beads against the dark recess of the open cave.

Bluhm’s instinct to retain his drip, splatter and bash in a measured but vital way gently dethrones the figural forms by seasoning them with the threat of obliteration.  By tweaking these forms through a back-and-forth process of give-and-take revision, Bluhm dances between specificity and indeterminate chaos.  Just as he verges on painterly overflow and obliteration, he pivots and reaffirms the innards of his design. His hand is in and out, on top and behind, applying counterpoint to each move and indexing his instinct to ride between affirmative application and gestural negation.

Each painting revels in the gestational dance between sex and death.  It is a bacchanalian revelry and Bluhm came to own it.  He reinvoked the gods of the ages and restaged their dramas.  From the heights of Tiepoloian excess and vertigo to the erotic posturing in Hindu temple statuary, the cup of Bluhm’s inspiration runneth over.  His painterly embrace of a mannered, floridly colored, biomorphic-cartoon form may yet be an untapped way forward from the illustrative, surreal-graphic style that has recently devolved from the great Philip Guston and Peter Saul.

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MARK GROTJAHN; BLUE PAINTINTS LIGHT TO DARK ONE THROUGH TEN
Anton Kern until February 28 (532 W20th Street between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 367 9663)

JOE FYFE
James Graham until March 10 (1014 Madison Avenue between 78 and 79 Streets, 212 535 5767)

Reductive art induces reductive histories of art.  When you think about art in terms of lessness and what is left out it is hard not to historicize, to see individuals in terms of a great march forward—or compromising retreat—towards or away from Minimalism. In this ne plus ultra1960s movement abstract art achieved its most severe exclusions, beckoning an end of painting, or its least its submission to the object, soon to be followed by the triumph of pure concept.

Individualists frustrate such neat theorizing.  Almost simultaneous with Minimalism was the movement that—logically—ought to have waited patiently in the wings for a few years: Postminimalism.  This word described the gradual reinvestment of personal touch, expressive feeling, rich surface, and human presence in nonetheless still radically pared-down artworks.

Despite the trumpeted demise of the medium, a new kind of painting emerged that stalked emptiness, as if torn between giving way to historical inevitability and resisting it.  Robert Ryman and Brice Marden fitted that description.  Another of the masters of that moment was Robert Mangold.  His whole career has been, so to speak, danced on a pirouette—his paintings are perpetually on the tipping point between reduction and regeneration.

Two elements stand out as the hallmarks of his aesthetic: the shaped canvas and the drawn arc.  To these can be added a third—whether stained in a color or rubbed using a drawing medium like graphite, he goes for an achieved (rather than simply given) surface.  While never overtly gestural, his art always recalls a hand that made it.   Cool, but not cold; impersonal, but not person-free.

Mr. Mangold also likes to flutter between the sensual and the cerebral.  His new show, at PaceWildenstein’s cavernous W22nd Street venue, offers a dozen  in a series of “column structures”.  They can all be taken in at the center of this vast space as a single gestalt, becoming highly architectural in the process; or they can demand individual space and time.  The supports are made from various joined canvases to form such shapes as a “T” in “Column Structure I” (2005), a trunk and branch in”IV” (the remainder of the series are 2006), a funnel-like shape in “V”, an anvil in “VI”, or less readily, or quite unnameable, shapes in others.  The ability or not to describe the shapes linguistically seems to determine different formal experiences from one column to the next.

The compositions are further complicted by scored lines that can easily be confused with the actual division between abutting canvases; the lines roughly adhere to some sense of a grid that stretches beyond the actual work, but no strict logic or system is apparent.  Each work is a singular color, stained in acrylic with even modulation but slight fluctuations—again, the hand is present but not insistent.

The curves, drawn by a superbly controlled hand, are neither mechanical nor organic.  They might be seen as responses to the shaped supports, but equally could be the formal force that determines those shapes.

The cumulative experience of all this back and forth between possibilities is a subtle, classical, and highly refined.  The Minimalist Sol le Witt, when describing his own return to more lyrical and sensually involved picture making, once spoke of wanting to make art he could show Giotto.  Mr. Mangold might want to show his work to Poussin.

Mark Grotjahn is a natural complement to Mr. Mangold—his supremely elegant show offers slight variations on a singular composition and formal idea, and a narrative sense of development as the eye follows this progression the Anton Kern Gallery (another elegantly sparse post-industrial space.)

My first visit induced a negative response.  Unlike this artist’s restrained installation of richly colored pieces at the Whitney Museum recently, the dark, barely scrutable canvases with their repeated compositional formula seemed gratuitous and stingy.  But a second visit on a sunny day revealed their subdued sophistication.

Mr. Grotjahn is fanatically committed to his chosen motif: a central vertical strip from the horizontal center of which emenate spokes of slightly thinner stripes.  Coming with modernist ancestry, this device is familiar from various Futurists and Orphists not to mention Marsden Hartley, and evokes a sense of a lighthouse emitting rays.

In the dingy half-light of my first visit this seemed like a series of black paintings but in fact they eschew black altogether to track a progression from a dark but vibrant ultra marine to an almost pitch black navy blue.  All painting needs light but these are enriched by the dependence, which they dramatize.  The strokes are compulsively even but the brush creates striations that seem to glisten under light, looking a bit like the sheen of black vinyl LPs.  (Jason Martin, the British painter who shows at Robert Miller and LA Louver in Mr. Grotjahn’s city of residence, LA, has made a life’s work from this effect.)

While the motif and its driving effects are always present and insistent, they eventually take a back seat as the slight and subtle differences between each work assert themselves.

Joe Fyfe is a brutalist.  His art is not so much reductive as severely blunt.  Often, the “canvas” is more striking than the paint: in “La Glorie” (2006), for instance, a picture painted in acrylic on terrycloth, felt, linen and burlap.  Colors and textures alike are instrinsic, in other words, rather than applied.  The composition has a central zip of various colors (painted bars or collaged strips of colored material) placed off center on a burlap ground crudely roller-painted in thin, dry white.  The surface submits to the support.

Historically he comes out of art of early 1970s: He was much influenced at the outset of his career by an exhibition of Blinky Palermo, an artist included in the National Academy Museum’s current “High Times, Hard Times” survey of painting in the wake of Minimalism.  He is also one of several Americans (others of his generation being James Hyde and Craig Fisher) who have looked hard at the French Support-Surface movement.  But his new body of work seems much less concerned with the semiotics of painting as earlier efforts.

The exhibition includes things made in the last four years and is more compositionally busy than the previous show at the same gallery.  Titles reflect his travels in Asia (a recent Fulbright took him to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos).  There is still an insistence on texture over shape, however; while “Hoan Kiem” (2006) seems almost pictorial in the way menhir-like shapes populate a white groudn with a gray skyline, the eye is still detained by the rough scrapings away and rude applications of paint accentuating the materials beneath, in this case felt, muslin, burlap and gauze.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 22, 2007 under the title “Minimalism with Feeling”

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Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens joined David Cohen to discuss Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, Nancy Spero at Galerie Lelong, Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons, and Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art.

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