September 7 to October 7, 2012
205 Norman Ave, between Humboldt and Jewel
Brooklyn, (718) 383-9380

Kris Scheifele’s second solo show at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Fade, represents the investigative efforts of an artist in search of a personal and singular form of expression.  In a continuum to her 2008-2011 Contortion series, these new works extend an intimate, methodological and obsessive relationship with acrylic,finding their locus in the materiality and literalness of paint.  Reveling in the alchemy of her process, Schefele intersperses layer upon layer of viscous paint with polymer binder and then proceeds to remove the encrusted surface from its wood panel support, slicing the peeled-off rubbery skein into a flexible, hanging, knotty strap.  Associations of bridles, reins and other apparatus abound – equestrian and S&M alike.   But Fade is much more than an iconoclastic gesture: aesthetically intriguing and procedurally relevant, this exhibition of an artist who graduated from Pratt Institute in 2009 exudes an air of maturity, forethought and clarity that doesn’t diminish the inherently playful and effervescent nature of her project.

The front room of the Gallery is an appropriate host for Schiefele’s thirteen intimately sized paintings, all but one made in 2012, and all suspended by nails which directly puncture the skin of the acrylic slabs.  Since the pieces are not supported by any type of frame or armature, Scheifele’s hanging method encourages a sense of performance — gravity, time and temperature exert their presence, exaggerating the work’s affinities to drooping fabric, the sagging body and begging the question (in demure tone) – when is a painting actually finished?

Scheifele’s brand of humor is not only visible in her installation method but palpable in regards to the placement of each work in relation to the next.  In Hate Fade, 2012, one of the smallest works in the exhibit, what is left of the painting’s midnight blue, blazing orange and blood red epidermis dangles asymmetrically from the wall, tattered and riddled with holes– the center completely consumed as if by the ravages of fire or a swarm of locust.   The follow-up to this act of violence is Summer Fade, 2012: a bright lemon-yellow piece, its thickly applied outer layer buzzes with almost irritating verve and then gracefully dissolves at its bottom, revealing hidden layers of oxidized green and Tiffany blue. Up close, the exposed under layers (excavated through Schiefele’s laborious use of a box-cutter) emit a blurry or pixilated softness that differentiates them from the preceding layers and adds a subdued sensuality to the work.

Antithetical tension (the grotesque versus the charming) created through placement in the case of the two works described above, is often an inherent characteristic of Schiefele’s most successful pieces. Money Fade 2012, a freshly minted glistening silver acrylic slab, and Quiet Fade 2012, a ghostly white and introspective purple piece, for instance, flaunt an individualized and peculiar brand of beauty, the type that has been tempered and humbled by the seemingly corrosive and abusive attributes of an unforgiving existence. signifying — or at least hinting at — something that exceeds painting’s formalist chastity belt.

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November 18 to December 18, 2011
205 Norman Avenue at Humboldt Street
Brooklyn, (718) 383-9380

Craig Olson, a painter of bright lyrical abstractions, has brought together artists spanning several generations for the group exhibition he has curated at Janet Kurnatowski’s, Idiot’s Delight, from recent MFA grads to established mid-career artists.  His people are unafraid to experiment, remaining equally unfettered by tradition or trend.Where there is humor in this show it is in the service of engagement with something of substance. Katherine Bradford’s Invisible Underpants, with its coarsely-hewn superhero figure and bold palette, is worked in the artist’s familiar conciseness, in what is currently called a “provisional” technique, accomplishing a lot with a little. The see-through underpants reveal the weave of raw canvas, and it splits and dissolves our super hero into figure and ground, analogy and smears of paints. It’s a fragile balance but the risks pay off.

Chris Martin uses the opposite approach with his For the Protection of Amy Winehouse, piling paint can lid-sized circles of dried paint onto a thick impasto ground to create a mausoleum with quarter-sized plastic gemstones, paper towel, an image of Winehouse and innumerable other detritus. Dated 2007- 2010, one can’t help but see the morbid failure implicit in the title in the crowded surface of the painting.

In Peter Acheson’s small, untitledpiece the entry point is the painted text “Hawk Feather” on an upside down newspaper clipping. This starts a cascade of memory and association, which further opens the reading of the painting as an experience and the record of an experience.

A funny remark overheard at the opening  rang true: the work here is “retinal non-retinal.”  The reference, of course, is to Duchamp’s call for non-retinal conceptualism. Olson includes works by pseudonymous artists S.H. and Ishmael Bubble: a candle wax and dried tea rose combine, and a signed UTZ red hot potato chips bag, adding to the sense of Duchampian mischief.

EJ Hauser’s subverted portrait Paul, a gestural and muddy bust traversed by red green and yellow horizontal lines, both engages and obstructs the gaze charging the piece with a winning punk energy, while Deirdre Sword’s rich umber and orange painting, Untitled (Holly Fool’s Sceptre), hovers between an Abstract Expressionist field and a palimpsest of script. Like oil soaked mud, the painting is both beautiful and foreboding.

J.J. Manford’s One Can’t Think of One’s Soul While Eating feels like two paintings clinging to each other and vying for their attention. The uneasy tension created at the sharp borders between color plains shakes the stability of the composition to near breaking point. But like the other work in the show, Manford manages to keep the counterpoints from vibrating the painting apart.

Ben La Rocco’s Voodoo’s Kustoms exhibits an understated modernism with playfully irreverent marks dispersed on the surface that look like hand drawn maps or bar napkin doodles. Paired with Portal, a bright green drawer face with the broken text “tradition” and scores reminiscent of the marks made to pass the days in solitary confinement, he hints at the idea of art both liberated from and indebted to history.  Tamara Gonzales displays similar ambivalence towards the past in Mariastein with its layered bright spray paint using lace as its stencil.

There is a nice dialogue between the two large sculptures in the show and the remaining small paintings by Linnea Paskow and Thomas Micchellii. Elisa Soliven’s Untitled Portrait is a charismatic bust reminiscent both of Picasso’s Head of Marie Therese and a Huma Bhabha sculpture. The white plaster used to form the head echoes Micchellii’s small work Thrice, with its three-quarter profile of a face painted red on white. James Clark’s Thermal Specialist is a construction blending the textures of found surfaces and applied marks into a figure that isn’t quite organic or robotic. Formal elements in the sculpture, including a long rectangular box lit from within and a green wooden ball, compliment the palette and circular shape in Paskow’s Red Ball, exuding the satisfying freedom found elsewhere in Idiot’s Delight.

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Janet Kurnatowski’s Greenpoint basement gallery is often the locus of lively, even raucous installations.  In one packed group exhibition a guest curator even took to hanging works from the low ceiling.  In Soundings the volume is turned down and the music is all the more penetrating for it.

Abstract painters Elizabeth Hazan and Jennifer Riley make an exquisite duo.  The alternating hang accentuates the distinctions between Riley’s chirpy, lassoed forms in shrill, synthetic, hard-to-name colors and Hazan’s fuzzy, somewhat nebulous, yet contradictorily at the same time blocked-out, jigsawish compositions that lure you into unexpected depths of warmth and resonance.  But while the eye savors the individuality of each painter as an ear would the contrast of, say, piano and violin, so too it soon becomes apparent that a playful conversation of rare intelligence is underway, harmonizing with one another in allusions to the legacies of modernism and reaching teasing dissonances upon abstraction’s possibilities.

Presto: the show closes Sunday.

September 9 to October 9, 2011 at 205 Norman Avenue at Humboldt Street, Brooklyn, 718 383 9380.

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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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Is there any material entity in this world that exists without a structure of some sort?  Arguably, the only time we ever truly escape the tangible element of structure is within our subconscious when we dream—although even there, Lacanians would argue, structure persists.  Exactly where the boundaries of the surrounding networks that immerse us lie are often not clearly defined or are so intertwined they shift seamlessly from one into the next.  The group show, “Hypothetical Landscapes,” (curated by Greg Lindquist) exhibits the work of eight different artists who create abstractions derived from physical systems that encompass us every time we open our eyes.  The artists — Miya Ando, Malado Baldwin, Don Gummer, Darina Karpov, Ati Maier, Dustin Schuetz, Rebecca Smith, and Suzanne Stroebe — create paintings and sculptures that carry a potency derived from the convergence of man-made networks with ones culled from nature.

In this exhibition, the grid is often employed to approach this convergence.  In Midnight Audit and View of the Defeated, (both 2009) Dustin Schuetz uses the grid to position an individual outside of the incessant force of commerce.  Inspired by the lighted skyscrapers of Manhattan viewed from the rooftop of his Brooklyn studio, Schuetz paints dissimilar gridded columns of ominous greens and yellows.  The groupings of squares and rectangles have slightly different sizes that slowly reveal subtle shifts of depth.  The paintings align themselves with Sarah Morris’s colorful gridded canvases that reflect the repetitious geometry of modern architecture.  However, unlike Morris, who places you up close and often within the structure, Schuetz’s perspective is at a distance and nocturnal.  This distance creates a sense of voyeuristic isolation as you peer from the shadows at structures of economy, and their interminable movement under the pulse of florescent lights.

Rebecca Smith’s Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica (2006) begins with a contradiction.  At first glance, the latticed network of flat steel bands, painted blue, and extending off the wall about one foot, has an airiness that is nowhere near the bulk and power of its eponymous glacial shelf. However, this grid is a fragmented one and the negative spaces in between Smith’s intersections and twists of metal stimulate contrasting feelings of largeness through lightness and expansion amongst fracture.  Although glaciers are dense and forceful entities, they also possess a nature that is inherently ethereal as they are made from water, float in our seas, and are disappearing rapidly.  The sculpture’s design brings to mind ideas of city planning, infrastructure, and the human movement occurring through these channels (all contributors to glacial melting), yet, as the piece floats by itself off the wall, it is also a disconnected fragment.  Through the use of metal, air, and our understanding of the grid, Smith sets up a system of contradictions to reference a seemingly solid structure, which could vanish tomorrow.

Don Gummer’s sculpture, San Ambrogio over Santa Maria delle Grazie (2004) excavates structural concepts from the past and reinvents them in a contemporary manner.  By superimposing the floor plans of two Milanese Renaissance churches, a matrical network emerges out Gummer’s reconfiguration of old ideas.  The overlapping 3 dimensional grids constructed from painted one-inch wooden rails, form a modular apparatus more congruent with pre-fabricated contemporary architecture than with the Vatican.  Gridded excavation is also utilized in Suzanne Stroebe’s freestanding sculpture, May I (2008).  Here the excavation comes in Stroebe’s collection of discarded objects – mostly fragments of wood one might find at a construction site.  The bits and pieces are upwardly assembled in a linear fashion calling to mind the figure while also referencing a torn electrical duct or a chunk of a building that has been blasted apart.

Two works by Ati Maier, Push (2007) and Level Out (2008), allude to movement amongst molecular structures in surrounding air particles.  Here, nebulous events and explosions burst and swirl above a landscape of colorful gridded planes, reminiscent of an early Atari game.  A confluence of elements between the terrestrial and atmospheric occurs that is coincidental and ceaselessly fluctuating at an atomic level.  Further organic organization intermixes with human activity in Darina Karpov’s small watercolors on paper, Untitled IV (sudden appearances into vanishing) (2008) and The Trickster (2009).  With exquisite detail and soft coloring, Ms. Karpov creates a biomorphic system that creeps and twists across the paper’s surface like kudzu taking over a tree or landscape.  Embedded within her leafy networks are miniscule landscapes, warring figures, and linear sprawls referencing both veins and rivers.  On a scale that shifts from micro to macro, these works speak of the unavoidable marriage between struggle and the structures of growth.

Miya Ando and Malado Baldwin conjure ideas of environments tainted by the synthetic in a post-human age.  Ando’s 04.09.51.38 (2009) fuses a minimalist landscape on a thin sheet of steel by adjusting the metal’s properties through lacquer, pigment, and patinas.  A sharp metallic horizon is formed carrying a carbonous black haze.  Baldwin’s ghostly abstracted vistas lack human presence of any kind except for the toxicity of their unnatural colors.

In this show of supposed landscapes, the question of what constitutes a landscape and where its boundaries are identified comes into question.  The work stems from the systems humans develop to navigate, control, and discern both their physical and perceptual domains as well as how these places intertwine with the design of nature.  In this way, a landscape is revealed where the natural world, the man-made realm, and the space of the mind coalesce.

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LaViolaBank: March 26 to April 25, 2009
179 East Broadway at Canal Street (Seward Park),
New York City,
917 463 3901

Janet Kurnatowski’s current exhibition is as close as a group show gets to being a string quartet.  It is not merely that Kurnatowski offers a four person show or even that each artist is represented by a single piece whose size, character and demeanor corresponds to an instrument in a traditional quartet. Rather, what makes the show quartet-like (I’m thinking Haydn by the way) is the deeply satisfying meld of four distinct but manifestly related painterly voices, and the intimacy – in the sense of scale to the viewer, and togetherness among the four – that the show engenders.  These are artists who can be described as hard-edged but tender hearted; their “playing” – jointly or severally – has the high minded warmth of chamber music.

Mind you, it might not be so easy to ascribe each painting to a part.  Allowing that Zahn must be the cello, as his painting is sitting on the floor, and Voisine as the most upwardly aspiring and clean cut of the paintings a violin, it remains a challenge to determine whether Waltemath or Francis is the viola.  Francis is the tempting candidate in terms of size, as she is larger than Voisine and Waltemath, and sort of the same size as Zahn (his piece is comprised of two overlapping canvases, so it depends if you count the visible or the implied square inches of his work).  But I’m tempted, in fact, to have Francis be the first violin, so strikingly expository is she of a theme.  Waltemath’s picture, by contrast, is diminutive, enigmatic, and quietly instrumental (sorry) in creating the texture that binds the disparate elements of this show.

These are artists who have their form-content ratio pitch perfect.  They all work with pared-down structures, with relatively simple math, but not out of some minimalist-redux attempt to see how basic art can get, nor out of a quasi mystical attachment to geometry per se.  In each picture, there is a sense that the overt structure is a kind of plan for the making of the work, while the work is the exposition of that plan.  But, at the same time, the work is more than its own plan.

In Francis’s Neutron Star (2008), there are four sets of white, thinly drawn circles (of four circles in three sets, five in the fourth) each occupying a quarter of red ground; the paint surface is brushy though even, all-over and not impastoed.  The arrangements vary in the visual impact of the circles’ interaction, in the degree to which they are purely schematic or they generate optical illusion.

Voisine’s Debutant Twist (2009), a tall, thin painting, has two outer bands of pale blue that sandwich vertically stacked dark rectangles, the top one to the left of the bottom.  Underneath these ziggurat rectangles is a lighter-toned rectangular shape of the same hue that runs off kilter with all the other shapes at a slight diagonal, syncopating the plumb-line, playing Broadway to the avenues.

Zahn is the most zany of the four, but also the most physically present.  His Modern Times (2009), places a square canvas in front of a rectangular one (landscape oriented) that is just an inch or so higher on its shorter side, with both supported on foam bricks.  They are painted a somewhat obnoxious synthetic browns, with one central, bisecting line in a darker shade, on the horizontal in the rectangle, the vertical in the square.  There are then small return strips accenting the corners, inviting a read of the images as the backsides of wrapped flat packages.  A thin strip of bright color at one edge of each canvas hints at labeling.

Waltemath adds a painterly, imagistic element that sets her apart from her quartetmates.  Blue Highway (2007-08) seems, at first impression, to represent the grid aflame: there are overlapping planes recalling Voisine and Zahn, but the dominant, dark rectangle to right is filled by an agitated area of orange and red that reads like fire.  There is a sense that it could be city buildings, or some activity in a room spied through an open door.  A figure seems caught in silhouette in the furnace. But then again, the painterly portion could literally be painterliness if the planes are viewed, à la Zahn, as stacked canvases, in which case the fiery rectangle might be an AbEx painting in storage.

These four artists are conceptual or painterly to varying degrees, but in and between each work structure bounces the eye towards texture, idea towards plastic value, and so on.  The conceptual and the painterly are truly symbiotic.  They make music.

If members of this group want to branch into piano quartets, Jennifer Riley is their woman: Her fulsome, vibrant, upbeat paintings are, like a piano, symphonic in possibility while true to a core sound. Hers are grand paintings in scale and scope alike.

As with the Kurnatowski Quartet, Riley is a geometric painter whose forms tease representational possibilities without compromising abstract values.  Her pictures impart the feeling that they are worked algorithmically rather than programmatically, that process trumps result, however much the forms are legible, spatial and enticing. Rather than driving the composition, image goes along for the ride.

Typically she builds her forms from discernable though irregular blocks: shapes are generally four sided though trapezoids and parallelograms, or else triangulated shapes, predominate, rather than rectangles as such.   Shapes are either filled in with solid color (synthetic pastel hues rather than primaries, always sharp and chirpy) or with bands of thin, hand-drawn stripes against a white ground.

The striped sections can read like sides of forms whose faces alone reflect solid color.  This abets illusions of depth, whether shallow relief or deep space, while the overall surface of her paintings retain literal flatness.  Bernini, Eiffel, Obelisk (2009) describes a vertical form that, despite its crazy-paving irregularity, conforms with the upwardly mobile connotations of its titular citations. It has some sides in a pale pink solid (various tones), others in stripe, to strengthen associations of faceting.  A sense of adherence to a goofy logic in Riley’s forms can bring to mind Jean Dubuffet’s late sculptures with their heavy black outlines filled in with white and the occasional primary.

The pink in Bernini, Eiffel, Obelisk is also subtly fleshly, which perhaps justifies the Bernini allusion (think St. Theresa).  It also recalls the knowingly “feminine” palette of Riley’s earlier, more heraldically modernist-referencing abstract paintings (Kenneth Noland, Agnes Martin) where the unlikely colors lent the works a subversive edge, a characteristic that carries across in milder form in the current series, with its pop palette.

But her sensibility is a far cry from the irony of, say, Sarah Morris or Liam Gillick. The many stylistic and art historical references and allusions in Riley’s works, whether Hokusai, Philip Guston, modernist architecture, classical history and myth, all come across as high minded, enriching rather than curtailing her pictorial ambition.  References, like the forms themselves, are algorithmic in their elaboration.  Her images are organic, and it is their palpable sense of growth that allows them to grow on the viewer, too.

The post Linda Francis, Don Voisine, Joan Waltemath, Michael Zahn at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, and Jennifer Riley: To Be A Thing In This World at LaViolaBank Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

June 20th – July 27th, 2008

Visiting Mike Nemire’s painting exhibition at Janet Kurnatowski’s salon-like gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in the dead heat of summer does not provide conventional respite from the weather.  Instead of cooling your mind and body, the seven paintings radiate endless refreshment for your eye’s retina—from the familiar shores of red, yellow and blue, into the hairier neon reaches of a full color palette.

For such a “light” genre of abstract painting Op Art carries a wide range of cultural and social ramifications.  From its kitsch value as the 1960s bedfellow of groovy fashion and design, to its inclusive democracy as an art form that can be easily “taken in” by anyone with eyes. Nemire’s paintings seem detached from this history, partly due to the artist’s employment of computer programs like Photoshop to find bizarre color spectrums and combinations. The coolness of this gesture is countered by a tight handling of the painted surface, and the complexity of optical patterns is nicely squared-off by wide canvas sides.

Each painting is a formal variation, in dimension and color, on grid systems. “RGB” (24” x 24”) is the most successful painting in the group in terms of creating space and movement from a dim center towards the brighter colors of the sides.  Bands of luminous, red, green and blue are represented on a full spectrum from their glowing, saturated zenith, to a dim commonality of murky hues.  The dim to bright contrast of the color weaves lends added weight to the painting’s uniform tonal center.  The effect is one of turning a dial to a neutral hum on a loud stereo system.

Exactly how modern (or ancient) is this color-grid patterning? Is it a pixilated movement of squares covering a virtual space into infinity—or a cloth weave pattern as timeless and mundane as plaid. With titles ranging from “Frequency” to “Harlequin,” we are expected to find affirmation in both answers. “Harlequin” (16”x17”), is an almost square canvas with carnival color combinations neatly subdivided by white strips.   A boxed group of red, purple and blue, morphs by gradient degrees into an equally electric group of green, turquoise and yellow. The brightness and compact size of “Frequency” (11”x18”) gives off a concentrated sense of real heat.  The painting pulses in waves of color: hot orange becomes cool lavender, cadmium red bleeds into toxic green. In “Zeros and Ones” the notes of individual color are so miniscule that the effect is like the static fuzz glimmering off a television screen. These are paintings that should be viewed from all angles, like a hologram the image will easily slide from a straightforward surface plane to an optical illusion.

The material adherence to oil on canvas and the use of tape to grid colors, keeps the paintings within a lineage of hard-edged, perceptually minded abstraction. Mondrian, Victor Vasarely, and Alfred Jensen come to mind as fellow painter-scientists who practiced within a personal system of colors to investigate mathematical, mystical and optical space in art. Nemire doesn’t rely on computer color programs to pump symbolic or narrative blood into his work, but instead employs them as one more prop in the performance of painting. It is a testament to the wide range of color and pattern that the paintings are able to reference both the noisy funk of 1970s and ‘80s analog technology, as well as the hyper slickness of contemporary digital image-making.

Nemire’s paintings carry the same obscure emotional charge as video color test bands, glowing stripes of pure color that signal a pause before the start of the video’s narrative.  The paintings are all variations on that “before” moment, endowing it with resonance as the primary subject. It remains to be seen to what end this young artist will continue to align his tremendous painting skills with the joyful endgame of color perception. For the time being, however, it is a satisfyingly balanced union.

The post Mike Nemire: HiColor appeared first on artcritical.

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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Janet Kurnatowski Gallery
205 Norman Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11222
(718) 383-9380

November 18th – December 17, 2005

Judy Simonian, a painter based in New York, blended themes of architecture and confinement in a recent solo exhibition at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery. Entitled “Chronic Civilization,” her show of three large paintings and several watercolors encompassed such disparate interiors as a medieval dungeon cell, the cavernous interior of a nightclub, urban office spaces, and the bowed perspective of an arena.

Simonian’s intuitive working methods bring a spirited, romantic negligence to her paintings. On canvas, her process is one of accretion: surfaces are often built up with collaged paper. Almost nothing of the canvas itself remains. In “Deep Purple Space,” painterly pleasure in light and shadow create a claustrophobic ambiance. The imagery clambers over and under a dense brew of gestural painting, hand-cut stencils, and sneaker tread textures. Within the tubular perspective of “Pink Cell,” schematic marks for granite blocks are accented by splashes of red paint while a shaft of sunlight illuminates the chamber. It’s a boudoir fit for a heroine of the French Revolution. Gazing into “Pink Cell,” I suddenly realized that I was the absent but implied figure. I was standing in the heroine’s soiled silk mules.

Simonian’s loose wet on wet technique weds the unreliable authority of power to the unpredictable process of watercolor in her works on paper. Several of them suggested architectural interiors where strong light seeps in through bars and barriers. The  paint’s liquidity creates an atmospheric background over which hard-edged forms appear. The barn-like environment of “6AM” featured horizontal burnt sienna strokes laid atop a reddish foreground, and recalled photographs of Jackson Pollock’s Long Island studio. In “Winter Garden,” arched indigo struts cage an upward, prisoner’s-eye view of the sky. The distemper of office environments was evoked in the wavering, single point perspective of a work entitled “Corporate Light.”

Simonian is very much an artist interested in the social role of art; she has created public art projects in New York during her long career. Yet, a sense of the almost sacred solitude of the artist at work pervades this suite of paintings. Artists from Fra Angelico to the French filmmaker Robert Bresson have grappled with the boundaries of the studio, the picture plane, the cinematic frame – their limits versus freedoms. Chronic Civilization alluded to such meditative thoughts, but also brought up a range of topical subjects such as surveillance and police power. In doing so, Simonian deftly balanced beauty against the citizen’s vulnerability – and the will to preserve freedom.

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April 29 – May 28, 2005

Painting is most exciting when it engages your grey matter as much as your guts. It’s amazing that an object on a wall – little more than a poster really – can get a mature adult’s mind racing and body trembling. At Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, five artists trace the line linking mind and body in a group exhibition called Art on the Line. Together they illustrate a continuum between the strictly methodical and the largely improvisational use of line in painting. The exhibition’s linear logic intelligently mirrors the structure of the paintings themselves.

Over on the left-brain side is John Warren. His drawings, graphite on paper, suggest an interest in physics. One drawing, Billow, describes the movement of a single line between moving poles crating a butterfly effect. In quantum mechanics, a single point in space is impossible to locate definitively despite the fact that the trace of that point is forever suggesting the point’s existence. So it is with Warren . His drawings chart motion without revealing what moves.

One step left of John Warren in brain logic is Nick Knight. Knight makes theory of Warren ‘s hypothesis in an oil on panel entitled Taxonome IV. Taxonomy is the science of classification and Knight’s painting is strictly classifiable only as itself. In an accompanying drawing, Knight sets the equation for his painting’s algorithm determining which lines will move which way right down to color coding. Knight’s delicate oil line is thin enough and controlled enough to frustrate but his dexterous handling liberates instead.

Back toward center away from the analytical left is John Cox. Cox suggests motion rather than charting it. His paintings are impressionistic. This might sound perverse given their appearance but in the company of Warren and Knight, that’s how they look. Cox striates his acrylic surfaces vertically and pulls color along them in bands. This creates a strong sense of movement, as with Warren , but seems to represent only a small part of a larger movement intuited. Cox’s paintings feel gleaned in the sense that impressionists gleaned their compositions from the fleeting effects of natural light. Impressionists were caricatured in their day as overly analytical for their “scientific” approach to painting. How things have changed.

The right-brainers of this bunch are Mike Miga and Elia Bettaglio. Miga is closer to center, but far from his above mentioned colleagues for two reasons: he hints at line’s potential for illusionistic description and he allows chance products of his process to determine his imagery. In El Protegido, he struck his fragile encaustic panel and used the cracks as a point of departure for the composition. The result is a web of thin lines, some fissured, some raised, which begins to hint at the emergence of discrete relational forms. This is a development none of the other painters in this somewhat austere show permit themselves with the outstanding exception of Elia Bettaglio.

Bettaglio is the deviant of the bunch. In his triptych of ink drawings, Bettaglio encourages line to define form not contingent on the nature of line itself. For his pals in the show, line is largely used to explore concepts. Bettaglio uses line, in the sense that Matta or Gorky used line, in service of his imagination. Mechanical mages materialize in little interconnected colonies set off expertly against the white of the page. Escalators are incorporated into his stingy world alongside faces and trees. It seems literally twisted, an image of a three dimensional space wound round itself. Bettaglio offers a hypothetical vision of Warren ‘s algorithm, a possible world emergent from the movements of an arbitrarily defined equation and an excellent bookend to the show.

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