Stanley Lewis’s work is the obverse of what one might think of as a downtown aesthetic. His paintings and drawings, now on view at Betty Cuningham’s new Lower East Side home, carry a real one-two punch. Here are deliberately banal subjects — backyards, suburban scenes, calendar views of Lake Chautauqua — transformed by a brilliant but tortured way of realizing a painterly image that can yield work of rare satisfaction and ambition.

The fascination he arouses comes partially from an almost irreconcilable tension between working directly from observation, with exacting attention to small forms, and a very contemporary, almost sculptural painting process that builds a work with obsessively dense materiality. Cloth and paint are built up by cutting and repositioning pieces of worked canvas that will be reconnected, at least partially, with a loaded brush, painting wet into wet, layer upon layer. This often leaves bare staples, gaps, and deep scars that resist integration with the image.

In his larger works, Lewis is often seen trying to correct initial estimates of how much surface is needed to chart the movement of the eye from near to far, so that the space of the picture can make sense as a world. As he focuses on a specific area, it expands to fill his field of vision, fragmenting a sense of the whole. If Lewis wanted to cover the tracks of his labors he easily could, but the point of his work, evidently, is not a view of nature alone, nor is it just a correspondence between built up paint and the presence of things. Instead, we are invited to move back and forth from the world depicted to the traces of his process. Ultimately, Lewis’s sucker punch is to shift our attention from quotidian views to his inner experience of looking and making, to the meditative adventure of what painting can be.

As I was looking back and forth between three terrific works in the gallery’s back space, Lewis’s distinct quality of light on partly cloudy days became evident. In Boat on the Beach, Lake Chautauqua (2013) and even more so in Backyard Jeykll Island, GA (2014), a subtle pink tone suffuses the air, transforming the everyday into a glimpse of reality enchanted. This surprisingly recalled Jess’s magical Translation paintings, which also share with Lewis a charmed light and an irrational play between image and a lapidary surface of thickly applied paint, erupting here and there into incongruous lumps. The third painting, Winslow Park, Westport (2010-2014), and the most recent work at the gallery’s entrance, Matt Farnham’s Farm with Truck (2014), share a cooler blue-green quality no less captivating than the others.

Structural ideas vary from picture to picture: a traditional repoussoir of dark trees frames the central vortex of space in Farm with Truck; in Winslow Park, a tree masked by a telephone pole serves as a pictorial axis using wires above and the gated fence below to extend their reach backward and forward into space. A network of silhouettes and shadows orchestrates Jeykll Island and diagonal paths of thickly worked rivulets of grasses and clouds open the space against the horizon in Boats on a Beach.

Perhaps the most unusual and surprising structure is featured in the show’s largest work, an elaborate paper bas-relief, Hemlock Trees Seen from Upstairs Window in the Snow (2007-2014), made with pencil on layers of cut and carved print paper. This irregularly-shaped snowbound landscape is partially modulated through the physical modeling of the paper, allowing the dominant central tree to float, as if we were watching a slow motion explosion of limbs moving outward in all directions. This is the show’s knockout punch. His master work captures the eerie grey light of a soft snow fall that carries an unmistakable air of fatality.

Thinking about this and other fine drawings on view, it is hard to miss correspondences between Lewis’s work and School of London artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Closer to home and recent innovation are the drawn mappings of Dawn Clements and recent tree photographs of Mike and Doug Starn. All these artists share with Lewis an interest in the reinvention of realism by piecing together literal fragments of paper that re-synthesize the image. Lewis’s crazy-quilt painting process stands for the dignity of his unique experience. This is the source of what is so disconcerting, so irritating and so crucial in his work.

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May 22 to July 31, 2008

At the Tibor De Nagy Gallery  you can reconnect with the singular world of Jess, the poetic visionary who died in 2004, and whose work has not been seen in New York since his astonishing Whitney retrospective in 1994.  The current show presents a robust sample of collages and paintings spanning Jess’s strange career, of which nothing is more emblematic than its origin.  After years of the straightest imaginable life as a high security nuclear chemist, including a stint producing plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Burgess Collins had an apocalyptic dream that he heeded, in 1949, by enrolling in the San Francisco Art Institute, mythologizing his name, and hooking up for life with a learned bohemian poet, Robert Duncan.  Nearly twenty years before the Summer of Love, Jess had Turned On, Tuned In, and Dropped Out.

The pre-hippy, pre-Beat San Francisco Renaissance was fancifully seasoned compared to the professional New York scene Jasper Johns and the late Robert Rauschenberg were setting out to conquer with ostensibly similar means–– collage, assemblage, and semiotics.  Jess found himself surrounded by gay occult esoterica and Dionysian nature rite (duly psychotropic, one presumes), in addition to High Modernist poetics, both literary and visual.   Clifford Still was an example of such, being one of Jess’s instructors at the Art Institute, though he may not have been as doctrinaire as one would suppose.  (Some typically cantankerous letters from Still are on view at the Jewish Museum’s current Action/Abstractionexhibition.)

It was Max Ernst’s seminal tours de force in collage, however, that offered an immediate way into the dream syntax that Jess was in urgent haste to decode.  There is an interesting selection of Jess’s collages in Tibor’s show whose salient characteristic is disorientation: resuscitated engravings of machines concatenate with body parts from Life Magazine, the celestial has truck with the banal, time runs backwards and gravity repels.  He called them “Paste-Ups,” which can’t help but suggest William Burroughs’ and Bryin Gysin’s contemporaneous “cut-ups,” in which pulp narrative was randomized in search of opiated delusions of Jungian synchronicity.  Jess’s early collages can seem, by contrast, a bit genteel, even amateurish; they also suffer in comparison to more formally resolute works by the likes of Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, or Harry Smith, on paper and film, arising in the same milieu.

But Jess’s learning curve quickly trajects to a sustained mastery.  On view is a late epic from 1980 that is undoubtedly among the most ambitious spectacles in the history of the medium.  A Cryogenic Consideration; Or Sounding One Horn of the Dilemma (Winter) is packed, as always, with disjunctive cryptic incident, yet the six foot-wide whole is held in tension by a dazzling cosmic sparkle that simulates –without remotely obeying –the laws of a unified visual field.  In the age of Photoshop, one may speculate as to what portion of such meticulous whimsy is digitizable and what inheres in Jess’s lifelong labor-of-love of thrift-shopping, slicing, filing, arranging, pinning, and finally– without recourse to Undo– gluing.

Tibor is also showing a prime cross-section of oil paintings.  On view are some early, hesitantly symbolist works, but already in Ex.1- Laying a Standard: Translation #1, (1959), you can witness the invention of a radical new practice seemingly declared by a higher authority.  The year before, Jess’s colleague Jay DeFeo had started in on The Rose, which was to become the all time poster child for painterly obsession.  Jess too began to pile up layer after layer of pigment, in this case upon the lucid perspectival lineaments of an obsolete apparatus from an 1887 issue of Scientific American until it took on the strange, sensuous density of a meteorite pocked and patinated by interstellar wear.  Consider that this was the breakthrough upon which a staggeringly brilliant series of 32 Translations across 19 years was founded and it is not too much to say that the painting enacts a true metaphysical redemption: as image coagulates into thing, science is reclaimed by art; mass recaptures energy; and a thermonuclear chemist is reborn as magus, as artist.

In Ex. 3- Fionn’s Finnegas: Translation #4, (1964) a more complex antique diagram solidifies into dreamily colored matter, but here the image is wedged apart at every graphic joint, as if a river system had cut illustrational canyons through strata of time.  The crepuscular palette is both quiet and loud, synthetic and organic, primeval and utterly new.  The painting is an enigma that you can’t stop looking at.  Four of the Translations are on view in this show, and each precipitates, like a word repeated over and over, a luminous, truly euphoric state of nonsense.

You can read the paint-by-number pictorial architecture of the Translations, straightforwardly enough, as a forced zoom into single details of the sort found in cacophonous abundance in the Paste-Ups– scientific diagrams, as noted, but also old postcards and snapshots, bygone children’s illustrations, comics, advertisements, and esoteric texts.  Indeed, Jess explained that the series began as training for an epic synthesis of collage and painting, Narkissos, that was never fully realized.  Because he needed to learn about free paint handling and remote color harmonics without, in the process, emulsifying the image, he temporarily put aside the fragmented syntax of Ernst.  But something happened: an inadvertent stroke of compression which charged the Translations with the altogether more potent humor of Duchamp.  This is Jess in a nutshell: sincere literalism colliding with arch semiotics and giving off rare alchemical heat.

Such genuine bathtub fusion as Jess offers may be more valuable to us than anything in art at this moment.  Superficial comparisons to DeFeo’s, Milton Resnick’s or Alfred Jensen’s enriched transubstantiations of sheer paint aside, theTranslations might once have seemed outsider-ish.  Now this very eccentricity appears to have been strategic, allowing Jess to sidestep Expressionist theatrics, dour Formalist abstinence, and toxic Pop cynicism as lastingly, if by no means as nimbly, as the canonical Johns and Rauschenberg.

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