January 5 to February 4, 2018
327 Broome Street, between Bowery & Chrystie Street
New York City, nicellebeauchene.com

Is painting in monochrome in 2018 retrograde? Jim Lee’s solo exhibition Half Off at Nicelle Beauchene seems to suggest as much as it fixates on the absurdity of this investigation. Lee explicates the perverse nature of painting monochromes (or painting itself) through tongue-in-cheek illustration of them. The paintings become physical manifestations of his casual approach and slapstick process and efforts to undermine the stoicism historically found in painting.

Uneven in texture, saturation, and hue, Lee’s paintings boast their apparent ineptitude: He unabashedly folds, staples, and tears lopsided seams, which feels irreverent given their nod to color-field abstraction and notions of purity. This is made meaningful by Lee’s use of different historically class-laden materials, such as oil paint and linen, intermixed with crass interlopers—Flashe, zone marking paint, visible staples, glitter, acrylic: lowbrow materials that feel deliberately applied to expensive supports that have been previously agitated and aggressively handled. The lowbrow materials occasionally impersonate highbrow ones or gesture over them, denouncing any aura of opulence implied by high quality. Lee’s works are biting their thumb at the elitism and purity bound to the stuffy history of the monochrome.

Highlighting the texture of the raw canvas or the slick plastic sheen of acrylic, mimicry and illusionism in Lee’s gestures double as surface depictions. Registered quickly for their tactile surface, their substance draws from deeper-rooted content, heavily contingent upon a viewer’s diligence. That they ask for a patient and persistent viewer can be seen in the paintings’ multifaceted intersections – these arise as time is spent with the works—whether between the digital and physical, humor and solemnity, elitism and the egalitarian. Lee’s surface quality, materials, gestures, and handling juggle anecdotes of the heavy baggage paintings can carry.

Intentionally or otherwise, Lee’s work often imitates the behavior or interaction a user has with an interface, such as manipulated screens that press against the picture plane and simultaneously recede into a deep space. A Cream Divide, split in half by conjoined canvas and linen, recalls a Photoshop preview dialogue box, de-saturating an image on the right half of its surface. The bright red panel on the left has a soft, blotchy red coating, unevenly mirrored by a seemingly darker red shaded by the underlying linen on the right panel. Similarly, in Safety and Senegal, Lee connects two distinct yellow surfaces of different prismatic intensity, sheen, and texture. Comprised of Flashe and zone marking paint, the lighter yellow intensified by its dark linen support, and conversely its light beige canvas, amplifies the deeper yellow. The physical and conceptual subtleties in Lee’s work invite the viewer to spend time with them, contradicting our expedited relationships to the information available via the screens alluded to in some of his works. Other paintings, such as Rutting Moon and Mr. Pleasant, inch closer to a “truer” monochrome with only a single color applied scrappily to a cobbled surface, appearing simple but still jabbing at traditional color-field painting.

Lee has provided his own bench from which viewers can fully absorb his faux monochromes. The same size as the paintings, the bench has printed on its seat a story from the artist’s hometown about a peeping tom and inevitable chaos that ensued. There is humor in peering around seated visitors in an attempt to read the text, mimicking a peeping tom’s mannerisms oneself. Looking back up at the paintings after reading the story feels like a violation of the paintings’ and artist’s privacy, and removes the deified objecthood to which works of art aspire. Paintings as an extension of oneself splayed out in a sterile gallery space is now re-imagined as unwelcome trespassing, but also realized as a necessary evil of continuing a sustainable art practice within a capitalist society. In this vein, the artist has provided a take home tee shirt emblazoned with the text “FCKER” for visitors to purchase. Who is the real fucker here?

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June 21 to July 31, 2015
299 Grand Street (between Eldridge and Allen streets)
New York, 212 510 7646

Marc Straus’s recently closed summer group show, “Gray Would Be the Color, If I Had a Heart,” showcased nearly 30 artists, spread through three galleries on two floors. Each artwork was rendered primarily in grayscale and the show went far beyond grisaille studies, including gelatin silver photographs, drawings, prints, and sculptures. That kind of excess is, although not ideal, pretty much to be expected with a lot of summer group shows. “Gray…” exceeded many similar exhibitions in its more-or-less consistent tone; and it basically achieved its aim of selecting works intended to be, as the press release puts it, “Not completely hopeless. Not utterly bleak. Not fully shrouded in darkness.” The maudlin grimness, which is supposed to be tinged with optimism, is excessive, too. But there were some really great artworks, silver lining or no.

Kind of surprisingly, few of them were monochromes. Although the show celebrates gray, it doesn’t remain there alone, and it recognizes that the color itself is broad: cool grays, warm ones, dark, light, tinted with pink, or blue, brown, orange, nothing at all, reflective, matte, symbolic or concrete, and so on.

There are contrasts from the start: near the gallery’s entrance is a photocollage diptych by VALIE EXPORT, showing a woman’s face towering over and observing a hypnagogic modernist cityscape, set next to two small assemblages by Kristjan Gudmundsson, made by adhering mechanical pencil leads in ordered rows on sheets of aluminum. In a nearby corner of the gallery, Rona Pondick’s man-headed dog sculpture, Fox (1998 – 99), recalls sci-fi horror from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Mars Attacks! It uses an image variously intended as horrific or absurd. One realizes that chimeras — aesthetic, biological, conceptual, whatever — are usually both.

Here also hangs a totemic punching bag by Jeffrey Gibson, a tight drawing by Joyce Pensato and Matt Ducklo’s South Parkway East Church (2011), a black-and-white photo of a small bus, used by a Memphis church, locked behind a chain-link pen in the middle of an empty parking lot at night. Like a lot of the work here, these simple, spare images are iconic and direct.

Upstairs, the show doesn’t hang quite so neatly together, or at least some of the works in it fall flat. Diana Shpungin’s A Failure of Memory (2015) suffers from a bland execution, as does Grayson Cox’s Vent (2015). The artists’ material choices are unclear: why is Shpungin’s wastebasket cut so loosely in half? Why are the shorn edges lined with plaster-cast material? Why is Cox’s painting framed in a large plywood casing? Why does the frame look so unfinished compared to the naturalism of the painting embedded within it at an angle?

Although Zlatan Vehabovic’s image of a large, dead whale, called Rock Bottom Riser (2014), is painted fussily, the image has deep roots in Dutch printmaking, and it’s a powerful one: a morbid leviathan. One reason that the icon is so common, besides its allegorical value, is because its one that recurs under human guidance. Whales have been threatened for centuries, first by large-scale hunting, and now by climactic catastrophe. Two works by Sam Trioli, hung side-by-side — Harry S. Truman (2014) and Untitled (Vibrations) from 2013 — show in photorealistic detail the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, and the man who ordered such weapons dropped on Japan 70 years ago. These, at least, are utterly bleak.

Also upstairs is a small and reserved etching by Jasper Johns: an image of one of his pewter-colored flashlight sculptures, titled Flashlight (1967 – 69). Johns was a gray eminence who sort of inspired the much-remarked on work of another of the color’s most famous painters, Brice Marden, whose early monochromes likely subsequently influence some of the other artists on view, such as Jessica Dickinson, Geoff Hippenstiel and Jim Lee. These artists are still exploring the marriage of surface, color and image. And for whatever reason (there are probably several that the artists would cite) gray is a good way to do that.

Finally, Dove Bradshaw’s 2013 painting, Contingency (Snow Tracks), shows a really concrete, absolute way to think about color’s use in art. Bradshaw made the painting by applying liver of sulfur to a silver-coated canvas (the former substance reacts to patinate the latter). Her technique here and in other works uses chance-based methods — developed by Johns’s friends Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage — in order to create images rooted in the precise relationship of one chemical to another. There’s nothing more factual than that. It’s not morose or bright, just true. Another fact is that this show had a lot of interesting work, a mélange. I don’t know about anyone else’s heart, but mine is there: it’s a gray fact.

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June 20 to July 27, 2008

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery’s storefront entrance on Williamsburg’s Union Avenue bears minimal signs of a commercial gallery space, seamlessly blending in with the neighborhood’s perpetual state of transformation. As such it is an appropriate setting to view the work of five artists who each in their own manner transform the “non-art” materials of urban refuse and raw construction to create restrained and complex abstractions.

Michael DeLucia’s “Gate,” a cement encrusted section of a chain-link fence stands as a kind of portal into the inter-related world of each object in the one-room gallery. It’s a vision that is both childlike and slightly menacing in its re-imagining of an ordinary street object. “Gate” is a strangely impassive yet tense object, able to carry on a conversation with the gallery’s nearby free-standing radiator, as well as the totality of the space. Looking like a cross between a sublime construction site accident and Antonio Gaudi’s drippy sandcastle architecture, “Gate” is an ideal entry point to understanding the spirit of transforming the quotidian that permeates each artwork.

Elisa Lendvay’s sculptures, “Pass” and “Three,” created from charred wood and papier mache, are placed on pedestals in the manner of a primitive shrine or devotional offering. The ageless materials could be scraps recycled yesterday and picked up on a street corner, or have existed for centuries buried in caves. The patterned rust of the tin ceiling is reflected in the mirrors that each piece sits on. An orange band painted around one of the wood pieces in “Pass” recalls nautical colors, a fragment from a buoy, or the remnants of driftwood grouped together to start a fire.

The flash of orange paint, the mark of the artist’s hand on seemingly scrappy material, also appears in Jim Lee’s painting “untitled (History and Belief).”  The painting is a slightly irregular grey shield-shape, supported by simple plywood pieces, constructed to be the painting surface’s visible sides. Lee’s other painting in the show, “Untitled (Shaft),” rests against the gallery wall like a stray ski, maroon and black diagonals give it a flag-like presence. A delicate framework of balsa wood supports the canvas surface, calling to mind the basement ingenuity of model airplane construction.

The tension between painted minimalism and a comparatively rough fabricated support is a personal signature of Lee’s. The resulting Malevich meets Home Depot aesthetic is reminiscent of the experimentation in the1960s and 70s towards a new poetics of painting supports and structures. Artists such as Ron Gorchov, who left the rectangle of the painting frame behind to work on a curved, sculptural stretcher, an intimation of the infinity of Space beyond the painted surface.  Don Voisine, a New York painter whom Lee is currently in a group show with at the Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicgao, paints hard-edged abstractions of color planes, X’s and diagonals on feather-thin, industrial pink and yellow Styrofoam. The illusion of indestructibility and determined eternity of the painted abstraction is given a fresh mortality by the exposed material of its edges. Lee’s wooden supports have a similar function to Voisine’s Styrofoam, disseminating the tension away from the two-toned solid grey sublime to the handmade craft that supports it.

Joy Curtis’s sculpture, “Eight,” in dialogue with Lendvay’s “Pass” and “Three,” looks like a fragment of colorful wreckage from a ship or flooded house.  The piece, standing 5’ 5” tall, was created from household molding cut and glued together.  The mottled rainbow colors against the white wood surface appear as the natural result of sanding the painted surface. Like a rainbow of oil in a puddle after a rainstorm the effect is one of elemental magic.

Inhabiting the gallery’s back wall and baseboard is Keiko Narahashi’s installation, “assembler,” a grouping of small boxy shapes of varying sizes, painted in bright white with red and black accents. The forms range in character from candy-like pills to geometric constructivism, effectively recalling both the building blocks of childhood, and the deeply learned lessons of painting all at once.  Like “Eight,” and “Gate,” the objects of “assembler” were created from a repetitive process of material transformation. In this case paper boxes coated in layers of paint to achieve their own individual architecture.

The overriding mood in the gallery is inexplicably hopeful, perhaps a subliminal effect of the Buckminster Fuller term, “Tensegrity,” given to the exhibition. Fuller’s theory of tensegrity, the harmonious synergy and tension of parts within an integral structure, was later adopted by Carlos Castaneda to define ancient physical and mental exercises (“magical passes”) practiced by Mexican Shamans. By doing so he effectively translates a construction-based theory of energy onto the human scale, as the bodily energy that passes fluidly from waking to dreaming consciousness. In narrative form this is perhaps best defined by Borges’ magician of “The Circular Ruins,” who at the moment of his death finds that he is not a mortal, but rather merely the dream of another.  Witness to the ever-shifting zone between found object and art object, construction and luminosity, visitors to Klaus von Nichtssagend’s “Tensegrity” are given the privilege of the dreamer forever awakening to new perceptual realities.

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