Half an hour before NADA New York was set to close its doors Sunday, artist (and longstanding artcritical contributing editor and review panelist) Joe Fyfe enlisted my aid in the hanging of an extra work at Galerie Christian Lethert’s booth – actually the unutilized opposite outer wall of LA dealers TIF SIGFRIDS at #507.  Fyfe was showing several of his painted constructions with the Cologne dealer in the company of Imi Knoebel: Nice company, I remarked.  “Actually I first started going to art fairs in New York just because it was the only way to get to see Knoebels in those days,” Joe responded, acknowledging his reverence for the legendary German minimalist.  A reverence that didn’t extend, mind you, to breaking up a grid of small framed pieces to steal a couple of screws for his flag.  “Just stand at a distance and make sure it isn’t too crooked” he said, fumbling to get traction between a recalcitrant screw and his electric screw driver- eventually resorting to hammering with its heel. A little uneven wouldn’t hurt, I volunteered, contemplating the blocks of blue and turquoise fabric loosely adhering to the Stars and Stripes, as it goes with the provisional look.  “If I hear the word ‘provisional’ one more time I’ll scream,” he said.  Oriane Stender told him to pose with his flag for a photo.  “Does this mean I’ll be all over Facebook” he asks in mild disdain, acquiescing nonetheless.

The post Hoisting the Colors at NADA with Joe Fyfe appeared first on artcritical.

October 30 to December 23, 2011
47 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand
New York City, (212) 274-0064

There is something deliciously grubby about the paintings and sculptures of Bianca Beck.  She favors distressed, punctured, encrusted surfaces, an earthy, at times visceral palette and painterly gestures that border on violence.  Lacerations, smudges and sgraffito incisions attack the paint as if in a last-ditch attempt to extract imagery from recalcitrant materials.

This debut solo commercial gallery show is titled “Body” and follows a spot earlier this year in the project room at White Columns. In but a couple of instances, the paintings are untitled, date from 2011, and are less than 2-1/2 by 2 feet.  The three oil painted sculptures – also 2011 and untitled – are roughly carved or perhaps found shapes of wood, arranged on pedestals, each not much more than a foot high.

Dance Painting is an exuberant aggregation of curlicues forming a web against what could register equally as a flower or an orifice, a red depression with a black and blue center.  A swirl of lines, seemingly dragged wet in wet through thin paint, sometimes sharp, sometimes smudged, is accented here by dabs and there by scratches.  Darker browns against the light tan of the panel support invite an association of pubic hair against flesh but without enforcing such a reading.  The painting has a compelling gestalt, an almost tantric center, and yet there is a sense of elements coming into being as we look at them, of wet, wayward squiggles coalescing into form.

The artist, who is in her early thirties, has been seen in a number of group exhibitions recently, including Le Tableau at Cheim & Read in 2010, a show that proffered affinities between contemporary artists from various centers and postwar French painting.  Beck’s work would make a convincing bridge in a three-person show with two otherwise formally dissimilar co-exhibitors in that show, namely Joe Fyfe (its curator) and the British painter Merlin James.  Readers aware of this reviewer’s ongoing attention to Fyfe and James will recognize this as a statement of praise.

Beck’s scruffy supports and mucky surfaces share with these artists an oxymoronic luxuriance in unprepossessing ingredients.  What is less immediately apparent in the younger woman than in the supremely history-conscious older painters is a way of reconciling studious awareness of precedence with a determinedly improvisatory expressiveness: knowingly making space for innocence.  Beck adopts a striking variety of approaches from piece to piece without a loss of personal style, managing simultaneously to bolster and destabilize authorial integrity.

Her primitivism is both “primitivism” in quotes, with a strong nod in the direction of postwar apocalyptical art informel and art brut, and at the same time an authentic-seeming venting of feeling, a connection to deep urges.  The allusions or affinities are with artists like Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier or Jean Dubuffet (in his brown phase), or with Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.  They are not with the Viennese actionists, Antoni Tàpies, or Julian Schnabel, with each of whom they bear some occasional formal resemblances.  This comes down to a matter of scale, not just size—or even for that matter bombast or speed.  The key is that Beck’s visual statements are contained.  Thus the sense of their being pictures rather than paintings; images rather than fields of experience.  Thus, too, perhaps, the title of the show: Body. The show almost feels like a vindication of Fyfe’s inclusion of the artist in his curatorial argument for a kind of abstract picture making that is a paradigm apart from Abstract Expressionism.

Art historical erudition is not the same thing as pictorial intelligence, of course, but these enticing objects – at once spontaneous and heavily worked, orgiastic in their immediacy and thought through in their local, formal implications – achieve a delectable balance of seemingly opposite impulses in painting.

The post Making Space For Innocence: Bianca Beck at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

Stephen Mueller, abstract painter of exquisite poise and art critic of insightful, affirmative precision, died on Friday after a relatively short battle with lung cancer.  He was a week shy of turning 64.

Eight of his sumptuous, at once subtle and exuberant watercolors are currently included in the group exhibition, “Papertails” curated by Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond, on view at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery on Washington Square.  Last year he was the subject of a well-received solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, where he had shown his work since 2007.  Reviewing that exhibition in these pages, Stephanie Buhmann observed how, with solo shows by Thomas Nozkowski and Brice Marden as neighbors, Mueller’s show was “a wonderful intervention in a gallery-to-gallery symposium concerning the nature and experience of abstract painting.”

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1947, Mueller had studied at the University of Texas, Austin before taking his masters at Bennington College, Vermont.  Bennington was then a hotbed of a Greenbergian formalism “shoved down your throat” as he told Joe Fyfe in a 2002 Bomb magazine interview.  His subsequent career can almost be defined as a running battle between aesthetic purism and engagement with visual culture. But rather than resulting in tension, this collision course of values seemed to result in a harmony that was all the more sweet and intense for its complexity.

In his mature work – which was characterized by vibrant yet ingeniously modulated color choices and increment-free paint surfaces (or in the case of watercolor, ethereal yet sumptuous stain) – the imagery manages to be at once cosmic and decorative. Typical compositions would see mandalas floating amidst audacious plaids.  The sensibility, however, was not an abrasive one of postmodern incongruence.  Rather, he traded in a kind of tantric gaiety that could collapse the boundaries between kitsch and the sublime.

Mueller brought similar qualities to his art writing as to his painting, most notably a kind of sophisticated naïveté in which he could develop somewhat off-the-wall comparisons and formulations while paying close attention to the mood and intention of the work under review.  His writings were published with some regularity in Art in America magazine, Gay City News and, in seven cherished contributions between 2003 and 2007, here at artcritical.  His writerly tone managed to combine deadpan delivery and almost impish enthusiasm.  His conclusion to a joint review of shows by Deborah Kass and Dana Frankfort from four years ago around this time of year (the post Labor Day rush) is a timely reminder of the purpose of making and seeing art: “The implications and issues raised in both of these shows are far ranging and quickly become quite deep. They are both a lot of fun and offer several fertile fields for painting to grow in. Don’t miss them before the shows come too thick and fast to detect an issue or an implication.”

The resolution of opposites in both his art and his criticism was for some of a piece with Stephen’s deportment, in which a seemingly somber and taciturn manner actually proved a foil for a lust for life and an unfailing generosity of spirit.

Click Here for a complete list of Mueller’s writings at artcritical

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Le Tableau, curated by painter and critic Joe Fyfe, is a typical example of what happens when hermeneutic hypothesis trumps the ability to discern qualitative significance in painting. There is a tendency in synchronic exhibitions these days to foreground an explanatory text in such a way that the works chosen become merely ancillary to some theoretical proposition. In the case of Le Tableau, without the printed, accompanying text, it would be different to grasp exactly what this exhibition is trying to tell us. Fyfe separates his concerns as artist, critic and curator from the legacy of Greenbergian formalism by advocating less the concept of  “the flatbed picture plane” and more the “material means and/or structure of painting as a form or figure” as, for example, found in post-war French painting from the 1940s and ‘50s.

In fact, , I’m fully in support of reviving attention to post-war French painting, based on my own experience in seeing works of these painters in the late 1960s on my first excursion to France.  Even so, and in spite of Fyfe’s handsome text, there is a paucity of work in this exhibition that catches a glimmer of what this mid-century period in the recent French painting (at least from this American’s perspective) was all about.  Le Tableau is a gathering of a few modestly scaled Ecole de Paris paintings by Jean Fautrier (measuring just under 9 X 11 inches), Serge Poliakoff, and the French-Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle ( 7 X 5 1/2 inches) along with a recent work (2009) by Supports/Surface painter Claude Viallat, whose rise to prominence came in the 1970s.  A mediocre painting by the otherwise remarkable Hans Hartung is included, yet pales beside anything that was shown in that artist’s phenomenal retrospective at the Maeght Foundation in San Paul de Vence in 2008.  There is no work by Pierre Soulages, Wols, Gerard Schneider, or Georges Matthieu to stand in support of the eclectic, motley choice of slightly larger works from recent French and American artists. An exception is the sumptuous Untitled (1959) by Joan Mitchell, who can be claimed equally by America and France, particularly in this most heraldic moment of her development.  Fyfe is generally correct in characterizing Mitchell (from the late 1950s) as “an insouciant semiotician of the painterly mark.”  What made these paintings so eminently important for Mitchell was her propensity to stop short of de Kooning’s sweeping brushwork, and to focus intensively and unabashedly on destroying the surface. Paradoxically she maintained the force of restraint so as not to kill it entirely as her anxious marks became signifiers of an explosive, personal content, both self-determined and utterly convincing.

The exhibition also includes Kate Moran, Jonathan Lasker, Merlin James, John Zurier, Juan Usle, Jean-Francois Maurige, and the late Milton Resnick, among others.  Fyfe participates in the exhibition himself with an elegant sewn work using felt, cotton, and jute (from Southeast Asia), and thereby implies that the French approach from the 1950s is his own proper context. The positioning of one’s own work in such an exhibition is perhaps more problematic today than it would have been three or four decades ago, a time when the overall emphasis on the market was known but considerably less obvious than it has become.  While Fyfe may hold a clear commitment to the intellectual aspects of advanced painting, the presence of his work in Le Tableau appears somewhat overstated.

Reopening the book on Michel Tapié’s Art Informel and Tachisme is certainly welcome, but the kind of contiguity and consistency between then and now is simply not clear in the works selected for this display. The balance is off, and the installation is often awkward. There is not enough strong work from the early period in Paris to get a definitive idea as to where recent abstract painting from New York and France may have found an unforeseen place in the current century. Fyfe’s comparison of two nearby Chelsea buildings by architects Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel as a way to characterize the extreme aesthetic differences between America and France I find to be absurd. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the kind of abstract painting advocated by Greenberg, criticism based in qualitative judgments is still relevant. This is where the application of theory in terms of justifying much of this exhibition becomes highly problematic, and where Le Tableau falls short of its potential. Even so, whatever one may think of the thesis of this show, a  new look at postwar French painting relative to the present deserves more institutional support as better works by these earlier French artists could have turned this rather hesitant exhibition into something of real significance.

The post When Hypothesis Trumps Quality: Le Tableau at Cheim & Read appeared first on artcritical.

Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator (and a contributing editor at artcritical).  In “Le Tableau,” a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition at Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery that he has organized, Fyfe pugnaciously shakes by its horns the francophobia of the American critical establishment. The show pairs contemporary practitioners from both sides of the pond known for their almost semiotic interrogations of a painting’s support with 1950s and ‘60s “tachistes,” as the French liked to call their abstract expressionists: Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, and that quietly lyrical genius of sumptuous tones, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff. These guys were big names at the time. But while they continue to command a loyal collector base in France, where they are often found in the concluding room of regional fine art museums, they are completely marginal to the official history of post war art promoted in the United States. Such “old masters” rub shoulders with Paris-friendly yanks such as Joan Mitchell, who resided in the city of lights for much of her time, and Milton Resnick. The result of Fyfe’s revisionist experiment is, quite apart from its critical or historical validity, both a tactile and a visual orgy of raw textures, smeared impastos, and punctured supports. Until September 3, 547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-242-7727.

A version of this article, accompanied by a work of Serge Poliakoff’s, appeared at the New York Sun, June 28, 2010

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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.

The post Joe Fyfe: Recent Work at James Graham & Sons appeared first on artcritical.

November 14, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Ana Finel Honigman, Joe Fyfe, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman, Sue Coe at Gallerie St. Etienne, Ron Gorchov at Nicholas Robinson, and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum.

The post November 2008: Finel Honigman, Joe Fyfe, and Mario Naves with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

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”

The post Robert Mangold at PaceWildenstein, Mark Grotjahn at Anton Kern, Joe Fyfe at James Graham & Sons appeared first on artcritical.

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Joe Fyfe, Andrea Scott, and Roberta Smith joined David Cohen to review Gilbert and George at Lehmann Maupin and at Sonnabend, Jesper Jest at Perry Rubenstein, Richard Tuttle at the Drawing Centre and Sarah McEneaney at Gallery Schlesinger.

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“Band of Abstraction” until August 14 (819 Washington Street, between Little W. 12th and Gansevoort Streets, 212-243-8572).

A painterly equivalent to the truism that the child is father to the man is that an artist’s early drawings reveal the essence of his or her character. If this is indeed the case, anyone intrigued by the enigmatic art of Robert Ryman should repair to Peter Blum’s SoHo gallery. The selection of works on paper there, from the outset of his career, apparently constitutes the first survey of his drawings.

Harold Rosenberg labeled work that induces uncertainty about its aesthetic intentions or its very status as a work of art “the anxious object.” It is the genius of Mr. Ryman, throughout his distinguished career, to have made supremely anxious objects while always ensuring that not one is marked by the faintest degree of angst.

But that’s par for the course for so playful a reductionist. Mr. Ryman is primarily known for painted, white, square canvases, a drastically pared-down form he inherited from Malevich. What he jettisoned is the Russian Suprematist’s key ingredient: metaphysics.

His works can certainly seem, from the telling, severe enough: What, after all, can be more minimal, or conceptual, and yet remain a painting, than a white square? Yet the actual experience of a Ryman, once you get used to the closed-down range of his obsessive formal and material interests, is a sense of the perennial doodle, of someone simply mucking around with materials and having fun – quite possibly at the viewer’s expense. But the uninhibited may share the sheer pleasure-sensation of paint smeared on paper: Look at the isolated smudges of oil on mylar, or of casein on Bristol board in a couple of drawings from 1960, and you almost feel like you have put it there yourself.

A Ryman always teeters on the edge of pranksterism, not despite but because of its element of preciousness and pretentiousness There is humor as well as nonchalance in his touch in particular and his project in general. Mr. Ryman’s prank (if that’s what it is) compares with the honorable tradition of the hoax in turn-of-the-century French culture, which Roger Shattuck (in his book, “The Banquet Years”) brilliantly related to Cubism. Earnestness and absurdity ought to be opposites, but somehow, Mr. Ryman constantly has the one feed off the other.

Perhaps this odd aesthetic posture relates to Ryman’s start as a jazz musician. He turned to art on a whim and never submitted to formal training as a painter. And though he came to prominence with the generation of minimal and conceptual artists, and has attracted no end of weighty theorizing from critical supporters, he never lost a sense of improvisation: You could say he brought a light touch to their heavy agenda.

There is hardly a sense, in Mr. Ryman’s oeuvre, of early as opposed to late. He is either ever a beginner, in Rilke’s sense, or else – if you buy fully into his aesthetic – he arrived a fully-fledged master. The tentative, goofy curiosity of his early drawings show precisely the same quality, or lack of quality, that characterizes his “mature” work.

That said, these early efforts from the late 1950s and early 1960s pack some surprises, primarily in terms of color and expressivity. Mr. Ryman’s most recent show of paintings, at PaceWildenstein in the fall of 2002, was marked by the unusual extent to which colorful grounds were exposed, but even for the Ryman aficionado the displays of bold color in these first drawings is almost shocking. It is rather like seeing bright colors on modern tennis stars, where you expect the decorum of white.

More startling, though, is the tightness of pictorial organization that characterizes some of these works. The usual touchstone with Mr. Ryman, given his oxymoronically casual purposiveness, is Jasper Johns, the Dadaist debunker of Abstract Expressionism. But rather than looking like another enemy within of action painting, Mr. Ryman circa 1958 looks like an avid and uncritical admirer of Robert Motherwell, Clifford Still, and Mark Tobey. Even where he goes for alloverness or drastic informality, there is a studied sense of design, of a compelling gestalt.

Where a sense of the prankster-doodler undoubtedly comes across is in his unremitting play with his own signature. Arthur Danto has described Mr. Ryman’s “RRyman” as not so much a signature as a graffito that happens to be his name. The artist has made extraordinary motifs out of date and signaturewhich are all the more remarkable for being left to stand out in otherwise motif bereft compositions. In some of these early drawings, the artist’s name is repeated over and over, as if he were an adolescent trying to fix the style of his autograph. In what seem, anyway, solipsistic meditations on expression and its absence, the signature becomes a precarious signifier of ego.

If early Ryman puts you in the mood for oddball abstraction of a sophisticatedly childlike tenor, be sure to catch the closing week of “A Band of Abstraction,” the delightful and adventurous survey of less-known painters put together by painter and critic Joe Fyfe at Van Brunt Gallery.

Mr. Fyfe, himself no stranger to extremes of rough-edged painterly nonchalance, has gathered 17 artists. His stated guiding principle is that they should be relative strangers to New York exposure and that they should make small works. What looks at first, curatorially, like effortless scatter is in fact a marvel of dialogue and interchange between eloquent individualists.

An achievement of this show is to present New York debuts for several painters known quite well in France as latter-day followers of the Support-Surface movement. As the name implies, this movement was much-enamored of quirky games with ground and material. Jean-Francois Karst has a simple green grid on a white ground; both are incongruously animated by a tumorous buldge in the canvas. Nadine de Koenigswarter enlists hole punch chads as the ingredient of a monochromatic montage.

Several of the natives among Mr. Fyfe’s band pursue, as if punning the title of the show, bars and stripes as their motif – among them Jennifer Riley, Taro Suzuki and Adrienne Farb. One of several motif-orientated painters I was charmed to discover was Jason Duval. The subtly multilayered serpentine form of “Wrong Turn in Kharkom,” (2004) seemed-to paraphrase Paul Klee’s famous remark about line-to take the *grid* for a walk.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 22, 2004

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