December 11, 2017 to January 21, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, nyss.org

At first glance, the bold patterns in John Walker’s recent paintings and drawings appear to mark a change in direction from the large gritty paintings of tidal pools of Maine that were his last body of work. On further viewing, it becomes apparent that his familiar landscapes of mud, water, fire and tides have become compressed into signs or ideograms. These perhaps reflect time spent in Australia during the1980s when he made a study of boriginal bark and cave paintings as well as the abstract lineage of modernism.

The intimate, explorative exhibition at the New York Studio School exposes his complex interaction with a particular place and its shifting transient nature. Walker has often spoken about rejecting the picturesque in favor of primordial nature as represented by mud, dirt and water. In the region of Maine’s Seal Point and John’s Bay, he has found these necessary elemental motifs. At the edge of land and water, he has become immersed in the visceral experience of light, space and motion. There he has sought to bridge the atmospheric, volumetric world of matter and its equivalence in signs. Landscape thus becomes an arena not only to view the fleeting nature of the elements with its seasonal and biological cycles but also a vessel for thought and process within the context of various pictorial languages.

In Fire and Tide and Two Brush Fires, some of his former complex spatial panoramas with their diverse vantage points and horizon lines remain. Walker, however, has often changed his viewing perspective. At times, he has vicariously crawled along the surface of the earth or seen things as a fish traversing water or as a bird from above or a combination of different vantage points in the same painting. In Two Brush Fires a vertical panoramic space is grounded by two trees uniting land, fire, water and sky seen both from above and at the horizon. By contrast, John’s Bay Pollution” reveals a flatter, condensed spatial world of water patterns containing floating interactive shapes. Viewed from above, a brown form hovers over incoming and outgoing tides acting as a magnifying glass revealing particles of pollution. This pivotal form compresses the action of the bird/fish and shield shapes reminiscent of the mapping of animal and water trails found in Australian aboriginal painting.

Sign language becomes even more evident in black and white drawings that evoke musical exercises with their motifs and recapitulations of the ebb and flow of tides: times of day amidst floating objects pulled by currents. Walker has stated that all his abbreviations of shapes and forms come from acute observation of particular sites. His drawings reflect these observations of a sea world with undulating patterns, horizontal and vertical lines that act as cross currents creating pulsating tensions. Fish, ice cakes, detritus, clam markings, and fragments of land intermesh with the tides.

Walker’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout his long career he has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Goya, Constable, Turner and Abstract Expressionism with the more formal language of Matisse, Malevich and Ethnographic Art. Over the past decades he has been moving back and forth between both pictorial concepts, sometimes emphasizing his love of light and expressive painterly forms, other times using abbreviated signs, and sometimes managing to simultaneously employ both modes. In his painting series, “A Theater of Recollections” (about his father in the muddy trenches of World War I) he combined ideograms, patterns, and words from poems that interact with volumetric shapes and atmospheric moods. The Studio School show is a good introduction to his innovative merging of the physical tactile world with a formal language of signs, ideograms and pictographs, expanding the painter’s language in this time.

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October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish joined moderator David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read, Peter Fend at Essex Street, David Hockney at Pace Gallery and John Walker at Alexandre Gallery.  The panel took place at the National Academy Museum.  Video by Anna Shukeylo.  Recording Engineer: Isaac Derfel.

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October 2 to November 15, 2014
41 East 57th Street (corner Madison Avenue)
New York City, 212-755-2828

Few painters have expanded the original impulses of Abstract Expressionism in more directions than John Walker. During the course of his half-century of painting, he has incorporated into his canvases written poetry verses, concise renderings of skulls and allusions to both aboriginal art and the old masters. He has pushed painting’s material limits, employing shaped canvases and large-scale collage techniques, and mixing all manner of ingredients into his paint: gels, chalk dust, and more recently, mud. But his biggest departure from “classic Ab-Ex” may be his reliance on the perceived world. Although moodily abstracted, his images from the last decades have been consistently inspired by observations of the real. His urgent strokes and brooding color, moreover, reveal a certain discipline of form; their forces build in ways that create discrete, tangible presences in his paintings – a feat of internal composition that hints as much of European modernism as the New York School. If the artist is an Abstract Expressionist, he’s an unusually worldly one.

For more than a decade, Walker has investigated a particular slice of the observed:  the view from his studio in Seal Point, Maine.  From the foot of a cove it overlooks a dramatic panorama, with fingers of land cutting across the vast meeting of water and sky. The tides, which alternately cover and expose wide mud flats, add to the shifting effects of light, time and weather. This disequilibrium seems to suit Walker, who says he chooses to work in the least scenic spot, one strewn with washed-in garbage. Even so, his recent paintings at Alexandre Gallery suggest the artist has reached, career-wise, a kind of personal equilibrium. The palette for his large canvases has become lighter, and their compositions more lucid. Gone are some of the more extravagant forays, including the skulls and written texts – the mud remains – as if the broad spaces and limpid light were sufficient fuel for his painting. The work at Alexandre falls mostly into two categories: six- or seven-foot tall canvases, and paintings on discarded bingo cards just over seven inches high.  All are vertical in format and boast a high horizon above a spreading plane of water/earth.

Most of the large canvases are divided into contrasting planes of parallel, sometimes zigzagging, lines. Often they include one or two realistic tokens of the actual scene: an island covered with trees, the small circle of a sun or moon. These paintings manage to convey nature’s immensity even as they mangle its topography. In “The Sea No. II” (2014), for instance, a large, white shield-like shape, articulated by vertical green stripes, hangs before horizontally striped deep blues. The energy of the forms is clear, even if their perspectival relationships aren’t; it represents a point of land intruding weightily upon the water’s spreading surface. At the top, a red sun tips into an unlikely indentation in the horizon. A sprouting of greens interrupts the blue halfway up the canvas. The lower half of the shield-form has the rough texture of mixed-in earth, grounding it metaphorically. But the metaphor isn’t really necessary: one senses land against shimmering expanse, the remoteness of sun and sky, and the isolation of a tree-covered island. One absorbs the usual paradox of painting, of material representations of the immaterial. But one experiences something else, as well – a representation made especially vital through abstract means.

Other large canvases introduce different elements. A snowfall of white or beige patches descends through three canvases; in another, tentacle-like arms stream across blue of water. At times the artist’s generalizing or repetition of forms suggests a “problem-solving” approach – the studious application of a workset of ideas. But this hardly diminishes their overall power, and the small paintings on bingo cards – over a dozen of which line one wall – are a delight.  All of these tiny works size up broad scenes with startling immediacy. Walker’s marks dash about and dot their surfaces in a frenzy, in a wider array of colors – emerald blue-greens, grass-greens, blazing oranges and subtler reds in some, ochres and browns in others – as well as freer and more profuse detail.  A thickly brushed, rather obtuse white form dominates most of the images, angling tensely across the ground’s receding horizontals. In some, a cluster of greens becomes, palpably, a tree rooted at a specific distance; in others, a sprinkling of dots could be tiny figures on an immense plain. A minority of the marks are recognizable as objects, but all read as presences in the almost mystically deep and bright spaces. Though painted on humblest of supports, the colors and forms capture the primal experience of land meeting sky, and the artist seems to experience it anew each time.

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February 3 – March 19, 2005

British-born John Walker is an abstract painter of singular power, fully in possession of his craft. As an artist and much admired teacher, his career has been illustrious and influential. Yet no exhibition should be seen through the distorting lens of credentials. Viewed straight up, this sampling of mammoth abstract collages from 1974-78 at Knoedler, together with current work in the same medium, is disconcerting. The exhibition is beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

First impressions are breathtaking. In the main gallery, your eye is pulled immediately to the two10 by 8 foot paintings-painted canvas collages-structured on a majestic ordering of blues and yellows : “Ostraca I” (1977) and its untitled pendant piece from the same year. The architecture of the work overwhelms with the coloristic rhythm of its recessions and advances, hard-edged pieces of painted and cut canvas shifting and jostling for position like tectonic plates. Ignoring Clement Greenberg’s gospel of flatness, Mr. Walker has been a gifted exponent of spatial depth. So difficult to achieve, this is what makes these arrangements particularly memorable.

The skewed facets of “Juggernaut with Plume for P.Neruda” (1975), with its moody rusts and earthen tones over an ashen ground, is punctuated by a small flash of brilliant color that appears like a sudden sharp recollection. While the title evokes a preferred political stance of the post-Vietnam era, the image itself reminded me of Joan Baez’ “Diamonds and Rust,” an inescapable hit in 1975. We both know what memories can bring; rarely is it politics.

In the 1970s, the decade of muscle cars, painting was another macho performance vehicle. Of these early collages, the artist himself said he wanted the impact “of a truck, not a mini.” Minis they are not but Chevie El Caminos or Pontiac GTOs are another matter. Hugh Davies, writing in 1979, referred to them as “a wall of machinery in flat-out operation.” It was an apt analogy for aggressive works built from component parts moving together like pistons. Besides, the artist’s hot-rodding paint application is of a piece with the era of Sting Rays and Firebirds.

Heavy moving machines impel you out of the way. These collages have a similar effect. You have to keep backing up to enjoy them. Seen from a distance, Walker’s transparencies are magical; but the closer you get, the more the means-gel in great swaths-asserts itself. Compare the transparencies of Matisse or Diebenkorn which rely on the properties of pigment, not plastic transparentizers.

Followers of art world Kremlinology will notice Dore Ashton’s swipe in her catalogue essay at “conservative critics” who “breathed a sigh of relief when Walker produced identifiable landscape elements.” She adds, ” But I think they missed the point.” It is a gratuitous reference to Hilton Kramer’s stated admiration, in 2001, for Mr. Walker’s landscapes of the Maine sea coast. Perhaps Ms. Ashton has missed the point. Mr. Kramer aligned Walker ‘s Maine motifs with those by Marsden Hartley and John Marin precisely because they avoided scenic cliches. But abstraction generates its own cliches, which overtake Walker’s collages from 2003-04 installed in the smaller gallery.

Recent works are art department pot boilers of throw-away gestures in raw red, white and blue. It is as if the artist has begun to mimic his own imitators. Gone are Walker’s previous tonal subtleties and near-musical subordination of detail to patterned relationships. One untitled collage refers to the Maine landscape with a smear of real local mud, a hokey literalism that mocks the mastery of analogy on which great art rests. His earlier loamy neutrals were wonderously suggestive; mud is just mud. (Try to imagine Haydn composing “The Creation” using real farmyard animals.)

Then there are those illegible scrawls of handwriting, gravely termed “signage” by Ms. Ashton. What Magritte wittily-and fastidiously-introduced in the 1920s and 30s has dissolved into inchoate decoration. No longer a germinal idea, it has become a platitude that a generation of artists have fallen for like nine-pins.

My favorites are two very small collages from the ’70s and a series of four spare., schematic drawings, white chalk on a black ground. No bombast, much tremolo. Here are testaments to what refinement of conception and execution John Walker is capable.

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