Karin Davie
until June 25
Mary Boone
541 W. 24th Street
between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues

Karin Davie paints endless loops in more ways than meet the eye. In the best sense of the word, she is a formalist — the plastic fact of what she paints represents a conundrum of painting itself. Her joyfully dumb, intriguingly mesmerizing squiggles fill Mary Boone with visual music.

Ms. Davie’s motif is a thick, confident, lyrical, sausagelike line that changes color with consummate ease and curls up and around itself with voluptuous, serpentine physicality. At first they seem like effortless nursery doodles, until you realize some remarkable technical features.

For one thing, there’s no ground. Without allowing the line to diminish in scale, there is implied recession into deep space; the squiggle disappears to a distant vanishing point. The pace — both that of application and that at which the viewer is meant to look at the lines — is very hard to determine: The whiplash lines are bravura, but at the same time exude luxuriant ease, somewhere between allegro and andante.

Then there is the freshness and verve of her color. You can tell she is painting wet in wet, with wildly different hues keeping company on the same brush. Yet for all her promiscuity with pigment, she doesn’t end up in a mush. On the contrary, there are exhilarating flashes of illumination — a sense, in fact, of brilliant light pouring out of or onto selected passages within the composition.

In the mid-1990s the Canadian-born painter came to prominence as part of a wave of artists who looked with retro nostalgia to the implicit or explicit psychedelia of Op Art, Color Field painting, and 1950s and 1960s interior décor. She was part of a four-person project room display at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998 with Udomsak Krisanamis, Bruce Pearson, and Fred Tomaselli — all artists who could be said to get high on ornament. She was included in group shows with such indicative titles as “Post-Hypnotic,” “Ultra Buzz,” “Hypermental,” and “Ecstasy Shop.”

Her painting is still on cloud nine, but it has gotten used to its own druggy pop referentiality, insisting in its maturity on inherent painterly concerns essentially unchanged since the heady days of (sic) high Modernist abstraction. You could say that her work occupies a kind of aesthetic loop, scrolling back and forth between pop and purity.

This certainly comes across in her “drawings,” which are in the back room. These papardelle-like protruding reliefs are ingeniously torn from single sheets of paper, colored on the reverse with zippers sewn into the exposed edges. Intertwined are shiny sheets of aluminum-like Mylar. Like the paintings, and more so, they are at once tricky and simple essays in critical décor.

***

Pat Steir
Moons and a River until May 7
Chiem & Read
547 W. 25th Street
between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues
212-242-7727

For a telling generational comparison with Ms. Davie (b.1965) and her pop-abstract attitude, check out Pat Steir (b.1940), whose “Moons and a River” exhibition ends this weekend at Cheim & Read. They have obvious things in common: Both favor angst-free lyrical abstraction, are open to chance, are unafraid of the decorative, embracing its problematics in a vaguely feminist way, and are sumptuous and sensual. But Ms. Steir is an earnest romantic to the degree that Ms. Davie is a sassy deconstructionist.

In her 26-foot-long “ Blue River ” (2005), Ms. Steir recalls the Color Field stain painter Morris Louis . Yet her palette is at once more naturalist and shrill: The curtain-like “unfurled” forms are bright red and silvery white, bookending the blue “veil” washes to the point, almost, of producing a tricoleur banner. At the same time, her washy, drippy effects are phenomenological to an almost literal extent that would be impossible in Jackson Pollock.

Pollock’s drips, painted on the floor, implied ethereal spatiality; Ms. Steir’s drips evoke rain corroding a surface. Like Degas in front of Monet, we want to turn up our collar. It turns out, though, to be a light shower: “Summer Moon,” (2005) is shamelessly decadent in its Orientalist appeal and lustrous palette of greens and golds, feeling like it wants to decorate the home of a latter-day Freer.

***

Pamela Crimmins
Dreamhouse until May 26
Littlejohn Contemporary
41 E. 57th Street
Madison Avenue
212- 980-2323

The calendar, if not the weather, tells us it’s time to dig those swimsuits out of the closet. As if in anticipation, the galleries are awash with images of pools. Exhibitions run a gamut, in their response to aqueous movement, from the photorealist paintings of Eric Zener, closing this weekend at Gallery Henoch, to David Hockney’s pool prints of the 1970s, exploring the ripple in all its permutations, opening next week at Mary Ryan. Keeping these latter, perennial classics company on 57th Street is a remarkable group of photographs by Pamela Crimmins at Littlejohn Contemporary.

In contrast to Mr. Zener, who paints as if he were offering a photograph but primly rations precisely the perceptual quirks the lense would offer up as disturbed water impacts his water-treading supermodel types, Ms. Crimmins offers a kind of painterly photograph, in which the quirks of medium and subject, of perception and reproduction, constantly run into one another in complex cross-currents. From within a pool she photographs the people, furniture, and buildings around its perimeter, enlisting the body of water between herself and her motif as a secondary lens. Sometimes she agitates the water with her flipper to further fragment the field of vision, accenting the edges of her ripples with scorching prisms.

The press release calls her result surreal, and as a modus operandi it does indeed recall André Kertesz’s distortion photographs; her uppercrust Connecticut houses, captured in meltdown, also bring to mind the expressionistic wobble of Soutine, Schiele, and Friedensreich Hundertwasse. But the historical movement that makes more sense is Cubism: Strange perspectives that seem at first like puzzles ultimately follow their own system for seeing the world. Ms. Crimmins’s Archimedesian realization — in, of all places, a suburban swimming pool — is that we are from the water, after all.

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“A painter’s painter” is a phrase that turns up somewhere every dozen reviews or so but no polls are ever taken among painters asking them who qualifies?” When it comes right down to it, critics and not painters are the ones most likely to use so loose, yet oddly particular, a turn of phrase. And this makes sense, for while painters are well versed and comfortable discussing another artist’s work in terms of pure process, writers tend to blanch a wee bit when placed in the position of making a linguistic assessment of an intangible, i.e.; the meaning of a brush stroke.

Which brings me to the paintings of Karin Davie. An impressive new series of her works were recently on show at Site Santa Fe, New Mexico. Large, colorful, raucous and sensuous, Davie’s paintings rely on a tightly blended quartet of formal qualities to convey their meaning; composition, translucency, color, and brushwork. As with any minimalist recipe, none of the elements can be removed or even watered down, but that does not mean that they have equal weight, either.

Compositionally, Davie works the edges. Her swooping lines careen from side to side, mostly staying inside the picture plane but frequently veering off the canvas – only to reappear a few inches later. Because the technique plays so strongly on the ambiguity between willfulness and loss of control, the effect on the viewer can be unsettling; feelings of intransigence and anxiety are apt to be aroused in equal measure. Indeed, the closest visual equivalent might be found in the experience of staring at tire skid marks on a highway as they crisscross the yellow lines a number of times before leaving the road altogether, becoming the unmistakable dark black parallel lines that culminate with a car fatally merged with a tree. You can’t help but wonder staring at a Davie painting – was she hitting the brakes,or speeding up?

Her color offers little by way of hint. Somewhat reminiscent of the palette of Judith Linhares, an early mentor, Davies fields a mixed palette of predominantly bright, sunny colors, a full spectrum of blues, reds, and oranges, deep greens and yellows. Woven in, occasionally, one also finds a range of low notes comprised of midnight blues, ivory blacks, and burnt umbers. It could be that these darker colors serve to intensify the brightness of the lighter ones, and in part they do. But they also create an undeniable undertow, pulling us into far murkier waters with little warning. Extended viewing reveals that even the brightest colors have an oddly turned, spoiled quality, akin to a bouquet of flowers that have been in their vase a day longer than they had ought. The net effect is to create, ever so slightly, a seeping melancholia.

Despite these elements, one would be hard pressed to describe Davie’s work as depressing – her brush strokes will not allow it. Exuberant and graceful, the artist’s brush work is the kind possible only when an artist paints with her entire body engaged. It is hard to think of antecedents for this kind of brush handling other than perhaps the late de Kooning’s, which calls for a brief digression.

At the time of the brilliant show of those late de Kooning’s curated by Robert Storr at the MOMA in 1997, many in the art world questioned aloud whether de Kooning had painted the works on display and, if he had, whether or not his advanced Alzheimer’s condition made them “not” de Kooning’s. Gallerist Charles Cowles was among that latter group. Standing with me at the opening in front of one of the works in the very last room, a giant white painting with long, powerful red strokes winding diagonally across the surface, I asked Charlie, “Do you think that he actually painted these?” “Yes,” he replied. “Well,” I asked, “regardless of de Kooning’s condition, can you think of any better paintings painted in the last ten years?” He paused and said, “No.” The point being that certain things cannot be faked, any more than their meaning can be ignored. Simply put, the late de Kooning paintings are just too good technically and emotionally for anyone other than a master to have painted them and, medical evidence not with standing, the paintings themselves prove beyond a doubt that while de Kooning the everyday person may have ceased to exist, de Kooning the painter had not.

This is not to claim that Davie is on par with the late de Kooning. What I am asserting is that certain aspects of technique may simultaneously reveal many truths while at the same time sailing clear over the heads of many less technically savvy viewers. Davie’s brush strokes are a prime example. Gracefully to the point of appearing effortless, they pile up in shimmering bands of color that traverse monumental lengths with unflagging intensity. Just how ambitious these brush strokes are, however, might best be illuminated by some basic measurements – in an 84″ x 108″ painting like “Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #7”, 2002-3, a deep blue-black line makes its way from top to bottom six times as it completes its journey from left to right across the canvas. To be clear, as with all of Davie’s lines this stripe was not physically created with a single loaded brush, but it was painted in such a way as to appear that was, and it is over 40 feet long. This is typical for Davie, and she has painted much longer ones. For instance, the deepest red stripe in “Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #2”, 2002, is close to 75 feet long. As with the others, though this stripe was not created with a single stroke, the impression of continuity has a tactile verisimilitude;despite its considerable elegance, it is hard won.

What information can be found in marks like these? Certainly, the abstract content can only be gleaned by each individual viewer – that is part of the excitement of abstract art. However, the physical content is a different matter: insights can be deduced from process. Some painters paint with their wrist, others paint using their whole arm, or their arm and their upper body; Davie’s paintings require the use of her entire body. They could not be painted while sitting, or even while standing still; Davie’s paintings require her to move back and forth, up and down, to and fro. In working wet as she does, she must scoop up massive dollops of viscous paint on her brush and apply it in a series of rapid gestures over exceedingly large areas. While she may depend on improvisation, she has little space for indecision; fluidity of this magnitude is only possible through intense concentration. In short, each Davie painting is a glistening, high fidelity record of the dance she choreographed in order to make it.

Karin Davie recently exhibited six paintings in a solo exhibition this summer at Sites Santa Fe, NM, curated by Robert Storr. She is represented by Mary Boone, NY.

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