Marilyn Lerner: Walking Backward Running Forward at Kate Werble Gallery

September 4 to October 5, 2018
83 Vandam Street, between Greenwich and Hudson streets
New York City, katewerblegallery.com

The title of this exhibition, “Walking Backward Running Forward,” is an apposite description in itself of the rationale for a presentation of Marilyn Lerner’s paintings from two periods: five from the late 1980s and nine completed since 2016. Amongst this selection are two rondos, from 1989 and from earlier this year, respectively. This allows us to connect persistent formal elements while also discerning shifts, albeit at irregular speeds. Throughout the exhibition, color and shape, though consistent as vocabulary, varies continuously: colored squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, discs, dots remain simultaneously structural and syncopated.

A fixation with time does not come as a surprise. The shifts in shape (of the paintings themselves and the forms within) and permutations of color amount to movement—registered by the viewer in myriad ways, whether perceptually, physically, psychologically, or spiritually. The paintings are static objects, but that’s where any stasis ends. The overall shape of the painting, always oil on a wood support, is more pronounced in the earlier works. But all the paintings are an exploration of the relationships occurring between geometric shape and intuitive color, between random and anticipated structure. Harmonic Relations (1988) is a white, irregularly shaped wooden panel, stepped like an inverted crenellation at its lower edge and curved across and up toward the left side. Across this composition, at sporadic intervals, are black, yellow and white circular forms, two containing diagonal sections, three squares and one a complete disc. They balance to a fluctuating emphasis due to color modulation—yellows especially range in intensity from cadmium through cream—and scale variation. The shaped support suggests identification with the surrounding architectural environment, the rhythmic composition with our passage through it.

Black Center (2017) is a regular, vertical rectangle that features, as suggested by the title, a jagged, black central area abutted by saturated color. Together with blocks of color, lines follow perimeters and cut across solid colored shape, further enhancing and refining this sensual tessellation. The color pulsates and enriches itself, Lerner always finding something unexpected and new by altering the mix, by responding as she goes along. Careful, methodical, and repetitive small brush strokes lay down the color giving to the surface a built quality visible up close but still felt from a distance, as the surface absorbs light in its slight unevenness in a way a totally smooth surface would not. The geometric composition is so fluid that it denies any rigidity associated with pure, basic form. As in music the cyclical repetition interweaves and repeats themes in mesmerizing combinations, like Javanese gamelan and Algerian Rai, a fusion of Bedouin and popular music that Lerner listens to. The radiant strong color that entered the paintings in the last decade happened after her discovery of Rai, when, as she describes it, her “palette exploded.”

Lerner’s aim has been to “make paintings that reflect the sounds of music,” and whilst they can certainly be seen to be doing just that, the achievement goes much further than Kandinsky’s observation, via Walter Pater, of visual art aspiring to the condition of music. The application of color free from any theoretic approach to openly improvised structures dissolves the notion that form itself is fixed. In Marilyn Lerner’s handling, form appears to be time based, moving with the illusory effortlessness of a dancer’s arms, as fluid as thought.

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To place Melanie Schiff in the context of a staid photographic genre would be counterproductive to the poetic space her work inhabits. In her first solo show at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City, “Run, Falls,” she draws us into conversation with the light of Los Angeles — where she has lived since 2008 — and the way it bounces off windows, bends around form and reflects to create layered compositions.

Schiff’s work began as colorful still lifes born of parenthetical youth culture and prosaic inanimate objects: moody mise-en-scène self-portraits with beer bottles in the aftermath of a party scene; half-nude women playing in wild landscapes; references to iconic musicians and albums within images; meditations on light hitting unremarkable objects. She was recognized for it with inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her current work is a negotiation of the manmade set against the natural environment in a motif that calls for a visceral sense of place in reimagined quotidian scenes. In the aesthetic tradition of photographers like James Welling — whose work is among the canon of post-conceptual Los Angeles artists — Schiff continues to experiment with her medium, elevating the photograph beyond the frozen moment, using multiple or long exposures, unexpected juxtapositions, and as in earlier work, a play with light refraction and reflection. But whereas Welling uses tools like colored gels to alter space and create layers on top of the found environment, Schiff gently intervenes, adding texture with tangible objects (a textile, a window), or using technical processes like motion blur to further manipulate space. Sometimes Schiff doesn’t interfere at all; she allows light to trace its path and reference form. She only gives the viewer the most palpable subject of the image in her titles, freeing the mind to experiment with an underlying narrative syntax that she beckons through movement and enduring heliacal energy.

Throughout Schiff’s series, textiles and manmade materials commingle with textures of natural objects. Sometimes waterfalls are overlaid with pattern: a blanket becomes backdrop to weeds, and multiple exposures of a tattooed dancer are an energetic force in an otherwise rigid industrial architectural environment. Those latter pictures, Double Dancer and Dancer and Broom (all 2014) call to mind and provide a contrasting reference to Imogen Cunningham’s portraits of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

On the farthest wall of the gallery, Threadbare I and Threadbare II set the tone for Schiff’s work. The images, which are some of the only color works in the exhibit, are a foray into the artist’s muse: Southern California’s harsh, warm light, which emanates through and peeks around worn oriental rugs. And perhaps by curatorial decision, environmental light is reflected a second time into the images: by light bouncing into the glass frames from the adjacent gallery door. While other reflections abound, smaller framed black-and-white landscapes spaced throughout the exhibit act as reference points, anchoring the series back to earth. There are works like Falls, which fits into the genre in a traditional sense, celebrating the watery life-force as portrait, and its counterpart, Triple Falls which is a suggestion of the same waterfall as an abstracted form approaching Cubism. There are less traditional landscapes too, like that of an image of a limb and its darkly clothed body written with light shining through a wicker chair. Where color shows up, it is overshadowed by the sun, which illuminates the composition, turning a monotone world into a spectrum myriad of hues.

A series orchestrated in a roving soliloquy that drifts between genres, Schiff makes work that’s an authentic representation of her social, geographic and solar environment. She plays with ubiquitous objects and asks us to consider their singular situational relevance, further eschewing boundaries set by formal elements of photography to reframe our expectations of narrative. In a time when a constant stream of imagery has the power to dilute conscious photographic practice and experimentation with process, Schiff’s work shines. Perhaps she gives us an escape, even if it’s simply in her own reflection; perhaps we just can’t avert our gaze from the sun.

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discussing exhibitions of  David Adamo and James Castle at Peter Freeman, Inc; David Adamo at Untitled Gallery; Anna Betbeze at Kate Werble;  Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth; and Nan Swid at Margaret Thatcher Projects.

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Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

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