Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

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on view at Mayerson’s exhibition Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, Derek Eller Gallery, 615 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues, through November 15.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008

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October 20, 2006 – November 22, 2006

Keith Mayerson: Kings & Queens
Derek Eller Gallery
615 West 27th Street
New York City

October 20-November 25, 2006

Keith Mayerson and James Rielly appropriate photographic and filmic source material, transforming it through careful editing, alteration of scale and proportion, and inventive use of color. Whereas Mr. Rielly tends to appropriate photographic imagery of anonymous people from journalistic sources — favoring images of faces and groups of people often dressed in costume — Mr. Mayerson is interested in iconic images of famous people. And many elements found in their work are also pure imagination.

In Mr. Rielly’s current exhibition at Galeria Ramis Barquet, there is one watercolor that exemplifies the kind of irony he favors. The painting is titled “We Sustained Heavy Losses” (2006) and it is an image of a weird boy/man wearing a pale red shirt, black vest, lopsided sheriff’s badge, ill-fitting black cowboy hat, and a prank arrow piercing his temples à la Steve Martin. The disjointedness of the serious title and the seemingly light-hearted imagery causes a rift between the viewer and the work, and the humor becomes something sordid. Are we supposed to laugh at this clownish figure or pity him? What kind of losses are we talking about?

Mr. Rielly has developed a very light touch and minimal technique using watercolors through the years. There are no superfluous marks or tones. He places his figures and faces within nondescript environments, often leaving the paper in the background untouched. Sometimes he suggests water or grass, but there is no obvious context. This lends the work a symbolic and ambiguous quality. In the painting “Give me, more more more” (2006), we see the tilted head of a young male or female with three cigarettes hanging out of his or her mouth. This could be a symbol of gluttony or demanding youth, but the tilt of the head gives it an element of seductiveness. It could be that the figure is offering these cigarettes rather than consuming them.

There are a number of paintings of groupings of people in this exhibition, including a picture of a red-tinted audience gazing at some event in “Sometimes Everyone Looks Hairy” (2006), and a picture of a huddled mass of children with numbers on their chest in “Red, Yellow, Blue” (2006). The tri-colored group of children might be a comment on the psychology of the crowd, the loss of individuality.

Another painting with multiple figures, “Let’s queue” (2006), depicts three adults. One man is dressed as a centaur and wears a suit jacket, and the woman dressed as a mermaid holds a handbag. They could be waiting in line for a movie, and the casual combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary invites multiple readings.

Keith Mayerson, whose work is on view at Derek Eller Gallery, paints pictures of pop-culture narrative and icons, but he is not interested in deconstructing our worship of celebrity. His work is about the painful and euphoric process of losing oneself in someone else. His painting style features energetic and tactile brushstrokes and a lush, subtly modulated palette. The effect is so sensual and earnest that we forget we are looking at images we have seen hundreds if not thousands of times before: The Beatles showered in confetti during their first visit to America, in the painting “The Beatles 1964” (2006); Elvis thrusting his pelvis forward as he balances on his toes onstage in the painting “Elvis ’56” (2006). As many times as we have seen these images, Mr. Mayerson manages to create surprising and beautiful translations into oil paint. The medium slows things down, and lends these beloved figures a timeless and elegiac quality.

In paintings like “Love Triumphant (James Dean in a Tree)” (2006), where we see a lushly painted image of James Dean masturbating naked in a tree, Mr. Mayerson has managed to transform a celebrity into a symbolical figure in order to express generalizations about human existence. The leafy canopies surrounding the figure are filled with writhing abstract forms and bodies. James Dean with an erection is a force of nature, synonymous with organic growth and plentitude.

In the painting “Temptation on the Mount (King Kong and Fay Wray battle the Giant Taradactyle)” (2006), the gorilla clutches Fay Wray with one hand and fends off a dinosaur bird with the other. In this painting, these aren’t silly Hollywood special effects. They represent aspects of our humanity (which they also do in the original film). But the sensuality of Mr. Mayerson’s brushstrokes lends a tactile quality that is missing from the film. The static painted image stands in contrast to the kinetic film image. The intensity of King Kong’s feelings for the human female become something more than a plot element in a narrative arc, and all of the latent sexual content comes to the surface in the painting. Battling monsters also look cool.

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