First news in of a fine art casualty to chalk up to Sandy is the seriously tragic loss of a major series of paintings by artist Joa Baldinger.  Her series, I want to Talk about You, inspired by scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Beware of a Holy Whore” (1971), were on display in the subterranean bunker-like space of Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert on West 19th Street which got completely flooded Monday night.

I wrote about other paintings from the series at The New York Sun website when they were shown in the Hampton’s in summer 2010.  Sad to think of a cursory review outliving such stunning pictures.

The post Collection of Sandy: Paintings Lost in Flooded Chelsea Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

This article, from 2006, was originally published at The New York Sun and is posted here in tribute to the late Robert Berlind on the eve of his solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., opening in Chelsea Saturday, January 9, 2016.

Robert Berlind at Tibor de Nagy, Elizabeth Neel at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert

The phrase “American-type painting” was coined by Clement Greenberg in the 1950s, in relation to Abstract Expressionism. With hindsight, however, that style looks both remarkably consistent across national boundaries and individualistic within the New York School. A stronger case can be made for an American-type realism that emerged in the postwar period, one alive and kicking to this day. I am referring to a frank, open, painterly naturalism based upon perception but as concerned with the fluidity of vision as it is with stasis: This almost cinematic sense of movement gives a whole school of landscape painting its unique, Yankee twang.

The tradition is probably rooted in a few strong individuals. If you imagine them as clusters of trees (which, almost symbolically, is a common motif among the painters I’m thinking of) then the tallest is Alex Katz — even if he is less known for his landscapes than his portraits — with Fairfield Porter, the late Neil Welliver, Jane Freilicher, and Lois Dodd as neighbors. Porter was Mr. Katz’s senior, but there has never been any doubt that the sense of inner light and the bravura smoothness first came from the younger painter.

Like Cornelia Foss, another painter currently showing, Robert Berlind could be thought of as a branch that teases the gaze as he flits between the upper rafters of these thicker trunks at Tibor de Nagy. (This could equally apply to George Nick, who recently signed up with Tibor.) In polite circles one tries not to describe an artist as a leaf off another man’s tree (as Oskar Kokoschka once dismissed Picasso, in relation to himself!). I point to this commonality not to question the originality of these painters, but to show that their style is part of a broad, collective endeavor specific in an enriching way to a time and place. Freshness can be a tradition.

Equally striking as Ms. Foss’s homegrown influences is her Frenchness. Her beachscapes in particular, painted in the Hamptons, bring Matisse and his disciples Marquet and Manguin to mind. Mr. Berlind also has a French connection, though in his case it cuts deeper into tradition: Delacroix, Courbet, and Cézanne are frequent visitors in his intellectually complex, deceptively charming works. Ironically, Mr. Berlind’s images, while more referential than that of Ms. Foss, also seems more casual.

Mr. Berlind often strives for the nonchalance of a snapshot. In this respect his work more closely resembles the painted Maine landscapes of Rudy Burckhardt than Mr. Katz’s mode of cropping, which is always aligned to the glamour of immediacy rather than quirkiness of chance. Mr. Berlind seems to look for the meaning within the slice of nature he has uncovered, rather than impose it by the a priori fact of making it his composition. This must have been what Irving Sandler had in mind when he wrote that Mr. Berlind “does not seek his subjects; they happen to him.”

There is a consistency of vision in Mr. Berlind’s paintings, such as this new group of work from the last three years, but there also is considerable variety of speed and touch, as if each subject demanded a different approach. He can veer from tight, meticulous, draftsmanly application to almost luxuriant scumbling; from obsessive faceting, in which each stroke is given specific weight and measure, to a kind of bravura flourish of serpentine strokes (Cézanne one moment, Sargent the next). The choice doesn’t seem the result of some inner caprice, but rather, on each occasion, a phenomenon caught his attention and demanded specific treatment.

Mr. Berlind has a great love for the reflection of trees and light in agitated water. “Stream and Rocks” (2004) is a tour de force within this genre: you get the contrast of solid, actual fixed rocks and the ephemeral film of reflectivity sluicing around them. Such an occurrence in nature obviously draws upon hidden reserves of virtuosity. But Mr. Berlind is never a show-off, always preferring his painterly plainspokenness: American-type painting has a stiff upper lip.

Mr. Berlind is insistently un-photographic: He is not about freezing a moment in time, but also avoids the modish Gerhard Richter-style smudge that suggests a camera overwhelmed by movement. Instead he brings fresh verve to old-fashioned means, demanding from paint a sense of the plasticity of time.

***

Elizabeth Neel’s must-see debut solo at Gasser and Grunert offers a radically contrastive response to landscape to that of Mr. Berlind and his tradition: There is nothing in her temperament to suggest puritan empiricism. She paints what seem at first to be neo-romantic jungles and forests — dense, wild, pulsating with life and danger. An accompanying text by John Reed informs us that the artist culls all her images at random from the Internet. Maybe the World Wide Web, in its chaos and unlimitedness, is a kind of contemporary wilderness: The locus of the sublime. Nature or ’net, however, Ms. Neel is herself a force of nature, painting with a majestic, violent bravura that recalls de Kooning and Francis Bacon.

Her work also bears a striking similarity to certain British painters from the 1980s that I’d be very surprised if she is aware of — Maurice Cockrill, Ken Kiff — as well as the Australian landscape painter Sidney Nolan. Perhaps there is a kind of eternal recurrence among modern romantic painters of exuberance when they are drawn to nature and its archetypes.

The wonder of her images is that with all the splash, splutter, scumble, pouncing, and dabbing going on there is amazing chromatic clarity. Many of her effects make you aware of the surface, yet she builds dense intimations of deep space. This comes about through an extraordinary balance of big, restless shapes and gestures, on the one hand, and tight, finessed detail on the other, with the washed out and the painterly fearlessly juxtaposed. It is very rare to encounter such a combination of energy and assurance in a young painter: Ms. Neel looks, literally, like an old master.

Berlind until July 8 (724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, 212-2625050).

Neel until June 18 (524 W. 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-807-9494).

The post Freshness Can Be A Tradition: Robert Berlind and Elizabeth Neel appeared first on artcritical.

“Ena Swansea: situation” at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert through October 9 (524 West 19th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 807 9494)

“Lois Dodd: Flashings” at Alexandre Gallery through October 2 (Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue, 13th Floor, 212-755-2828)

Will Cotton’s latest paintings give new meaning to the term “eye candy.” His four canvas show at Mary Boone continues a photorealist preoccupation with the motif for which he is best known, confectionery, but forcibly fuses it, this time, with what had been a second subject, the erotic female nude.

Mr. Cotton’s candyscapes collide the genres of landscape and still life, constructing spatially ambiguous vistas out of perceptual and digestive excess. Usually there is a gaudy overload of sweet things, whether icecreams, chocolates, familiar mass-produced goodies like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, or toffees and caramels in a molten state, rendered in suitably sickly, saccherinne hues. His modus operandi is to photograph complex constructions of such stuff and render a painted image in a deadpan academic hand.

“Cotton Candy Cloud,” (2004) confines itself, with twisted restraint, to a single treat, cotton candy, unless we semantically join his sexist orgy and classify the voluptuous reclining redhead as a sweet thing, too. The puffing pinkness cannot begs to be read as an eponymous stand-in for the artist himself: its folds have the feel of musculature.

Art historically, the image overtly references Cabanel and Bougereau, the nineteenth-century “pompier” classicists, and in so doing recalls Mr. Cotton’s own education, which was completed at the New York Academy, which promotes “technique” in the beaux-arts sense of the word. Mr. Cotton’s nudes, more Vargas than Velazquez, lag behind his confectionery in sexiness.

The problem with them is that they come with baggage: The more he tries to make them voluptuous, the more they recall a grand tradition of which, by painting with giant quote marks around his own expressivity and curiosity, he can but be a testy footnote. They aren’t at all convincingly drawn from life, but nor is there an interesting sense that they derive from a specific kind of artifice, in the way, for instance, Cecily Brown uses hardcore pornography.

This deprives them of the warped frisson of vitality enjoyed by his cookies and chocs, ambiguously poised as they are between reality and artifice, a readymade pun as they are on the synthetic. On their own, the still-life motifs were intriguing, if not enticing, in a Jeff Koons kind of way. With the addition of his lethargic classicism his ice-cream melts away into silliness on a par with Lisa Yuskavage.

His delivery contrasts with the great modern master of the creamcake and spandex nude, Wayne Thiebaud, whose still startling images of pies and cheerleaders found in such proto-Pop imagery an apt metaphor for painterliness. Mr. Cotton’s images have some initial energy thanks to their kitsch overload of slick rendering, but that turns out to be the pictorial equivalent of a sugar boost. A Thiebaud is good enough to eat, but a Cotton gives you very little, aesthetically, to get your teeth into.

Ena Swansea also treads ground between artifice and reality, though with radically different results to Mr.Cotton’s. Her figuration eschews academic formula, and endures the awkwardness that inevitably arrives in its wake.

Her show is consequently uneven: some canvases are belabored by nerdishly rendered inanimate objects like an automobile or an air conditioner that upset the delicate ratio between transparency and opaqueness. And yet, other images are energized and animated by an equally pronounced but expressively more convincing awkwardness. Despite a couple of turkeys, the best paintings make this exhibition one of singular power and importance.

Like Mr. Cotton, Ms. Swansea had, earlier in her career, achieved a slick, contained, fully resolved still-life style before succumbing to the temptation of human subjects. In her case, ambiguous shadows cast by flora and vegetation produced images of compelling beauty. Her turn to figuration seems less a style gambit than an expressive necessity.

Her shadowplay led to experimentation with elaborate set-ups, in her case utilizing the camera oscura. The new imagery extends the photographic metaphor. One picture, of a child’s head, is entitled “color negative,” (2004): like all the works in the show, it is painted on a ground of graphite, a material of sinister ethereality, at once leaden and other-worldly.

Ms. Swansea can paint with exhilerating facility: “devil on the road,” (2004) an ambiguously poised, goggled and spandex-clad red demon casting his shadow on shimmering, near-molten asphalt is a suitably devilish display of convincing, beguiling and deft painterly sleights of hand.

The real show stopper, though, is a 15 foot long dinner party scene that recalls a Tintoretto last supper in its compressions and foreshortenings. This image, at once timeless and a painting of modern life, offers an appropriately enebriated perspective: the distorted still-life arrangements and stilted figure poses have the eye lurching between ease and alienation, speed and arrest. In its fusion of fluency and awkwardness this rich, complex work recalls Manet at his weirdest.

Short mention must be made of a compact display of tiny oil sketches by Lois Dodd at Alexandre, the septugenarian’s third show at that gallery in two years. Actually, the show, propped on ledges in the gallery’s foyer, warrants close attention-critical and appreciative: it is exquisite fun, and surveys 50 works from as far back as 1990.

These plein air paintings are done on roofer’s flashings, thin, aluminum panels of five by seven inches. As such, they are like postcards from the front line of observational painting. The medium, eccentric and yet practical and effective, is true to this artist’s character: Ms. Dodd is one of the true mavericks of American painting, a quietly audacious realist whose quirky, enigmatic, yet empirical and heartfelt observations of the rural scene make her the supreme “artist’s artist” of the New York school.

These lyrical yet hardnosed sketches capture, in completely unaffected simplicity, such phenomena as floral color contrasts, subtle noctornal lighting effects, movements of water, a shimmering breeze. At this size and speed, the artist’s affinities with her better known contemporary, Alex Katz, and their mutual mentor, Milton Avery, are clear, but so too is her utter individuality.

In scale, slickness, and “attitude” Ms. Dodd could not be further removed from either Mr. Cotton or Ms. Swansea, but she does share with the younger artists an intuitive sense that oddity and credibility can make happy bedfellows.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 16, 2004

The post Will Cotton at Mary Boone, Ena Swansea at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

closes April 15, 2004

Ann Craven’s paintings at Gasser and Grunert are confounding. In terms of subject matter, they couldn’t be more straightforward – deer in fields and birds on branches. One painting, one animal for the most part, all painted on monumental scale in saccharine colors. What makes them confounding, is that they are intentionally formulaic. If you know your next painting will look just like your last one, why paint it?

Craven’s finely honed style draws heavily on contemporary German painting, particularly the work of its foremost representative, Gerhard Richter. Craven wipes her backgrounds, and allows her brushwork to show in the painting of the animals. Blemish free background, visible mark in the fore, just like a Richter abstraction. Unlike Richter, however, Craven is not interested in deconstructing how a painting is made. Instead, like Jeff Koons, Craven focuses on the mechanism of mechanical reproduction and its relationship to superficial beauty, i.e. kitsch. Or so it seems, judging from the fact that she literally paints the same painting multiple times as in “Deer” and “Deer in Daises” in Gasser and Grunert’s first small room, and “Hello, Hello, Hello” in the rear.

The latter painting, a monumental triptych, illustrates most clearly the conundrum of Craven’s work. The three long vertical panels repeat the image of a red-tailed gray parrot stretching its wings urgently. On the gray ground behind it, beautifully painted, hang purple flowers. The painting of the bird is lustrous, wet in wet scalloping feathers building to the orange eye of the sideways parrot glance. The handling here seems impassioned yet we know it can’t be because it’s copied as conscientiously as possible in each painting. Passion in painting has to do with inspired risk and invention. A painter intent on such passion seeks not simply to make a painting but to have an original experience in the making of it, to make a discovery. Craven gives us this kind of passion in the parrot and then throws it to the birds by repeating it in formula.

Originality, then, is not Craven’s concern. Instead, she presents a stubborn lack of it. Craven’s assembly line parrot paintings fall like the monotonous hellos of the parrot itself, all in service of a visual pun: three parrots, three hellos. Why paint then? She could easily make her point about dehumanizing mass production in another medium. Instead, she uses an inherently sensuous medium presumably to underscore her point by desensitizing it. Painting, by virtue of its uniqueness, draws attention to the lack thereof in so many human endeavors. The greater the apparent uniqueness, the keener the sense of its absence elsewhere. Like cultural theory, Craven’s work functions in the opposite sense, taking you analytically step by step along the path mass culture travels. It offers virtuosity, ambition and artifice in service of this end, but remains obstinately contradictory as painting.

The post Ann Craven appeared first on artcritical.

March 27-May 3, 2003

Ena Swansea achieved recognition in 1998-99 for a series of abstract paintings based on observations of lightfall in the landscape. Key to this work was a subtly colorized grisaille palette and layers of transparent paint. The restless gray forms suggested moving shadows and were widely appreciated for their ingenious equation of style and content. Critical response noted that a subtle but recurring theme in the history of painting had resurfaced in a smart new way.

Swansea’s debut exhibition at Klemens Gasser Tanja Grunert currently on view through May 3, 2003 features paintings dating from 1999 – 2003. Introducing figuration and text, it reconfigures Swansea’s repertoire of formal and stylistic elements. Surfaces vary from translucence to opacity or blinding shine on dark grounds; same goes for a few planes of lead-based white. Several of the most optically unconventional paintings start with graphite grounds that subvert color and squelch light altogether. They would seem to spring from unimaginable motives if not for Swansea’s known interest in the painterly paradox shadows represent (as the relative absence of light and color). Formats vary, but at medium to large size (88″ x 108″ the largest) most canvases project an ambitious physicality in the gallery’s skylit space.

The new work experiments with varying degrees and types of illusion and depiction in its figuration process. Swansea compounds the issue with allusions to famous paintings hybridized with portraits of friends and famous painting styles. Models from Manet and Vermeer appear; form-rendering techniques of old masters are used; the flatness of silkscreen and Warholian inversions of value come up (Warhol’s “Shadow Paintings” should perhaps be mentioned in passing). The late Degas has a fleeting presence due to some unusual, theatrical lighting effects and pastel tinted highlights on lips, noses, ears. Swansea’s graphite surfaces perhaps even recall Degas’s metal plate photos of ballet dancers in lurid, chemical reaction-tinged colors. All of this challenges viewers to flex their optic taste buds into new poses.

“]If the first group was derived from the observed landscape, the focus of the present group shifts inward, toward a psychological landscape. In a recent interview with Barry Schwabsky, Swansea reveals that she has been interested in theories of multiple personality, and set herself the challenge of investigating her painterly concerns “from behind”. She found a line in the Frank O’Hara poem In Memory of My Feelings that resonated with the kind of psycho-sexual introspection she was after: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.” (The text is stenciled twice on one of the paintings, “Man In It”.) Once one is aware of the O’Hara line, individual figures and pairs of figures on stylistically various paintings seem to interact with or separate from each other, as in a drama with endless episodes. Voices, thoughts, and feelings lie just beyond reach. Swansea is less attracted to multiple personality in the clinical sense than the garden variety neurosis most people experience, say, reading a novel or in dreams. O’Hara’s dreamlike image has this effect, and the author himself is a totem of Ab Ex. The quoted line lends an open conceptual structure, albeit a cryptic one, to the whole show.

Swansea’s interest in grisaille is still important and maintains its engagement with issues particular to abstract painting. But why graphite? Consider again that Swansea is interested in metaphor and working with the theme of multiple personality. As a black pigment, graphite is untrustworthy: dark for sure, but reflective also. Graphite, derived from carbon, is so slippery it’s used in car lubricants. In pencils, it’s ideal for both drawing and writing, activities as prone to erasure as productivity. Graphite facilitates movement of the hand on the page, which comes from thought in the mind. Swansea brings it to the surface, almost as subject matter in itself, an unreliable narrator to the oily brush strokes decription above it. The figures’ schematic mien seems to be an almost involuntary consequence. On the other hand, three paintings on oil-based white grounds show figurative elements fused with white shadow space: losing hold of ego in a camouflaged environment. Swansea suggests that the twilight zone of opticality is analogous to states of mind, awake or asleep, where consciousness and certainty are momentary.

Thus gliding over the slippery surfaces of the grounds, the new paintings’ blend of illustrational style, historical appropriation, petrochemicals, and text is the stylistic equivalent of an unstable psychological realm. Swansea’s first interest is abstraction, so her push of the early grisaille into this new territoryentails a certain amount of risk. From formal, stylistic, and conceptual angles, the new work projects a sense of contingency onto the positivist encounter with each canvas. It’s a good concept, but the outcome looks more often transitional than insightful in this group.

Notes on Individual Paintings
Portal, 2003
Like the Foreword to a book, the first painting one encounters while walking up the ramp to the gallery is a predominately dark canvas depicting a woman walking from sunlit greenery outdoors toward the dim metallic interior of a passageway. With her conservative attire of shirtwaist dress, purse, and heels, she could be entering a clinic and the gallery simultaneously, like the viewer. We enter the painter’s space together, perhaps.

Undecided, 2001-2002
A horizontally formatted depiction of a conversation between a woman and a man, rendered in transparent colors over a an oily black ground that switches like the nap of shiny velvet as the viewer moves around to see it. The blonde woman, suburbanly coiffed, has just spoken to him. His back is turned, one ear bright pink from the sound of her voice. Two black lines echo between them. Perhaps it’s better that we can’t hear what she said, what he heard, and so on.

Luncheon on the Grass, 2003

A monumental female figure crouches above a mecurial graphite field. She is seen from the back, from a hovering elevation, a schema rendered in close values accented by a few colorized highlights. A big brush describes her hair in burnt sienna, cut with bluish motor oil from certain angles, caught in a ponytail held by red elastic. The brush brakes for a pale ear, strokes the supple back, glides along a downy arm and, upon arriving at the model’s tennis wrist, reduces scale and halts in an attitude of erotic attention while bestowing an expensive watch. This negligent hand holds a picnic plate with a spoon glowing green and red at the edges, extends from the right knee at the end of its luscious long thigh. She is a composite: Manet’s famous nude luncheoner crossed with a friend’s portrait. Painted by multiple personalities or not, a ploy that incompletely masks a trained hand, it’s clear that Swansea takes pleasure in her technical facility.

Lie Down I Think I Want You, 2003
Defying gravity, two torsos stretch, mirror-like, from the left side of the picture field, on a graphite ground. The topmost, wearing a garment that looks most like a green choir robe, seems to scrutinize the other figure inconclusively. Myth like, they suggest Echo and Narcissus.

Antoine, 2002
A single head, a close up three-quarter portrait: set deeply with in close-hued mineral pigments, her white flecked globular eyes suggest a sea bird or mammal blinking miserably after an oil spill.

The Letter
One painting, not on display but easily taken out of the back, is a white on black homage to Vermeer called The Letter. Swansea crops the young woman’s face close to the dreaded sheet of paper. She, ghostily sketched, is visible thanks to a few deft strokes left by a stiff 3-inch or so brush oozing with white. The brush is negligently, yet specifically, dragged across her forehead and features in distorted perspective. Her ears, having read the letter, are “red”; but she maintains her composure through a new translation of Vermeer’s strategy for concentration. The distinctive pearl drop, tear drop earring on the ear which hears the news dances with antenna-like powers.

Fourth Marriage 3, 2003
At the white end of the spectrum, a little team of fairies dances through the cream blue and yellow shadows of lotus, ginkgo, and champagne-glass shaped flowers – as well as they might in a painting entitled “Fourth Marriage”. The wry humor is upscale: this much paint, cushioned by an oil-rich medium, slathered over the surface like icing on air. Here is an optimism that revels in success, space, and outdoor freedoms. Balanced, optically, to daylight.

Tiny Man, 1999-2003
The confident big brush swings through the model’s coiffure, slips past her face, rustles under her nightgown, and pops out under an evanescent line as the upward gazing face of… a tiny, but mature, conservatively dressed man. Father?

Out of Town Until the 26th, 2003
The hellish mood of a woman lying prone before an array of windows in a recovery clinic on a sunny afternoon is matched by a horizontal void inserted on her couch, as if to suggest that she were tipping into the crack of doom.. Of course, she never does; but the disposition of painterly elements is the more devilish for bubble-gum pink highlights stuck to her chin, lips and nose. Ick! Degas meets Nan Goldin in the glow of ghastly music hall gaslight, in the harshly lit cinder block asylum..

Man In It, 2001-2003
A young woman stands in the petal rich breeze, caught in some puzzle-like grayplanes cutting through the atmosphere. Frank O’Hara’s poem, In Memory of My Feelings, not in pencil but rendered twice: noticeably in hot pink stenciled letters, then again as mild dropped out text (in more austere typography) near the bottom of the image, as if fading away on curved space. The stenciled letters spell out, like an Ouija board: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.”

The post Ena Swansea appeared first on artcritical.