“Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades” is a show that includes the retrospective aspect to which it title alludes in one room and a display of new works, in the other, made since the artist moved upstate following the disastrous flood that claimed his downtown Manhattan studio of as many decades and damaged his archives. Any transition between the restored or spared earlier canvases and his fresh new efforts is seamless to this viewer’s eye. As I wrote of his show  at Stephen Haller Gallery (before the merger of Stux and Haller) in 2011, submitting to an urge to pun on his surname, “here is a painter who reinvigorates the tradition of post-painterly New York School abstraction by making explicit what were –despite partisanship for non-objectivity, or at least non-representation, at its historical outset – irrepressible references and sly allusions to landscape. Landfield puts the field back into Color Field Painting.”

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It’s been almost a year since Hurricane Sandy wrecked havoc on New York City and much of the East Coast. Artists were effected in a number of devastating ways: from water-clogged homes and studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to decades-worth of work lost in flooded Chelsea galleries. Phong Bui, artist and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail is recognizing this anniversary with Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1, a benefit exhibition that is more in the spirit of celebration and solidarity than somber remembrance. Conceived in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation and Industry City, the show features more than 300 artists, roughly half of whom were directly affected by the storm, across a remarkable range of disciplines and career levels. Bui himself lost years of work and much of the Rail’s archive in his flooded Greenpoint studio. The two-month exhibition will also be the site of  poetry readings, film screenings,  musical performances, talks with conservators, and other cultural events.

Exhibiting artists include: Marina Adams, Susan Bee, Katherine Bradford, Mike Cloud, Cora Cohen, Tamara Gonzales, Ron Gorchov, Josephine Halvorson, EJ Hauser, Michael Joo, Alex Katz, Ronnie Landfield, Chris Martin, Carrie Moyer, Nari Ward, Wendy White, Richard Serra, and newer faces such as Becky Brown, Allison Ginsberg, Heidi Howard, Osamu Kobayashi, Brie Ruais, Gabriela Salazar and Nicole Wittenberg.

The opening of Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1 is Sunday, October 20 from 4 PM to 8 PM.

Industry City is located at 220 36th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The exhibition is open Thursday through Sunday, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM , and will run from October 20 to December 15, 2013

For more information and a full schedule of events, please  visit: www.cometogethersandy.com, or email: info@dedalusfoundation.org

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The first stain paintings of mine that had hard-edge bands on the bottom all generate from the late summer of 1969. The bands served three major purposes for the meaning and expression of my paintings at the time.

I was invited to have my first one-man show at the new David Whitney Gallery at 53 E. 19th Street in Manhattan in October 1969. The inaugural exhibition at the gallery in September 1969 was a group show and mine was to be the first one-man show.

In August 1969 after returning to New York City from a trip to California I painted ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’, 108 x 168 inches – a stained landscape with thick, and free-wheeling abstract pours of opaque, linear, colors, thrown across the main body of stained abstract landscape and a wide yellow band across the bottom of the painting. In the yellow band I splattered and splashed acrylic paint so as to create a kind of abstract calligraphy in the band. The painting in now in the permanent collection of the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christie.

Prior to my trip to California that July I had made a major series of ‘’Pour’’ paintings and ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’ was initially a continuation of that series. However as I contemplated the state of painting, the state of the world and my sense of what it was that I wanted to say as an artist; I saw ‘’Sunday Afternoon’’ as the beginning of something radically new and in my own voice as an artist.
One of the paintings that immediately followed was ‘’Diamond Lake’’, 108 x 168 inches. ‘’Diamond Lake’’ redefined the art of painting.

That painting is a stained landscape with a hard-edge violet band across the bottom and soft and pale stained colors across the top. The top reads as sky, the stained mid-section in the body reads as landscape and the violet band at the bottom serves a threefold function.

In response to the criticism lodged by Donald Judd that painting was dead because it was illusionistic and was a lie because it didn’t own up to its objecthood; I decided to move the art of painting forward by re-defining it via its own past. By creating new paintings that were illusionistic, pictorial and anti-object. In response as well to the demand by Clement Greenberg that painting be unified, – one thing – one way – I was determined to create a new type of painting that was in keeping with my view of my generation incorporating several philosophies of art-making into my paintings at once. A simile in music might be folk-rock; or the separate sections in a song like ‘’Hey Jude’’.

Moving forward by looking backward. Consequently I distilled my new work beginning with ‘’Diamond Lake’’ into foreground – middle ground – and background sections. The hard-edge bands serving as foregrounds. Initially they were particularly high – almost taking up the bottom third of the picture. The purpose was to project out to the viewer, creating a literal foreground. While the main stained body drew the viewer in with multiple layers of thinned colors, and the sky at the top evoking infinite space.

By aggressively creating physically powerful, cutting edge, abstract paintings that evoked nature – landscape – and foreground, middle ground and background, I was sending a message to artists and art lovers alike in contradiction of Judd’s dictums.

By combining hard-edge areas with stained areas I was directly addressing Greenberg’s proscribed limitations by essentially changing the priorities of picture making to express and evoke the sometimes contradictory truths of modern life as I perceived it.

The second and perhaps more important underlying meaning of the hard-edge bands in my paintings was the necessity to express the truth of life. The landscape, stained sections of my paintings evoke nature, freedom, wilderness, and the bands include the man-made element that defines our lives in today’s world. Architecture, roads, buildings against nature, telephone lines, electric poles, set against the virtual lack of true wilderness in today’s world. Even as we drift from canyon to canyon as I used to do in the wilderness of Utah and other places we are proscribed in our lives with appointments and responsibilities, and limits – the bands are metaphors for that essential truth of our lives…

The final meaning of my use of the hard-edge bands was perhaps the most important, certainly one of the most important aspects of my work. I am an admirer of American abstract expressionism, characterized by large scale, aggressive, brash, and matter of fact, in your eye, surfaces and color. Perhaps those descriptive elements defined some of American culture in the late 1960s and 1970s. I am also an admirer of the history of art.

We were engaged in war in Southeast Asia, and I opposed that war. I was opposed to our aggression against a small, helpless country like Vietnam and throughout that region of the world. My stained landscapes have their roots in Song Dynasty Chinese Landscape painting, characterized by flatness and the depiction of a wide range of terrain at once. Song Dynasty Landscape painting is the beginning of all landscape painting pre-dating the art of the west by a couple of centuries. A visual characteristic of Chinese landscape is the presence of geometric chops, adding the calligraphic signature of the artist as well as calligraphic written poetry; often those paintings on silk were bordered on both sides. The colors and subtlety of those Chinese landscape paintings were stained into the silk fabric reminiscent of the subtlety and color of stain paintings.
My bands are my version of those artist chops. The size and scale of my paintings being aggressive, and evocative of abstract expressionism. Hofmann, Rothko, and Pollock (see ‘’Portrait and A Dream’’) being important inspirations, for duality and the psychological language of color and scale. In the first stain, band paintings that I made in the late summer of 1969 several including ‘’Rain Dance’’ I, II, III, and IV as well as ‘’Elijah’’ (108×55 inches, US State Department) , and ‘’Any Day Now’’, (108×93 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art), there are drawn and painterly lines – my version of calligraphy in the hard-edge bands, further identifying with Chinese landscape in my own terms. The size, brightness, and aggressive surfaces of my paintings are unmistakably western, but the format and iconography is unmistakably eastern. The reflection and respect for eastern philosophy being also a major inspiration for my work as an artist in the 1960s. My stain band paintings serve as a marriage between east and west. Creating a philosophical unity of east and west being an important aspect of one of the most important issues of our lives…

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Jack Whitten at Alexander Gray Associates
526 West 26th Street #215. 212 399 2636. www.alexandergray.com

Greg Drasler: On the Lam at Betty Cuningham
541 West 25th Street. 212 242 2772. www.bettycuninghamgallery.com
reviewed by David Cohen (capsule reviews)

William Anastasi/N. Dash at Nicole Klagsbrun
526 West 26th Street. 212 243 3335 www.nicoleklagsbrun.com

Ronnie Landfield: New Paintings  at Stephen Haller Gallery
542 West 26th Street. 212 741 7777 www.stephenhallergallery.com
reviewed by David Cohen (exhibitions)

Will Barnet: Small Works on Paper from the 1950s at Alexandre Gallery
41 East 57th Street. 212 755 2828 www.alexandregallery.com

Anthony Goicolea: Pathetic Fallacy at Postmasters
459 West 19th Street. 212 727 3323 www.postmastersart.com
Was discussed at The Review Panel, September 30

Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street. 212 977 7160. www.mariangoodman.com
reviewed by Jonathan Goodman (exhibitions)

Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
138 10th Avenue. 212 750 0949. www.loribooksteinfineart.com

Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings at Marlborough
545 West 25th Street. 212 463 8634. www.marlboroughgallery.com

Ad Reinhardt: Works from 1935-1945 at Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street. 212 421 3292, www.thepacegallery.com

Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World at Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue. 212 570 3600 www.whitney.org

Loren Munk: Location  Location  Location at Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street. 212 410 6120 www.lesleyheller.com
reviewed by Greg Lindquist (exhibitions)

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September 8- October 15, 2011
542 West 26th Street
New York City, 212-741-7777

Paintings as decorous and tasteful as Ronnie Landfield’s demand a critical response equally mindful of its manners.  And yet, if ever an artist called out for a pun on his name, this is he.  For here is a painter who reinvigorates the tradition of post-painterly New York School abstraction by making explicit what were –despite partisanship for non-objectivity, or at least non-representation, at its historical outset – irrepressible references and sly allusions to landscape. Landfield puts the field back into Color Field Painting.

Clear as Day (2006) uses color and stain to denote distance and differentiate the play of light and mist on receding hills with the polite subtly of a watercolor, despite its nine feet width and its being acrylic on canvas.  What Gauguin Said (1998) is a more turbulent, busy, heated composition, less legible as landscape, but it still uses the bold gestures of action painting in ways more akin to paint hatching reminiscent of the Post-Impressionist of its title than the Abstract Expressionists he evokes in his scale and stripping bare of reference.  Franz Kline in Provincetown (2010), a brooding and romantic evocation of a valley with encroaching storm, is similarly more Turner than Kline.

Of course, where pioneers of the first generation like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko were implicitly landscape-like, denizens of post-painterly abstraction like Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski went on, in their later works, to revel unabashedly in romantic landscape associations.  Landfield is never as sumptuous as Frankenthaler or as fearless as Olitski, but he has a very likeable touch that is restrained even when it is exuberant.  He exudes pictorial intelligence.

His elegantly installed exhibition includes work dating back to 1997 as well as examples from this year.  Several paintings here include what has become his trademark device, a bar of solid color at the base of the canvas.  This gives the works a somewhat incongruously conceptual look.  If they serve as chromatic points of reference for the artist in his working process then they are, I guess, like Alberto Giacometti’s (or Euan Uglow’s) nervous-tic spatial markers, pentimenti that are tolerable if nonetheless somewhat affected.  But if they are intended to ground his images in a contemporary moment, as if to apologize for the otherwise traditional implications of landscape painting, then the strategy is heavy-handed and likely to back fire, as they actually make him look a bit old-fashioned.  He’d be raising the bar if he lost them.

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October 14th – Nov 12, 2005

These artists have known each other for over thirty years. The exhibition is a combination of intensely colored paintings and sculptures that embody different world views. Ronnie Landfield attempts to transcend the material world by avoiding representation while Peter Reginato celebrates an abstract materialism. The title of the exhibition, “Color Coded”, is a pretentious way of saying, “The artwork is colorful!” This reduces the art to interior decor. It was a mistake for the artists to permit such a crass packaging of their work.

In his writings about his own art Ronnie Landfield tells us it is about the expression of transcendent, universal themes, and his tools are “color, space, and form.” On occasion his paintings are mildly suggestive of the meeting of earth and sky. His work has been consistently non-figurative for many years. These seemingly improvisational paintings are filled with subtleties and suggestive of large open spaces.

Ronnie Landfield’s impersonal formalism avoids specificity of place and time. Clearly they are not figural in any way, a tribute to the artist’s discipline and strong commitment to what he believes paintings should be about. Certainly they emphasize such formal elements as color and form. They are an examination of color relationships, which have existed throughout the painterly tradition. The drama they generate is solely due to the clashing and melding of beautiful colors in a palpable non-space. They are also about universal and religious themes, endless vistas and imaginary spaces, manufactured and natural light, the timeless image of the meeting of earth and sky (which is a favorite theme of Helen Frankenthaler, another great Lyrical Abstractionist), and fragile and ephemeral textures generated by overlap and juxtaposition of colors.

Landfield’s disciplined focus on the formal qualities of painting perhaps limit the power of these works to generate metaphors that complicate the viewing experience as it occurs through time. However, these images consistently maintain a level of non-specificity, while at the same time they are redolent of the outdoor world. I did not feel like I was looking at an interior at any point. The open sky always felt present. We are left wondering about the where and when of these interactions of colors and forms in space and this universalizes the language of abstraction. There is an inherent contradiction between the artist’s emotional connection to these colors and tones, the intricate meanings they have for him and him alone, and his avoidance of the anthropomorphic, the blatantly symbolic. Unlike a different branch of painterly abstraction, we don’t play guessing games with these works. We don’t feel the need to discover repressed or distorted signs and symbols. Landfield puts all of his faith in color, color as a vehicle of communication.

Peter Reginato’s sculptures are chock full of individual parts, welded together and painted with bright colors or mid-tones. The artist is an avid collector of lunch boxes and clocks and his love of the minutiae of the material world shines through. The horizontally oriented floor sculptures are a combination of the spread out innards of a busted clock and an exploded Joan Miró painting. Reginato’s vocabulary of forms grows out of his deep appreciation of the Moderrnist masters. A number of Peter Reginato’s sculptures were unforgivably placed on a shelf above a desk at the back of the gallery. This limited the viewer’s ability to see them in the round, the way they should be viewed. Although the coloration of these steel works is completely seductive, sometimes you felt like the sculptural forms and the colors laid on them were warring with one another. The floor sculptures could feel compressed, like the multiple layers, the overlapping of forms were not articulated enough. The originality of these floor sculptures is obvious though.

The viewer is initially disoriented by the weird gravity they exist in. How should one position oneself in relation to the sculpture? By not setting up a clear relationship between sculpture and viewer, the viewer ends up meandering about the work, focusing and refocusing on the colors and forms but never quite sure of which way is up. This completely undermines all Modernist notions of the isolated sculptural object. So the inherent contradiction in this work, the artist’s obvious appreciation of Modernist pods and squiggles and his desire to disorient us through an entirely intuitive building process makes these sculptures as strange as they are beautiful.

“Salmon Hill” is a successful sculpture from 2003. The multiple sections are welded together in such a way that they form a cone or tepee shape. The dark spaces visible through the myriad of forms cut out of the larger pieces of steel are mysterious and suggestive. The coloration of this sculpture is subtle and smart.

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