May 12 to July 29, 2016
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 941-0012

Five medium-sized paintings in the rear of the gallery break with Stephen Westfall’s familiar practice. Unlike more characteristic paintings such as Cortona (2015), with their coolly satisfying symmetry, the structure of these newer works display a strongly asymmetrical and relational pictorial composition. This exciting departure is a result of the artist’s experience of mural scale wall painting completed over the past several years where he has begun to break with pattern, to an extent, and has increased the role of white as a color. The site-specific murals completed at at Art OMI, Ghent, New York, in 2014 are examples of these.

There is also a faux comical undermining of seriousness, both in the titling of the show and in the deadpan paint surfaces. For a Modernist like Westfall, the strategy of linking high and low cultural narratives—constructivism and graphic signs—proves expedient in deflating grandiosity and productively opening influence to the vitality of quotidian environment. But originality is not dependent on novelty of technology and media. Westfall has achieved a singular style of painting that stands out for all the right reasons—it is compelling, arresting work—whilst not straying from already existing modes.

The diamond shapes, though recalling a harlequin design, represent an ostensible pattern that is broken through changes of hue and value. There is one color per shape, often now with the addition of white diamonds that when adjacent to each other create a context of figure/ground with the chromatically varied diamonds with which they cohabit. These consistent shapes, edited actively at the edge of the paintings’ rectangular limits, are converted into triangles of various sizes in proportion to the over all size of a particular painting. In The Future Advances and Recedes (2015), a central diamond shape is made up of four smaller diamonds, two aligned vertically, the top one deep purple, the lower one black. The horizontally aligned diamonds are a cadmium red and cobalt blue and can be read as eyes in a Paul Klee-like geometric head balancing on a diagonal of orange and yellow. The orange is a triangle formed by the lower edge of the painting bisecting what would have been another diamond. The orange and yellow flip to read also as a three-dimensional roof-like shape. The remaining triangle, taupe in color and to the left of the geometrical head as I describe it, skews what would have been otherwise a general symmetry of composition.

Color is liberated to function in a kinetic way through the simple devise of geometric shape. Thus articulated, color moves and reorganizes, as we perceive it, like a mobile turning through space. Like Stanley Whitney, an artist who structures color through geometry in a similar way, nothing is static in these works. Pages could be written simply to address what color does as one looks at it, the sensations it causes and the thoughts it elicits. An added quality is the perspectival lean that happens in a steeply vertical painting like Delta (2015): the narrow format and large scale of the contained shapes fragment the composition in such a way that there is no complete diamond visible, creating an almost sculptural column. That so much is possible still in the field of an expanded, inclusive modernism and its visuality is evident in considering this exhibition. Westfall’s change in direction only serves to intensify and enlarge his subtlety and range.

The post Diamond in the Smooth: Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg appeared first on artcritical.

At the recent memorial service for Robert Berlind, who died December 17th after a long illness, friends and family members spoke movingly of Robert’s profound generosity of spirit, his equanimity, and his unflagging determination to experience life’s gifts even in his last weeks.

Over a fifty-year career Berlind produced an expansive and refined body of work that was rooted in landscape, reflecting a scholar’s knowledge of the history of art, and a contemporary artist’s relentless effort to understand how we perceive and integrate the visible and interior worlds. This effort was almost entirely camouflaged by the deceptive simplicity of his work, and yet it could be sensed in the considered organization of forms, and in the tensions he created across the surfaces and within the layers of his paintings.

The movement of Berlind’s vision reminded me of the gestures of a Tai Chi practitioner, gradually encompassing all dimensions of space (and time). We sense the scanning and tracking motion of his eyes as he sought and isolated particular fragments of the landscape. The artist Mary Lucier, Berlind’s wife of 22 years, beautifully captured his tight concentration in her video Summer, or Grief (1998), as his head moves quickly back and forth between the motif and the canvas he is painting. This working method resulted in a way of saying – through his paintings – Here, look at this. Pay attention—this snow shadow, this shivering reflection is really magnificent.

Berlind’s particular contribution came through the manner in which he superimposed layers of space and distance, foreground and background, as though the substances within each spatial level were compressed under a microscope’s cover slide, or seen through sheets of Mylar, one above the other. This layering and flattening of the levels of space contributed to a straightforward coolness and precision in his work can bring to mind Winslow Homer’s ravens waiting to attack a fox in the snow, or his hunted ducks careening above waves in mid-air. For me, Berlind’s approach to pictorial depth also metaphorically suggested that all things are (ideally) created equal, and that the hierarchies we impose on life are essentially artificial and divisive.

His ingenuity also came through in his articulation of the edges of things, either softened by movement or distance, or crisply delineated—as in the branches of Studio Roof #4, 2015, a painting to be shown in his scheduled solo exhibition next month at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., his New York gallery. In the monumental (5 x 17 foot) Passage (2007), Berlind created a shimmering grid of interwoven branches and fluttering leaves that alternate between blurred and crisp focus, not unlike the dizzying sensation of watching a filmmaker pulling focus. Berlind’s mastery of subtle color reflected his affinity with such peers and mentors as Harriet Shorr and Robert Kushner, Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, but his greens were the envy of many painters, as he captured the symphonic range of hues reflected in stream beds, rice seedlings, and winter branches according to their position in the light, the time of day, or the season.

In addition to his work as a distinguished professor, and writer of art criticism, Berlind was also a supportive colleague in quieter and less visible ways. One day in 2005 while crossing Fifth Avenue I bumped into Bob as we were both heading up to see his exhibition at Tibor de Nagy. With his flashing blue eyes, laugh lines, and regal elegance Bob always resembled an 18th-century portrait of Voltaire. Immediately launching into animated conversation about studio problems, we became so engrossed that we almost got run over by a taxi.

Remarkably, Bob made a recording of his thoughts on dying and expressions of gratitude to be played at his memorial service, a gesture that conveyed the tremendous grace and awareness possible within loss. He will be remembered as an artist who was always interested in locating what was most alive in others’ work, and who scrutinized the world with searching curiosity, devotion, and love.

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton opens Saturday, January 9, 5-7 pm, at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 West 25th Street, New York.

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September 18 to November 1, 2014
514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 941 0012

Rigorous, flat, unpredictable, startling, deadpan, funny. These are all descriptions that can apply to Harriet Korman’s paintings. Among painters, she is esteemed for integrating in her abstract work a wide range of qualities from the clumsy and odd to the most gracious unities of jewel-pure color. Her first exhibition since winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 2013, composed of works from the past three years, feels like an exuberant engagement with the animating aspects of her work from the past two decades.

Essentially a suite of themes and variations, this exhibition of 10 drawings made with oil stick and 10 paintings are meditations on painting’s potential for unexpected encounter. They certainly compel and reward a meditative look.

The works avoid assuming any sort of posture — high-tech, ironic, romantic, or post-this or that — drawing upon honest studio experimentation. Colors, in their variety, combinations and sequences, reference lived experiences from garishness to mysticism, and it is this range that is key to their depth of feeling.

Most of the works on display differ from the output of Korman’s last few shows in that they include areas of plain white paint, as well as hand-painted linear elements. In the previous two shows, Korman’s paintings were constructed exclusively of highly saturated color areas. The colored lines in the new work let Korman respond to the optical activity at the edges of adjacent hues. Drawn lines and clusters of colored outlines are used to orchestrate color vibrations where areas of color meet.

Entering into the simple composition of each work it is possible to become engaged in contemplating mandala-like geometries. Untitled (2014) is symmetrical in layout but not in the weight of its colors. The central diamond creates a restrained color hum, while the surrounding four diamonds advance and expand. Some white areas are under pressure, while the corners are open. Many kinds of edge co-exist.

The new paintings originate in corresponding drawings. One can study ideas as they transform from the very personal oil stick works to the more austere, painted realizations, noting that they do so without loss of intimacy or immediacy. (The drawings are also beautiful on their own.) Compositions are built on simple layouts — diamonds intersecting cruciform shapes — but it is the complicating of these geometries through color that make the paintings happen. Color skews the symmetry of the layouts and sparks a dynamic, optical experience that takes us to a more complex, active order.

In this visual process, questions arise: how do those varieties of green differ? How are those glowing contrasts on one side of the painting offset the other? Are those oranges all the same or subtly different, and if so, and why? Structure is established, then repeatedly contravened by color, the visual impact of specific hues creating tension and imbalance. As we gaze, geometric configurations give way to sequences of extraordinary color, radiating, playing hopscotch, building glow upon glow.

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January 9 to February 15, 2014
514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

As a vehicle for combining color and light there is no better material means in painting than watercolor. Its properties are well documented, though that doesn’t diminish, in the right hands, its capacity to surprise. Willem de Kooning was well-acquainted with its particular qualities, valuing both its sublety and its capacity for directness; the medium fit well with his desire for a spontaneity capable of conflating lived life and studio practice. It seems this is something equally appealing to Melissa Meyer who has achieved it , arguably, without the associated drama of abstract expressionist ways. While choosing to pass on that generation’s angst, Meyer continues a tradition of abstraction without foregrounding personal struggle–which isn’t to say she in any way takes it easy. As Mary Heilmann said of her own work, there is no need to “Duke it out” with paintings as Ab-Ex artists once appeared to do. The difficulties and challenges of painting are not eschewed, as they are not necessarily a correlative of a combative or risk-filled life. As Larry Poons said, risks are better taken in painting than when crossing the road.

This exhibition, Meyer’s third at Lennon, Weinberg, makes the best possible use of a relatively narrow space that affords views of considerable distance from front to back. Groups of works encompass a range of temperature from black and white works on paper made in 2012, through paintings like Little Smokey, 2013,  that evince a relatively austere range of color, to the painting Shuffle, 2013 which is warm and expansive. Little Smokey, 2013, is a horizontal diptych whose lateral emphasis recalls the proportions of Cinemascope, an apposite association in view of the artist’s long-standing interest in cinema.  The bluish-black and violet brushed tracks have a calligraphic quality, but they are not writing per se or distinct pictograms, and describe a dry melt of turns and curves that speed up and slow down in bursts. Their episodic yet linked characteristics enfold an idea of the uneven flow of time rather as cinema can vary pace through editing. These separate yet always active passages imply and dismantle an idea of the grid using askew rectangular sections that establish an irregular and constantly changing pulse. The saturated or pale yellow, pink and off white areas join the energized armature in leaving only brief pauses for the eye to halt until continuing helter-skelter (think also of the Beatles song of the same name). Chinese landscape painting and the sculptures of David Smith both come to mind, though here any comparisons are made with the understanding that a thorough reinvention has taken place.  The changes of illumination and contrast made possible by the under-painting pull  what might otherwise be be a very frontal composition into a torqued, flickering, pulsing  set of loosely-defined  spaces that recalls the coexistence of disparate spaces and scale changes in Chinese 18th-century painting.

There are three paintings that share the same chromatic range as Little Smokey and are placed in the same area of the gallery that nonetheless diverge in subtle, exploratory ways. In the larger Smokey, (2013) the change in scale of the mosaic of compartments and the reduced contrast as well as the blurring through washed color implies changes of focus amidst a sweeping, undulating pattern of light. Meyer achieves contrast from one painting to the other though shifts in color and structure, ever mindful of the potential of discordant and disjunctive means. These means, nevertheless, unexpectedly cohere whilst not submitting to stasis.  In Devlin, (2013) for example, a painting of contrasting lushly warm and sharply cool colors, there is no predictable sequence yet overlapping and always extending riffs somehow don’t fall apart thanks to an implied melody.

With Meyer, drawing and painting play an equal role in generating her linear element – and she cannot be accused of forsaking either in not separating them. An arabesque can remain just that or it can thicken and double to become a shape. Other times areas of color are drawn over or partially cancelled out, the choice constantly varying. When it comes to her consideration of composition, spontaneity would appear to win out over structure because the hand is ahead of thought.  But there is no attendant loss of control as experience clearly informs the hand as much as it does thought. A painting always happens over a period of time: it is a time-based medium after all, a fact of which Meyer’s approach makes a virtue by repeatedly elapsing one painterly moment or relationship into the next, simultaneously exposing the process and allowing it to run backwards and forwards for the viewer. There is always discovery in Meyer’s paintings, even when there are clear horizons to head towards.

This article was updated February 14.  The exhibition under review was the artist’s third at Lennon, Weinberg, not her second as previously stated.

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March 7 to April 20, 2013
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

In “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire envisions a painter of “the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” He also condemns photography, which for him too easily gratifies the popular desire for images. But Baudelaire’s words about the painter could well apply to video artist Mary Lucier, whose latest piece, Wisconsin Arc, combines constructions of light and contrapuntal movement with a sympathetic documentation of everyday life. In this highly formalized record of bourgeois recreation, comparable to Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Grande Jatte, Lucier engages both popular culture and high artistic ideals.

These new videos were made during two years of teaching in Milwaukee. The works unfold progressively in the gallery, beginning with a three-minute flat screen video at the entrance. Like the predella to an altarpiece, this loop, visible from the street, entices viewers with narrative scenes, leading into “Wisconsin Arc”, the more ambitious projection in the inner gallery. There’s indeed some sense of a chapel in that chamber, with benches before large images of Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum, whose monumental window onto Lake Michigan creates a cathedral-like space, with networks of reflected light.

Shot on a beach near the museum, the more documentary and informal “predella” video, entitled Beauty and the Beast, follows a Hmong family group filming one another on the shore, seemingly aware of Lucier’s camera on them: observing and being observed. Lucier implicitly acknowledges this fundamental condition of our public life, while the obvious fact of the family’s ethnicity leaves open the question of what social divisions underlie the popular democracy of the beach.  As viewers pass into the inner gallery and the more sophisticated recreational context of the art museum, the passage is hung with video stills printed on silk, suspended like prayer flags along the gallery wall. These exemplify the multiple potentials of digital images, including their commercial value. The passage might reference the museum shop with its omnipresent commodification of culture. Like the question of ethnic diversity, the issue of art’s complicity in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” is acknowledged but left open.

These undertones of contemporary media ethnography give way to a starkly formal image in the opening section of Wisconsin Arc, a close-up of a glass with ice cubes. Centered hugely in the frame, it creates a lens through which we view the distorted figures of passers-by on a distant walkway. The message implicit in this surrogate eye is the camera’s authority, as it imposes itself on the visual process. Its active intervention is only extended in the editing of the next two sections.

If we think in musical terms, the middle section would be the scherzo, with its hyperactive pace, as amateur performers move through the space in front of Calatrava’s giant window. Along with this intricately choreographed sequence come layered images of the beach and the lake, dissolving the architectural frame while introducing footage of the family from the “predella” video.

The final section is the longest, set to the leisurely pace of a group of walkers. Now down on the beach itself, the camera tracks a panoramic vista as it picks up and follows a man and two women who are  carrying their own cameras. The man acknowledges Lucier with a glance before strolling on into what becomes a fugue of layered tracking shots. Sequences of the group overlap with one another and combine with other shots until the initial group re-emerges, approaching us again, and the procession repeats itself. By varying the opacity of the layers, and manipulating the speed of the projection, Lucier treats the people and landscape as visual elements in a larger composition.

Indeed, the sixteen-minute duration of this loop prolongs the simple pleasure of viewing and being viewed into a timeless, meditative continuity. Given our conditioned expectation of quick editing and punchy messages, it comes as a mild surprise each time the group reappears for yet another swing along the beach. For those who recognize the musical accompaniment – the intro to Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” – the continuity extends into the past, into a primeval ‘fifties realm, before the invention of video art.

This attitude towards time distinguishes Wisconsin Arc from Street, a video by James Nares currently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nares has recorded passersby in New York in slowed motion and heightened detail, like Lucier, but where Nares emphasizes a sequential movement through space and time, Lucier layers her sequences to create a less linear, more forgiving temporal structure. Like the Soviet experimental filmmaker Dziga Vertov in “Man with a Movie Camera”, which concludes on a human eye merged with a camera lens, she integrates time, space, people and technology.

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The Ghost in the Machine, Curated by Stephen Westfall: John McLaughlin, Nicholas Krushenick, Don Christensen, Harriet Korman, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Jennifer Riley, Rachel Beach, Jackie Meier, Thomas Raggio is at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., June 23 to August 19, 2011.

REVERIE, Curated by Stephen Westfall: Andrea Belag, Shirley Jaffe, Alix Le Méléder, Sylvan Lionni, Julia Rommel, Patricia Treib, Stephen Westfall, Stanley Whitney, at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, New York. NY 10012

The last thing you expect of cognitive dissonance is a harmonious feeling, and yet that is what you get when you consider Stephen Westfall’s mode of painting and his way of conducting himself in the world.  Rigorous, cool, hard-edged formal abstraction is his painting mode whereas his activities as an educator, critic, essayist and (this season) an especially busy curator of group exhibitions are marked by ecumenism: warmly inclusive and boundary-breaking in the people he selects to write about or to exhibit with/together, he often makes unexpected connections across mediums and styles, generations and allegiances.  His approach is non-dogmatic, suggesting that pragmatism rather than idealism lies at the heart of his aesthetics.

This season he has been the subject and instigator of three New York shows.  His sixth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, his Chelsea dealer, titled Seraphim for one of the paintings in the show, opened at the end of April and followed on from an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, where he had been a fellow, in Summer 2010.  During his residency in the eternal city, Westfall became mesmerized by mosaic flooring in early medieval churches.  The result – an extended series of diamond-shaped bands of color, formats that recall Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella but in ways that, to paraphrase Klee, take the grid for a walk – captured praise from the influential husband and wife critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz.  For Smith, in the New York Times, Westfall’s “syncopated progression of hues, which is more intuitive than systematic, creates a wonderful, jangling destabilization, warping space and confirming scale (not size) as the living energy source that it is.”  For Saltz, in New York Magazine, “it feels vibrantly alive, quirky, open, ever-mutating, and popping with color… Westfall’s work has never felt so free, confident, and his own.”

His New York solo show was followed in the same space by a group show he selected, Ghost in the Machine, that included a large work of his own, a show that juxtaposed artists all working within geometric abstraction but to sharply contrastive ends.  Coincidental with the Chelsea group show was Reverie at Zürcher Studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, which again included a painting of his own amidst a diverse and intercontinental group. Zürcher is his longstanding representative in Paris.

Ghost in the Machine can be read as a kind of manifesto of “impurist” geometric abstraction in which popular culture and humor are celebrated as extensions of abstraction rather than its enemy.  “Some people think that artists deploy geometry as an austerity.  It ain’t necessarily so.” Westfall wrote in a statement accompanying the show.  “All the work here stands for more than one thing: swoony craft, optical dazzle, compression and expansion.” John McLaughlin, the Boston-born Californian whose proto-minimalist paintings have been the subject of recent rediscovery, might seem closest to a purest aesthetic with its allegiance to Mondrian, Malevich and Zen.  Even he allows his color and spatial decisions to be inflected by a Californian aesthetic of gloss and ease.  Jennifer Riley, one of the younger artists in the group, and a former student of Westfalls (he has taught for years at Bard College and at Rutgers, both important centers for abstract painting on the East Coast) makes the connection between her crystalline forms and a Pop aesthetic explicit, if extremely coded, in the title, Starburst for NK, (2009); NK is Nicholas Krushenick (1929-1999), also represented in the exhibition and held by many to be the father of pop abstraction.

If Ghost is a manifesto, Reverie is a visual poem; in place of the rigorous organizing principle of geometry – whether subversive or subverted – this show allows for greater diversity of touch and process, ranging in its modes of abstraction from monochrome (Julia Rommel ) to gestural (Andrea Belag) to minimal (Sylvan Lionni ) to organic (Patricia Treib).  Its presiding eminence grise was the Paris-based veteran Shirley Jaffe, represented by a monumental, tapestry-like collage of glyphs and decals, while another “lifer” – to quote Westfall’s witty euphemism from his supporting statement – was Stanley Whitney, whose gutsy grids are composed of wobbling lozenges of sharply contrastive colors and gently differentiating textures. Whitney’s found grid stood in instructive contract to the meticulously preplanned rigor of Westfall, but rather than suggesting an opposition, it seemed that Westfall enlisted Whitney to say that he, too, arrives at his patterns through feeling and whim as much as any formal logic.

Westfall has been known for years for his penchant for cheery, upbeat geometric abstraction that simultaneously registers order and disruption.  At first his compositions strike the viewer as well-behaved structures of pattern with decorative correlates in the applied arts, such as plaid, herringbone, chevrons.  Good humored populist titles like “My beautiful Laundrette” or “Candyman” and raucous color schemes hint at subversion of prim minimal grids or Color Field-redolent arrangements of parallel stripe.  But his visual wit goes beyond mere reference to recent abstract art history.  A key element in his vocabulary is the disruptive kink he will admit into his patterning that sets it off kilter; never quite subverting the flatness of the picture plane, he nonetheless allows a breeze or ripple to run across the composition.

The references to other art and the broader culture, coupled with his funky palette, might sound like Westfall belongs simply within the pop or deconstructive camp of Neo-Geo and its derivatives, making him a bedfellow, say, or Jonathan Lasker or Peter Halley.  And there are generational connections, as there are with other abstractionist wits like Mary Heilmann.  But somehow, in Westfall, the attachment to the positive, energetic, affirmative aspect of pattern and decoration always seems in earnest; the subversion is within pattern, rather than of pattern.  He recalls Ruskin’s dictum that “All beautiful lines are drawn under mathematical laws organically transgressed.” He leaves viewers feeling that his intention is to invigorate abstraction rather than to debunk it.  And this makes sense of the community he establishes around himself of fellow abstractionists, and workers within other styles, for whom wit is important but irony is to be avoided.

This article first appeared at the newly-launched website of Abstract Critical, a British not-for-profit organization dedicated to abstract art.  Despite a similarity in name, Abstract Critical is not connected with artcritical magazine, although artcritical editor David Cohen has agreed to submit quarterly reports to Abstract Critical with cross postings here at artcritical.

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October 21 – November 27, 2010
514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 941 0012

Stephen Mueller’s paintings and works on paper radiate colors that sweep us off our feet. Those fearful that a palette that embraces such saturated and domineering purples, pinks, turquoise and yellow could veer towards kitsch, or cause sensory overdose, will be pleasantly surprised by this exhibition. It takes experience and a finely nuanced sense of balance to avoid such pitfalls. Mueller is equipped with both these virtues and, without shying away from spectral indulgence, applies them with exhilarating finesse.

At Lennon, Weinberg, Mueller’s compositions vary considerably and yet, the group is unquestionably cohesive. Like a family, among whose members essential differences exist, recurring signature characteristics assure an unbreakable bond. One such rather ethereal characteristic is atmosphere, the realization of an illusionistic space generated by contrasting opaque shapes with translucent, thinly layered backgrounds. Like a cosmic close up, these crisply delineated forms emerge from —or retreat into— infinite spheres. They are at once floating and fixed. It seems as if Mueller managed to capture them just in time, during a brief moment of pause in an otherwise never-ending state of flux. It is this notion of motion turned into stillness that causes these shapes to assume an iconographic presence.

But what are they exactly? Inspired by art historical references and cultural objects of the past, they function as emblems for hidden truths and tokens of mysterious philosophies. They are symbols for something unknown and possible keys to deeper understanding. One realizes their significance, their inherent urgency and yet, their only immediate importance resides in their physicality, how they are described through color and form. As centers of concentration, these shapes draw much attention, gain personality and hence, rather appear as protagonists than as compositional elements.

In his first New York solo show since 2006 and his first with this gallery, Mueller stresses a sense of theatricality by elaborating on one particular compositional element. In several of his new paintings, side banners of solid color evoke an immense stylized curtain. Pulled to the sides, it is the gateway to all action, allowing a better look at the drama that will unfold on the painter’s stage.

Mueller’s work reflects an array of eclectic interests and influences. There is an evident affinity for the symbolism found in Northern European Romanticism, for example, or the formal structure of Far Eastern mysticism. Mueller’s touch and care in regards to rendition should imply an appreciation of Renaissance masters, while his focus on color alludes to various ethnic decorative patterns. However, the challenge here is not to figure out the ingredients that make up Mueller’s vocabulary or to decipher the dense mélange. What matters is what we see, the composition with all its facets and how it unfolds as our eye travels from element to element and from one section to the overall plane.

Mueller’s exhibition finds itself in great company in Chelsea this November, with Thomas Nozkowski’s newest body of work displayed at Pace Gallery right next door and Brice Marden’s two installations at Matthew Marks on 22nd Street. Mueller’s show is thus a wonderful intervention in a gallery-to-gallery symposium concerning the nature and experience of abstract painting.

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The ten paintings in “The Divide” are the powerful culmination of many years research and travel. Denyse Thomasos’s long interest in the architecture of confinement has taken her to Europe. Africa, Asia, and most recently, to the new super jails Maryland. Merging indigenous structures such asMali mud huts and Indian dwellings with hi tech prison catwalks and a punchy palette, Thomasos has made an opulent creative breakthrough in this new body of work. Known previously for her monochromatic elegance, the unexpected jolts of cotton candy colors replicate industrial stairwells and the quirky hues of current fashions.

While Thomasos shows widely in her native Canada (especially her monumental wall pieces) this is her first New York solo show in several years. In October, Lennon Weinberg included her more abstract 2001 painting, Inside Wyoming, in a superb group show, “Before Again”, alongside works by Joan Mitchell, Harriet Korman, Melissa Meyer, and Jill Moser.  These new works of complexity and intensity are beautiful in their pattern making and pattern breaking, allegorical architectures that present new possibilities for painting.

The artist portrays futuristic environments that reference slavery and imprisonment. There is also an element of fifties space age nostalgia in her diagonally floating crosshatched apparitions. Trinidadian by birth, raised in Canada, now a New Yorker, the artist has a sophisticated visual language in which intense dimensionality allows for a free flow of ideas and information. Her masterful hand reveals poetry in the political.

If early modernist abstraction was inspired by nature, Thomasos’s vigorously contemporary abstraction is constructed upon imaginary metropolitan grids in which subterranean cages rise to skyscraper scale and architectural renderings blur into infinite space. In the receding passageways of Inca Matrix (2009) weirdly pastel swatches emblazon the skeletal blueprints while otherworldly structures are pierced by hot pink unwavering brushstrokes.

Form and content are inseparable in Lollipop Nation (2009) where a cage imprisons a vermillion-saturated block, perhaps a bloody heart. Of this particular piece, the artist has said: “We can live in luxury and the invisibility of imprisoning mostly black kids.” The methodically built textural surfaces of her imaginary infrastructures, as if corresponding to cultural codifications, intimate a nuanced view of oppression.

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On view at the artist’s solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, 514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York 212 941 0012 through Saturday (December 20)

Restraint with a smile has always been Stephen Westfall’s hallmark. As surely as his method of tight, almost heraldic geometric abstraction remains focused, so are his stylistic references correspondingly diverse. His paintings acknowledge both minimalism and pop in their serial logic and jazzy, synthetic color. A somewhat designer-ish, language-game take on abstraction places the artist in the dubious company of postmodern contemporaries but Westfall seems incapable of irony: indeed, his work is pervaded by ingenuousness, placing him in genuine and respectful dialogue with the luminaries of the purist tradition in modern painting.

This was an artcritical PIC in December 2008.

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