January 17 to February 23, 2013
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

What is a painting? For some time, artists have been answering that question in very diverse ways by taking painting apart into its constituent elements. Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray focused our attention on the stretcher; Julia Mehretu and Cy Twombly dealt with the painterly gesture; and Mel Bochner and Sol LeWitt, the role of drawing. Peter Soriano, who in the 1990s made colored sculptures from polyester resin, now is seeking to make his art more portable by doing improvised wall paintings, schematized landscapes based upon plein air drawings. His original contribution to this ongoing artistic dialogue involves bringing a new visual resource into the discussion. A couple of decades ago, New York City’s subway cars were covered with graffiti. This form of wild art, art from outside the regulated gallery world did not long survive. Its presence was generally seen as a political problem: graffiti showed that the authorities had lost control of the public spaces. One marvelous illustration of graffiti appears on the cover of Frank Stella’s Working Space (1986)—indeed it is the source of his title. But otherwise graffiti, like other forms of wild art, has not been given much attention by art world authorities.

Anyone using a ruler and spray can, so Soriano says, “could learn and re-make my work.” Thus Bagaduce #1 (2012), which is nine feet long consists of brown shapes overlaid and connected with blunt spray paint lines in black, blue and orange.  And Bagaduce #4 is composed of circles, dots and points of paint, linked together by dotted lines and a long stretch of sprayed blue. It is striking to see how varied are these wall paintings, which are composed of a relatively few, relatively simple elements. And, also, how effectively they make use of Lennon, Weinberg’s long narrow space, with its natural lighting at the front and back. Soriano means his works to be “mutable,” which is to say that when they recreated by another draftsman in another site they will be somewhat different. Just as Martha Argerich’s Schumann performances differ from Sviatoslav Richter’s; so, if you purchase instructions for one of these Sorianos, the work you then create at home will differ a little from those in the gallery. Only Norman Mailer and a few other visionary aesthetes admired graffiti. But anyone who loves painterly visual art can enjoy Soriano’s wall paintings, which are joyous, truly ‘gay’ in the traditional sense of that word. Seeing his paintings coming from the bitter cold of an overcast winter day, I thought of Henri Matisse’s late cutouts, a perhaps strange but not-irrelevant association. Constructing diagram-like markings, which diagram nothing, Soriano shows how far reaching aesthetic effects can be created by using minimal means. In that way, of course he extends a familiar tradition which now is lengthy. To deconstruct painting, he demonstrates, is also simultaneously to reconstruct this medium, extending its reach in ways which are aesthetically challenging because now, as in the past they remain essentially unpredictable.

The post In Search of the Mutable: Peter Soriano at Lennon Weinberg appeared first on artcritical.

Denyse Thomasos, a painter whose works are at once conceptual and abstract, intimate and monumental, died suddenly on Thursday, July 19th.   The cause was an unexpected allergic reaction during a medical procedure.  She was 47

Born in Trinidad, her family moved to Canada when she was 6 years old.  She developed an interest in art early on, and in 1987 she graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in painting and art history. She then attended Yale, where she received an MFA in painting and sculpture in 1989. Upon graduating, she immediately moved to New York and began teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.  In 1995 she became an Assistant Professor in Painting at Rutgers.

Thomasos’s bold, sometimes monochromatic, gridded abstractions have a visceral kick that immediately draws the viewer in.  Layered fat strokes of acrylic paint hover in a constant state of flux, sketching out the frameworks of architectural structures that exist on the edge, caught precariously between full formation and total collapse. Though successful on a purely abstract level, Thomasos spoke of more earthbound, often darker themes when asked to discuss her work.  A frequent world traveler, she spent a great deal of time studying prisons and slums, looking at ways disenfranchised people are constrained, both physically and socially.  Coming from a privileged background herself, she struggled intellectually and emotionally to understand how culture can warp self-perception and, ultimately, destiny.  Taken in this light, the super-enlarged crosshatches cascading across her canvases are not a loose representation of actual places, but an attempt, repeated consistently over many years, to create a multi-dimensional map for understanding the world as we live in it.  The intensity and passion Thomasos brought to this project, as much as the subject itself, are inextricably woven into the palpable frisson her paintings elicit.

Thomasos exhibited regularly and had over 15 solo-exhibitions. Olga Korper began representing her in Toronto from 1994, and Lennon Weinberg in New York from 1996, and both continue to do so.  She received numerous prestigious awards and grants, including multiple grants from the Canada Council, a regional NEA grant, two Pew Fellowships, grants and residencies from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Ucross, NYFA, the Guggenheim, Marie Walsh Sharpe, the Bellagio Foundation, P.S. 122, Mac Dowell, and Yaddo.  Her work is in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, along with many other major corporate collections.  Reviews of her shows appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artnews, Artforum, Art in America, and the Village Voice among many others.

Interviewed for Rutgers Observer TV in February 2011, Thomasos said, “I have had the most magical life I could imagine…every dream I’ve ever dreamed has come true…to travel around the world.  Being an artist you have the opportunity to live a creative life every minute of the day…it feels like I’m an explorer…and I get to translate everything that I’ve seen, show it in a gallery, and get feedback from audiences. I love every aspect of it…”

Thomasos is survived by her husband, documentary filmmaker Samien Priester, and her daughter, Syann.

The post Painter of Palpable Frisson: Denyse Thomasos, 1964-2012 appeared first on artcritical.

March 1 – April 14, 2012
514 West 25th Street , between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

For more than three decades, Harriet Korman has been on a mission to strip her work down to its irreducible elements. The current exhibition of thirteen modestly-sized yet surprisingly monumental paintings finds her boiling away what little fat remained of her vision. Those familiar with her work might have thought there was not much left to do without, as her previous exhibition featured simple biomorphic shapes rendered in solid blocks of color sans shadow, overlap, or dimensionality.  As it turns out, for Korman curved lines are expendable too.

Replacing the swooping forms of the preceding works is a series of triangles within grids of rectangles, with patterns and layouts resembling a child’s first geometric coloring book.  The resulting deadpan compositions work decisively to undermine the viewer’s ability to project meaning–subjective or otherwise.  In short, by deleting curves along with their subtle underlying hint of personality, Korman’s paintings appear to a startling degree to be purely objective.

There is another curious element to these artworks that may at first elude notice, so infrequently is it a factor: they are 100% flat.  In his famous 1955 essay “Modernist Painting”, Clement Greenberg suggested that to move forward painting should eschew the traditional depiction of space in favor of embracing the reality of the essential flatness of the painting surface.  Yet while this concept has found a secure place in the practice of art, it is hard to name abstract painters from Greenberg’s time to ours whose paintings actually appear without any illusion of visual depth.  Overwhelmingly, from Pollock’s drips to Chris Martin’s slavered brushwork, the perception of space, of foreground and background persists.  Not so in Korman’s work, which refuses to imply anything beyond the surface, adamantly inhabiting a single plane of existence.

What remains?  Denuded of meaningful subject, other than the painting itself, or of figure/ground relationship, or of any of the content available to traditional depictive strategies, Korman bets everything on the three things left: color, brushwork, and line.   Color, naturally, starts off the conversation as it reaches out from the greatest distance. Indeed Converge, 2011, beckons convincingly all the way from the far back wall of the long floor-through gallery space.  Like everything else in this body of work, Korman favors a simple, rather than simplistic, palette.  Luminous variations of blues, reds, yellows, greens, and oranges predominate, rounded out with violets and tertiary red-browns.  Each solid color, subtly fluctuating, is applied with a careful but not overly fussy touch.  The oil is not strictly speaking a wash, but is thin enough to allow the ground to abet the painting’s substantial glow.  If one looks closely, one can discern the elegant yet matter of fact brushstrokes.

Once you get close to the brushwork, the sensitivity of Korman’s minimal draftsmanship reveals itself.  For whether the artist creates the under-drawing defining the shapes with a straightedge or not, it is clear that each tenuous border is painted without one – the color gently pulled to obey by Korman’s hyperconscious hand.  This tremolo effect, though barely perceptible, supplies the paintings with their undeniable warmth and humanity.  So, although what remains is reductive in the extreme, there is material aplenty for deep meditation on what painting can achieve.

The post The Tremolo Effect: Harriet Korman at Lennon Weinberg appeared first on artcritical.

Stephen Mueller, abstract painter of exquisite poise and art critic of insightful, affirmative precision, died on Friday after a relatively short battle with lung cancer.  He was a week shy of turning 64.

Eight of his sumptuous, at once subtle and exuberant watercolors are currently included in the group exhibition, “Papertails” curated by Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond, on view at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery on Washington Square.  Last year he was the subject of a well-received solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, where he had shown his work since 2007.  Reviewing that exhibition in these pages, Stephanie Buhmann observed how, with solo shows by Thomas Nozkowski and Brice Marden as neighbors, Mueller’s show was “a wonderful intervention in a gallery-to-gallery symposium concerning the nature and experience of abstract painting.”

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1947, Mueller had studied at the University of Texas, Austin before taking his masters at Bennington College, Vermont.  Bennington was then a hotbed of a Greenbergian formalism “shoved down your throat” as he told Joe Fyfe in a 2002 Bomb magazine interview.  His subsequent career can almost be defined as a running battle between aesthetic purism and engagement with visual culture. But rather than resulting in tension, this collision course of values seemed to result in a harmony that was all the more sweet and intense for its complexity.

In his mature work – which was characterized by vibrant yet ingeniously modulated color choices and increment-free paint surfaces (or in the case of watercolor, ethereal yet sumptuous stain) – the imagery manages to be at once cosmic and decorative. Typical compositions would see mandalas floating amidst audacious plaids.  The sensibility, however, was not an abrasive one of postmodern incongruence.  Rather, he traded in a kind of tantric gaiety that could collapse the boundaries between kitsch and the sublime.

Mueller brought similar qualities to his art writing as to his painting, most notably a kind of sophisticated naïveté in which he could develop somewhat off-the-wall comparisons and formulations while paying close attention to the mood and intention of the work under review.  His writings were published with some regularity in Art in America magazine, Gay City News and, in seven cherished contributions between 2003 and 2007, here at artcritical.  His writerly tone managed to combine deadpan delivery and almost impish enthusiasm.  His conclusion to a joint review of shows by Deborah Kass and Dana Frankfort from four years ago around this time of year (the post Labor Day rush) is a timely reminder of the purpose of making and seeing art: “The implications and issues raised in both of these shows are far ranging and quickly become quite deep. They are both a lot of fun and offer several fertile fields for painting to grow in. Don’t miss them before the shows come too thick and fast to detect an issue or an implication.”

The resolution of opposites in both his art and his criticism was for some of a piece with Stephen’s deportment, in which a seemingly somber and taciturn manner actually proved a foil for a lust for life and an unfailing generosity of spirit.

Click Here for a complete list of Mueller’s writings at artcritical

The post Mandalas Amidst the Plaids: Stephen Mueller, 1947-2011 appeared first on artcritical.