Mary Ijichi, Dan Mills, and Jeffrey Reed at George Billis Gallery
October 28 – November 22, 2014
525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 645 2621

Functioning as pressure valves for excessively solicited curators and dealers, cluster exhibitions — mini-one person shows that offer a third alternative to the expansive solo show and the thematic group show — give artists the benefit of a solo listing, and the sponsoring gallery an efficient scheduling solution. Of the venues I visited one evening this month, the Painting Center managed to squeeze together solo shows by Elisa Jensen, Lois Dickson and Ying Li in their modest space, while the George Billis Gallery offered its own trio of solos with Jeffrey Reed, Mary Ijichi and Dan Mills. Billis’s recently expanded gallery is a welcome improvement for a venue dedicated to providing exposure to a large stable of artists. Lois Dickson’s choice of Elisa Jensen and Ying Li to share the space with her this month is an expression of solidarity among the membership of this long-standing artist-run institution. I wished they all had more space to share.

Elisa Jensen’s work was surprisingly large, having previewed the images online and assumed a scale that would have matched what I know of the space itself. They are urban scenes with a flat, linear quality reminiscent of Ben Shahn. The wall graffiti in Yellow Skirt, Brooklyn (all works 2014, except where noted) shares the same slender calligraphy as the bicycles depicted in several other pictures. By a crude delineating technique, Jensen suspends her imagery between a gritty realism and a self-conscious primitivism that in tandem captures both the solidity and the transient temporality of a cluttered Brooklyn sidewalk.

On the other side of a half wall, Lois Dickson’s abstractions evoked a melding of space and figure one might associate with better examples of allegorical symbolism. Her ability to match a remarkable inventiveness with subtle paint handling is particularly evident in Backstage, a canvas that, frankly, deserved the sort of space Larry Gagosian recently squandered in his uptown digs on the sophomoric maneuvers of Richard Prince. It is a canvas of rare erudition and presence. It alone is worth the trip to this fifth floor roost, high above the gallery district’s hinterlands.

Ying Li, occupying the small chamber (the euphemistically familiar “project” room) to the side of Dickson’s allotment, succeeded in reproducing the charged feeling of a working studio with selections from an extended study of views framed by the square lights of a large, grid-like window. The window is that of a space Li moved into after her husband’s untimely passing. The poignancy of her sharing her partner’s perspective on the city through the same transom is kept silently personal, leaving the viewer with a characteristic maelstrom of multiple views, painted in Li’s fierce, brawling color and seismic texture. And yet the Monet blue of City Series #3: Blue Curtain hints with both delicacy and abandon at the solitude of a podium on an empty stage.

Attuned, I suppose to the square frame of Li’s work, I was drawn immediately, at Billis, to Jeffery Reed’s landscapes. On panels measuring little more than nine by nine inches, Reed proves himself a match to the elusive ambition of his forebears: the depiction of air and light. Refined in the studio from outdoor studies made in Maine, Pennsylvania and Ireland, Reed combines memory and visual notes to produce jewels of form and color, informed by late afternoon cloud patterns, sunlit structures and receding planes — well, let’s face it, the most conventional aspects of landscape painting one could imagine. And yet there is not a hint of pedantic posturing or histrionic calls to tradition. Soft Rain, measuring a mere six by ten inches, is an affirming tour de force of nature seen through a sensibility.

Reed’s sturdy reserve proved that he, too, could endure the compression of an undersized-solo-show confederacy. But there was still more to see. A mere head turn and I was presented with Mary Ijichi’s drawings and collages, again of modest scale hovering around sixteen inches, which blend string tape with acrylic paint on Mylar. Quietly contemplative, they mimic the delicacy of Paul Klee but with a different sense of playfulness. Here the focus is on the phenomenology of patterns. The text-oriented pieces place her closer (though not necessarily indebted) to Agnes Martin. They reiterate the accidental texture of a Roman Opalka, yet steer clear of his obsessive density.

Ijichi’selegance compels the observer to locate herself at an optimal viewing distance, which turns out to be rather close and fortunately harmonious with the installation. Intimacy, however, is not an interest shared by Dan Mills, whose very public approach is to apply color to large printed maps by painting over their written information, returning the cartographer’s data exertions back into the drawn and painted renderings that all maps really are. Though most of the work failed to transcend the obvious gimmick, there were notable exceptions: Bleed (52) displays genuine painterly authority, and Outtake A’s (2013) extended strokes offers a winning digression from the motif. They work because they do not rely on their maps per se.

Those of us occupying the lower echelon of art-world actors struggle to resist what often seems like structural hostility toward an art of circumspection. But as the struggle continues I suppose we have to make the most of available opportunities. The organizers of these six exhibitions may not have been able to provide optimal viewing conditions for their artists, but it proved enough.

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New York Studio School
June 6 to July 20, 2013
8 West 8th Street
New York City, 212-673-6466

Currently gracing the walls of the New York Studio School gallery are the paintings of two accomplished mid-career artists who both paint abstracted images inflected by elements of the real. Their philosophies of painting, however, are very different. Filling one of the gallery’s two rooms, Eve Aschheim’s small canvases reveal a process of steady probing, with fine lines and carefully considered shapes set against smoothed layerings of white; suggestive but never descriptive, her forms accrue as a kind of cerebral poetry.  In the second room, the surfaces of Ying’s Li’s small to moderate-sized canvases swirl with thick strokes of paint applied in every color and tone; her subjects are far more readily apparent—one experiences coastlines, still lifes, landscapes—but these emerge through torrents of struggle. The inspired pairing highlights the fact that two painters, pursuing their art with equal ardor, can reveal utterly different notions of the rigorous.

Aschheim’s canvases hum with the allusive potential of marks: indications of motion, presences—or, perhaps more accurately, situations—arising out of subtly reworked, almost pearly depths. Lines radiate and scatter, or sift in fragments through space. Everywhere one senses the artist’s diligent attention. What might a line do here? What would it say to this form here? The viewer absorbs this process of richly accumulating associations: the openness and searching of scattered lines; the conversations between paired forms, the transience evoked by scraped-down surfaces. The separate sensations gather as mysterious, multivalent impressions. Sometimes a title reinforces the effect, as in Pinch (2013), where a vertical passage of white succinctly clips lines angling across the canvas’s width. Lines intersecting like cross hairs, and horizontal flairs of pink and yellow, take on added intensity when one realizes another painting, also from 2013, bears the title “Bullet”.

If Aschheim’s paintings are meditative probings, Ying Li’s are voluptuous declarations. It is her turgid technique that initially catches the eye, but underlying this is a strong sense of the pictorial weight of colors and forms. Each color pressurizes the adjacent ones while drawing energizes these intervals within the canvases’ rectangle. In a painting like North Chatham (Andy’s Path) (2011), one sequence—an elusive blue-green gray, a brilliant, acidic yellow-green, a richly absorbent bluish-black—anchor the impression of a foreground tree arching momentously about a path’s distant bend. Even where the subject barely emerges from the maelstrom of paint, as in Winter Lilies of Hanover #1 (2012), plastic forces continue to articulate: a vacant greenish-white holds before our eyes, a hard pinkish-white props itself above, and together they shunt a variety of sturdy blues into remote depths below. Rather than presenting scenarios, Li’s paintings embody them. This eloquence of form, however, is doubly camouflaged: once by the paradoxical nature of the best representational painting—from Chardin to Picasso—which locates a subject‘s inner character ultimately in abstract forces; and secondly, by the seductive technique that may encourage some viewers to look no further.

For me, Aschheim’s works resonate as excursions in process whereas Li’s resound as experiences of form. I find Li’s approach closer to traditions pursued by Titian, Mondrian, and Matisse, and Aschheim’s closer to the contemporary interests in the semiotics of mark- and shape-making, with Malevich, Newman and Twombly, perhaps, as antecedents. In any event, the Studio School’s exhibition presents a memorable juxtaposition: Aschheim’s self-contained search for unbounded associations next to Li’s unbounded search within a self-contained language.

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on show until November 22 at the Painting Center (Project Room), 52 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand, 212-343-1060

Ying Li’s attack in these ten charcoal portraits shows the same unique blend of impetuosity and rigor as her paintings. Outlines criss-cross and flail, contours twist, and details emerge and dissolve without discernable method. And yet we’re left, remarkably, with likenesses that seem all the more human for the struggle. Seldom is orneriness so empathetic, and ferocity so astute.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

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“Ying Li” at the Painting Center until February 28 (52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-343-1060). Prices: $1,800-$4,000.

“Marc Quinn” at Mary Boone Gallery until February 28 (541 West 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-752-2929). Prices: $125,000-$140,000.

Jackson Pollock famously answered an inquiry about his influences with a belligerently short shortlist: Picasso and Albert Pinkham Ryder. A valid description of Bill Jensen – who is himself an eloquent and impassioned supporter of the maverick American romantic – would be a synthesis of Pollock and Ryder.

Like Pollock, Mr. Jensen is blessed with lyricism of line, a kind of suprapersonal calligraphy that is nonetheless intensely his own. But his brush is always tempered, questioned, energized by awkwardness: He is like the young Pollock in temper, mature Pollock in fluency.

Which is where Ryder, with his oxymoronically dark luminosity, comes in. Although Mr. Jensen’s palette is nothing like Ryder’s-the American master was a reckless experimenter with bitumen– it has something of hisspiritual weight. Mr. Jensen’s more recent work – some of which is hanging at Danese Gallery – reveals newfound chromatic boldness. This show brings together two series of works, both from last year: a densely colored and textured set, “Duo Duo,” worked in egg-and-oil tempera, and “Drunken Brush,” a predominantly black-and-white set whose appropriately Zen-like title signals a close affinity with Oriental calligraphy.

A “salt of the earth” quality to Mr. Jensen’s color still reinforces the sense of his rootedness in nature, however. He seems at times to be willing himself to become an agent of nature, refusing to settle for being a mere transcriber of its surfaces. He replaces some of the intellectual ambition to be found in Terry Winters (an artist he sometimes resembles) or in Thomas Nozkowski, with an innocencenot to be found in these more canny practioners.
His achievement, however, is to embrace the spiritual without going gooey.

In eloquent denial of William James’s distinction between tough- and tender-mindedness, his forms and touch reveal traces of both. [no break]In similar vein, he collapses the dichotomy of fast and slow: The movements he describes and embodies seem, like geological forces, at once wayward and inevitable. They evolve at a mind-numbingly gradual pace yet suddenly jerk forward cataclysmically.
To my eye, Danese has overhung Mr. Jensen’s dense, tense, and exhaustive paintings by around 30%, which will mislead cursory visitors with an impression of repetition and sameness. To the converted, however, this testing hang is an added incentive for repeat visits.

For a more traditional but no less spirited pursuit of the lyrical in landscape, be sure to catch Ying Li’s show at SoHo’s Painting Center before it closes this weekend. Eighteen works reveal bewildering diversity both of influence and of pictorial ambition.

She has a touch to die for in terms of bravura painthandling and innate good taste. In her best works, she manages to endow brushstroke with the power of metaphor. Different brushes and their tips sometimes converge in a single canvas in a Dionysian orgy of painterliness.

Often, in works that look to Turner or Boudin or to more contemporary examples like Louis Finkelstein or Stuart Shils, Ms. Li is inspired to gorgeous but familiar effects, to a comfortable expression of the pleasures of landscape. In other works, she pushes further towards abstraction, almost offering a pastiche de Kooning, for instance, in “Riverstroke #1” (2003), but with no less tasteful a result.

Only in two or three works, however, does a restlessness reveals itself, an indication that jouissance is not enough. “Vermont, Deep Fall” (2003), for instance, shares the frenzied logic of Soutine to suggestthat expressiveness and a sense of structure need not be mutually exclusive. Ms. Li’s best paintings pulsate with emotional and pictorial complexity.

Marc Quinn has always been one of the more thoughtful of the “YBAs,” the notorious band of young Brits collected in the 1990s by Charles Saatchi. True, Mr. Quinn went for the jugular with “Self” (1991), a self-portrait head made of 8 frozen pints of his own blood, but his work is usually richer and more historically layered than that of his shamelessly shallow and opportunistic peers.

His current show at Mary Boone finely balances the poignant and the prurient. He has had 11 carvings made of people with missing or deformed limbs, victims of birth defects or misadventures. These enervatingly literal carvings have the deathly dullness of the neo-classical Bertel Thorvaldsen. But by finding models of a certain readymade modernity, Mr. Quinn can be said to have married the academicism of that dreary Dane with the biomporphic oddity of Henry Moore or Arp – a fusion typical of Britain’s young neo-conceptualists.

Mr. Quinn was shortlisted for a competition staged at London’s National Gallery recently for a work for the empty pedestal in Trafalgar Square. He chose to depict Alison Lapper, a thalidomide child, now grown and in an advanced state of pregnancy. He argued that it complemented Horatio Nelson atop his column on two counts: overcoming handicap is as heroic as fighting for one’s nation, while the admiral is famously missing a limb and an organ.
Seen alone, Ms. Lapper was indeed heroic. But amassed in a whole Valhalla of the deformed and the maimed, Mr. Quinn’s project begins to seem a little sick. That said, the figures are of handsome, strong, and athletic men and women, dignified in the titles with their real names. If they inspire some viewers to confront their own squeamishness and preconceptions about beauty and wholeness, they will have achieved something.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 26, 2004

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February 3-28, 2004

Painting is as old as, well, the hills around Lascaux or Altamira-and yet painters are still finding ways of challenging our expectations. When we walk into a gallery today, we’re liable to be struck by the curiousness of an image and by original ideas about processes and roles of painting. We might even encounter a couple things that seem to have preoccupied those 30,000 year-old cave painters: a delight in the materials of painting and its language of forms.

The current exhibition of work by Ying Li at the Painting Center reminds us why these virtues have endured so long. These eighteen landscapes, with their thick encrustations of oil paint, turgid colors, and lashing strokes, positively exude an enthusiasm for paint’s sheer materiality. (Having visited the artist’s studio a number of times over the years, I can attest to the splatters of pigment covering walls, ceiling and floor. By way of disclosure I should also mention my ownership of an earlier Li painting.) Li’s furious reworking of shapes and all-over kneading of surfaces suggests something of Pollock’s wing-and-a-prayer attack: the self-regenerating, free-fall meditation that hangs all hope on the moment and the complete banishment of PRE-meditation. Indeed, after a few moments with Li’s livid hues and violent, contrary strokes, Pollock’s sweeping gestures can seem almost MELLOW.

Expressive as it is, though, the vivid paint-handling serves as just a conveyance for other, perhaps more interesting, impulses. Li’s eagerness to sling paint belies a subtler, simultaneous purpose that on the surface (no pun intended) may seem strangely at odds with painterly abandon. As a representational painter, she builds complex connections towards elements of nature, and with her solid grasp of pictorial forms she imparts in her best paintings an emphatic sense of size, weight, location, role-that is, PRESENCE-to the elements of her images.

Sounds old-fashioned? Li certainly uses the motifs and material of a traditional artist, but she employs them with rare verve and honesty. If an illustrator communicates a likeness through referencing details (two eyes, a nose, and a mouth make a face), then a painter organizes more primitive sensations to re-create an optical event (a shadowed recess, a projection into light, a declining plane give weight to the impression of a face under a particular illumination.) Li PAINTS the landscape, and does so without any kind of safety net. Her contours form an almost brutal spatial framework for the actions of her color, and within it her hues, jostling forwards and back in space, link in forceful sequences across the canvas. The effect can be felt at its most basic level in a painting like the tiny “Montecastello, Sky Series #2,” in which a small hut plays a large and distinct role: its rectangular side (practically a single swipe of vivacious ochre) is pressed to the canvas’ lower edge by its dense green roof; above, the 80 percent of the canvas that is sky flows out luxuriantly in a sea of blues ranging from cerulean to traces of ultramarine. The weights of colors provide the timing of these events-the placing, the holding, then the release-so that this one or two square feet of canvas brims with the sensation of vast space.

Colors and blunt drawing collaborate again to animate the entirely different space of “Riverstroke #2”. In this forest scene, furious green-blue scribbles emphatically locate a softly lit plane (a distant field?) behind taut verticals of trees which, as they rise, trap bits of sky against the canvas’ upper corners. Once more the audacity of attack startles. There’s clearly no preconception of composition; all rests on a visual response and the possibility of making pictorial sense of a hundred sensations.

In the more complex “Vermont, Deep Fall,” an irregular, hour-glassed shape of dull cerulean blue, hemmed in by contrasting patches of brown-green and greenish-ochre, stares back from a remote but insistent location in the mid-distance. It doesn’t take imagination-only an active engagement in the painting’s rhythms-to see that this is a river receding between banks of overlapping walls of foliage. The frontal towering of the foreground tree, the contraction of the banks kneeling at the river’s far side, the water lithely slipping in-between, joining near and far: Li’s formal arrangements of these loaded events is every bit as vital as her violent brushwork. (Intriguingly, the “realistic” touches-the sky’s perforations of a tree’s canopy-compete with fantastic ones-the grayish-yellow-green patch somehow residing comfortably in the sky-all of which only shows that the connecting impulse of good painting is not literalism but pictorial coherence.)

One might suspect that for Li the paint-slinging technique is indispensable for a focusing of intention, but for the viewer it’s more like a conspicuous raising of the stakes, one that risks uneven results but also makes triumphs like these all the sweeter. Not every painting in the exhibition in fact has the impact of “Vermont, Deep Fall” with its powerful particularizing of forms. At times Li’s gestures convey the urge to come to grips with the subject more than they actually illuminate it. But considering that this is a characteristic of a great deal of expressionist painting (the Neo-expressionists who came to fame in the 80s are especially good at showing more grasping than grasp), this is the occasional shortfall one gladly accepts in view of the intensity and bravery of the work here. And brave it consistently is, pressing the bounds of technique, of motif (with images ranging from immense panoramas to close-ups of water), and fashion (who else would dare paint-sincerely-a waterfall in 2004?)

The impulse of a good artist is always a generous one, and ultimately it’s to share a memorable visual event. Ying Li’s paintings at the Painting Center offer just such a gift. They are visions of vigorous abandon, and the attendant truths-purely visual ones-that are her hard-bitten prize.

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