Amid today’s unlimited range of styles and endless combinations of media competing for art world support,  one of the great innovations of early Western modernism, Abstract art, continues to garner attention, evolve, and in many cases deepen in the hands of some of its current practitioners. Such is the case of veteran abstract painter Pat Lipsky whose career spans three decades marked by explorations in both abstraction and representation, and as demonstrated by her most recent aptly titled exhibition” Color Paintings” she continues to advance the issues of her work.

The grid based format of the nine human scaled paintings in the exhibition is becoming a recognizable trademark structure for this artist, placing her in the company of such reductive, contemplative painters as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin. Five vertical columns of varying widths are sub-divided at midpoints that in cross section appear as ascending and descending steps, which dip down or rise up in the center. In most cases three narrower columns frame two wider central columns that contain her carefully arrived at, in-between, colors within the ten rectilinear blocks, or segments, created by the divisions. The symmetrically deployed colors allow for a myriad of associations such as landscapes viewed through a colonnade, renaissance facades, geometric patterns, ornamental motifs and blocky figures.

In “Proust’s Sea”, 2006, two central columns feature colors that recall sky and earth are framed by three columns of colors that recall earth and sea. Naming the blues, greens, umbers and teals become a fruitless exercise because those names are never adequate to describe how the colors behave in their arrangements. Subtle hue shifts occur within similarly colored segments . One is apt not to notice her mastery of color because it all seems just right. The blues, at once radiant and atmospheric are activated by the somber tones of browns and greens. Credit is due to the handling of her edges for the additional vitality of the work. One could journey quite far simply following the lines, spaces, smudges and blurs that separate the segments. The surfaces are delightfully polluted with traces of life, dust hairs, blobs of dried paint which underscores the fact that these are hand made paintings, and although they may make allusions to an ideal they are full of the irregularities and imperfections of life.

Kim Uchiyama and Barry Goldberg also make work that participates in a late modernist conversation, however, while Uchiyama explores the poles of expansion in her brightly colored banded abstractions, Goldberg mines the poles of reduction in his spare oil and encaustic canvases.

In her current exhibition titled “Strata”, Ms. Uchiyama’s landscape based abstractions come in a portrait format of stacked horizontal bands of colors. Muscular strokes of thick oil paint, in varying widths, span the surface and are interrupted by intervals of segmented color blocks. Her expressive paint handling brings to mind the built up surfaces and rough edged strokes of Sean Scully; however, the space she evokes is decidedly more referential. In  “Untitled “ 2006, saturated hues of red yellow and blue are tempered by occasional off whites and lighter blue hues. Thin lower bands of dark colors seem compressed by the weight, heat and vitality of wide red and yellow bands in the upper layers, serving as an apt metaphor for the effects of time upon landscapes and civilizations.

Barry Goldberg’s  paintings at first seem to be primarily about ground. However, in most of the works on view from 2006, a thin colored frame of buttery encaustic color superimposed upon a field of oil color.  This thin frame seems to delineate a figure within the field thus unsettling and in some cases reversing the reading of what is figure and what is ground.  “City Square in the Rain” 55 x 42inches, brings to mind the rounded shape of a subway car window. A two inch wide blue encaustic stripe circumnavigates the canvas; it’s position, an inch or so from the edge creates an outer frame of remaining olive green ground. Inside, an atmospheric grey blue area recalling a foggy, rain soaked window is streaked with occasional vertical lines, traces left by the sharp edge of the tool as it pulled successive layers of oil color down the surface. At once, alluding to rain as in the title, these hair like marks also describe with considerable clarity the process of how the work was made. The muted color grounds are often activated by the presence of the brightly colored encaustic frame. For example, in “Rysa Szpara” 2006, a scarlet-vermillion frame enhances the reddish identity of the brown field and adds warmth to the cool cream color of the top field.

These three diverse painters made me think of something Agnes Martin once said, “Anything can be painted without representation.”

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Richard Deacon at Marian Goodman through October 7 (24 West 57 Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, 212 977 7160)

Richard Long at Sperone Westwater through October 23 (415 West 13 Street, between 9th Avenue and Washington Street 212 999 7337)

Pat Lipsky is not merely the dean of current, hard-edged formal abstraction but its dominatrix. She offers color and shape relationships within structures of unrelenting rigidity. It’s ambiguous whether the disciplines to which she subjects the eye are for her own satisfaction or the viewer’s. And like a classic “dom,” a steely, seemingly dispassionate composure fronts seething reserves of aesthetic emotion.

It would be fanciful, however, to detect a range of emotion in her work: shifts in mood from canvas to canvas are as nuanced as the differences in hue between closely related colors within a single composition. The nine paintings in this, her fourth solo exhibition with Elizabeth Harris, adhere to a strict serial pattern: a pair of thicker columns flank and sandwich three thinner ones, with each column comprising unequal horizontal halves.

Color-wise there are subtly differentiated blacks and reds-the blacks restricted to the thinner columns, the reds free to wander-and more pronouncedly contrastive shades of blue and gray. The designs are almost, but significantly not quite, symmetrical. Reductive as her mode may appear, however, Ms. Lipsky-who began her career in the late 1960s-is no minimalist: More significant than its strictures and exclusions is her painting’s overt, if hard edged sensuality. Despite the egg-shell, matted finish with her affectless paint delivery, each bar within the grid pulsates with its obsessively sought color and context.

The compositions are set on a ground that forms a framing border: some are white, others gray. This device inevitably brings Josef Albers to mind, with his prim “Homage to the Square” sereis. As with Albers-and for that matter Mondrian, as ever the touchstone for serious abstract painters-Ms. Lipsky’s work demands a leap of faith on the viewer’s part. Her formally austere means aim to give the viewer a pure color experience . But the actual sensations engendered are divorced from the habitual life of the eye, taking the viewer to a conceptual place that’s *about* color rather than of it.

Even within Ms. Lipsky’s stringent limitiations, the recalcitrant eye can never dispel the possibilities of representation. The columns with their pulsating reds pushing perceptually backwards and forwards, beg also to be read, schematically, in terms of up and down, like pistons or syringes filling with liquid. Or else the blues, spied around corners in A-B-A sequences of up-down-up or down-up-down, try to insinuate themselves into sea and sky. Or allowing a musical analogy to take hold, they read like organ pipes filling with sound, or digital equalizers recording its fluctuations.

The more the eye is beaten into form for form’s sake, the more it wanders along extraneous paths of association, fantasy, analogy.

The form vocabulary of Richard Deacon is in equal measure austere and exuberant. The attitude that comes across in his handling of materials similarly diverges between nonchalence and finesse: a maverick found object sensibility cohabits with a virtuoso celebration of craft. He is at once a maker and a finder.

He is part of a generation of British sculptors, including his friends Tony Cragg and Bill Woodrow, who rose to prominence in the early 1980s. This group was at pains to distance itself from formalism, seeking its antidote in humor, appropriation, and an English spin on the Italian minimal art movement, arte povera. And yet, among his peers Mr. Deacon could rarely supress a formalist bent. A body of work that remains almost his trademark despite the diversity of his output utilized sandwiched strips of ply laminate, the glue almost insolently oozing from its layers, to play out in whimsical, open, linear structures. They almost read like sculptural realisations of Brice Marden’s loops the way Calders can sometimes look like Miros in 3-D. Another American he often resembles, incidentally, is Martin Puryear, like whom he creates enigmatic forms out of studiedly non-art materials and processes.

Sometimes the collision of found and made is a little too causal for the artist’s own good. “Display Table,” (2001) places five readymade sculptural objects, rather like the pebbles and twigs Henry Moore liked to pick up on his rambles, on the prinstine, Donald Judd-like display table of the title. This is a forced culture clash which plays rather too hard for the wry smile it at best deserves. Usually, Mr. Deacon is more sophisticated in his style games.

The key to his aesthetic is the way he folds the values of the technologies he appropriates into the sculptural meaning of his best work. This doesn’t happen in a banal, symbolic way but subtly-more metaphor than simile. He is equally open to traditional and industrial age crafts. The latest works at Marian Goodman take his loop forms to a new pitch of baroque complexity without losing, indeed further reveling, in a nuts and bolts sense of facture.

The two part structure, “Red Sea Crossing,” (2003) entails multiple twists and convolutions, with steel-joined oak strips arching and doubling back on themselves. Forms oscillate between the distressed and the fluent, with a sense of commonplace stuff put to exotic ends. A great deal of the energy of the work has to do with bringing together the humble and the high, the honest and virtuoso. In this gorgeous and intriguing sculpture it is as if Bernini is being helped out by a crew of coopers and wheelwrights.

* * *

To view Richard Deacon and fellow Brit Richard Long on the same Chelsea morning is to savor the distinction between a career that balances radicalism and craft and one that sacrificed the former to the latter. Mr. Long is a conceptualist turned would-be shaman. He staked his claim in the 1970s to very considerable international attention with a set of iconoclastic gestures that entailled long walks, minimal landscape interventions, precisionist documentation, and rather prissy arrangements of rocks in circles.

At his best he taps into forms sublty suggestive of the primordial and the prehistoric, but the ease and elegance with which he can now fill gallery upon gallery with his trite decorations-paintings on plywood with rings of slick hand prints and artful dribbles of mud-is a sad object lesson in what happens if the kind of tension between facture and thought that animates the work of artists like Mr. Deacon and Ms. Lipsky is absent. The thinker for whom making was beneath him has become a fabricator for whom thinking is beyond him.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 23, 2004

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L.I.C.K. at LTD Fine Art
46-44 11th Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
March 21 to April 17, 2003
Wed.-Sun. 12-6PM

Pat Lipsky’s two current New York exhibitions remind us that the art of painting is invariably about itself before it is about anything else, about its own making, and its own cultures. Lipsky’s basic strategy appears, at first glance, to be remarkably simple: vertically aligned bands of color (she works in oil pigments) are broken mid-way through the canvas and are met by another band of contrasting or similar color. This compositional structure is further contextualized by subtle framing devices: these include outlines that read as colored rivulets between the dominating color bands, and, more often than not, an outer edge which surrounds the entire painting, exposing yet more outlining and then the raw canvas itself. Once she has set up this basic rhetorical structure, Lipsky proceeds to explore any number of compositional and color issues. Adherence to this particular scheme provides a clue to Lipsky’s artistic enterprise: she is as much concerned with the potentialities of painting, and the opportunity to expose those possibilities, as she is with any signature style. That there is something almost stubbornly procedural about her art is readily apparent: I’m actually reminded of Francis Bacon, who once described the process of painting as a battle between the artist and the inevitability of the medium itself. The happy revelation of these new shows is that Lipsky has uncovered the vocabulary in which her attitude toward art making can find free reign.

Lipsky’s recent paintings have much to say about the cultural contexts of color abstraction. In terms of their scale and physical presence they are certainly situated in the traditions of New York color field painting, yet in their process-based exploration color and composition they establish a dialogue with earlier strains of modern painting, recalling Mondrian, and the purists of Paris (we might observe here that Ellsworth Kelly has taken these same sources in an entirely different direction). That this dialogue with the history of abstract art can be found in her works helps explain the complexities that enter our viewing experience once the strategies of her compositional arrangements have been assimilated. The painting Blue Border (at Elizabeth Harris) typifies the various strains of this conversation. Blue Border has all the object presence of a flag painting by Jasper Johns, yet it immediately reminds us of the rigorous, almost “objective” attitude toward color and surface to be found in early modern abstraction. As such, Blue Border functions as the hinge for Lipsky’s paintings in both shows, announcing her commitment to both variation and difficulty. In its scrupulous deployment of blues, reds, and whites, Blue Border is a virtuoso display of painterly discipline, and it is the most insistent and formal work to be found in either show. Blue Border prepares the viewer for the range of themes that Lipsky explores in her investigations of composition, pictorial space, surface effect and palette.

In the paintings Black Covert and Syncopated Black (at Elizabeth Harris) Lipsky sets up a beguiling array of blacks, pale pinks, lavenders and greens. The regular march of black bands across these canvases heighten the luminescent delicacy of the paler colors, and, for this reviewer, conjured associations of Chinatown at dusk. More typically purist in their incremental discourse about composition and color are Jump In (at Elizabeth Harris) and True Lad (at L.I.C.K.LTD). Jump In takes the balancing act of bold yet discrete blues, reds and whites about as far as it can go, and it comes off handsomely. In True Lad Lipsky takes a similar palette in an entirely different direction: calibrating an arrangement of whites (and their various overtones) with red and blues, the space of the painting opens up, reminding us (not without a touch of sly humor) of her versatile knowledge of the ways of picture making, and her ability to throw us off balance just when we might have figured we were on solid ground. In Blue Grey Not Touching (at Elizabeth Harris) Lipsky arranges a far closer group of color values, and, in this variant approach, the imagery takes on another quality altogether, conjuring the effect of subtle colors levitating before our eyes. Lastly, there are the group of paintings, including Blues, and Red Isn’t Blue (at Elizabeth Harris), and Chartres II (at L.I.C.K.LTD), which I think of as nocturnes. In these canvases Lipsky lets down her guard a bit, exploring an internalized realm of colors juxtaposed with blacks. While we may miss in this group the obvious struggle we find in her more meditated and risk-taking color essays, they open up yet another approach to the possibilities of space and light.

In these two shows, Pat Lipsky demonstrates not only that New York color abstraction is alive and well, but that it is still possible to pursue a challenging individual vision for painting while making art that is fresh and of the moment.

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