November 3 to December 21, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
138 Tenth Avenue, between 19th and 20th streets
New York City, lissongallery.com

People sometimes bemoan the state of formal abstraction.The critique is as follows: It’s repetitive, stale, too often attached to the grid. Yet, this is not a new critique. The grid remains, so long as the convention of a rectangular support remains. Even the most sophisticated High Renaissance painting responds to the grid – breaks with it, negates it or conforms to it. Rosalind E. Krauss bankrolled her early career attacking it. Without offering an apology for the modernist preoccupation with the grid, however, I would argue that sometimes exploring formal conventions can expand the language of once well-worn trajectories. Such is the case with Stanley Whitney’s solo exhibition, “In the Color,”at Lisson Gallery.

Whitney came of age, as an artist, with peers such as David Reed, the late Jack Whitten and the slightly older Ed Clarke. The late 1970s were a time when some didn’t believe that any kind of painting was possible; others still rejected color as too tied to a cultural moment, deemed it superficial or lacking in seriousness. The art world periodically likes to relive this hangover, usually after binging on candy-coated color that’s all too easy to like. Color is most interesting when it is incredibly specific—otherwise it can become generic.

In the show’s title work, In the Color, (2018) Whitney uses a perfect square measuring 8 x 8 feet, and employs a loose lattice, vibrant grid structure, with three horizontal bands unevenly spaced to create spatial dimension. Cadmium yellow on the left side of the canvas, cadmium red on the right, a few cobalts, teals and viridians closer to the middle, and a few pastel pinks and yellows dead center create a patchwork motif. It’s in the placement of rectangles and their sameness or relative proximity to other hues where color begins to take shape, to create space. Color becomes subject and object.

Whitney’s grids aren’t dogmatic. He allows a few drips on the right side of the canvas; a deep, cadmium red bleeds into a peach-pink, a blue-grey rectangle bleeds down the bottom left corner of the painting allowing for transparency. It’s in moments like these where Whitney seems to harken back to his earlier paintings of the 1980s and ‘90s. Using a loose geometry and a range of natural color, Whitney has found a way around the static grid that neither negates it or simply repeats it. It is a playful response, a cartooning of the grid.

And cartooning is most evident in the drawings. In Untitled (2013), Whitney scribbles, scrawls, draws sharp verticals or horizontals and even swirling curlie-cues all in crayon.They all conform to the grid like structure, the bands, and vignettes, but the language of his line is buoyant and playful and nearly collapses a sense of structure at all. The drawings elicit a whimsical quality not often seen in abstract painting.

I first encountered Whitney’s early work in Raphael Rubinstein’s survey, “Reinventing Abstraction” at Cheim and Read in 2013. In the early ‘80s, David Reed and Jack Whitten famously found new technologies and employed theoretical or synthetic color to definitive aims, resulting in new discoveries. Meanwhile, Whitney was forming out of color field painting and gestural abstraction. With loosely scrawled or drawn gestures painted wet into wet and in partial grid-like formations, the frenetic energy of these early works burst with individual intensity, as if pulsating from within. A change of focus subsequently saw color begin to dominate the language and gesture to take a more secondary role. The show at Lisson Gallery has bothtendencies on display. Nearly a survey, it spans some 22 years of paintings and drawings. A good example of his mid-career work is Untitled, (1996) in which Whitney employs the same basic compositional structures that would come to form his mature work but including distinctly colored grounds to form the underpainting for each rectangle. Flatly painted opaque layers of light blues, white, pale yellows, bright reds and deep blacks all act as placeholders for painterly activity. Inside these self-contained vignettes, Whitney’s hand is incredibly evident, deft, and robust. His brushwork is gestural, at other times drips or stains in a variety of bright oranges, creamy yellows, and grass greens to punctuate the intensity of the darker grounds. Alternatively, crimson reds, Pthalo greens and cobalt blues contrast the lighter grounds. It is one of themost lively paintings in this show.

Whitney’s paintings indicate a deep lineage back to Philip Guston and other giants of the New York School, while also pivoting in a new direction, towards territory uniquely his own, one that collapses subject and object, color and form and mesh into inseparable space.

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March 9 to April 14, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lissongallery.com

By the time of Ted Stamm’s premature passing in 1984, his Wooster paintings were becoming known in the New York art world, especially among younger aficionados in the SoHo art district (then the center of the avant-garde in New York). While Stamm rarely traveled outside the metropolitan New York area, the Wooster paintings were often seen in group and occasionally solo exhibitions, including Documenta 6 (1977), and were presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA – PS 1, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others. Thanks to the tireless advocacy of Danish New York-based curator Per Jensen, a stalwart against years of art world neglect, we have a show at Lisson Gallery that affords these works some interpretative clarity. Stamm was born and raised in New York. He was an avid conversationalist and a faithful correspondent. His manner of letter writing was always in longhand and seemed to follow a comparable direction to the Woosters. At the outset the paintings appeared more static, but as they developed after 1979, as in the Lo Woosters, they began to take on the appearance of speed. By comparison, his hand-written letters also began to extend laterally to three or four words stretched across one line on the page. In the process, the speed and intensity of the words took on a new meaning. A further example of his speed might be attributed to Stamm’s consistently dressing in black except for his glistening white tennis shoes. I have few recollections of Stamm sitting still, but many of his appearance standing in a conversation continually in a state of motion as if transporting words through the sudden movements of his body.

The Woosters employ an unusual rectangular theme that extends into a triangular hinge on the left side. These works were both drawn in graphite and painted in black and white (and, later in silver). At the outset (1978), it seemed that few observers were aware of Stamm’s discovery of this rather obtuse form. Given the analytical orientation of the times, many assumed it was based on some complex mathematical derivation; but, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Stamm, being a man of the streets, with bicycle in tow, discovered this abbreviated form one day on the sidewalk near his loft. The fact that he could not decipher its use or origin piqued his curiosity enough to accept it as what might be called an unknown readymade.

The exhibition catches both the artist’s consistency as well as his complex reprieve from an all-over spatial reduction, replacing it with a series of modular variations. Examples of this would include 78 W – 4 (Wooster) and 78 SW – 22 (Small Wooster) (both oil on canvas from 1978). The difference between the two is not only the shift in scale in relation to identical forms, but also the enclosure of the black band that moves around the edge of otherwise white paintings. In the first, larger version, the band descends from the upper side and follows along the upper diagonal slide of the triangle before it extends back along the bottom edge. The second, smaller form carries the exact same proportions except that the black band completely encloses the white surface, which makes the interior shape a smaller version of the larger one that extends outside the black frame.

Beyond these modular variations, Stamm began to move from stasis to kinesis. LW – 2H (Lo Wooster) and LW – 2A (Lo Wooster), both graphite on paper from 1979, are flattened versions of the rectangle and its adjacent triangle that optically incite leftward movement. In either case, this suggests they are studies that precede the large low-hanging oils mounted at the entrance that dominates the wall as one enters the Lisson Gallery.

The space within the Woosters was gradually evolving into space/time. By 1980, he had returned to the origin of the Woosters as he became conceptually involved in placing red stickers of his familiar sign, which he called “Wooster Designations,” on bumpers and license plates of parked cars with the intention of transmitting the message throughout New York in the directions in which they would drive.

Some two years later (1982), Stamm began sending out cards on which the message “Painting Advance 1990” was printed. In my reading of this, Stamm was saying that painting would move towards another level, a higher level of sensory cognition, in less than a decade. Sadly, Ted never reached 1990. But he showed the potential of painting to move beyond stasis and connect with urban time – not simply as a representation, but as bright new awareness of how we think and see and how we come together through painting.

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