September 12 to October 27, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Commuting between studios in New York City and up along the Hudson, Elena Sisto has adjusted her paintings to a wider setting. Having focused previously on intimate studio scenes depicting young women painters in fragmentary close-ups, she now incorporates elements of the natural world and glimpses, as though in transit, of urban and rural landscapes. But the new works on view in As We Dream at Bookstein Projects remain firmly rooted in her personal space. Indeed, while they reflect the new ecology of her expanded studio, these unconventional self-portraits involve a heightened self-awareness, an evolving consciousness of the fragile boundaries of nature, self, and the built environment.

With no history of working from landscape, Sisto can note, as though for the first time, the intrusion of an insect, or the distraction of a flower. Virtuosic in her detailed rendering of clothing, hands and heads, she now confronts a new ecology of signs. Long devoted to cartoons and to la pittura metafisica (and an early fan of Hilma af Klint), Sisto can bring a sense of childhood wonder to the shadow of a wasp on a bare canvas. The touch of her brush takes on metaphysical implications as conventions of shading and outlining assume abstracted forms, generating symbolic images of leaves and flowers in her garden, where a pond outlined in decorative zigzags inevitably recalls the artifice of Giverny.

As if to extend this metaphysical invocation of Impressionism, Sisto’s self-portraits assume vivid new colors, as though some light attuned to emotional temperature were suddenly turned on. Impressionistic not only in their brilliance and complementary color contrasts, the heads in her portraits are calligraphic, suggestively ephemeral, like the play of emotion itself. While fugitive, their faces are placed at a greater subjective distance than the previous, more naturalistic ones. Vagabond (for Agnes Varda) (2018) alludes to the unconventional film director of Faces, Places (2017); Sisto invokes the cinematic gaze, which here is objectified in the profile views of Vagabond and Mister Moonlight (2018). Sisto’s subjects don’t meet our eyes, or do so only with the confrontational, sun-shaded ones of Orange Field (2018). The deep purple of that face, the orange of Vagabond, or the green of Spirited Away (2018), where even Nancy, a familiar cartoon surrogate from Sisto’s earliest works, returns in lime green – a vehicle for more complex, adult emotions that now include estrangement – suggest that much more is going on here than in the studio paintings. Enhanced luminosity evokes exposure and vulnerability, an uneasy undertow of ecological and sexual forces, which Sisto associates throughout with exaggerated masses of hair. Emblematic of femininity, these also recall Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of storms and floods. Sisto finds ironic humor in the way natural disasters, and the stark realities of sexual politics, compete for attention with preoccupations with fashion.

Hair overflows in Rapunella (2018), around a dark tower that invokes the genius of Philip Guston. His light bulb hangs in Rapunzel’s high window in an apparently empty studio, along with a blank canvas. Its orange glow extends into the sky outside, over churning coils of hair that press the boundaries of the frame. Alluding to the sublime, Sisto combines Guston’s cartoon-like simplification with intimations of apocalypse. The coils end with a whimsical flip, aligned with the canvas and bulb. Exiled from the sanctuary of the studio – like Guston under Nixon – Sisto upholds its formal ideals as a beacon for troubled times.

The post A New Ecology of Signs: Elena Sisto beyond the studio appeared first on artcritical.

Bookstein
April 19 to May 26, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Harvey
April 18 to May 20, 2018
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Rivington streets
New York City, shfap.com

Might a bookish analysis provide the best way to understand the art of a marvelously intuitive painter? Perhaps! In his great treatise on figurative art, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) Ernst Gombrich offers a far-reaching thesis about the history of European painting. In a process of what he calls ‘making and matching,’ an artist starts with some simplified pattern, which Gombrich calls a schema, and then adapts it to match the particular visual features of what is represented. In cubism, which marks the beginning of the end of this tradition, so Art and Illusion claims, “the scrambling of clues” baffles perception. And then Jackson Pollock, going one step further, prevents “us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind . . .” Then visual deadlock is what results when there’s no way to consistently match the pictorial content to some depicted site in physical reality.

Often Paul Resika’s paintings from the 1980s show seascapes from Cape Cod, where he maintains a studio. These works, it might seem, are far from the modernist tradition of abstraction. But now, as if working in a highly personal way through a Gombrichian history of figuration, he juxtaposes backgrounds of clear skies, with yellow suns, with jagged pyramids in the foreground. And this show falls into two, distinctly different parts. Bookstein Projects shows a roomful of these enigmatic works, Resika’s more conventional paintings, variations on this theme. And at Steven Harvey’s gallery, in addition to the beach scenes, you also see several works, which are harder to place — A Quiet Romance (2017), showing a conch shell on a similar background, and, in the back room, the magnificent Self-Portrait with Rag (2017). Resika, you sense, keeps his options open. For this reason, my schematic history hardly does justice to the bold originality of all of these paintings. Look at Triangle- Sun (2017) are Harvey, or Rose Dawn, also 2017 at Bookstein. These prickly images set against the sky, which have no sources that I can identify, are a law onto themselves.

In some of these recent paintings, The White Sky (2017) for example, (on view at Bookstein) you see the edge of the sea on the horizon. The sea and sky backgrounds of these landscapes could be painted from nature, but what are we to make of these geometric structures – which, and here I contradict one statement by the artist in the gallery press releases, do not look remotely like any sand dunes that that I have seen at the beach, neither in Cape Cod nor elsewhere? Rather, I would argue, it is as if Resika self-consciously chooses to juxtapose a seemingly non-figurative form against these natural settings, in pictures that are half abstract, and half figurative. What a strange juxtaposition of figurative and abstract-looking elements – and what an original way, certainly never envisaged by Gombrich, to deal with the traditional issues of pictorial representation. As far as I know, this is a remarkable, seemingly unprecedented development in Resika’s long evolution. MoMA’s display “the long run,” which runs through November 4, chronicles the development of artists after their breakthrough moment. This exhibition includes an enigmatic recent work by Lee Bontecou, a late painting of Elizabeth Murray and one picture from the seemingly endless ongoing development of Frank Stella. These two shows of Resika’s very recent paintings nicely supplement that presentation, for at ninety his art, too, has undergone a dramatic transformation. In old age now, he prepares to leap into abstraction, as if returning to the concerns of the art world of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied in the mid-twentieth century. How surprising and how absolutely admirable is his determined ability to remain essentially unpredictable!

The post A Scrambling of Clues: Paul Resika, Geometry and the Sea appeared first on artcritical.

LESLIE WAYNE: Your new paintings are terribly funny! How refreshing to bring humor into a canon so historically laden with gravitas. Particularly since the underlying themes of your work have always been deeply psychological (not that the human mind isn’t fodder for constant hilarity).

As I understand it, there are many members of your extended family who were in the mind trade. When I look at your work of the last 15 years, I can’t help but think about the impact of that personal history, subliminal or not, on the ideas that have consistently engaged you over time, the female personae, personhood, and identity as an individual artist within the wider membership of a tribe of artists and the art world. 

You’ve said that you love Freud. But the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious immediately comes to mind when I think about how your paintings, from the three-quarter female figures of 2005 to the young women artists in their studios, which you made between 2010 and 2012, have represented the idea of a collective identity within this tribe. In your current show, you have shifted from the female personae/artist as an archetype, to the self-portrait. You, the individual, an individuated artist, in her own studio. What prompted you to make that shift?

ELENA SISTO: My father is an aeronautical engineer, which has influenced me very much. My mother is a social worker and I had an aunt and uncle who were therapists and a cousin who is a psychiatrist. The conversation in my family was oddly “psychoanalytical” — not sure how accurate that term actually is for what went on – and intellectualized. Freudian concepts were thrown around rather recklessly, I’d say, in retrospect. Consequently I had to look up Uncle (because his name was invoked so often) Sigmund for myself in order to get an idea of what he was really about.

That family experience sent me and my work on a path progressing very purposefully away from the psychoanalytic towards emotionality and the pleasure of paint, a shift from above the neck to below the neck, so to speak. I really liked Freud’s writings, especially what he wrote about humor, loss and the uncanny. He was a warm human being, I think. I was interested in Jung’s ideas as well, especially the collective unconscious, but I he wasn’t so nice.

In the long-term view, the “Girl” or “Daughter” paintings and my last show of young women artists were the anomaly. I have mostly always painted autobiographically. Those two shows were about my daughter, Clara, and the insight that observing the process of her life gave me on my own experience of adolescence and young adulthood. I wanted to go back over that period and set some things straight for myself. I was comparing her experience to mine. But I also knew that the issues were ones many young women are involved with, balancing between the public and the private, self-consciousness and the need to be seen. The bottom line is that I always seem to work from what’s right under my nose.

Humor is a way of disrupting the current order of things, touching the emotional depths and coming back up to new possibilities. My father, the engineer, has a great, dry, sense of humor. It takes a minute to realize he’s made a joke and then you can’t believe how silly it is. He was able to slip in and break up the tyranny of the psychological, thankfully.

I’m glad you found them funny, by the way.

Yes, and they’re actually funny to me in the way that you describe your father being funny. They’re kind of sly. They sneak up on you and then they continue to tickle. The extreme close-ups feel like you’re saying, “Can you believe how great that is?” But I wonder also about your father’s being an engineer and how that’s influenced the way you think about your pictures as constructions. 

I’m glad you asked that.

There are three ways. First of all, an engineer is a designer. I can remember seeing my father sit in his chair at his desk thinking for hours and hours. Just thinking. And then swiftly writing down pages of numbers and formulas on a yellow pad, a completely foreign language, with sketches. The solitariness of the pursuit. The drawing. And the experimental approach to structures.

Second, his field was flutter, of airfoils and jet engines mostly, anticipating and dealing with turbulent airflow. To me the ideas of fluid mechanics have always seemed analogous to the movement of form and paint in the space of a picture: the effects of compression, expansion and temperature on flow, what happens when a passage of paint is squeezed by the forms on either side of it, or when those forms let up and allow expansion, rhythm, speed and momentum. Those things all relate to ideas of plasticity in painting and drawing. He doesn’t necessarily agree by the way.  But that’s ok.

Finally, the far out weirdness of some of his inventions, the willingness to really go out on a limb is like an artist.

Hmm. Cubism would be the most obvious analogy to an experimental approach to structures, and your work certainly takes many cues from that period of Modernism. Whereas your interest in the fluid mechanics of material feels completely Post-modern – a passion for the inherent thingness of paint and how it behaves as separate from the image. Using oil and water based paint together seems like a way for you to achieve a sensuality that is both mechanically challenging and delicious to behold, but never at the expense of the picture. In other words, your technique does not hold the image hostage to its materiality, which is hard to do. 

But let’s get back to the space in your paintings. Unlike standard Cubism, or say, reverse perspective in the works of Mernet Larsen and Scott Grodesky (both recently the subject of discussion over Facebook by two spaceshifters in their own work, David Brody and Alexi Worth) your space seems to come out of the flat world of cartoons. Your space is very shallow and in some cases feels like it’s pressed right up against the surface. In “Couch” it’s almost as if the space in the painting and all the objects in it, were painted originally in the round – literally bent around a tube – and then splayed out flat on a table. SPLAT! In “Splurt” the hand holding the paint tube (which itself has a picture of a hand holding a paint tube or some sort of jar on the front) and the paint that’s being squeezed out of it, have nowhere to go but right up against the camera lens. IN YOUR FACE! But in spite of the lack of room to move, your pictures feel neither aggressive nor claustrophobic. On the contrary, they are filled with light and air and joy, which I believe has a lot to do with your palette. Can you talk about that? 

Cubism has been quite important to me. I see it as the last great innovation in pictorial structure. The concepts of Cubism are extremely provocative. They open up a huge amount of freedom to paint what, where, how and when you want, not to mention painting what is otherwise unseen. I don’t think we’ve played this out yet by any means. Alexi is a great example of someone taking advantage of those freedoms, as are Carroll Dunham, Judith Linhares, Katherine Bradford, Tom Burckhardt, Elliot Green. Dana Schutz’s work has become very Cubist recently. I would say all these people are working in a classical Cubist painting space. It’s the imagery, the content and the authors that are different. They may disagree.

I don’t exactly think of my work as coming out of cartoon space or as flat, unless you are calling “compressed” “flat”. Because there’s flat “flat” too. I think of the space as compressed and the imagery influenced by cartoons. The Post Modern element is in the imagery.

And I think one of the best examples of the compression and expansion I was referring to would be Morandi. The rest you describe better than I probably could. But if you think of Morandi, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, Guston, they all were involved with these issues.

I do want my painting to move forward from the canvas and I feel like I am only beginning to understand color. It’s so powerful all on it’s own and there’s a great deal of emotion in it.

Getting away from the city makes all the difference. Where the air is cleaner, color is pure energy. In the city it seems to be more of an attribute of something else.

Everyone’s sense of color is so intuitive, even if they’ve studied color theory. I have a friend who has the weirdest palette and I finally asked him one day what he based his color choices on, and he told me that he was color blind to red. He saw all reds as grays. That’s an extreme case. But beyond the technical optics of color and light, there’s no denying the intense emotional power of color. I think color can function as a reflection of one’s internal make up and history as well. What’s bred in the bone. I never studied color, and so my color sensibility is completely informed by having grown up on the West Coast. The Pacific Ocean to me just seems to fill the sky with more lumens! So I understand how environment can deeply affect your work. So do you generally prefer to work upstate, or is this something specific to these new paintings? How does being in the country influence your process?

I love being upstate because I can forget about everything and just work. I feel like I am in love with where I am and I am working all the time up there even when I am not painting. People are more casual. There’s more elbowroom. I have great neighbors. Everything is good to look at. We’re surrounded by animals. The animals are intense! I can see things more clearly. I do need to bring the paintings down here for a little reality check. I can begin to believe they will make themselves up there or that everything is good. But most of the paintings in the show were painted up there at least in part.

Surprisingly, my dog and studio mate, Busby, prefers the NYC studio. Mostly because he has the perfect place to bask in the sun here and get rainbows scattered all over him, my little sybarite. I keep prisms in the windows everywhere.

Prominent in this group of new paintings are your hands — swatting flies, cradling Busby, clutching a bowl of salad while painting, squeezing out a tube of color, and of course, forever holding your brushes. Was that an intentional theme or did you just find yourself subliminally coming back to the one tool that forever connects your heart and mind to the muscle memory of making pictures?

I decided to crop in on the figure and lose the head for a while because the head implies consciousness and then suddenly the viewer is thinking about what the painting is thinking. The face can suck up all the meaning out of the rest of the picture and make it too specific. I want the painting to be about what I feel so I concentrate on other parts of the (my) body that are more available for identification. In fact, the plane is often completely identified with my body.

The hands function very much like the head without that extra degree of specificity, which can send the entire picture off in a narrative direction or turn the figure into an object. I don’t paint narrative. I’m much more interested in the emotionality, the abstract level of the work, the paint and light. That said, I am always trying to bring the head back in but in a more dynamic way. Or maybe I should say less dynamic.

They are amazingly successful at attaining a perfect tension between emotionality, conceptual rigor and technical light-footedness. Then there is the subject of the artist in her studio, which has been a subject of fascination for generations. How do you see your work in the context of that history? Or does it even matter to you?

Thank you! I totally see my work in that context and I keep it around me in the form of reproductions. I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to put into other people’s lives and what I have to offer. Since the studio is what I know best at this point, that is what I am painting. I think people are very interested in artists and artists are interested in each other. The different states of being in the studio, the sense of suspension and potential, making your own rules, the cooperation between forms, the ability to be your own best judge, the sensuality of it — how can you go wrong?

The post “The Solitariness of the Pursuit”: A Studio Visit with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

January 8 to February 7, 2015
138 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets
New York City, 212 750 0949

Eric Holzman makes small, luminous paintings that refer to locations in Westchester and the Hudson Valley. These paintings emphasize a lyrical abstraction as well as a closely noted view of landscapes and trees. Though small in size, they do not yield to limited ambition. Indeed, they delineate, in a completely contemporary manner, a tradition of painting that reaches deep into American art history.

Holzman looks for tight compositions that encapsulate not only the shape of the landscape but also its feeling, which can best be described as visionary and mystical, not unlike the pastoral landscapes of Albert Pinkham Ryder. But the expressiveness is not high-pitched; instead, the lyricism is understated, muted even, within quite a dark palate of browns and greens. Unlike much art today, Holzman’s paintings reward close and extended gazing; they act as meditations not on what the life of nature might be, but rather on what it consists of now. Also, there is no real sense of nostalgia or ecological despair; the beauty of the paintings derives from persistent study of the green forms surrounding us. As a result, there is an air of realism that comes close to the way we see and experience nature, however precarious its position actually is.

Painting, which is far from dead, is in the hands of Eric Holzman singingly alive. He begins his paintings in situ, which may well account for the verisimilitude they convey. He then finishes the work in his New York City studio, where he incorporates a complex, built-up surface that compellingly corresponds with the particular view he is addressing. It is a difficult task in contemporary art to relive and push forward the genre of the landscape, which in the age of the Internet can seem antiquated and anachronistic. But Holzman bravely undertakes the recording nature in all its particularity, a stance still capable of engaging, even moving the viewer in the transcendental tradition of American writing and art. The curving forms of the trees fill Holzman’s art in ways that intensify the small dimensions of the paintings, which can be seen as serving an idealized vision of nature—even if the foliage is accurately rendered, with an eye to actual form. In many ways the persistence of Holzman’s interest in nature, in art-world circumstances that heavily favor technology and conceptual underpinnings, starts to look like a brave move to keep alive something of our relations with the outside world, which sadly we are changing beyond recognition.

Atmosphere is key to Holzman’s art. Billowing masses of dark green spread out across his canvases, to the point where they form more or less abstract passages built on the vernal forms from which they originate. In Kessico (2000), we see a small, blue-green tree in the foreground, with a pond just behind it. Trees in the background and to the right add a magical, mysterious atmosphere that sweeps across the small dimensions of the painting. The colors of these vernal shapes — olive green and blue green — don’t seem quite true to observation, intensifying the feeling of a dreamlike reality. Yet the viewer feels that this is an actual place, recorded in the moment but with an eye to posterity.

In Elm (2008-14) a large green tree rises up above a series of smaller trees grouped together at the bottom of the painting. An unusual dark mauve background contrasts with the darkish greens of the trees. The muted hues tend to place the composition in an atmospheric ambience. What comes through more than anything else is the formal elegance of the tall elm, which curves over the green forms beneath. The painting appears modest, but lasts a long time in the viewer’s thoughts.

While it is difficult to see these paintings without thinking of the Hudson River School, Holzman is not aiming to overwhelm the viewer with visions of an echoing sublime. Instead, he is content with returning to landscape art something of the dignity that those earlier painters conveyed. The rich textures of the applied paint serve to enhance our perception of the painting, whose rough surface adds to its contemporary feeling. Late Afternoon/Crestwood II (2013-14), a deep mass of green and brown foliage, has a small curving white truck placed right in the middle of the painting. The light is muted, as might be expected for the time being depicted; there is a marvelous haze that seems to emanate from the leaves. Here, as elsewhere, Holzman taps a quiet, but far-reaching vision in which the landscape has recovered from the great damage already done to it. His art facilitates this vision in profound ways.

The post Atmosphere is Key: Eric Holzman at Lori Bookstein appeared first on artcritical.

November 13, 2014 to December 20, 2014
138 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th streets)
New York City, 212 750 0949

The title of Helen Miranda Wilson’s recent project room exhibition of eight small paintings at Lori Bookstein, “Kuba Cuneiform Quilts” is, like the works themselves, factual, neat, and informational. Until, that is, one spends a bit of time contemplating the works and their titles.

An initial view of the paintings reflects the noted sources — quilts, Kuba culture, cuneiform script — and yet very quickly an imaginative place between language and object is evoked. The surface of each panel has been prepared to a smooth and pristine pale-toned ground upon which the artists has skillfully painted hundreds of shapes often nestling and linking into each other. The scale — none of the works are much larger than a book cover — invites one to step in and explore a universe of multiple unique families of colored triangles and squares arranged within a small and shallow space. At first glance this can read as a kind of visual braille, but then, Wilson’s titles and colors, suggestive of particularities of atmosphere and environment, evoke many possible readings.

Titles like Lexicon, Snow, Old Friend, 5 O’clock, Light Garden, Little Dusky Darling and Mercato allude to familiar, quotidian things and register well with the color sensations and qualities of the painting they belong to. Snow, for example, employs a loose grid more than any of the others and reminds this viewer of an urban snowstorm where yellow lights in frigid inky darkness of night are softened by a veil of snow. Mercato’s colors link easily to flowers, fruits and even synthetic hues of mass-produced goods. These sink into a pale terra cotta ground in a space that appears shallower than the others bringing to mind pottery and crafts rather than the atmosphere or the place of a market. Teetering between description and statement, Treasure Land is both a proper name and an imperative, a place to go to and a plea. Light Garden as well, could be interpreted as light in a garden, a garden made of lights, or even a local name for Provincetown at night.

What is so remarkable about these works is how they are simultaneously unassuming and completely dense. And it is uncanny that such a broad range of experiences is conjured with the reduced language of triangles and squares.

With deliberate clustering of similar-hued groups of her triangles and squares the artist suggests movements and counter-movements as close valued hue-sets placed adjacent to each other vibrate and subtle shifts in value create very slow ripple effects. One merely needs to stop, step in and look. Wilson’s achievement is in presenting us — the viewers — with a new kind of space, one that despite the modest size of these images continually expands, both perceptually and referentially. This surely is the experience viewers want most: to be brought to a new space carved out specifically for the mind to explore.

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Clive Hodgson, 2012
Piri Halasz, 2008
David Cohen, 2008
Eric Gelber, 2006
Maureen Mullarkey, 2004
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

Full index entry for “Boepple” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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April 25, to May 25, 2013
138 Tenth Avenue at 19th Street
New York City, 212 7500949

Sentimentality, nostalgia, and illustration are the common pitfalls for a figurative painter undertaking to represent feeling and emotion — particularly when the imagery is invented and not photo derived. There is a huge payoff, however, for facing those risks head on. In her first New York show since 2004 and her debut with Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Elena Sisto takes as her subject the predicaments of young women painters as they embark on their calling. In images that Sisto, in the tradition of Philip Guston, originates from pure acts of painting, her self-critical perseverance has produced work that is unique, psychologically complex, and moving.

Elena Sisto, like all serious painters, is a formalist. Behind her subject matter, part of the content of her work is the structure of the decisions that constitute painting. To emphasize this, about seven of the twenty paintings in this show are close-up details of her young painter subjects: blouses and patterns and fragments of hands and arms and necks. Each of these paintings becomes a mini universe of inventive facture as pigment turns into light and flesh, and patterns turn into fabric and paintings of paintings, but always revealing the mechanics of their construction from paint.

These “cropped in” paintings (as the artist calls them), deft and colorful, are almost abstract in their formalism. Paintings like Frogs, 2013, where negative spaces between elbows and torso become patterned triangles, may assuage viewers not willing to see the abstraction in the formal structures of the other, more psychological paintings. These are the ones that depict various young women struggling with the act of painting. The “cropped-in” paintings, amusing and exhilarating in their invention, gain in complexity through their context with what has remained “uncropped.”

And it is these paintings of young women wrestling with their intentions, which comprise the soul of this show. Because of the added implications in the way faces can signify feelings, the range of emotions is broader, the ambiguities more enticing, and the questions to be asked more probing.

In the masterful Self-Portrait (with Van Dongen), (2011) a painting filled with faces, the convergence of all Sisto’s painterly knowledge produces a heady concoction of formal, psychological, gender, and sexual issues. It may be a commonplace notion that a painter, especially a young one, is surrounded by a host of voices that she must listen to, battle with, ignore, or embrace, but this painting elucidates the idea in such a charmingly complex manner that it seems a revelation.

The picture depicts a white smocked young woman, right hand holding brushes, in the act of painting a self-portrait. Her smock is delineated with a few deft lines from a white wall tacked with painting reproductions, and the back of a canvas, as well as her ostensible reflection in a mirror bookends her. The eponymous Van Dongen of the title, a flame-hued and bare chested Jeune Arabe, 1910, peers haughtily at the painter over her shoulder and practically jumps off the canvas. Van Dongen is an apt choice for Sisto as the Dutchman’s paint handling and use of patterns clearly inform Sisto’s own work.

Head and body tilted in contrapusto to the Van Dongen, the young painter herself, with an expression of intense concentration, dominates the painting. Her face in shadow, her mouth forms a little brown hyphen, and in a supremely subtle painterly invention, Sisto lightens the shadow just above her mouth, to create the impression of her tongue pressing there intently.

The four dark brushes that our young heroine grasps form a Maltese cross  of vectors, which, along with her index and forefingers, extended Guston-style, point to the various voices/influences in the painting. Alongside the lithe Van Dongen Arab, a chunky, neo-classical Picasso maiden gazes earnestly at her. And up in the left corner, constituted by the merest blobs of color, are two women obliviously kissing in a passionate embrace. At the bottom, its little phallic head lasciviously poking into the picture is a tube of paint with the tiniest squirt of turquoise protruding from the tip. It is the same color and size as the tiny dot representing a fragment of blouse that appears behind — and defines the edge of — the girl’s right wrist.

But most importantly, occupying a gray trapezoid that cuts into the left fifth of the composition floats the spectral reflection of this artist herself, seemingly older, as if wonderingly peering at her younger self from the future. This little sleight of hand elucidates the irony of the “self-portrait” of the title. The painting depicts a young woman painting an image of her self. But like Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the only painting we actually see the front of is this very painting, which becomes Sisto’s own Joycean “portrait of the artist as a young woman.”

In what could be called the Bildungsmalen genre of painting, it is unique to see a female painter as protagonist. But aside from this feminist act of rectification, what makes these paintings unprecedented is that Sisto constructs a gaze for us that somehow becomes parental.

We regard these young women, not as the next hot young artists, but sympathetically, as daughters and students in the process of becoming. Though the art that Sisto has them making is usually abstract and a bit callow, she doesn’t mock them.  The very sympathy that these paintings elicit is what makes them so fresh. Youth becomes not a threat or admonition to the older viewers that are Sisto’s peers, but something to be fondly nurtured and encouraged, not despite but because of its awkwardness and lack of sophistication. And to her younger viewers Sisto offers the hope that painting can become a tool for understanding their relationship to the world, and that sophistication comes not from conforming but daring to be different.

The post Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Elena Sisto at Lori Bookstein appeared first on artcritical.

November 15 to January 5, 2013
138 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th Streets
New York City, 212.750.0949

Within her characteristically restrained chromatic range, Susannah Phillips’ latest body of work, on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, manages nonetheless to exude incredibly nuanced color. These paintings and drawings were all made over the last two years, the latter mostly from direct observation; the subjects consist of four motifs – two landscape views, a still life, and one domestic scene – each painted numerous times.

An unnamed horizontal landscape, featured in nine of the 28 works in the show, depicts a body of water surrounded by mountains or hills at different times of day. Her compositions play upon a fret of different perspectival depths: water wraps around a central mass of land located in the mid-ground; a sliver of land is occasionally foregrounded, more visibly in some pictures than others; an undulating mountain range sits just below the sky. In Landscape 3, where the morning air is thick, humid and hot, mountain edges are brought up to the picture plane, magnified and sharp. In Landscape 11, the most sumptuous of the paintings, the dawn is quiet, cool and soft, misty even, as the furthest mountain range recedes from view. This kind of comparison can be done between all nine within this group. As you move through them you can feel the sun and air shift as if you were growing to know the place.

The absence of representational details grants these landscapes an unexpected second life. They have the capacity to suddenly flip to abstraction, for a moment losing their pictorial depth. Yet the muted and succulently specific color always shifts the landscape back into view. The change in light from painting to painting is sophisticated, creating strong implications of volume and space between landmasses. As you walk though the gallery, the landscape progressively reveals more dimensionality, with variations in the height of mountains, the position of the sun, atmosphere, and time of day. Time intervals between paintings seem no more than 30 minutes or an hour, allowing the artist to slow time down to the point of capturing the closest thing to what we can understand as the present.

Phillips’ subjects, whether landscape or interior scenes, are transformed into vessels for explorations into light, volume, and form. Like Agnes Martin or Giorgio Morandi, her motifs seem to have emerged from a metaphysical search, from a need to infringe on the barrier between the concrete world and ourselves, to reach a point just beyond our grasp. These new paintings and drawings straddle a line between spirituality and philosophy as they begin to utter the unspeakable, the nature of time and the instability of reality and perception.

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September 6 to October 6, 2012
138 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets
New York City, 212-750-0949

A visual coup de foudre, this gem of an exhibition of masterful collages ambushed a skeptical critic on her Chelsea peregrinations. Defying expectations, what were these collages that owed such a graceful debt to Kurt Schwitters and possessed such intelligent and delicate affinities with the work of Anne Ryan while exhibiting a definite character of their own? Was this the work of an emerging artist and if so, how to explain the modest mastery and lack of self-conscious appropriation characterizing these quietly radiant compositions? A time warp touch of quiet authority and sure grasp of abstract shape and color juxtaposition seemed beyond the imagination and skill of the typical MFA graduate these days. Yet I had never heard of the artist, Henry Rothman, before this encounter.

The works in the current show were made over two decades, from the mid-sixties until the late 1980s. Rothman (1910-1990) was an artist’s artist: in what was then a much smaller and more intertwined art world than today’s five-ring circus, his collages were admired and snapped up by many of the New York artists who were his clients and peers. But recognition of his work was sidelined by his own modesty as well as by the relentlessness of aesthetic fashion, with its appetite for the always bigger and more spectacular.

Rothman, who had immigrated to America some time in the 1930s from Austria, where he had attended art school in Vienna, studied journalism at NYU after he got to New York. He began his career in the 1940s as a street photographer fascinated with urban decay, graffiti, and peeling fragments of posters. He also opened a small framing business on Manhattan’s 28th Street. This shop also doubled as a kind of casual salon for other artists, among them his photographer colleague Weegee, as well as Louise Nevelson, Jacques Lipchitz and even actor Anthony Quinn, then pursuing his fortunes as a painter. By the 1950s Rothman had begun making small collages that deftly incorporated shards of advertisements typography, combining scraps of color with orphaned lettering that visually echoed his earlier photographs.

The Jed Bark of his day, Rothman’s great skill as a master framer brought him many of the era’s most prominent artists as clients. Apparently they eagerly acquired his collages, which he would then frame for them. But reluctant to be seen as competing with his artist clients, he never pushed his own artwork. Instead their creation seems to have been an intimate and personal activity.

Like Robert Kulicke, artist and legendary goldsmith, whose prowess as an inventive framer (he pioneered the Plexiglas box frame in the 1960s) may well have initially obscured his excellence as a painter, Henry Rothman remained exceptionally modest about his own artistic achievements. Celebrated as a master of water gilding, (the refined technique of applying sheets of gold leaf over a carefully prepared layer of red clay), he was deservedly famous among professional framers. To this day his son David carries on the high standards set by his father in the framing business that is now on West 36th Street. At last, though, Henry Rothman’s exquisite collages are gaining recognition they deserve.

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March 29 to April 28, 2012
138 Tenth Avenue between 19th and 20th streets
New York City, 212.750.0949

Willard Boepple has a knack of keeping us at a threshold where a sense of something familiar and utilitarian slides away into mysterious relationships of planes, spaces and colors. In terms of the familiar or the useful he gives us few clues.  The three looming structures in his present show, sparsely and handsomely installed in the main gallery space at Lori Bookstein, make possible reference to radio masts, pylons, towers etc, in much the way previous bodies of work were titled, and related to, ‘Looms’ or ‘Rooms.’ But these apparent references don’t take us far. As for the mystery of planes, spaces, color, rhythm, structure etc, we are faced with a problem – we don’t have much of a language for it, and yet it is clear that this is the real content of the work. It is easier to think about the radio mast as an object because it has a name and a function whereas the sculptures turn us away from this towards that which we know much less about; our more instinctive and unmediated responses to such phenomena as weight, density and scale.

The installation is generous in allowing us to walk around in between the sculptures, to back off to some distance and see them against the plain while of the gallery walls.  There is an invitation to speculate, and to pass in, out and around the works repeatedly, noting differences and similarities. What gives (2011) holds within its slightly tapering vertical grey frame, red panels or blocks, while Heath (2012) has a darker gray frame, and contains more slender, dark gray bars. Ever (2012) has a paler frame and even more attenuated climbing (or falling) bars in it. In each piece rhythms and weights are uneven within the regularity of the tall frame, but each sculpture has these two fundamental elements in dialogue, the frame and the forms that are placed within it. Musical references have been used to describe this sculptor’s work, and Boepple himself says that he wants his work “to be open and clear like a ringing melody”. Here, and in earlier series, one can also think of themes and variations – there is something quite methodical as well as intuitive about the way ideas are explored within a repeated framework. Each piece is a conclusion but also contains the idea of variability and movement.

The way each piece has a more or less gray frame that contains elements of a different second colour emphasises the distinction between frame  and elements and also stresses each piece’s individuality.  This simple color coding tells us something about the order of apprehension; first, the single identity of the sculpture (the red one, the yellow one, etc) then, the separateness of its two elements: the framework and its contents. However, the coloring also unites the pieces in a painterly way (there isn’t a sculpture where one element is painted and the other isn’t). The natural connection one makes is to Mondrian’s lines, or strips, of various dark greys, that hold in place areas of color– a framework that is itself an active component. The artist says of these towers that “eventually the framework began to function as a sort of engaged pedestal, a part of and support for the whole”. There is also a kind of freedom in the coloring that I take to be simply pleasurable, which relates to the musicality of the ideas of variation and rhythm, and I think one shouldn’t underestimate the sense of enjoyment of colour, surface, facture and so on, that the works seem to advocate. It is the pleasure of apparently simple things that very rapidly become complex and unfathomable.

Boepple’s work repeatedly stresses that we can see through it, that its space is also part of our space. I don’t know of a completely solid Boepple.  The densest sculptures of his that I know, the ‘Temples’, still have gaps between the elements that form their relatively compacted and heavy blocks, and the more sealed up forms of the resin pieces were made sufficiently transparent to see their interior. Other series are typically open and airy, especially so these towers. They retain the idea that the sculpture holds, or makes or divides spaces within it and around it.  The gaps and openness in his work suggest that he wants his sculpture to be contiguous with rather than separate from the ‘normal’ space and character of the world we inhabit. The Towers presumably reference the ethereal space of radio waves, unknowable to us but for the mediation of a mechanism. This is a nice metaphor for the functioning of Boepple’s sculptures: mechanisms that make apparent mysterious qualities that surround us.

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