May 26 to June 25, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 647 1044

Karen Arm burrows into essential formulae of nature. Her motifs have been few, but comprehensive: tree branches, water droplets, spider webs, smoke, stars, and waves. Or rather, her motifs are distilled from those sources, broken down into constants and variables. From here she reassembles a vision of nature truer than optical transcription. Her spare, articulate images of restless seawater, for instance, probe beneath the surface, beyond the moment, to capture its fluid drapery. Her work bears superficial similarity to that of Vija Celmins, particularly the water images, but in contrast to photo-based drawings by the latter — uncanny ghosts which provide only the tease of nourishment — Arm really wants to shows us how water works.

There are two motifs in exclusive rotation at Arm’s current show at P.P.O.W.: “suns,” being centripetal accumulations of small circles into enormous ones; and “wavy rays,” in which numerous bendy lines radiate from a central point. The painting Untitled (Yellow Wavy Ray on Brown Red) (all works 2016) is the best of an impressive bunch. Here the radiating line motif, flexible and exact, can be read as a gathered topknot of angel hair, perhaps, or the pulsating rings of a pebble dropped in a pond. If the exquisite dry precision of Arm’s works on paper often eclipses the glazed depths of her larger canvases, in this superb painting the layers of acrylic mix richly, projecting graphic energy forward with wriggling intensity. The complex method of Arm’s color is left for the viewer to contemplate on the dripped edges that fold back to the wall like photochemical rainbows at the bleeding margins of pre-digital art prints; here one sees that the painting’s basic two-color scheme is woven from many strands.

The wavy rays recall Bridget Riley’s Current, and thus of Philip Taaffe’s tribal re-enactments of her imagery. The central burst has also been a device of Mark Grotjahn and an occasional motif of James Siena and Marsha Cottrell. These artists, along with Daniel Zeller, Jacob El Hanani, the late Lori Ellison, and many other participants in the thriving afterlife of linear abstraction, think algorithmically to some extent — most notably Siena, whose gamesmanship is steadily electric. But to a greater extent than most of her peers, Arm is oriented toward the singular, concentrated image. Her true forbear may be Agnes Martin, whose horizontal lines hover above specificity, in search of pure spirit.

If picturing was anathema in a previous age of linear abstraction, artists working in that vein today take inoculating sips of scientific illustration, decorative and shamanic arts, Op and Pop, 19th-century engraving, the animism of Paul Klee, comics, comix, and other pathogens that the scrupulous Riley and the wise Martin steered clear of — as does Arm in her own way, her steely eye always striving to build a convincing image, not a quotation or diagram, out of persistent studio ritual. So it is with the second motif in the current show, the suns, which began some years ago, an order of magnitude more distant, as “globular clusters” — galactic-scaled works that were comparatively dispersed, pinprick stars against unknowable void. In the new work, we are far more quickly drawn into dense gravity. Incalculable accumulations of tiny, concentric bursts of color thicken, in some of them, to haptic hallucinations of pebbly skin or bubbling tissue at a thermonuclear center.

Biographical information is irrelevant to interpreting such formally driven work, but as Nancy Princenthal points out in her biography of Martin, it nevertheless helps to know that her subject grew up in the sere plains of Saskatchewan, and that she was at times overwhelmed by mental illness; perhaps for Martin (as for Ellison) the balm of abstraction was a vital necessity. Arm nowhere puts forward the fact in titles or press releases, but she is personally frank about a long and difficult fight with breast cancer, and it is hard not to see that the suns are breast-like, and subject to a cellular logic bound to run amok — the ineluctable logic of supernovae and black holes.

As serious as these works are — as obsessive, cosmic and, possibly, autobiographical — they are full of lively questions about color and touch, compositional freedom and strategy, and the contours of taste. Untitled (Yellow and Red Sun on Blue) pushes things almost too far, into an excessively hard-won illusion of sphericality. It is as gaudy as an encrusted Lucas Samaras box, and in its own remarkable way, as mystical and gorgeous.

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January 5 to February 11, 2012
511 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 989 5467

In previous shows, you had to ask to see Lori Ellison’s drawings.  Her elaborate doodles on lined paper were kept behind the desk, in plastic sleeves or retained in their floppy, spiral-bound notebooks.  At McKenzie, a number of these densely florid ballpoints have finally been liberated.  Delicately mounted on the wall, they assume their true dimensions.

Drawing is fundamental to Ellison’s practice.  Worthy of contemplation on their own terms, these works are the quaking earth beneath the relatively quiescent structurings of her better-known paintings.  Deprived of the context of the drawings, Ellison’s careful geometric abstraction can look almost too polished, too knowing.  In proximity to the drawings’ thorny touch and seismic agitation, however, these Insider paintings look a lot more Outsider.

The biomorphic logic of Ellison’s goth drawing sensibility bursts at the margins, pushing against the limits of dime store materials and human perseverance –– as urgent and resourceful as a prison tattoo.  By default, it induces mesmerizing claustrophobia.  One drawing piles up tiny wagon-wheel rosettes in airless suffusion; another seems to depict undulating skin caught in a shallow relief of ropey netting; a third could be a dissection study of spongy tissue squashed into a box.

Not all the ballpoints are super-dense.  One pleasingly restrained drawing floats what looks like a continuously bending, mile-long bicycle chain above a luminous, wooly ground.  Another airy drawing suggests an unraveling Celtic knot, with fine indications at crossings as to which strand passes above and which below.

If these images are abstractions, they are carefully illusionistic ones, with light-struck volume and precise contrasts of texture, weight, and surface.  On the other hand, Ellison can elicit dizziness by graphic means alone, as with one lapping curve motif that generates something like inside-out, space-filling yams.  Even more purely graphic are her numerous grids and webs: impossibly dense, emphatically wobbly, but geometric to the core.  And it is these ballpoint abstractions of triangles and squares, informed by the occasional lighter touch just described, that locate points of departure for Ellison’s current painting practice.

McKenzie is showing a few earlier paintings, more sculptural and imagistic, but Ellison’s recent two-color gouaches on wood panel, methodically constructed by applying a dark pigment over a light ground of near hue, are the main event.  They are calm where the drawings are frantic; polished and professional where the drawings are abject.  Even when taking direct handoffs of restless motifs from the drawings, the paintings tame these pressurized nets, cages, and cells, toeing a line of polite, measured exactitude.

Three untitled gouaches from 2011, for instance, one purple, one green, and one blue, make use of a freely tiling triangle motif.  The blue version exploits variations in paint density to release the eye into the pattern’s winding, ambiguous depths, which are only implicit in ballpoint.  When this improvisational mesh of geometry is activated, it can dance like the phosphorescent scales of a dragon.  Here, the upgrade in materials provides elegant compensation for the loss of the drawings’ scratch and fury.

But that is the exception to the rule.  The purple and green versions of the motif, though lovely, remain comparatively inert; as with most of these gouaches, the paint is applied with as little inflection as possible, flattening the image into a dispassionate, serially tinted monochrome.  The two paintings that carry off this cool approach best are lively figure-ground interplays of overlapping rectangles, which look as if Ellison had scattered decks of tiny cards over the light-colored ground, applied a coat of darker color, and then removed the cards.  Jagged conjunctions, reading as perforations, suggest fragments of Islamic ornament.

Typically, however, her patterns are both more rigid and more handmade, and any associations with sacred architecture or textiles, rather than buoying the paintings up with transcendental energy, tend instead to anchor them in the busy-work of their construction.  Two gouaches, for example, interweave negative and positive triangles into concentric oval bands, like a hooked rug, around an oval void.  Again, Ellison rests her case on the pattern alone, and this one has its nuance and starry fascination –– even, perhaps, a narrative of memento mori in the vacated portrait niche at its center.  But these modest devotional panels remain actual-size.  Their repudiation of psychic sweat, rather than releasing the pattern to do its cosmic work, seems to take for granted that the decorative should lead to the visionary.  As I suggested earlier, Ellison’s paintings can seem all too quotational: not only of tribal, folk, and religious arts, but of Mondrian, Reinhardt, and Frank Stella; of Agnes Martin, Myron Stout, and Bridget Riley; and most of all, of a generational embrace of “hypnotic geometry” –– Raphael Rubinstein’s description of the post-psychedelic Brooklyn-centric scene in which Ellison is well known.  (Rubenstein’s phrase comes from a brochure text written for Ellison, to which  I also contributed.)

At McKenzie, however, Ellison’s paintings can be seen in context as healing balms of meditative objectivity, counterbalances to the blazing obsession of her drawings. The careful craft of her small, luminous gouaches redirects the drawings’ arrested teenage alienation onto higher planes–planes to which Ellison aspires with all the dogmatic fervor of the self-taught convert.  Ellison’s knowingness, in other words, is the exact opposite of Insider sophistication.  If the paintings presume too much, it is from a rare, authentic mixture of erudition, innocence, and deep hunger.

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