April 15 to June 7, 2015
175 Rivington Street, between Attorney and Clinton streets,
New York City, 212-387-8190

Carlo Ferraris’s small, darkly disturbing exhibition at LYNCH THAM succeeds in covering a lot of ground quickly, ranging from the inwardness of his own essence to the vast grid of Manhattan. Ferraris has been calling himself a “conceptual photographer” but here shows epigrammatic sculptures on plinths, subtle sound installations, and three completely different short videos –– not to mention a couple of photographic works that are far more visceral than conceptual. One of these, Me and Millions of Me (2014), is a self-portrait with a twist of self-love, and a second twist of self-humiliation. In this digital print the lean, brooding artist, who convinces as an aloof rock star in one of the videos, poses casually in a tee shirt. A closer look reveals a dollop on his face, which, in light of the work’s title, is likely to elicit a strong reaction –– revulsion, lust, anger, or pity, perhaps –– from the suddenly self-conscious viewer.

There are two other auto-phallocentric works in the show: an electric cooking coil unwound into an adolescent graffito, and a window installation involving 35-mm transparencies of the artist at the forge, fabricating a suspiciously lifelike, red-hot steel dildo. Undeniably solipsistic, these works gain objectivity by association with the exhibition’s broad, cool approach to reversals of meaning. One work, in which a steel-belted radial spins in place on motorized rollers, quite literally turns language upside-down, as despite its title, Going North East (2015) is in fact going nowhere. On the tire’s rim is a circulating whitewall logo, the word “chump” written in tricky script that somehow reads the same in every orientation. By itself, this appropriation of a century-old rotational ambigram (one-upping Ed Ruscha’s household palindromes) is a clever enough piece of work, and the pathos of the economy-brand tire used here induces some nostalgia for all those heraldic Goodyears and brawny Firestones assisting at the birth of Pop Art.

But more than this, because the sculpture is part of an oeuvre which elsewhere is unafraid to get down and dirty, its endlessly circulating accusation leaves emotional tread marks: who, after all, is the “chump?”

“I am no longer obsessed with winning,” another unreliable text, is the title both of the show as a whole and of the most astonishing of its three videos, from 2013. The phrase lifts itself by its own bootstraps out of touristic footage of the Times Square area. The four-minute video, presented on an off-kilter flatscreen, seems to be a studio-produced Hip Hop music video, a free-verse stream of consciousness laid over a cool groove, and then accompanied by random images of crowds, traffic, neon marquees, and so on. But wait –– didn’t the rapper just declaim word-for-word the text of that ad on the side of that bus? That flashed on that Times Square super-screen? That walked past on that girl’s shirt? Yes, yes, and yes: it’s the music that accompanies the video, with perfectly credible cadences such as “Never trust a criminal until you have to,” and “How can you explain the unexplainable?” scripted from fragments of the videographic flow. The title phrase, with its supposed relinquishment of ambition, is also embedded: indistinguishable from the rest of the sloganeering, it scrolls across a news ticker at the very crossroads of the consumer world.

The idea of lyric text arising from purely visual logic is not new, going back at least to Futurist and Dada precedents. And I once saw John Linnell of the band, They Might Be Giants, compose a song on the fly with precisionist lyrics matched to projected slides shot from his apartment window. Yet Ferraris’s reverse-engineered music video is not a recap of F.T. Marinetti or Kurt Schwitters; it works too smoothly for that. The anonymous MC (no credit is given for music production or performance, so we may take it as strictly commercial outsourcing) makes the words sound profound, even grave –– including numerical countdowns that come close to parodying minimalist opera. Did Ferraris, an Italian living in New York, edit the text-bearing video like a ransom note collagist, in the service of syntax? Or is it more or less haphazard? If the latter, why do we respond to such refrigerator-magnet poetics, compiled largely from ad copy, as if it were Hip Hop sagacity? Who’s the chump?

The mood of the show when not passive aggressive is just plain aggressive, as with a playfully violent video of bowling balls being rolled and bounced down a winding tenement stairwell, or a sound sculpture in which a drywall screw administers a seizure to an electronic keyboard (though surprisingly, the resulting tone cluster wafts mildly, almost pleasantly, though time and space). And you might even miss the implicit threat of a creepily “unattended” suitcase, unless you attend to an audio installation consisting of a second anonymous rap, this one a cappella, which plays between video cycles. “If you see something, say something” –– so recites Ferraris’s proxy concerning the suitcase. And following that logic he proceeds to index the contents of the storefront gallery and its relationship to the street (a stretch of barrio still holding its own against encroaching oyster bars and, presumably, the posher galleries to come). There are clues in the lyrics concerning a knife stuck under a table and about a message “rolled up and sealed on Rivington,” which I haven’t deciphered. There is sufficient evidence, however, to believe that every word is meant concretely, albeit in a way you’d never expect.

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June 1 – July 15, 2006

The Material Sign is the carefully chosen title given by painter and critic Stephen Westfall to this show of four artists: Craig Fisher, Phillis Ideal, Marthe Keller, and Gwenn Thomas. Their work, as Westfall writes in the press release, “reflects an overt participation in the material processes of painting in abstract work that nonetheless admits references to what one might call the “image” of the material itself.” This statement along with the title of the show act to frame the primary questions of the exhibition: What is a “material sign,” and what is “the ‘image’ of the material.”

First, before an examination of the paintings, it is helpful to define the terms signand image. According to the Swiss linguist Saussure (1857-1913) a sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified and this relationship is referred to as signification. The paintings then are signifiers (a sound, image, written shape, object, practice, or gesture invested with meaning).Image, on the other hand, is the thing perceived and represented in the mind.

Craig Fisher is represented by a single 6-1/2 by 5-1/2 feet work that is typical of his unique form of abstract non-objective and non-relational painting. It includes many of his seemingly casual but masterful moves of drips, pours, splatters, scrubbings, etc. Fisher paints on raw unprimed cotton canvas and begins with many yards of it rolled on the floor. He then goes about his haphazard process until there is enough of something that it suggests a painting of a certain size and a certain orientation. At this point the section of canvas is cut out, stretched, and possibly worked more typically on both the front and backsides. Then almost as if nothing specific happened there is a finished painting.

Fisher’s work is often discussed in relationship to the French Support/Surface movement of the 1970’s, which attempted to strip down painting to its basic phenomenology of support and surface in order to build the process again while maintaining the integrity of these fundamental elements. Fisher in his own way does something similar, yet his work is more solidly rooted in a lineage from Pollock and de Kooning to Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

In Fisher’s paintings the meaning exists in the trace of their existence as signifiers and it is in this way that they become “material images.” It is only through their materiality that the residue of the essential decisions and non-decisions that occur in their process of creation can be seen.

Creating a similar quality of the material-as-image are the two square pieces of Phillis Ideal. Her paintings are built from varyingly thick skeins of paint that have been previously poured and collected for later use; the final works become a collage of their material elements. Ideal refers to it as a kind of ecological process where her poured paint skeins become interdependent signifiers. As a result different parts of the paintings suggest cartoon outlines, raster dots, computer graphics, graffiti, and a wide range of abstraction.

This process produces a unique conceptual doubling where the paint exists as both a specific tangible material and simultaneously as a referent of the visual language of different styles of image making. It links to Dada and Surrealist experiments through its use of collage and chance elements to create meaning. It also acts as a parallel with the experience of current technologies like cellular communications and high speed Internet where time becomes a warp-speed pastiche of information and signifiers. The work also references forms of abstraction from the Concrete movement led by Max Bill to the Neo-Concrete and Grupo Madi movements in Brazil in the 1940’s all while showing hints of Lichtenstein and Warhol. The scope of Ideal’s project is broad and even though these two paintings feel a bit unresolved they suggest the innovative and invigorating potential of her process.

The two works by Marthe Keller expand the material form of painting into 3-dimensions with a stunningly painted curved ceramic piece and a work in two parts, half of which drapes off the wall and conceals what appears to be a chair. Unifying all of Keller work is a compositional device that she emphatically refers to as vertical strokes, rather than stripes. These strokes become, in essence, theimage of her work. They also act as a comprehensive signifier for the issues at stake, which include a complex, ironic, and playful questioning of the nature of painting as subject versus object, and illusionistic versus concrete.

Keller uses her material with a sensitive touch achieving sensuous, rich surfaces, and vibrant fields of color. Central to her work is an understanding of the fundamental role of drawing at the origin of the creative process—she allows it to exist unfettered. Thus she has great freedom and flexibility as she applies her ‘strokes’ from stretched canvas and linen, to tarpaulins and walls. Keller’s work shows the influence of the New York School in their goal of sublime painting while at the same time embraces the paradoxical impulses of artists from Lucio Fontana to Cy Twombly in their use of a single seemingly authorless gesture.

Gwenn Thomas whimsically and cleverly broadens the idea of the material image with her use of photography and inkjet printing. The end result of which is, ironically, an image of material. First, she creates delicate collages of different swatches of fabric and other woven textiles often arranged in a grid of some sort. Then she photographs these collages, prints the photograph on canvas and stretches the canvas in the same manner as one would stretch a painting and presents them as such.

On one hand Thomas’ work exists entirely as signifier as a result of its mimetic function. The objects perform all of the functions expected from a painting: they present an image on canvas and stretched on a frame, they create space that’s in dialogue with specific Modernist works, and they feel painterly. On the other hand they become a new material form that is entirely their own and mediates between painting and photography. The result, while a fairly accurately printed and “true” photograph, creates a distancing effect between the viewer and the thing seen that forces the acknowledgement of the absence of the real. It is a perceptual conundrum that deeply questions the possibility of phenomenological truth.

In all four of these artists work there is something disturbing, mischievous and ironic. They continue to shake-up painting by questioning it and then giving it new life. They consider each aspect of their process and the specific material that’s involved and they impregnate it with meaning. The work is not slick, craftsy or pretty. None of it feels like the current mass proliferation of laboriously decorative post-minimal abstract painting that is often covered with a shinning layer of epoxy. A good look at this show and at these artists who have all been working for decades makes it clear that in the search for this years new “ism” we should just consider ourselves “ismed out” and instead focus on what’s really good and continually extending its potential.

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“Friedel Dzubas: Paintings of the 1950s” at Jacobson Howard Gallery through April 17th 2004,
19 East 76th Street, between Madison and Fifth 212-570-2362

“Angelo Ippolito (1922-2001)” at David Findlay Jr Fine Art through April 24
The Fuller Building, 41 E 57th Street, at Madison Aveunue, 212 486 7660

When Dia:Beacon opened last year, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times announced that minimalism, not abstract expressionism, provided America’s “greatest generation”. On the evidence of the kind of art favored by museums, where the monumental, serial, standardized and reductive never lose their appeal, he may have had a point, but where painting is concerned, he was dead wrong.

It is staggering, in fact, how much life is left in the revolution that took place in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s. Without making extravagant claims for “our generation”, there is truly a renaissance of abstract painting underway in New York today, with figures like Thomas Nozkowski, Terry Winters, Melissa Meyer, and Bill Jensen at the helm.

Craig Fisher belongs in this company: his art directly takes up the challenge of the first generation New York School , engaging Adolph Gottlieb, late de Kooning and classic Hans Hofmann in eloquent dialogue. With freshness and verve, however, he is unmistakably grounded in the present. He stands apart from the abstract expressionists in his determinedly decentered and anti-compositional approach, yet the rythms of these masters flow through his own paintings without seeming to miss a historic beat.

No throwback to older styles, it is a form of minimalism that saves him from looking retro – minimalism, however, in a European rather than American incarnation. With his contemporaries, the painters Joe Fyfe and James Hyde, Mr. Fisher constitutes the “French connection” in current New York painting, taking creative impetus from the “support-surface” movement of the 1970s. Each of these younger American painters is obsessed with the semiotics of surface, but without capitulating to dry reductivism. Each, in his way, lubricates an intellectual interrogation of the language of painting with personal quirkiness and individuality.

Mr. Fisher’s is an art of cool, sparse, isolated, yet somehow heartfelt expressivity. The overriding impression made by his canvases is of canvas itself: the support is nonchalently left raw, with merely sporadic painterly incident. You can almost believe they have been hung the wrong way round: nebulous forms and staining make it seem as if a more boisterous, resolved composition, flipped against the wall, is going to waste.

His favored support is the back side of a failed, or abandoned canvas, or better still, as in the case “Crop-Drop Painting,” (1999), the earliest and largest painting on show, the drop cloth he had placed underneath other canvases while being worked on the floor. Unwilled texture is generated by paint seeping through from one canvas to another. Such calculated impersonality might smack of “process art” of the 1970s, which in its turn took its cue from the Dada anti-creativity of Duchamp with his aesthetics of chance.

But Mr. Fisher is not a process artist *per se* because this penchant for the accidental isn’t a programmatic or declared modus operandi that constitutes an element of the work. Despite the disperateness and infrequency of his, marks and gestures, and their obstinately unorchestrated nature, his effects nonetheless behave in each other’s company with unfailing grace. But still, his strategies will strike many as an “arty” way of deconstructing purposiveness in painting. Knowing what future paintings are going to need by way of “chance effects” must make this artist supremely self-conscious as a dropper and spiller of paint.

The recent paintings in this show, from 2003, introduce an element of color absent in his earlier work, suggesting a radical departure. His new preference is for acerbic, acid hues that heat up the canvases. This new color adds a level of intentionality alien to the “readymade” canvas colors and tastefully neutral shades that used to predominate, as in the 1999 painting. But dissonant color actually introduces a new kind of accidentalism to his art, as if so perverse a palette could only have been stumbled upon by chance.

***

Mr. Fisher’s show forms a timely comparison with a raw canvas and stain painter of a previous generation. There is a rare chance to see a group of 1950s paintings by Friedel Dzubas at Jacobson Howard, who recently took on the estate of the German-born artist, who died in 1994. Through his friendship with Clement Greenberg, the formalist guru of second generation abstract expressionism, Dzubas became a studiomate in the early 1950s of Ms. Frankenthaler’s at the time of her breakthrough “Mountains and Sea” series of stained paintings.

On first impression, Dzubas relates closely to these paintings, in palette and mood. But although staining, which is evident in these works, would become a dominant aspect of his more familiar color field painting, these early works have a gutsy impasto which offsets the more ethereal effects of staining, offering a rich earthiness. In a painting like “Cyclop,” (1959) there is a dynamic relationship between autonomous gesture and described forms that really gives the painting depth and punch.

***

Another lesser-known figure of the postwar period who is enjoying some reconsideration lately is Angelo Ippolito. Earlier this year, he was the subject of a generous retrospective at Binghampton University, where he had taught; now a small but illuminating representation of his output can be seen at David Findlay Jr, a gallery who are making a speciality of examining different members of the first of the Greenwich Village cooperative galleries, the Tanager, which was founded in 1952. Other members of this group included Charles Cajori, Lois Dodd, William King, Alex Katz and, slightly later, Philip Pearlstein.

Italian born (and trained) Ippolito picked up scale and directness from “the older guys”, as he referred to de Kooning and Pollock, but insisted on a cheery palette (comparable to Mr. Katz of the early 1950s with its sweet pinks and oranges) and compositional refinement that held his painting back from the roughness and robustness of abstract expressionism. In this respect he is rather like the Spaniard Vicente Esteban, who also retained European painting manners despite enthusiasm for “American type” painting.

In Ippolito’s case, a love of landscape and a diehard traditionalism regarding pictorial organization lead to some extraordinary partial returns to representation, such as in the masterful “Landscape with Red Table,” (1972) which pits a smooth, hard-edged, almost Pop interior against neatly delineated pockets of painterly exuberance.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 15, 2004

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The conflicts and antagonisms that impinge on the place of painting in contemporary culture are innumerable, and they’ve been with us for generations. In wake not only of Gerhard Richter’s work, but also that of Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among others, the relation of painting to photography remains contested, as does the closely related issue of the dichotomy between representation and abstraction-and also that between abstraction and the readymade. Another related problem, most obviously articulated in Pop art and its many subsequent derivates, is the one often signaled by the dichotomy between high and popular art-although it would be more accurately articulated as the problem of what becomes of an art whose roots are entirely in high culture when the very division between high and low is becoming an increasingly dated historical artifact.

Not only must any serious manifestation of painting implicitly take a position on such issues-every indication is that it must also fix on one or more of them as its very subject matter. A glance at the work of Craig Fisher is sufficient to indicate certain positions that have been taken: this art is entirely abstract and non-objective, and appears to have found an effortless equanimity in being able to align itself with the highest traditions of modern painting that go back through Abstract Expressionism to the Impressionists-but in a way that never asserts a complacent or toplofty denial of all those formerly despised or ignored aspects of being that are now sometimes described as “abject” or “formless.”

That very equanimity suggests, however, that the tension that would give Fisher’s work its true subject is not to be found in its vicinity. Instead, let’s look for the irritant that impels this art in less specifically aesthetic, more broadly metaphysical terrain: in problems of human action, and specifically in the relation of will or intention to everything that, determinate or indeterminate as the case may be, seems to function independently of our will. The more perceptive of the critics who have commented on Fisher’s work have always noticed the importance of this theme, David Cohen marking the effect of a “courtly style in which volition is held to lack decorum, but in which it is equally poor manners to betray angst in the denial of volition” (Art Press, March 2000) where Lilly Wei found “chance configurations” of which Fisher “acts more as agent than as author” (Art in America, September 2000).

Every action, every event must have its stage. Isn’t that why these paintings take place on raw canvas? Canvas is preeminently the place where painting takes place, and in order for this “taking place” to be exposed, made evident as such, the stage too must be made to show itself as a stage. So the canvas is that which, in the painting, has not yet been assimilated or subsumed into painting. Or which will not be so assimilated, one might say, until the last minute-that is, until the fecund unity of the picture emerges from the sparseness and welter of those seemingly stray bits of pictorial matter that float as if indifferent to one another across the picture. The ambivalent nature of the canvas-its hesitation to be seen as either already a manifestation of painting or as a mere field, a readymade, on which that which is truly painting will take place-is lightly mocked in some of Fisher’s paintings by certain passages that have been painted in a shade as close as possible to that of the canvas itself. Fisher’s ability to joke with the fundamentals of his art in this way is, needless to say, quite distant from what in the ’80s used to be mislabeled irony, despite one commentator’s having mistaken his work for a “tongue-in-cheek conceptual exercise” (Kim Levin, The Village Voice, October 26, 1993), which is just what it is not. It’s more like the matter-of-fact recognition that there are, after all, more serious things in life than this-a simple matter of keeping one’s fascination with art in perspective.

Now as for the events that take place on this canvas: To characterize them is either too easy or too difficult. Pours, smears, dabs, rubbings, stains…and I can use the thesaurus, if I care to, to expand the descriptive vocabulary to encompass flows, discharges, smudges, spatters, traces, blots, mottlings….but that will hardly give the reader a real sense of what these things look like. They are of the order of material instances that are differentiated but not individualized. Sometimes they seem to be the kind of things that happen accidentally, but more often they seem rather to be the sort of marks one might make intentionally and yet absently-the kind of marks one might make in order simply to test a brush, or a particular mixture of pigments, that one intends subsequently to put to some more concerted use. And then there are marks that appear to be not on but somehow of its surface-places where the canvas itself seems to buckle and harden. These are caused by puddlings of paint on the verso-just as certain other more or less faint discolorations have been made by inundating the other side of the canvas with paint: another deconstruction, if you will, of the canvas’s status as ground for the events of the painting.

It is this sense of absented intentionality that leads me to believe that the underlying concern of the paintings is the relation of the artist’s intentions to the realm of determinacy and indeterminacy (which is to say the realm in which intentions are irrelevant). Wasn’t that Buster Keaton’s subject too? Houses fall down around him, but Buster soldiers on as if everything were going according to plan and, somehow, everything does work out right. Of course, that’s because his alter ego Keaton was there behind the scenes directing the film. Craig seems, in these paintings, to be rummaging around in the studio, spilling things, sopping up the mess, procrastinating by trying out his new brushes, doing anything but having a solid go at asserting his intention to make a painting-and somehow or other, at the end of the day, there’s a ravishing one anyway. Lucky thing his alter ego Fisher was there patiently directing. To get a grasp on the paradoxes of intention, it seems-the way you can fulfill them by evading them, and presumably frustrate them by carrying them out as well-you’ve got to be of two minds.

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