In the long slow summer of 2020 Kathleen Kucka, artist and former curator of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, headed up to her 1850s country barn in Falls Village, Connecticut to make large scale works that would have been impossible for her in the city. During that time she discovered a unique building in the center of Falls Village that seemed to be lying fallow: A former post office, town hall, plumbing shop, and grocery store, this edifice was a bank just prior to the town acquiring it in the early 1960s. Twenty years ago, the Canaan Board of Selectmen began renting spaces on the first-floor to artists for their studios. Kucka saw a unique opportunity to bring artists she admired in the city to her own doorstep and in the process add life to her Connecticut community. An introduction to the powers that be led to a meeting with the town council, and before she knew it, she had herself a gallery.

Its name, Furnace/Art on Paper Archive refers to the town’s history as an iron smelting center while specifying her curatorial mission.  The 22 by 19 foot gallery has high ceilings that make the room feel airy and welcoming with lots of natural north light. The clean white flat files that hold the “archive” of works on paper by gallery artists, is prominent without taking up wall space and lets visitors know that there is much more to see than immediately meets the eye. In addition to her gallery space, Kucka has also taken hold of the bank vault as an exhibition space, accessed through a hallway where the Falls Village Café is about to be added.

Stephen Maine was the subject of the inaugural show at Furnace/Art on Paper Archive in May. The former Brooklyn-based artist and art critic and his wife, artist Gelah Penn, now live nearby. Titling his show “Cupcake Uptake and the Cloud of Unknowing”, Maine presented a selection of paintings on paper and two canvases.

His process-based abstract idiom combines the arbitrariness of chance with his acute aesthetic sensibility. Maine describes his practice deftly:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes . . .yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception.

When I look at these works, the artist Ingrid Calame comes to mind: Her tracings of actual shapes made by the every-day wear and tear on a typical sidewalk results in an all-over abstract pattern with a pristine graphic quality that belies the grittiness of their source. In Maine’s images, however, the organic patterns feel first hand, rather than mediated, in layer upon layer of mind-bending technicolor that protrudes from the surface like the buildup on any well-trodden road. Blobs sit on top of other blobs, creating not only the illusion of dimensionality with drop shadows, but actual dimensionality. They beckon scrutiny and reward the viewer with multifaceted incidents of color and form. His combinations of saturated color create dissonant vibrations that are mesmerizing and seductive and not a little jarring.

On the wall to the left as you walked into the space were four beautifully framed pieces (all of the works on paper are untitled, approximately 22 x 18 inches). They led you to the far wall facing the door and a six and half foot tall canvas, P17-0302 (2017) whose gorgeous aquamarine and ochre complemented, rather than detracted from the works on paper, adding to the sense of galactic immersion he masters in both scales. A further small canvas in bright red and green kept company with several more framed works on paper, as well as unframed paintings from the same series easily accessible in the flat files.

The show has a cohesiveness that illuminates the breadth and depth of possibilities Maine has been able to mine from this very specific and idiosyncratic method and yields an infinite combination of colorful possibilities that inspire reverie at a time we could all do with more of that.

Furnace/Art on Paper Archive, 107 Main Street, Falls Village, CT. Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 11:00–4:00

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November 16 to December 29, 2018
33 Main St., Torrington CT
fivepointsgallery.org

For some years, Stephen Maine has been making paintings in layers applied by printing techniques of his own devising. In so doing, he focuses attention on color and surface rather than hand-manipulated authorship and control. The recent display in Connecticut of what the artist calls Residue paintings (a genus begun in 2014) constitutes his most impressive exhibition, both optically and conceptually, to date. Five imposing canvasses, all 100 x 80 inches, were spaciously installed in a window-wrapped corner storefront gallery. While the paintings’ luminous crackle of oppositional colors was immediately striking, the gallery’s abundant indirect light slowly revealed, more subtly, the paintings’ shifting interplay of translucency and opacity. Moreover, the serial installation of the five works allowed one to discover that, while diverging radically in chroma and texture, the paintings were uncannily interrelated – each sharing a DNA of seemingly random scratches, pits and puddles, like quintuplets separated at birth.

Maine has published lucid and penetrating criticism for many years, and his concise explanation of his method and intentions is worth quoting in full:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes would save a lot of time and trouble. This indirect, intentionally imprecise production method yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception.

Maine implies by omission that the intaglio of gouges and markings with which he incises his Styrofoam plates, while perhaps hands-on, is by no means invested with the mystic graphology of Cy Twombly, or with the elegant violence of Lucio Fontana. Rather, the artist seems to be cultivating the “calculated crappiness” (as he put it in a recent rave review of Ryan Crotty’s process-oriented abstractions) which helps “avoid the slick seamlessness that sucks the life out of so many pseudo-minimalist paintings, and gives reductivist pictorial strategies everywhere a bad name.”

One painting in the current exhibition, P18-1001 (all works 2018), seemed both the shiftiest and the most plainspoken, being the result of a single printing of taxicab yellow over an intensely tinted baby blue ground of varying density. In context, this painting constituted a statement of the theme, the printed yellow image hovering as a coherent layer over the distant blue like a thought experiment.

The other four paintings embroider the image in layers of vibrant, interfering color. P18-0714 comprises a highly satisfying, coruscating variation produced by misregistered printings of harsh green, yellow and pink over a volcanic orange base. Maine pays close attention to the properties of pigment, and the phthalo green dye used here is unpredictably transparent, a kind of anti-color that can amplify underlying layers or go venomously black. The crucial factor in the interaction of Maine’s colors, however, is the “intentionally imprecise” slop in registration, which tends to outline bits of pattern illusionistically, as if they were cut from a wafer and raked with light. The hysterical contrasts of color at these edges is informational and arresting, like computer-enhanced microphotography.

Rather easier on the eyes is P18-0724, a luscious concoction of subdued orange over a ground of bluish-green you might see at an aquarium on a bright day. The opaque orange mass flows in places into sensuous pockets of purple, pink and violet underlayers, blending more liquidly than in neighboring works. A small area of patterned dots along the left side is also distinctive, more visible here than elsewhere. This anomalous patch of regularity seems to be a holdover from Maine’s previous Smoke pictures and Halftone paintings, closer-to-the-vest bodies of work which restricted themselves entirely to nuances teased from cryptic dot matrices.

The Ben-Day associations in those earlier paintings inevitably evoked Roy Lichtenstein’s and Sigmar Polke’s antipodal versions of Pop, while dissolving those associations in an acid bath of what Yve-Alain Bois has called Non-Composition. Maine’s Residue paintings, by contrast, are extrovert dynamos of color and surface whose image-matter is just scratchy enough to goad one’s eyeballs ­­– while steering clear of various camps (including camp). Neither beautiful nor ugly in themselves, the images incised onto Maine’s Styrofoam plates resist symmetry, representation, indexical process, symbolic language, and anything that can comfortably be called “expression.”

Maine seeks the philosopher’s stone of painting by maintaining a nimble skepticism, hedging all bets, and ruling nothing entirely out – not even tactical content. In addition to the patterned dots, Maine distributes several larger, emphatically geometric circles around the image that in several paintings resemble, with their shadows of misregistration, crisp Warholian silkscreens of a typewriter period. Maine places these cryptographs before us as if he were Ishmael describing harpoon scars on the physiognomy of the ineffable. Like the prodigiously erudite narrator of Moby Dick, the artist pleads ignorance, asking, in effect, “How may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”

The post “The Great Pleasure of Surprise”: Stephen Maine’s Residue Paintings appeared first on artcritical.

What with finessing the installation and a checklist of 41 artists (who are also editors, writers, interns and staff at artcritical and/or guest speakers on The Review Panel) I managed to forget to secure the services of a photographer. Luckily several guests had cell phones to hand, and extra shots have found their way to us via social media. An ad hoc arrangement which fits nicely with the collective and impromptu nature of the show.

Click on the photo below to launch the slideshow.

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STEPHEN MAINE: When I heard about the IABF, my first thought was: terrific! My second thought was… what a load of work it must be to launch a new art book fair. I’m wondering for how long you’ve been focused on developing the IABF. What were the circumstances of its genesis? How did the idea take shape?

KAREN SCHAUPETER: When I first conceived of the idea, I wanted to get it out the door around February 2016, during either the time of the LA Contemporary Art Fair, or Paramount Ranch — things that happen at the end of January — or alongside the LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) in the second week of February. But the timing was tight and the venue I wanted wasn’t available, so I went down to Mexico City and did an artist residency about two blocks from the Material Art Fair. They said “Come do this in Mexico City.” So I had Mexico City and LA developing before New York — those locations are essentially available when I get there. It felt like I was already getting off the ground in three different locations.

I first announced in May 2016 that I would do the fair, and the response was fantastic. I was expecting… well, you never know. I thought people might be protective of the PS1 event. But the responses were nothing but positive.

I created the IABF to include people from all over the world. This is the first fair, so we’ll see what happens. It’s all open to interpretation — I have certain expectations but I’m trying not to let my expectations overshadow whatever will actually happen, or the democratic spirit of the event.

Is IABF in any sense modeled after the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF)? Do you see IABF as a satellite fair, in the way that smaller-scale projects have proliferated around art fairs such as the Armory Show and Art Basel Miami?

I don’t know what word would best describe it. “Satellite” is kind of unavoidable, since IABF is the smaller of two fairs happening concurrently. But my goal is to make something a little more digestible, and more of a hybrid of an art fair and a book fair. We’re definitely not modeled after NYABF, though some other things have been inspiring, like the Index Art Book Fair in Mexico City. That venue is amazing, and the sellers are not overly pressured — it’s a relaxed environment. I’d like to see that at the IABF. And at the LAABF, I liked seeing the zines and the smaller publishers alongside the limited edition publishers. Seeing the high and the low together makes everyone appreciate what it is they’re looking at a little bit more.

We’re not competing with NYABF, because there’s been such an incredible rise in book publishing that they just don’t have the physical space for everyone who wants to do something. It’s great, and it’s definitely the “institution,” what everyone wants to be a part of, but there are boundaries and limitations. With all the newcomers making great things, there’s plenty of room for another fair.

Why is the IABF scheduled for the same weekend as NYABF?

It’s part of my effort to be efficient. Bookmakers from all over the world are in New York then, so why would I do IABF in, like, October? With all the fairs going on all over the world, you have to respect people’s time. I think it will alleviate some pressure at the NYABF — we’re one stop away on the East River Ferry, at the Greenpoint ferry stop.

Fairs are a function of capital as well as culture, of course, so I’m curious about IABF as a corporate entity. Who are the fair’s primary backers? Have you been pursuing corporate sponsorship?

There is no financial backing for this. I’m very DIY by nature. It’s completely operated by me, putting in time whenever I can. Our director, Kayla Fanelli, puts in a lot of time. There are a lot of other people volunteering, but in terms of administration, it’s Kayla and me.

IABF isn’t set up as a corporate entity at this point. I want to get through the fair first, then figure out the structure moving forward. We might decide it should be a nonprofit, or remain a sole proprietorship, fiscally sponsored by a group like NYFA or Fractured Atlas.

How has the IABF attracted exhibitors?

Mainly, I reached out to my email list, which includes about 700 publishers all around the world.

Can you give me an idea of who the exhibitors are? Will there be a concentration at the zine end of the spectrum, or of artist books/limited editions, or something else? And what price range can visitors expect to see?

We have over 60 exhibitors from the US and internationally. As to publications, there is quite a price range — from about $10 to $1,500. The mix is a little bit of everything, some of the zine-y/lowbrow/fetish material; the more crafty zines, using screenprint and woodcut techniques; and then higher-end publications and independent periodicals; a little queer culture; the independent gallery projects presenting one or more artists; and some larger academic things will be happening. Designers and Books will present their facsimile reproduction of an important avant-garde book, Depero Futurista, also known as the “bolted book.” The original dates from 1927, and it presages so much of where we’ve gone with graphic design over the past nearly 100 years. The new edition will be available for pre-order. It’s a great example of the book as a vehicle of communication, and of our effort to strike that delicate balance between art and commerce. 

You are a hybrid insofar as visitors can see original art also.

Yes. I wanted to open the door to smaller galleries, so they can present an artist’s work and not have to kill themselves financially. 

You’re keeping exhibitor costs affordable, then?

Exhibitors’ fees range from $250 to $2,500. I want to create a fair that’s more democratic and I hope to be able to keep a simply structured pricing arrangement. That way, gallery can get in for $2,500 and get 16 to 20 linear feet of exhibition area on two flat walls — and they can do whatever they want.

Nowadays, many if not most print publishers have some kind of online presence, but are any of your exhibitors involved solely in online publication?

No IABF exhibitor publishes online only, except for Tiny Atlas Quarterly. Tiny Atlas was started with the intention of making it a quarterly print magazine, but the Instagram handle took off, and the hashtag #mytinyatlas has something like 1.7 million photos attached to it. This is a project that is only about three years old. They have a huge community of people who embrace what they’re doing, and because they are a major part of the publishing community, it made sense for them to participate. It’s about the project, working with artists, and involvement with the community. Our lines are open.

Who is handling the exhibition design, and what is the concept regarding the look and feel of the visitor’s experience of the fair?

I am the creative force behind the exhibition design, much of which is rooted in being resourceful and democratic with materials and fees. Most of the contributions we have received have been in-kind with time, or majorly discounted flat rates. Kim Sutherland of Full Time-Part Time Design studio did our logo/brand element. I have help from interior architect Sarah T. Engelke, Faster Horse Designs, and countless others who are helping with poster layout, exhibitor catalog design, and printing: Nic Jamieson, Alexander Soiseth, C&B Printing and more. It’s really a grassroots project at this point. I think I have used up my friend favors for a while now!

How did you settle on the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse as a venue?

I’ve been in photo production for 17 years, and I’ve done a lot of location scouting. For IABF, I did quite a bit of legwork to find an appropriate place. A tip lead me to the Brooklyn Expo in Greenpoint, which wasn’t available, but the contact for that venue showed me a photo of their new space, the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, and I said, “Done! I want that space.” The vibe of this raw warehouse in Brooklyn is in some ways similar to the vibe of the fairs in Mexico City and LA.

Is any additional programming scheduled?

We have some help from a Brooklyn publisher called Perfect Wave, with performances daily from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, by Alice Cohen, The Vets, Sex Crystals, and Tropical Rock. There will be readings and panel discussions. Stephen Shore just started a new publication called Documentum, published by Fall Line Press, for which there will be an event. Hana Pesut, a photographer from Vancouver, will do portraits of couples who’ve switched their clothes, in the spirit of her book Switcheroo. It should be hilarious. We want to have some fun, and to keep a nice rhythm of something happening maybe every hour or two.

Of all the challenges this project undoubtedly presented, what was the biggest hurdle you had to clear?

Organizing during the summer was a huge challenge, because everyone is away. We were getting auto-replies from some people for the entire month of August. 

As a new venture, IABF has no financial track record as a baseline measure. By what criteria will you grade its success? Is exhibitor feedback important to you? I mean, in the event that exhibitors overall make money, gain contacts, get some publicity, etc. but the fair itself is not profitable, how will you proceed?

I’m determined, but I don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. I don’t measure success by what’s in the bank account, but I realize people need to sell their goods and make enough money that that they would do it again.

That’s a big part of the puzzle for a lot of the exhibitors, isn’t it?  

Well, maybe half-and-half. For some projects, it’s not important to make money. They have followings wanting to come see them, and we’re going to share in that. A publisher or gallery might go into it not expecting to be able to sell high-priced works. People have been managing their expectations in a healthy way. Everyone knows this is the first fair, and everyone — exhibitors and IABF crew — will be working hard to get people there. I think there’ll be a lot of interest just because it’s something new.

The bottom-line numbers are not the only measure of success. That will be based on the exhibitor experience and visitor experience: how exhibitors are taken care of, and how visitors feel about it while they’re there. Those are the most important things — without them, I don’t have a fair. I want it to feel roomy, with enough space to flow through and everyone getting proper attention, not lined up like trade show. The idea is for there to be movement, and a lot of people enjoying themselves. I think it will be like a breath of fresh air.

The Independent Art Book Fair runs at Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, 67 West Street, Brooklyn, September 16 to 18, 11:00-7:00. Admission is free of charge. For more information: www.independentartbookfair.com.

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February 18 to April 2, 2016
525 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

The work of New York painter David Row has been labeled “conceptual abstraction” but the unabashed physicality of his work—of which 15 choice examples are on view at Loretta Howard Gallery—suggests “calisthenic abstraction” as an equally apt designation. This exhibition’s checklist spans the promised 40 years, from 1976 to the present, and every painting is as much a material presence as it is a pictorial conundrum.

Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” is recognizably the source for the vertical, zigzagging motif in Koloph I (1986), implying that it might imaginatively extend beyond the top and bottom edges of the canvas. A pictorial field that seems too small to accommodate the figure—that is, in which the boundaries of the canvas or panel appear to crop the image—has long been crucial to Row’s compositional strategy. Variously reiterated, it yields all manner of spatial displacement and disjunctions. But this instability is carefully controlled, meticulously planned—another paradox that only deepens the pleasure this stunning show affords.

If the truncated figure/cropped ground is the exhibition’s through-line, the clearest evolution from Row’s early years to the 1990s is coloristic. Whereas Koloph I makes its point with just three hues—a brooding blue; a dense, cold gray; and black—the surface of Split Infinitive (1993) is scraped and repainted and scraped again, producing complex optical blending. Roughly approximating mustard yellow and blue-black from a distance (and in images), the surface is streaked and flecked with pale cadmium green, teal blue and a tamped-down alizarin crimson. The painting features concentric ellipses, a signature device that emerged in Row’s work of the early 1990s. The artist’s take on the ellipse—a foreshortened circle—is described by band of unvarying width, and thus both does and does not occupy illusionistic space.

At 7½ by 12 feet, Wind Cools Itself (1996) is still more chromatically complex, resonating in both major and minor keys. The wind in question is no balmy zephyr, but a gale that howls through the painting, rattling its shutters. Across a black ground smeared with white and green a great coiling band unspools through a scraped and squeegeed zone of underlying Popsicle orange, candy pink and lime green; qualifying its dominance is a vertical panel (more oranges and greens!) in which screened grids of tiny dots buzz. It is the most unhinged painting in the show, teetering on the edge of chaos. Row admires Indian painting; this work’s title might refer to a well-known Basohli gouache-on-paper work from 1730 in which a parti-colored cleft in the rocky Himalayas encloses a swarm of serpents, and trees with dot-filled green blobs for foliage. The deep space beyond—the heavens?

A grid of rather larger screen-printed dots is way up front in Here and There (2003), laid over an interlacing of flat brushstrokes that resembles a nightmare freeway interchange seen from high above. The grid reads as a pixelated scrim, with orange on the left half, green on the right. As in other works, bifurcation suggests two sides of the same coin; “Here” might be the picture plane, “There” the middle ground into which the brushy figure recedes.

The gallery’s walls feel crowded, but it is pointless to quibble over any specific inclusion; Row’s trajectory has been rich and varied, and the gallery is not enormous. Among the surprises is Omega (1991), in which concentric ellipses in charcoal and ink are distributed across the top sheets of three intact, contiguous watercolor blocks—an unconventional use of a traditional material. It echoes the three-canvas structure of the closely related Split Infinitive, which hangs nearby. Row’s work in fresco merits mention also, particularly Dean Street Special (1990), a somber study in brick red and olive green. The eccentrically rectilinear support’s chunky thickness almost—almost—eliminates the window-like illusionism of the picture’s face.

In recent years, the artist has worked on irregular polygons with (usually) six or seven sides, of which none is perpendicular or parallel to the edges of the framing wall. This family of shapes relates to the silhouettes of the artist’s smallish, cast-glass “Lighttraps” sculptures. But an understated horizontal/vertical axis, keyed to the painting’s center, anchors the work’s equilibrium—in Elektor (2013), it provides a spectral, yellow-orange ellipse another compositional structure to confront.

The familiar claustrophobic tension of ellipses expanding outward to press against a polygonal boundary is present also in Joule (2016), but its surface (it is oil on wood panel) feels significantly less worked-over; it is fresh, even lively. A smoldering red-orange peeks out from between the inner, blackish ellipse and its whitish surround; stirred up here and there, turning pink, are traces of this underpainting, which also resides in a diagonal incision slicing across the panel from top to bottom. The humming visual energy of Joule is quite unlike that of the strenuous Wind Cools Itself, or the workmanlike problem solving of Split Infinitive, or the radiance of Elektor. Each is unmistakably Row’s, and each reveals a different side of this artist’s restless intelligence.

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September 29 to November 14, 2015
81 Barclay Street (between Greenwich Street and West Broadway)
New York City, 212 220 8000 ext. 3013

“Diphthong,” a group exhibition of 17 artists curated by participating artists Stephen Maine and Gelah Penn, offers an axial slice into process-oriented abstract art being made today. By focusing on work that involves procedure and improvisation, touch and distance, this show raises intruiging questions about unpredictability and intention

The artists here are performing openly, making work that materializes physically in ways that remain apparent to the viewer. This can be a kind of misdirection, with “nothing up my sleeve” yielding something surprising and mysterious.

Distant descendants of Surrealist automatism, many of the works here are made free of conscious control. All the artists — who are working in a wide range of modes — are heir to Process Art of the 1960s and 1970s and more recent conceptually oriented painting that uses process as a meditative or exploratory practice.

The works organize themselves into degrees of directness of method and feeling. And while everyone here shares a highly charged visuality, they differ in the qualities of human feeling that they embody. This sense of “the ghost in the machine” is a kind of haunting in work that has its origins in the purely concrete.

At one far end of the spectrum is work that suggests a kind of fictive “painting machine,” with the artist as the operator. In the compelling paintings of Anoka Faruqee, for instance, pigment is furrowed by a custom-made trowel into moiré patterns. The effect is to see math made material, in a system set to a default mode of repetition and obsessiveness, all the while acquiescing to the inevitable glitches that arise in production.

In a parallel register, Stephen Maine confronts us with the residue of process, a material memory. He has layered a series of off-printings from floor mats and extruded foam to create his complex painting. In high-key green and magenta, the canvas has a kind of psychedelic, ruined glamour, making a painterly virtue out of the necessity of loss. It plays with our continual impulse to find a meaningful signal in the perpetual noise.

John Zinsser’s Nebraska Night Driving is a devastating painting, achieved with six tracks of blue roughly squeegeed on black, and an errant line of paint escaping, like a wild arrhythmia. The whole effect of this work is inexplicably moving.

There are two artists in the exhibition whose process is strongly improvisational, but each with their own emotional valence. Gelah Penn’s large, wall-mounted drawing employs Yupo (a synthetic paper), lenticular plastic, acrylic paint, graphite, and monofilament with photographic imagery of installations, this last element managing to implicate the viewer in the very process of memory. Six angular sheets of translucent Yupo articulated with folds, parts of a fractured whole, each bear an eruption in plastic and paint, suggesting a series of ruptures, both physical and emotional, in the precinct of art’s formal serenity.

Also in the improvisational mode is a rather hilarious work by Denise Treizman, Who Let the Stripes Out?, that sprawls from wall to floor. With her painted ceramic elements and found materials including a duster, matting, tape, foil, and colored sand, she has made something improbable, a multi-directional sculptural party, full of color and high spirits.

Of the works that incorporate a sense of conscious making, notable are the stitched canvas paintings of Rebecca Ward, which actually entail a subtle kind of unmaking. Deconstructing areas of the canvas into the threads of its vertical warp generates a kind of scrim. The result is to have the simplified, quilt-like field dematerialize and reveal reality beyond its bounds.

For a number of the artists, their process is one of accumulation — Leslie Wayne building and then depicting glowing cairns of discarded paint, Rosemarie Fiore collaging the residue of fireworks, and Michael A. Robinson assembling an all-black installation, comprised of a desk with objects, including a laptop displaying images that are also in black.

For the three sculptors in the exhibition, process becomes an idiosyncratic method for creating expressive forms. Kara Rooney’s digital collages use images of her sculptures, which are made by casting manufactured materials into cryptic black and white fragments. Julia Klein’s five sculptural elements, wrapped and plastered, are tall, spindly presences, funky, tree-like, and somehow animated. Susan Still Scott’s sculpture in painted canvas seems to hide a human presence, like the Venus de Milo in shrouds.

The painters include Elizabeth Cooper whose flows and gestures of paint suggest emotive uprisings, and Michael Brennan with hallucinatory, icy monochromes. Jaq Chartier’s dispersions of color have the quality of scientific, photographic documentation. Carrie Yamaoka and Thomas Pihl are the most minimal of the painters here, Yamaoka with reflective fields of color on mylar, Pihl with glowing expanses of finely grained color.

Artists have a knack for taking the art in their orbit and crystallizing it into intriguing exhibitions. In curating this show, Maine and Penn have gathered work of widely divergent methods, impulses, and poetics, signaling an open-ended, generous process of looking and relating.

The post The Ghost in the Machine: Diphthong at the Fiterman appeared first on artcritical.

June 3 to August 14, 2015
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 206 0220

A group exhibition may be tightly focused, like a beam of light that penetrates the artfog to reveal a previously obscure order. Or it may cast a more diffuse glow, allowing the assembled works to illuminate one another, and viewers to intuit an order as they may. The latter curatorial style is just as rigorous as the former; if anything, a less programmatic exhibition requires (and rewards) heightened alertness to unexpected affinities among diverse works. Such an exhibition is the lively, elegant “Space Between,” on view through August 14 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Curated by Louis Grachos, Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin, and FLAG Art Foundation Director Stephanie Roach, “Space Between” is ostensibly a consideration of objects in which the conventions of painting coexist with characteristics native to sculpture. This cross-generational exhibition of 33 works by 24 artists also reaches to photography to demonstrate the interplay of pictorial and physical space, exploring the fuzzy edges of this fruitfully gray area.

Of course, spatial ambiguity is not front-page news. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915 – 23) is but one illustrious 20th-century example, among many others. And then there is the ancient tradition of bas-relief, which transmutes ambient light into chiaroscuro. But “Space Between” doesn’t overplay this hand, as it touches also on the persistence of a certain shape-heavy, color-centric strain of abstraction and, by extension, urges viewers to think about art history in terms of continuity rather than wave upon wave of innovation, of radical newness.

Three relatively recent works by Ellsworth Kelly anchor the show. The most salient of these is Blue Relief Over Green (2004), two oil-on-canvas monochrome rectangles joined at a right angle and measuring about seven by six feet — plus, (the all-important third dimension) the two and three-quarters inches depth of the panels’ stretchers. The seemingly minor physical displacement of the picture plane interferes with the property of color — even Kelly’s full-throated hues — to appear to advance or recede in relation to one another. The visual tension is exquisite, and sets the tone for ”Space Between.”

Gazing down into Roni Horn’s Pink Around (B) (2008), a solid glass disk 40 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, the viewer is simultaneously impressed by its mass and beguiled by the blushing delicacy of its coloration. Sadie Benning’s compact wall pieces, such as Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (2011), embody color quite differently: on these small, plaster-covered panels, two distinct hues occupy the same physical plane while vying for illusionistic space. Meanwhile, the title divulges the object in Thomas Demand’s photographic triptych, Detail (Sportscar) (2005), in which extreme cropping renders unrecognizable these sleek orange forms.

In this context, attention to color doesn’t necessarily imply abundant chroma. The oldest work in the show is Mystry Man (1984) by Tony DeLap, a seven-foot-high wall construction made of canvas over an eccentrically shaped and beveled wood stretcher and painted a precise shade of gray. Nearby is Wyatt Kahn’s Untitled (2014), another painting/sculpture hybrid, in which the deadpan color of raw linen contrasts with the flat panels’ animated, undulating contours.

There are two corner pieces in the show. Untitled Still Life (2013) by Kaz Oshiro is a large, cherry-red, square canvas tipped 45 degrees, its left corner bent and crumpled where it meets the adjacent wall. It seems a bit reluctantly sculptural. Jim Hodges contributes Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink) (2014), in which two mirror-tiled panels — irregular polygons — reflect each other and complete themselves. It is dazzling, and makes you giddy.

Two adjoining galleries testify to the wide influence of Agnes Martin on the work of contemporary artists. One space houses Martin’s Peace and Happiness (2001), a wonderful 60-inch-square canvas comprising alternating horizontal bands of azure blue and dusty white, faintly delineated in pencil. The mirage-like effect is atmospheric one moment, concrete the next. In its proximity, Rebecca Ward’s clandestine (2015) — a five-foot-high work in which stitched sections of canvas, painted in pearly tones, are partially deconstructed to reveal the stretcher—shares this Martin’s split personality. The Sun, Chapter 1 [diagonal edge, horizontal stripe] (2001), a quiet stunner by R.H. Quaytman, also reflects on its own structure; the primary motif, a diagonal band, depicts in section the plywood panel on which it is painted. The interconnectedness of visuality and materiality is borne out in other splendid works in this gallery by Julia Rommel and Svenja Deininger.

A second Martin, the 12-inch-square Untitled #6 (1999), keeps company with a trippy, mirrored, space-confounding 2D work in glass, mirror and wood by Olafur Eliasson, Walk Through Wall (2005); a cast resin piece by Rachel Whiteread, titled A.M. (2011) — in homage to the Martin? — which seems to refer to a gridded windowpane; and two colored pencil drawings by Marc Grotjahn from his “butterfly” period of a decade or so ago. Rounding out the show are terrific works by Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Sérgio Sister, Andreas Gursky, Blair Thurman, and Douglas Coupland (yes, the novelist).

In the mid-to-late 1950s, Kelly and Martin worked in a loft building on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Contrary to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist autographic touch, improvisational composition and spatial flux, they concerned themselves with unbroken color and unambiguous, hard-edge shape. Decades of “isms” (and the neighborhood’s loft buildings) have fallen like dominoes since those days, but the deeper structures of contemporary art’s visual vocabulary remain intact and vital. As Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are lauded for eliding painting and sculpture in the neo-Dada 1950s, so too do the efforts of Kelly and Martin (and other Coenties Slip figures like Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman) echo today.

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Phoebe Hoban, 2014
THE EDITORS, 2011
Franklin Einspruch, 2011
Stephen Maine, 2011
John Goodrich, 2006
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Acquavella Galleries.

Full index entry for “Lucian Freud” at artcritical

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Stephen Maine: Halftone Paintings at 490 Atlantic Gallery
April 5 to May 10, 2014
490 Atlantic Avenue (between Nevins Street and Third Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 344 4856

Surface and the illusion of surface are the heart of the matter in the work of two abstract painters whose recent exhibitions in Brooklyn dangle the mystery of process and the indisputable facticity of material before the viewer. Stephen Maine’s paintings utilize a Luddite methodology that mimics and critiques the patterns of higher-tech dot printing processes while Amalia Piccinini coats her canvases in skeins of dark stains with accretions of paint, forming a self-consciously imperfect and mottled texture. Both artists circumvent typical questions of composition, instead conceptualizing painting as coating, skin or happy coincidence: within these alternative parameters though, they generate a considered reappraisal of recognized tropes.

Piccinini’s approach to paint explicitly invites many interpretations. Unabashedly abstract, they nonetheless invoke the underside of a Tiepolo thunderhead or the hills in the background of an El Greco crucifixion — there is a classicizing painterly style at work here. But her method of applying oil and acrylic paint implies both intentionality and accident, and revels in pushing the viewer into a position of interlocutor with the canvas. Her gloomy, dark pieces are a primer of references to Abstract Expressionism; the entire canon of that period contributes details, but as an artist she is less precious or egocentric and more mischievous. Resembling fireworks fading in a dark sky, Touch (2014) is a light-absorbing darkling canvas — transparent colors drizzle and trickle into nothing, and as they do, the pigment encounters dried bumps on the surface. Though there is the sense that the colors fulfill a careful and valuable role within the artist’s canvas, it is also apparent that they have been added later and are forced to contend with the preexisting lumps, scuffs and scumbles on the surface. Into this milieu Piccinini also adds glazes, creating pools of glittering reflectivity, versus regions of brooding matte black.

Stephen Maine’s Halftone paintings harness that seductive graininess of imperfect technological reproduction. Using a monoprinting or stamping method to apply acrylic to the canvas, he layered veils of dots of various tints and hues over each other and in so doing generates a picture plane that on the one hand insists on some unknown algorithm of order — implicit in the idea of mechanical reproduction is the assumption that there is a tool interface, a disjunction between the hand of the artist and the final work of art, allowing for repetition. Conversely, Maine’s process is purposely flawed in terms of reproducibility; he doesn’t know what the end result will be and therefore the pieces are inevitably unique. The images are titled in numbered series, with a mock scientific rigor, as for example: HP13-0701, HP13-0702, HP13-0704 and HP13-0706 (all 2013). These four are all identical in size (20 x 16 inches) and do resemble each other in color — light blue points over an orange background — but their similarities are like a stop motion sequence of a cloud or billow of smoke. The viewer finds herself uncomfortably situated between the cartoonish deconstruction of the printed image of Lichtenstein or Polke and the indulgence in mechanical process of Warhol’s silkscreens. Within this context Maine’s gorgeous paintings seem like casual studies of entropy, a wily clockmaker winding up a machine to produce sexy mistakes.

HP12-1212 (2012) layers an inconsistent field of black pixels over a pale ochre base. It yields an imaginative graphic cartography that the mind automatically leaps to find some recognizable point of reference for. If we can’t discern the metaphorical value behind the strength of one patch over another, as in a topographical diagram, the patterns of darkness and blind spots in the imprint offer an insight into the primitive and capricious nature of Maine’s process. But it is impossible to tell if the original pattern is identical to its doppelganger, or if something was lost in translation. Along the edge, the background bursts through like a slide melting in a projector, but again the singular idiosyncrasies of the surface belie the fact that though this looks like a copy, it is one with no apparent referent. The familiarity is very confounding. HP11-0402 (2011) is less frustrating, but again for no reason in particular except that the black dots are more material and they lie over a vibrant orange base and approximate a composition with more finality — the devil is in the details.

Piccinini’s pieces are more amorphously formed and much more diffuse in their legibility. Untitled (2013), a horizontal black canvas with eruptions of orange that vary in degrees of saturation — burning brightly, but quickly melting back into the black or floating off in ghostly sheets and billows — perhaps projects a sense of despair and deep, unsettled anger on the part of the artist. Piccinini embraces the proclivities of the media to flow and pool and seeks to erase a sense of hand. She engages in the psychological game of pushing our buttons with color, and though all the works evince a visceral response through the aforementioned art-imitating-nature application of pure abstraction, some, such as the multicolored Touch and Privilege (2014), employ a more stilted and painterly, but more effective approach to luring in the viewer.

The amped up imitation of natural randomness is a favorite pastime of the abstract painter: the hallucinogenic marble passages in Fra Angelico, Hockney’s meditations on ripples in a pool or Alex Hay’s reproductions of wood grain and cracked paint. Both Piccinini and Maine inhabit the interstitial realm of having their paintings appear reminiscent of something, but that resemblance is to the most ambiguous of models: cloudy landscapes and blown-up Xeroxes. In line with their fabrication, the paintings seem imitative of process itself. Various crystalline effulgences appear to well up from Piccinini’s paintings while Maine’s conceit may be time-based: oxidation or the leaching away of a surface.

The post Surface Tension: William Corwin on Amalia Piccinini and Stephen Maine appeared first on artcritical.

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Joining moderator David Cohen, the panel discussed Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, T.J. Wilcox: In the Air at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bruce Pearson: Getaways at Ronald Feldman Gallery, and Arcadia: Paintings by Bill  Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries.

To view Slideshows: While we sort out a minor technical issue, please click the “video mov” icon to view slideshows; the options underlined in blue are not currently working

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