Jason Farago, Seph Rodney and Karen Wilkin joined DAVID COHEN to discuss:

Susan Philipsz: A Single Voice
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21 Street, New York tanyabonakdargallery.com

Aneta Grzeszykowska: Mama
Lyles & King, 106 Forsyth Street, New York lylesandking.com

Sangram Majumdar: Offspring
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, New York shfap.com

Adam Liam Rose: Threshold
Ortega y Gasset Projects: The Skirt, 363 Third Avenue, Brooklyn oygprojects.com

James Hyde: Western Painting-Magnasco
Cathouse Proper @ 524 Projects, 524 Court Street (enter on Huntington St.) Brooklyn cathouseproper.com

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JENNIFER COATES
We are sitting here in your studio and I wanted to ask you about these paper constructed dioramas you have made over the years as sources for your paintings. I’m curious about how they have influenced your work and how they connect to the taped mixed media on paper pieces that are in your current show with Steven Harvey.

SANGRAM MAJUMDAR
Making the dioramas was a way to slightly detach myself from the physical environment, the kind of interiors we live in. If I paint something that’s in front of me or a space that I’m in, it’s hard for me to stop measuring my body in terms of what’s around it. Working from observation is about noticing the air around things and what happens when the body is in space. By removing that direct association, it helped me think of the painting as its own world, one step removed from where I am located.

So it’s a way to disorient yourself? Your relationship to an actual room had become too known and so shrink it down, to artifice it was a way to make it strange to yourself?

In a very simple way it was about being able to control it, do anything with it, flip it upside down. On one hand I wanted ground myself in light, air, gravity, but at the same time I wanted openness, and the ability to just change it all like it were a stage.

So you can be like a god!

Yes, I’m a god in training! The space in the paintings started to change, get more animated and dense.

After the 2016 election I felt like I needed to clean house – there was so much noise and anxiety in the world and I didn’t want that happening in the paintings. I wanted the painted space to be more of a refuge, calmer, a little bit simpler.

I was also thinking about the politicized language around walls and borders. I’d been painting rooms, but I hadn’t really considered the walls. What happens when you’re in a room? There is empty space that eventually hits a wall and what is that wall? The idea of literally getting closer to the wall was a way for the space in the paintings to get more compressed – layer on layer. My process now is about layering, removing, adding, and what happens if all the action is happening within a compressed space. Collage has become a way to approach that. When you layer collages over time, previous processes come through, and different layers of information are revealed. I remember one of the first times I saw frescoes in person and noticing how much was missing, how the decayed parts have become just as important as the information that was still legible.

What’s missing becomes part of our contemporary understanding of beauty. The ruin of the past in Classical sculptures that have lost their limbs, the darkening of formerly opulently colored paintings – the dirt, accumulation and dismemberment became part of western ideas of beauty. In some cases artists are trying to consciously re-make that.Yeah. I’m sensitive to that. I don’t want my paintings to become ruin porn. But I love how when there is information missing that our eyes can put it back together.

Ruins both unmake and remake themselves like a painting. When you have these moments where you see the picture breaking down and the materiality of it asserts itself. The picture remakes itself into an image and then it disappears into the materiality.             

I’d love to talk to you about color. Is color intuitive for you or do you have specific color worlds you are imagining before you start?

It is intuitive definitely. I’m interested in discordancy and setting up odd color relationships. The color can come from different worlds. One world could be a really rich color space like Monet’s last paintings and you can put that next to a color world like that of Ryder and it can all co-exist in one painting.

So you have all these micro relationship of color harmony moments in a larger composition. That’s a really exciting idea.

Let’s talk about “Alarm” [a large work, not exhibited, in the artist’s studio]. I love this painting. This crazy peach color you are using. In one area the peach is more opaque and in another it is painted more thinly over yellow, which comes through and creates an optical buzzy moment. They represent two temperatures. And then there’s this large, black, semi architectural, semi bodily construction that makes me think of something epic that an abstract expressionist would create. It feels monumental in that way and participates in a certain kind of art history. But then you’ve got these rays, dots and dashes that seem to come from a video game language or maybe a diagram. And at the edge it tapers out to gray. Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on?

Color is about making a decision and not screwing with it. I’m not trying to tweak things. That’s something I used to do, because when you are recording information, you have to really pay attention to the color relationships of the objects and spaces you are painting from. When you’re not observing but you have a thought in mind, then you have to just put it down. The only thing that you’re observing is really the painting and the world within it. Then painting becomes more about what are you willing to believe in, what surprises you. You can change it because you want to (or not) but it’s because of what’s in the painting rather than what’s in the world.

So in this painting “Alarm,” I put a figure in it to make this really monumental body. This was the key painting that led to the work in the show at Steven Harvey. The figure comes from an Indian miniature painting that depicts Thataka, a princess turned into a demon attacking Rama and Lakshman from the story of Ramayana. While in the story Rama is obviously the good guy, it’s Thataka who has such commanding presence in the painting. She was so much more interesting, almost heroic even. She is holding her ground. She’s in profile with one hand raised and her feet are moving in the same direction, but she’s a schematic figure. She’s holding potential energy within her body.

Does the color of the figure in your painting relate to the color of the demon in the Indian miniature?

No. In this painting I decided to pare down the color world into primaries plus black and white. I wanted the figure to be a luminous blue but dark. In Hindu mythology Krishna is often blue but that is not necessarily why this figure is blue.

I’m curious about your relationship to modernism and how is that connected to these Indian miniatures. How do these interests play out and intersect?

I have a somewhat detached relationship to where I grew up. I was really young when I left Calcutta. At RISD and at Indiana University where I went for my MFA, European art history penetrated my brain and body. I didn’t really know anything about Indian art growing up. When I started looking at the miniatures they reminded me of early medieval Italian art like Frangelico and that use of schematic color. I’m more drawn to the geometry, the color, the space, the framing elements. In this painting we’ve been talking about “Alarm,” the framing elements are like a video game I used to play.

I always bristle a little bit when discussing my work in terms of modernism because while it’s obviously there, I’m more interested in finding parallel connections from other histories and sources. A figure might come from an Indian miniature, but the color might come from a video game just as easily.

That’s what I love about this painting – your brain is telling you it’s a shallow space, but those modulations in the black – the matte to shiny, cool to warm – hint at a deeper more mysterious space. And then all the diagonals move into this vortex and with the scale of it, you are pulled into something overwhelming.

I like this painting too. I’m trying to trust what I’m drawn to, whether it’s in art or other elements that have been part of my life.

More just your lived experience embedded in the paint?

Yeah, the aspects of any given painting may relate to my cultural heritage or it may change and have a totally different set of associations.

A few years I gave my students postcards of paintings and had them paint them really from far away really quickly. The idea was to get them to focus on color and composition as broadly as possible.. One day in the studio I decided to try it myself with some postcards of Indian miniatures. I’m painting this postcard of a miniature done with a fine brush very carefully by someone who’s spent their lives learning these specific skills that I don’t have. I don’t paint like that at all – I’m painting with a bristle brush from far away, trying to translate it in 20 minutes. Failure is built in but so is that dislocation I’m interested in. My version will never be that. But at the same time, this is the only way for me to really discover it.

I just want to get back to the mixed media pieces for a minute. When I look at those pieces, there’s a sculptural quality that comes through and then it makes me think of your dioramas. But it also makes me think of this pixelated language that you’ve found in the direct painting gesture. What was the evolution of this stuttered language, how does that relate to three-dimensional space?

I ended up doing things I never thought I would do. if somebody had told me a few years ago I was going to use tape to do something, I’d be like, really?

The tape on a very simple level is an extension of a mark. You tear it, you put it down, you’re holding it at both ends, the hand presses it down. Maybe you try to rip it straight, but it never really rips right. I’m not cutting it with a knife or anything. So on one level it’s the closest mark to a painted gesture. But built within it is a distortion. I make a mistake, let me put some more tape on. It literally covers and erases and creates ground for a new decision. I like having that at my disposal because I feel like if I can make an image work with that blunt instrument, it’ll work when I’m going to paint it. My natural inclination is to be really sensitive to color and mark. So it’s disrupting my own sensibility.

The tradition of perceptual painting that I come out of is about observing slowly and carefully. But I want the image to hit you quickly and then then break down slowly via the layers that have accumulated.

Am I playing for both teams? I’m playing for the team that’s about erasing history: down with the past, newness is best, let’s move on to the future and just tear it down like an old building. But I’m also on the other team, which is about retaining connection to the past. That tension is akin to the world and how we exist as human beings. I want my paintings to be like that. I want them to be like people.

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, shfap.com

The post A God In Training: Sangram Majumdar in conversation with Jennifer Coates appeared first on artcritical.

Countless individuals, institutions, and causes lost a remarkable and irreplaceable friend earlier this fall with the passing of collector and philanthropist William Louis-Dreyfus. He literally transformed the lives of artists whose works he amassed. A stalwart campaigner for social justice, he pioneered ways of fusing his twin passions for art and for serving the underprivileged in the novel plans he laid for the dispersal of his collection. And, it can now be revealed, he was a significant and gracious supporter of artcritical magazine and its programs, a generous enabler who made no editorial demands and chose to keep a low profile.

I first got to know William in his capacity as a collector. He was a benefactor of the New York Studio School where I spent a decade as gallery director. The solo show of new sculpture by John Newman that I organized could fairly be judged a success on all fronts, starting with the quality of the work and its spectacular, architect-directed installation. Although John had enjoyed major attention at the outset of his career, attested to by the star-studded school lobby on opening night, his fortunes had taken a dip since the halcyon days of the 1980s. That changed with a steady flow of visitors and a review in the New York Times. But what totally galvanized the situation was a visit one evening to the galleries from Louis-Dreyfus. He evidently flipped on seeing Newman’s whimsical, fearless inventions. Quirky almost to a point of willful vulgarity, yet intense in their miniaturist energy, and heartfelt in pushing sculptural boundaries and chromatic possibilities alike, these intimately sized hybrids struck such a chord in the collector that he all but bought out the show. He would go on eventually to acquire three-dozen of Newman’s pieces and a number of drawings, and helped secure gallery representation for the artist. John is unabashed in declaring that William’s patronage turned his career around.

Alerted to William’s largesse – not to mention his appetite – I began to take proper note of him as a collector, especially when Christina Kee, who had been my work-study assistant at the School and later began to write for artcritical, joined William’s curatorial team. Nothing could quite prepare one for a first visit to his warehouse-cum-museum in Mount Kisco, NY where one could see room after room of efficiently stacked but artfully displayed works, often with one artist per room, although not a few artists needed more space than that. He had a penchant for outsider artists, amassing unparalleled holdings of James Castle, Bill Traylor and Thornton Dial (over 200 works by Castle and over a hundred each both Traylor and Dial). Tellingly, he preferred to avoid the term “outsider,” perhaps intuiting that all the artists he collected, well known or marginalized, academically trained or self taught, were equally charged by independence of vision and authenticity of touch.

His catalogue was a liberating and shameless mix of “big ticket” and oddball reputations, of conservative realists and outlandish mavericks, of modernist giants and student unknowns, it being very clear that the collector had his own criteria of worthiness. He had dozens of drawings by Giacometti; a massive early stain painting by Helen Frankenthaler among several other pieces from the same hand—an outlier in his tastes, this was a work whose quality he swore by; and literally hundreds of works each in different media by the social realist polychromatic sculptor Raymond Mason; the painter of hieratic and mysterious figures on beaches and blazing sunsets, Graham Nickson; the ethereal miniaturist Eleanor Ray; and others. He had more than 200 artists in his Mount Kisco Pithom and nearby estate. His collecting in such depth almost had an outsider, OCD aspect to it, as he would only half jokingly aver.

Eclectic as his holdings were, there were most definitely consistent qualities. He made no bones about the fact that he appreciated skill, hard work, individuality, authenticity, traditional mediums and a visceral sense of connection with the human story. Some of these were traits, it could be argued, that others were blessed to value in him, as a patron.

I realized that William was especially generous to take the interest that he did in artcritical. Although he was a literary man (for a decade he had been chairman of the Poetry Society and was a published poet himself) he was not in natural sympathy with art criticism. He was conscious of his alienation from prevailing art discourse. Although he obviously devoted enormous resources to collecting and supporting his collection, he knew that much of what he valued in art was out of fashion. That he was as maverick and “outsider” as many of the people he collected.

He knew about The Review Panel, having come to hear Christina Kee when she appeared in the series, but he wanted to know if we ever discussed more general issues or problems in art, rather than always focusing on shows. I argued that “meta” subjects often come up, but that to my mind it is better to have critics engage with specific bodies of work, and allow broader issues to emerge organically. Later, Christina shared her interpretation of this exchange, confiding with characteristic humor her sense that William’s dream was of one definitive, landmark debate, with someone arguing with the passion he felt on the subject, which would somehow dissipate all the misunderstandings that had arisen around art. He told me that he particularly liked the criticism of Jed Perl.

In “Generosity of Eye,” a film about William co-produced by his daughter, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, William outlined his audacious plan for the dispersal of his collection. Rather than leave it all to a museum, perhaps a new-built institution or a wing bearing his name, he would be donating it, for the purpose of sale, to a favored philanthropic project, the Harlem Children’s Zone. The creation of Geoffrey Canada, this is a cradle-to-college educational support system for an impoverished, at-risk community. Obviously, many of the artists William collected have or had little market beyond his own patronage, making the liquidation of his holdings problematic for artist and beneficiary alike, but the venture is a long-term one and will hopefully be handled with sensitivity and skill by trusted parties. Modest and self-effacing though he was, William didn’t shy away from the egotism underlying the altruism and risk in his gesture. The poet-philanthropist-collector-humanist was also—after all—a venture capitalist. He wanted the market to vindicate his taste.

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November 20 to December 22, 2013
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
New York City, ?917-861-7312

(Projector: 237 Eldridge Street, between Houston and Stanton streets)

The title of Sangram Majumdar’s exhibition of recent paintings, on view at two locations on the Lower East Side, is “Peel.” The appellation seems to ask viewers to look beyond the surface to get at the paintings. But when they do so they are likely to find little “there” there.

The Calcutta–born artist received his MFA from Indiana University, a graduate program famous for its emphasis on figurative painting, and true to his schooling, previous exhibitions presented still lifes, landscapes, interiors and portraits rooted in direct observation. Using a perceptual process that incorporated exacting measurements and finely calibrated tonal ranges, Majumdar’s earlier artworks recalled realist canvases by Antonio López García and Euan Uglow. In his 2008 interview with online magazine Neoteric Art he declared that, “As a painter, my concerns really revolve around form, space and the specificity of the experience.”  Making straightforward paintings with rich colors and decorative patterns, Majumdar’s canvases packed a punch.

But in “Peel,” Majumdar’s third solo show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, paintings are left in an ambiguous state between representation and abstraction. Though works here contain discernable imagery, scenes are not fully described. Loosely sketched depictions of hard-to-recognize objects are out of scale and strangely lighted. Majumdar’s canvases are deliberately evasive.

“Torque,” 2013, for instance, the first painting greeting gallery visitors at Forsyth Street, is a canvas comprised of gray and brown stripes. The composition is based on Majumdar’s own studio storage rack, where cardboard encased artworks, seen from the side, lean against one another. Rendered with a subdued palette, a hint of the studio beyond is visible between the wrapped paintings.

“Interrupted,” 2013, is a painting of a painting partially covered in paper and scotch tape, a trompe-l’oeil with a painterly touch. Though real-world surface textures and light are naturalistically rendered, this strange object with no clear meaning expresses only the laborious execution of a concept-driven exercise.

“Paper Tree,” 2013, is a visual pun. Here lime green, blue and purple triangle papers were affixed to the wall in the shape of a tree and then painted. Majumdar’s composition, reminiscent of Ab Ex canvases by Jack Tworkov, is also an idea-driven work: a realist painting of an abstract symbol of the natural world, referencing both abstraction and representation.

Illustrating obscurity, a reclining female figure, lit from below, holds a mask over the right half of her face in “Look, See,” 2013. The figure’s left arm dissolves into brown background at the wrist while the striped patterning on a red dress, started but not finished, indicates a hesitancy to say too much.

At Projector, the second exhibition space around the block, two large oils reference interior spaces. “Unbuilt to Suit,” 2013, features a violet-colored staircase, the only identifiable form in the picture, leaned over in a glowing red room. “Step Right Up,” 2013, a seven-foot-wide canvas, looks like an attic space, with a chair that is stacked precariously. An essay in the exhibition catalog explains these scenes were inspired by a broken dollhouse Majumdar rescued from the trash heap, “rooms caught in the turbulence of disorganization, with all the sense of their original small scale removed.”

Majumdar has shown himself to be an ambitious painter with tremendous ability, but in this latest body of work he seems to be striving for obfuscation rather than clarity. In doing so he fails to realize, perhaps, that urgency in a work of art springs from unguarded, direct expression. In an effort to make smarter, more complicated pictures, Majumdar sacrifices the emotional impact of his earlier work.

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