September 8 to October 8, 2016
521 W 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 695 0164

At Loretta Howard Gallery this month, six sculptures by Joel Perlman make the best argument I’ve found recently for reassessing a growing tendency to consider an artist’s dedication to working with a specific material as something that has passed into history. I don’t mean to imply that the assemblage techniques currently dominating, for instance, the Turner Prize competition are not adding to a welcome broadening of the sculptural genre. I’m wary of allowing technical mastery to lapse into a misguided notion of obsolescence. Intimate knowledge of a material gained through hands-on experience and nurtured along with an artist’s talent, judgement and intuition, has been a property of sculpture shared by nearly all cultures and in nearly all historical contexts. It is not a style. It is the recognition that sculpture has a formal essence.

As Perlman’s work shows, to develop an intimate and tactile knowledge of a specific material is not to unduly confine one’s experience, but to foster a level of focus that frees intuition and helps an artist develop an instinct for spatial language. His passion for industrial metal, specifically steel came early in his education. Leaving his native New York to spend a portion of his undergraduate years studying with welded sculpture pioneer Brian Wall at the Central School of Art in London, he returned to the states to complete a degree at Cornell, then went on to Berkeley. Though Wall has been a definite influence on his work, the sculptures at Loretta Howard are very much in the tradition of David Smith, particularly in regard to Smith’s innovative drawing mode as exemplified in the Whitney’s Hudson River Landscape (1951).

Like Perlman’s 2014 exhibition at Loretta Howard, the current work concentrates on a motif of open circular frames, with perimeters punctuated by half round and triangular shards dispersed intuitively along their curved edges. These marks function like swells and blots along a line of ink. One might consider them distant cousins to Pollock’s flung sinews, but the level of compositional control Perlman displays belies that tempting parallel. More than signs of mere spontaneity, these smaller elements read as stops or accents on a line of thought. When enlarged they intrude into the open space within each circle, redefine that space and accentuate the work’s abstraction. When smaller, they enliven pieces like Double Trouble (2015) by provoking a calligraphic interpretation that can lend itself to a range of implied references. Triangles suggest saw teeth; strings of half-rounds suggest worn gears.

Yet in either case, Perlman favors the abstract side of the spectrum and keeps the viewer’s eye trained on how the open spaces are defined by interruptions along the overlapping curves that define each piece. In Masterpiece (2015), a lower and upper emphasis on perpendicular circles cluster in a way that gives the space created in the center an illusion of expansion, which subsequently de-emphasizes the implied references to machinery. It is a delicate balance that changes with one’s concentration. The control Perlman demonstrates attests to his comfort with thinking in formal terms. Foremost here is a non-verbal and intuitive methodology apparently developed over decades of practice.

Perlman’s confidence allows him to occasionally leave the tactile security of steel, which informs his process through a feeling for weight, resistance and flexibility, and move to a near weightless material like Styrofoam in order to construct sculptures designed to be cast in bronze by means of a process similar to lost wax. Four of the pieces in the exhibition, including Double Trouble are fabricated this way. Casting in this manner is not all that different from the usual welding procedures, considering that it is based on assembled elements. Moreover, the production of multiples to which casting is often associated, is not possible in a loss system. Thus the motivation for its use is more like an exploration of visual ideas—sketching so to speak, not creating a line of multiples.

Each of the four cast pieces received a unique patina. Though subtle in range, color is important to Perlman, who prefers color that seems to deviate modestly from the look of the material beneath. And as he works intuitively, so experimentation with painting techniques follow. The two larger pieces in the gallery, Broadway (2016) and Wonder Wheel (2015–16) have been painted using a technique called powder painting or e-coating, which employs an electric current running through the sculpture that encourages an ionic bond between pigment and surface.

The formal vocabulary established in the smaller bronze pieces takes on an entirely different feel in the considerably larger Wonder Wheel. Here the triangular and half-round elements are scaled up, releasing them from their accentuating role and putting them to work merging and equalizing their relationship to the circular elements. A sense of solidity now joins the shards to the curve, leaving a more unified mass, the effect of which is to draw the eye to the irregular spaces between the solid elements—spaces that resemble the simplified edges of Matisse’s cutouts. They also — perhaps accidentally — create a pun on the idea of a cut-out.

It is this complexity, arising from nuance set upon nuance that makes contemplating these six sculptures a rich and open-ended experience. The variety of uses to which a few elements can be employed is limited only by the artist’s ability to see beyond the material fact of each shape toward a unified sculptural essence. And that ability, that sensitivity to variation and adaptation that Perlman’s work clearly demonstrates, ought to be a larger part of sculpture’s continued progress.

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Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

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July 22 to December 19, 2015
1230 5th Avenue (between 105th and 104th streets)
New York, 212 831 7272

Framed, perhaps unavoidably, by the artist’s predilection for mixing graphic and painted methods, Rodríguez Calero’s “Mártires Urbanos y Santos de Nuestros Días,” on view at El Museo del Barrio through December 19, 2015, is an exhibition that announces something more than Calero’s remarkable ability to mix media. Though her layering of techniques is somewhat unique and decidedly complex, there is really nothing unprecedented about them, which only proves to be one of the many reasons why her work is extraordinary — it embraces contemporary painting’s limitless possibilities yet transcends the unfortunately popular and futile search for the next new thing by taking a higher road.

Here are images of mostly solitary figures that are more than the dizzying array of visual sources and picture-making methods used in their creation. Though each panel is a composite of photo collage, stencils, embossments, painting, drawing and applications of metal leaf, what comes across in nearly every instance is a stately elegance — I would even say a genuine and rare beauty — the source of which is undoubtedly the artist’s commitment to images that address human dignity, furthered by a gift for design, color and especially nuance. As layered as the surfaces are, and as readable as each pictorial construction remains upon completion, to focus exclusively on their process, which I admit is tempting, risks missing both the vision and the ambition of their maker.

Only the second in the museum’s Women Artists Retrospective Series, (the first was an exhibition of Marisol’s work late last year) more than a hundred examples of Rodríguez Calero’s paintings, collages and acrollages (a term she coined to represent the more complex of her techniques) fill a long, narrow space in the main gallery that aptly resembles a nave. The sacred connotation this brings to the room is superfluous but certainly consistent with her highly effective use of sacred and iconographic tropes. Many of the images echo traditional representations of saints, but without making too much of the connection. In fact, it is her ability to fuse the sacred with the secular, and sometimes with the slightly profane that keeps a viewer’s focus trained on the stubborn spirit of each panel’s unique persona.

As they are rather complex images, a more austere example might serve as the best overview. Saint Anthony (1999), is built outward, so to speak, from a single photographic fragment cut from a magazine depicting the head of a young bearded man cradled in a high-collar sweatshirt. Added to this image is a hand and arm from another magazine clipping, and at the bridge of the man’s nose, yet another magazine fragment, in this instance revealing a woman’s eyes, tilted slightly against the axis of the male jaw that subtly emphasizes the benevolence of her gaze. Surrounding this gender-aggregated head is a nimbus of pale gold, painted in a manner similar to the decorative rubbings that overlay the painting’s deep liturgical red ground with decorative motifs. The pattern repeated in this particular motif is reminiscent of stamped sheet metal tiling that once covered ceilings in older New York tenement buildings.

Obviously not a purely traditional representation of the 13^th century Paduan monk, it is instead an assertion of the living metaphor St. Anthony embodies — a sympathetic archetypal figure that one could imagine seeing, as the artist apparently does, in the face of stranger on the street. It is this vision of living memory that Calero maintains so effectively in her work. Generally what comes across is the artist’s informed familiarity with, and an affection for, Nuyorican street culture filtered through the somber gravitas of the Spanish Baroque, the delirious fecundity of Picasso’s early decades and the manic inventiveness of Kurt Schwitters — all of whom are mentioned by the artist as significant influences.

The textures and rubbings that draw each composition into a coherent vision form a theme that runs through many of the larger panels. Yet their symbolism is delimited by their opulence, which is apparently the result of intuitive selections, each informed only by the graphic possibilities they offer. The tin ceiling reference may be interpreted as a visual trace of a NYC tenement, but in other panels, such as a riff on Catholic Sacred Heart imagery in The Apparition (1994), more mundane studio detritus functions much the same way, specifically in the figure’s crown, made in the shape of those extruded wedges that come attached to art store canvases — their dark silhouette offset by a flaming red nimbus encircling the figure’s drooping head.

As with all the larger panels, the focus is always on a figure enveloped in an ethereal, magical or hallucinogenic ambiance, the range and variety of which is stunning. But these represent only half the exhibition. The rest is devoted to examples of Calero’s more modestly scaled and more spontaneously fashioned collage work, much of which seems more attentive to a hip-hop than to a votive premise. These figures dance, bend and pose in gestures that recall imagery from advertising and music videos, although a few, such as Exotic Dancer (1994) use totemic imagery that reminded me of paintings by the late Emilio Cruz. Others, like Silent Scream (1997), echo notes typically struck by Francis Bacon.

Art historical connections fly of the pictures like sparks. Gustav Klimt came to mind as I stood before the majestic and mysterious Virgen Maria (2004), an experience I must report demands a visit to the exhibition. Its reproduction does little justice to its color and delicacy — a criticism, I hasten to add, of just about the only flaw in the show’s beautifully designed bilingual catalog. My only other gripe is the choice of a distracting yellow for the walls of the room where the collages were hung. But aside from these minor aspects, it is one of the most impressive retrospectives of a living artist I’ve seen in a long time.

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April 2 to May 9, 2015
529 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 9666

Julian Hatton’s painting seems to have been focused for some time on the contention that abstraction, if allowed to breathe in a deeper pictorial space, can maintain visual opulence without drifting too far from its essentially two-dimensional syntax. Among a generation of artists who matured on this side of painting’s pluralist expansion, where each painter’s style, look and touch was far more varied than that of their canonic New York School predecessors, Hatton held to a loose figurative scaffold based on landscape elements both perceived and imagined. Though the iconography in this recent work remains readable — each painting’s horizon is still easy to find — there is, in newer panels such as trouble and scrim (both 2015), a softening of the edges and a swelling of forms that now shimmer behind translucent washes instead of bending, as they once did, into each other’s space. From an optimal distance — coerced from the viewer by the five-foot spread of their frames — their reconfigured cohesion seems to rely less on drawing and more on a spontaneous manipulation of hue and texture.

The resulting airiness is a clear departure from his earlier work, which is reprised in this exhibition by trio (2012-13), an example of his harder-edged shapes, apparently reconstituted during the painting’s many stages of development so as not to diminish the careful co-ordinating of its unique structural invention. To drift from the success of this method is risky, for what’s been so appealing about Hatton’s work until now has been precisely its interconnected complexity. The changes seen in this exhibition may be attributed in some measure to his establishing a new studio in upstate New York. Like Bonnard in the south of France, Ellsworth Kelly in Chatham or de Kooning in East Hampton, a move from city to country will, for reasons not always linked to the landscape itself, reset a painter’s perspective.

A clue to the path taken in this shift between the earlier compositions and these newer, cloudier apparitions may be found in imprint (2014-15), a five-foot-square panel representing the artist’s trials at keeping the structure fixed tighter to the surface. Here, a familiarity with Hatton’s elevated horizon line helps the viewer read the ghost of a landscape that still exists despite the missing diagonals and story-book trees of his earlier work — elements that had once supported Hatton’s penchant for excavating spatial illusion with little cost to a lively surface. Imprint marks the change as its simplified shapes are not immediately recognizable as landscape elements. They also seem unusually tolerant of each other’s position in the composition.

And yet warbler (2014-15), to my eye the most adventurous of the newer canvases in the show, still owes something to the lexicon of the earlier work, though here it seems Hatton’s method has turned to a new and pronounced improvisation. warbler’s surface remains in an agitated state. Not a single section of color is truly resolved. Edges are ragged and makeshift. Translucency dominates. There is even a gestural coarseness replacing what was once a controlled chaos of endlessly suggestive shapes. The color alone in Warbler provides the link to earlier work, being mostly middle tones of contingent primary and secondary hues.

For anyone who has followed Hatton’s work these many years, an effort to catch up to where he is now will require diligence, which I believe is a fair expectation for him to make as his paintings have always appealed to a visually smart audience. Because his abundant inventiveness had constituted as near a legible pictorial language as created by any painter in recent memory, encountering its contraction will demand a real and unavoidable learning curve. The fact that Warbler takes pride of place on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue seems more than a hint that he is unlikely to turn back. Hatton is a painter whose strength had always been his ability to develop variations on a theme. The construction of an intelligent, readable and teasingly ambiguous pictorial image, even in this new looser style, still speaks to a continuity of vision.

Hatton has never been a painter fixated on concocting a new look, and there is no indication here of chasing novelty, nor is there any hint of applying arbitrary effects to avoid comparison with contemporaries. From the beginning his work has been a conscious adaptation of landscape elements knit tightly into compositions that owed a great deal of their cohesion to those compositional properties that as any instructor knows are maddeningly difficult to formulate verbally but can be appreciated in its many variations from the mature Nicolas Poussin to the early Richard Diebenkorn. As art fairs continue to hawk brightly colored things apparently meant for the simpler aim of accessorizing the expansive blank walls that once provided inexpensive working space for New York’s artists, it gives one hope to watch a painter keep to self-imposed limitations, not in spite of, but because there is more than enough room within a rectangle of canvas to address a thoughtful and historically aware sensibility.

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February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

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JEANNE WILKINSON: Are you concerned about your place in the current art world? 

PETER MALONE: It matters a lot to me that I’m seen in the context of what everyone else is doing, especially because I’m doing these conservative-looking portraits. I hate the idea of being shunted aside in a group of representational painters. I’m in the early stages of organizing an exhibition of portraiture that will focus on a contemporary painting, but will make no special reference to the edginess that often accompanies exhibitions of this type.

What do you mean by the word conservative?

Conservative is an extremely abused word. In the context of my painting it means not trying to be edgy, trying hard to avoid edginess and other contemporary art clichés. These paintings are as simple as a portrait can get. One of the few rules I set up for myself during this project was to insist that my sitters look directly at the viewer, so that a person coming into the gallery is confronted with someone looking right at them. I find when sitters turn away, they become a figure, an art school model. I dislike that insularity — that sense that the entire exercise is about being inside the art world. I want to portray people as they appear to us in our conversations with one another, without making it look as if they’re sitting on a pedestal in an artificial studio setting.

Another danger is the look of a photograph, so I try to stay away from the more obvious conventions of portrait photography, like frontal lighting.

You mean like a flash?

Yes, a flash right in a person’s face, or the way talking heads are lit for television. I work very hard to get the lighting spread unevenly. I don’t want a full tenebrism, but as rich a range of contrast as possible without killing the color of the darker side. I prefer to play warm against cool. I find the people who teach and paint in more traditional (conservative) modes tend toward tonal painting with very dark gray shadows, and I try to avoid that. The whole project has been a learning process. There are a lot of formal things I’ve had to teach myself.

Craft is a word that has long been disparaged, but what you’re talking about is the craft of painting.

Yeah. I still like the idea of matching what you do to what you see. A person who knows nothing about painting can see that these are convincing images of people’s faces, and if they know nothing else about painting they won’t get much out of it beyond that; but it is a starting point. There are other concerns. Craft isn’t everything. You can be a very competent painter and a very dull artist.

So craft is a vehicle.

It’s an important vehicle because otherwise you’re just left with evidentiary narcissism. A painting should be more than proof that the painter had an experience that was personally meaningful to them. The result of their work should be meaningful to the viewer as well. Maybe not in the same way as it was to the painter, but meaningful in some shared human way. 

Do you have an ideal viewer of your work?

I suppose an attentive viewer, certainly an educated one. Portraits are universal. Try to avoid looking at your fellow travelers across the aisle of a subway car. We are fascinated by each other’s faces. The viewer I imagine is a viewer that I can’t completely separate from my own habits as a viewer. I no longer believe painters should paint entirely for themselves. You step back eight feet from the canvas — a routine aspect of the painting process — and the scale gets thrown off and the contrast disappears and all sorts of problems arise. That is because eight feet away from your work you’ve entered public space. How the work is going to be seen by viewers is a public concern. And a concern with the public aspect of art is what separates a professional artist from an amateur.

It certainly affects my choices of what to leave in and what to remove or change, whether to push the painting in one direction or another. One of my favorite books is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983); his description of a gift economy, which freed me from obsessing over selling work, helped me to re-assess this idea that artists only paint for themselves. I like the idea that I am creating something that is to be given to someone, the viewer, the public, via an exhibition. And I try to address that responsibility while I paint.

My first written review — which proved too long for the editors but it’s on my website — was a comparison of a Barnett Newman and a Cy Twombly. They each had a piece at Sotheby’s and I thought I’d compare them. The conclusion I came to was that Newman was generous while Twombly was stingy. Newman is a visual painter who applies a shared cultural sense of color and geometry with his audience, whereas Twombly looks like he is hiding what he’s doing. All you get from him are indecipherable clues. People I respect find Twombly poetic. I don’t. I find his work irritating. It’s a very common perception that artists have to be lost in an introspective world. Introspection is of course essential, but not enough to provide meaning to a viewer, unless that viewer is willing to surrender to the artist’s self-regard.

The idea of the artist’s responsibility toward the viewer has changed dramatically in the last century.

The role of the artist prior to the 20^th century was to be a servant more or less to their patron, whether an individual or an institution. There was a literal contractual arrangement between the two. Later the focus became what the artist felt and the patron could choose from what the artist made available.

If indeed there was a patron.

True. But I find too much insularity a hindrance to strong painting. On the one hand we have absolute service to a patron, like the old social realism of Soviet art, and on the other hand we have the extreme of Cy Twombly’s notes to himself. I believe an artist is a participant in a conversation with the public. That’s what I mean by generosity. An artist ought to step back and consider where and how they are leading an audience that will put their trust in them. I think James Joyce succeeded in Ulysses (1922) but completely overshot the mark in Finnegans Wake (1939). It’s a fantastic piece of work, but impossible to read, if the word “reading” still means anything.

So it’s important to you that people understand your work?

Well, no, if the question implies that there is a right and a wrong meaning to each painting. I’m simply trying to get back to a kind of painting that doesn’t need a written explanation — that doesn’t need a statement on the wall next to it. I want people to talk about my work. Understanding is up to them. I don’t like explaining. I think there’s more than enough room inside a rectangle to share the world with another person. I want painting to work in its simplest form.

Its simplest form?

A single rectangle is actually quite a rich invention. You set aside this geometric patch on the wall and it’s different from the rest of the wall; that’s complicated enough. It’s a kind of window but you’re aware also that it’s a surface.

I saw some of your earlier work and it was very painterly abstraction.

In art school I had been a strict Minimalist, but afterwards I threw myself into Abstract Expressionism because it just felt good to let go. During that process I found myself painting things I was thinking of, like trees and hills, and I decided why not just paint trees and hills? I was trying to get the light, and once you’re trying to get the light in abstract painting things can get a little too artificial, a little too cute, so I decided it would be better to go straight toward representational art. I initially brought a Minimalist sensibility to my paintings. I would have, say, a single tree in the middle of an empty landscape. They were not unlike the portraits, which are also pared down and somewhat minimal. I’d now like to introduce environments — like how I handled still life a few years ago, with a large swath of light coming through a window.

I didn’t start painting portraits until 2011 and I think doing so fits into the contemporary art world pretty well if you think of what’s going on in alternative spaces and commercial galleries. But in terms of the museums — the Whitney, the Modern, and the New Museum — my work is as foreign as you can get. They’ve gotten very narrow in their focus.

They’ve gotten away from painting altogether.

Yes. Like this crazy show up at MoMA right now — “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” — where they’ve built a review of contemporary painting on an irrational science fiction idea about time. It’s an appealing idea for them because they’re stuck in time. By insisting on promoting a very edgy avant-garde, the major museums have hit a brick wall. They don’t know what else to do. So they keep reiterating edgy ideas, like Oscar Murillo’s unstretched canvas on the floor of “Forever Now.” It’s got nothing to do with painting, it’s just another tired old reiteration of installation art. MoMA has had recent shows by painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothea Rockburne, Sigmar Polke. But with “Forever Now,” they seem to be asserting an extremely narrow view of art, let alone painting.

Do you think the curators don’t understand or aren’t educated about painting?

Well, they’ve dismissed it… I think it has a lot to do with the university getting hard wired to the art world in a way that it hadn’t been before. In the 1940s Meyer Shapiro suggested to a young Robert Motherwell that he ought to leave Columbia in order to become a painter. Now to be an artist you first have to get an academic degree. The academic mindset has taken over much of the contemporary art world. Artists are taught their art has to exemplify accepted theories. You go through the wing of the Modern where they show work from the past 20 years and you find no color in anything; it’s mostly charts, wires, tubes and diagrams. They’ve lost interest in vision, color, nuance — in a word, painting.

I watch everything. I’m interested in everything, but as a critic I prefer to just write about painting. I think painting needs to be promoted. It’s a rich visual medium because it reminds us how perception is so fleeting. It cannot die. Neither can coherent writing, expressive dance, acting.

Yes, painting is dead, then it’s back, then it’s dead again. I’ve also heard of the idea of “de-skilling.”

It’s amazing isn’t it — people actually painting badly on purpose. Not for the old Freudian goal of reaching the unconscious, or striving for a culturally “primitive” look, but as a way of joining intent with novelty; coming up with something that looks new.

Yes, because apparently to be skilled is to basically be a hack.

Or to re-tread old ideas. To be fair, I think that’s how they genuinely feel about it. That’s why I purposely set out to teach myself to paint in a way that’s convincing and comparable to the portrait as it looked in the early 20th century — when painters were loosening up and experimenting, but had been trained in their craft.

I like making pictures, I like painting and I like looking at people, so what am I supposed to do with my life? I have to do something. I don’t think the portraits I’ve made so far are particularly groundbreaking, but they’re certainly competent, and from this point I’d like to see what I can do next. I want to see if I can make something of it without getting lost in preconceived ideas. 

Or coming up with a gimmick of some sort.

If only Modern art were studied more carefully. All these gimmicks have been tried. The Abstract Expressionists were trying to reinvent painting from scratch. Newman was proud of his skill as a painter. The AbEx artists never saw themselves as de-skilling.

Nor did the Impressionists.

No, they just wanted to be truer to what they saw; to loosen up a little bit. What we need now is more cross-pollination. That’s why I think those who paint the way I do should be showing their work with those who consider themselves edgy. Because in its own way my work is edgy; the fact that it’s so not edgy makes it edgy.

Jeanne Wilkinson is a writer and artist living and working in New York. Her short story “In the End Was the Word: a (Dis)missive from God” will be published in April in Catch and Release, an online magazine by Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts. Her essays have been featured on The Leonard Lopate Show and on NPR’s Living on Earth. An exhibition of her recent artwork is on view at the Yonkers Art Gallery until the end of February.

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Mary Ijichi, Dan Mills, and Jeffrey Reed at George Billis Gallery
October 28 – November 22, 2014
525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 645 2621

Functioning as pressure valves for excessively solicited curators and dealers, cluster exhibitions — mini-one person shows that offer a third alternative to the expansive solo show and the thematic group show — give artists the benefit of a solo listing, and the sponsoring gallery an efficient scheduling solution. Of the venues I visited one evening this month, the Painting Center managed to squeeze together solo shows by Elisa Jensen, Lois Dickson and Ying Li in their modest space, while the George Billis Gallery offered its own trio of solos with Jeffrey Reed, Mary Ijichi and Dan Mills. Billis’s recently expanded gallery is a welcome improvement for a venue dedicated to providing exposure to a large stable of artists. Lois Dickson’s choice of Elisa Jensen and Ying Li to share the space with her this month is an expression of solidarity among the membership of this long-standing artist-run institution. I wished they all had more space to share.

Elisa Jensen’s work was surprisingly large, having previewed the images online and assumed a scale that would have matched what I know of the space itself. They are urban scenes with a flat, linear quality reminiscent of Ben Shahn. The wall graffiti in Yellow Skirt, Brooklyn (all works 2014, except where noted) shares the same slender calligraphy as the bicycles depicted in several other pictures. By a crude delineating technique, Jensen suspends her imagery between a gritty realism and a self-conscious primitivism that in tandem captures both the solidity and the transient temporality of a cluttered Brooklyn sidewalk.

On the other side of a half wall, Lois Dickson’s abstractions evoked a melding of space and figure one might associate with better examples of allegorical symbolism. Her ability to match a remarkable inventiveness with subtle paint handling is particularly evident in Backstage, a canvas that, frankly, deserved the sort of space Larry Gagosian recently squandered in his uptown digs on the sophomoric maneuvers of Richard Prince. It is a canvas of rare erudition and presence. It alone is worth the trip to this fifth floor roost, high above the gallery district’s hinterlands.

Ying Li, occupying the small chamber (the euphemistically familiar “project” room) to the side of Dickson’s allotment, succeeded in reproducing the charged feeling of a working studio with selections from an extended study of views framed by the square lights of a large, grid-like window. The window is that of a space Li moved into after her husband’s untimely passing. The poignancy of her sharing her partner’s perspective on the city through the same transom is kept silently personal, leaving the viewer with a characteristic maelstrom of multiple views, painted in Li’s fierce, brawling color and seismic texture. And yet the Monet blue of City Series #3: Blue Curtain hints with both delicacy and abandon at the solitude of a podium on an empty stage.

Attuned, I suppose to the square frame of Li’s work, I was drawn immediately, at Billis, to Jeffery Reed’s landscapes. On panels measuring little more than nine by nine inches, Reed proves himself a match to the elusive ambition of his forebears: the depiction of air and light. Refined in the studio from outdoor studies made in Maine, Pennsylvania and Ireland, Reed combines memory and visual notes to produce jewels of form and color, informed by late afternoon cloud patterns, sunlit structures and receding planes — well, let’s face it, the most conventional aspects of landscape painting one could imagine. And yet there is not a hint of pedantic posturing or histrionic calls to tradition. Soft Rain, measuring a mere six by ten inches, is an affirming tour de force of nature seen through a sensibility.

Reed’s sturdy reserve proved that he, too, could endure the compression of an undersized-solo-show confederacy. But there was still more to see. A mere head turn and I was presented with Mary Ijichi’s drawings and collages, again of modest scale hovering around sixteen inches, which blend string tape with acrylic paint on Mylar. Quietly contemplative, they mimic the delicacy of Paul Klee but with a different sense of playfulness. Here the focus is on the phenomenology of patterns. The text-oriented pieces place her closer (though not necessarily indebted) to Agnes Martin. They reiterate the accidental texture of a Roman Opalka, yet steer clear of his obsessive density.

Ijichi’selegance compels the observer to locate herself at an optimal viewing distance, which turns out to be rather close and fortunately harmonious with the installation. Intimacy, however, is not an interest shared by Dan Mills, whose very public approach is to apply color to large printed maps by painting over their written information, returning the cartographer’s data exertions back into the drawn and painted renderings that all maps really are. Though most of the work failed to transcend the obvious gimmick, there were notable exceptions: Bleed (52) displays genuine painterly authority, and Outtake A’s (2013) extended strokes offers a winning digression from the motif. They work because they do not rely on their maps per se.

Those of us occupying the lower echelon of art-world actors struggle to resist what often seems like structural hostility toward an art of circumspection. But as the struggle continues I suppose we have to make the most of available opportunities. The organizers of these six exhibitions may not have been able to provide optimal viewing conditions for their artists, but it proved enough.

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Kneeling where Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue triangulates Atlantic and Fourth, my job was to hold the end of a measuring tape against a street lamp. At the other end, sculptor George Trakas calculated the distance to an open spot in the triangle and noted it on a drawing he brought with him. The purpose of this exercise was to corroborate a spot on the unfinished plaza surrounding the Atlantic Avenue subway kiosk where a tree could take root without interfering with the usual tangle of utilities beneath the asphalt. Trakas had earlier delineated this patch of earth as the best place to plant a Silver Linden, a tree that would serve as the culmination of a project he has labored over for a decade.

We met at the Atlantic Avenue station to tour Hook, Line and Sinker, the abbreviated title for an amalgam of interconnected sculptural elements riffing off the commercial and natural history of this busy transit hub. The project was initiated in 2004, but to date, the northwest end of the street-level plaza remains unfinished, closed off to traffic by painted demarcations and temporary lighting. Trakas envisions this section to be elevated a foot or two to the height of the finished plaza and shaded by the tree.

Currently all that rises above pedestrian level is the landmark-protected brick and sandstone kiosk, designed by Heins & LaFarge in 1904. Though abandoned as an entrance after the station’s renovation, the kiosk was preserved for its elegance, its symbolism of past civic munificence, and to provide a skylight for the expanded public space below. Work on the plaza surrounding the kiosk was partially completed in 2004 and updated in 2013 with enhancements by Trakas, working in conjunction with Parsons Brinckerhoff di Menico and Partners, including granite seating elements meant to be shaded by the tree. But the end of the plaza is unfinished, and as long as it remains so, and as long as the tree remains unplanted, Hook, Line and Sinker will also be incomplete. The tree is crucial to the interlocking metaphor Trakas has wrought below ground.

Hook (Archean Reach), Line (Sea House) and Sinker (Mined Swell), the full title for the tripartite installation, addresses the borough’s development along roads that extend inland from its waterfront. As a port city’s pathways tend to develop perpendicularly from the water, Brooklyn’s gently curving shore caused its neighborhood streets to clash at odd angles, thus creating the borough’s distinctive civic centers. It is this web of routes emanating from the sea (as much as the street names themselves) that inspired Trakas to introduce nautical imagery to an underground subway station.

With an extensive body of site-specific sculptures stretching from La Jolla and Bellingham to the banks of the Hudson River at Beacon and at Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, Trakas has earned a reputation as an artist committed to reminding us of our archetypal connections to the water’s edge. Addressing public concerns ranging from shorefront repair and reclamation to simple accessibility (and often both) Trakas has dedicated his career to creating places rather than pieces. He is not a monument builder. Visitors to his Newtown Creek Nature Walk (2007) in Greenpoint sometimes raise the question, where’s the art? What Trakas brings to his work and what he leaves for the public to contemplate is a deep sense of what was there originally, how it shaped the site he encountered, and how it affected what he built on it, or beside it, or within it.

My guided tour of Hook, Line and Sinker began with explicit instructions from the artist that I was to take the D train from Bleecker Street to the Atlantic Avenue stop, just one of many paths I could have followed to the site. Taking this particular route was intended to prepare me for a narrative of movement and landscape that informs the sculpture. My trip began underground at Bleecker, stretched over East River via the Manhattan Bridge, descended again beneath Flatbush Avenue to the inevitable ascension, this time by foot, back to street level — a rolling sea voyage, replayed as an ordinary commuter trip. When I met up with him at the Pacific Street entrance he launched into the history of the work and how its title invites and encourages overlapping interpretations.

Hook (Archean Reach) refers to the curved passageway leading from the Pacific Street entrance to the tracks below, which he has emphasized with a sculptural wainscot of polished metamorphic granite, undulating wave-like as it amplifies the floor’s gently rolling movement from turnstile to platform. Substantially more sculptural than the ceramic tile wall it undergirds, both its weight and color succeed as image and structural enhancement. Care was taken in its design so as not to interrupt the commercial and practical aspects of its location. Thus clean breaks were inserted to allow for a newsstand, vents and maintenance doors.

The sculptural aspect of Line (Sea House) is more implied than physically present, as it constitutes the interior vertical space directly below the kiosk. The kiosk itself has been transformed into a symbolic lighthouse, while architecturally serving as a clerestory opening, providing daylight to the platform and stairs below. For this space Trakas had originally settled on the inclusion of new steel markers embedded in the old walls where the original stair stringers once descended to a cramped landing. But an opportunity to solve an unforeseen problem led to one of the site’s more overt seagoing references. Electric lamps had to be installed to provide lighting at night, raising the issue of how fixtures were to be maintained in the now-floorless kiosk hovering over the stairs. The solution was a rolling gantry Trakas designed in the shape of a boat hull, with a functioning helm able to move the entire structure laterally on rails across the open space, thus providing maintenance workers (entering through the now-locked street-level doors) the ability to re-lamp light fixtures, while inadvertently enriching the artist’s rail and sea metaphors.

Sinker (Mined Swell) is an incline made of huge quarry-faced granite blocks that widen on their dressed sides as they descend between parallel staircases below the sky-lit platforms to the lower trains. They follow the stairs while enclosing the base of several steel columns. As the most massively sculptural element in the design, Sinker creates a visceral outcrop of bedrock that, when washed with the daylight from above, emphasizes the connection between street traffic and its subterranean rail extensions.

What’s missing is the tree: a single declarative chord sounding the opening of the three movements playing below. Not only would it provide an organic contrast to the steel and masonry underground, its branches would reach out toward incoming commuters from every direction, its roots suggesting the disseminating subterranean routes.

Trakas had submitted his proposal for the final plaza design to MTA’s Arts for Transit program and to the DOT in 2011, including the drawing that showed the exact spot where the tree could be planted. According to Bonny Tsang at the Department of Transportation’s press office, “DOT has been working with community stakeholders and Forest City Ratner Companies to develop a plan for this plaza. The formal design phase will be initiated in the near future.” Apparently the decision has yet to be finalized.

The question of whose design will be applied to the remaining street level space remains open and thus explains the long delay in finishing the project. When decisions are tossed back and forth between city agencies, while developers and “various stakeholders” vie for advantage, the only thing that is certain is that the artist, though a primary stakeholder, is but one voice.

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