May 6 to June 17, 2017
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Reductive rather than Minimal, strictly speaking, the art of Robert Mangold continues to induce a gyroscopic equilibrium of formal elements in relation to one another. That the relationship of part to whole is how to test the valid authority of line in and on a planar surface, which in turn must hold its own in respect to the supporting cut relief:—this composite of essentials remains constant throughout the body of work, however varied the rational format. This exhibition in particular is indicative of shaped canvases treated as framing devices of all sorts, some of which result in forced compensation for a cut hole’s demanding attention. More than with his past shows, this aggregate of formats puts the artist at risk of losing it all if the drawing isn’t just right—neither merely accommodating the frame within its bounds, nor being irrelevantly dramatic. A test of constraints, this show sharpens the viewer’s critical eye.

Yellow Extended Ring Frame, 2014, for instance, proves that an eccentric format need not be a liability but can be a challenge to composition. Given a strong shape, the response must be in kind: the set-up puts pressure on, to come up with an equally dynamical color and line, if the entirety is to cohere. Imagine a kind of hippodrome in a bright cadmium yellow, round which lines twist as they run their course. The elements of line planar surface and relief do indeed all pull together even as they remain in tension. And something else rewards viewing: close up, one sees the rehearsals of line in approximations of the curve in undisguised preliminary drawing, unaffected—not pathetic, not rhetorical.

In this assortment of works on view, drawn squares within a field contrast with the meanders favored, to raise the issue of the formal dualities Mangold has at his disposal: positive and negative shape, inside and outside edge—these occasion highly contrastive dualities. Possibilities are tested, not all are pursued.

Puncturing most of the works are rectangular cutouts, generally symmetrical with respect to the frame, yet a few are asymmetrical in size and position. Taken together, they represent the sort of composition made familiar through orthodox modern abstract art. Mangold shows his reductive strength by adhering to the proposition that abstraction is the fundament of form. Examples of this loyalty are to be found in an ochre painting, Yellow Double Square Loop, 2015, and the acidic Two Open Squares within a Yellow Area, 2016.

But there is a reason why Double Red Square Frame B, 2015, has pride of place in this display. The perfectly poised, yet inventive, drawing captures the principle of calligraphy that is line’s special attribute, and interacts with the dulled rose pigment applied to the surface, streaked and stained enough to manifest painting as such. Given the eccentricity of format, it should not work as well as it does; yet the rounded ends of the diptych’s outer corners, if anything, help to draw attention across the panels. The result is miraculous. Or, in Aquinas’s terms, integral, a harmonious and radiant whatness.

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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Shirley Kaneda: Space Without Space
May 1 to May 28, 2014
514 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-510-8181

Robert Mangold
April 4 to May 03, 2014
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-255-4044

A great deal of contemporary art mimics advertising images, which seek to deliver a potent visual punch all-at-once. The abstract paintings of Shirley Kaneda and Robert Mangold – a very different style of visual art– solicit close slow looking. Thanks to happy circumstance, these exhibitions were both at galleries on the ground floor, just a block apart, for a day or two of brief overlap. And so it was natural and suggestive to look back and forth, in order to make comparisons, which proved very suggestive.  In the world of Chelsea where there are so many shows of installation art, photography and video, Kaneda and Mangold may seem very similar, but look more closely and the contrasts reveal very different sensibilities.

Robert Mangold’s shaped canvases contain flat areas of pale color: yellows, ochre, orange and red, bounded by regular curves, drawn black pencil lines which circle the composition. Some of his paintings are square, while others are shaped—Angled Ring I,  (2011) for example, is a pentagon. The lines in Square with Open Circle  (2011) form a spiral, as do those lines in Framed Square with Open Center III (2013), which run around the empty center. The open centers of Mangold’s pictures focus your attention on a centrifugal structure. In the 1960s, Michael Fried proposed the concept of deductive structure to describe the way the internal structure of shaped pictures could be ‘deduced’ from the frame. Here, by contrast, you find yourself observing the antagonistic relationship between the shape of the canvas and the drawing that it contains.

Kaneda uses rectangular canvases, though of  varied size—the smallest can easily be held in one hand, while the larger ones are regular easel paintings. Although these shapes are thus simpler than Mangold’s, their interior activity is more complicated. Kaneda’s sensibility comes closest to that revealed in Mangold’s shaped canvases in her Untitled  (2013), with its series of circles around the center, and in Restrained Decadence, (2014), which also is centered on a circle. Sometimes she deploys areas of plaid orswirls reminiscent of James Rosenquist’s Pop imagery—Sanguine Apathy  (2014) for example. Or, in other works, she sets shaped areas of solid color running across or up and down in the picture, as in Plus Minus (2013). And occasionally, she presents odd organic shapes, of which Confident Apprehension (2013), is an example. Unlike Mangold, she always creates illusionistic depth; and, again, unlike him, her abstract images are full of cuts, breaks, and layering. To put this contrast in familiar formalist terms, he is a linear painter while she a painterly painter.

There are abstract painters who work in series and those who do not. Mangold proceeds as if he was trying to paint many variations on one painting. (This procedure was more evident in his previous exhibitions of recent work than this one.)  By contrast, Kaneda offers a more open vision of the processes of art making, for her activity isn’t bounded by any pre-determined structure. Mangold’s structures, like the ripples created by a stone cast in water, encourage you to look by moving your eyes from the outside of his pictures into the empty center. Kaneda, who has a very different visual susceptibility, keeps your eye on the entire surface of her all-over compositions.

As should be apparent, the contrast between Mangold’s and Kaneda’s sensibilities is evident also in the contrast between his matter-of-fact titles and hers, which usually are expressive and metaphorical. He is ‘a prose painter,’ and she ‘a poetic painter,’ which isn’t to say that one style of visual thinking is superior to the other, but only to identify important differences. What was often thought to discredit formal analysis—such as I am practicing here—was that it was concerned only with the art itself, and not with larger questions of its meaning and context. By now it should be obvious how misleading this judgment is. Imagine that both Mangold and Kaneda took up creative writing—what markedly distinct literary structures would appropriately express such different visions of artistic activity.

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In my favorite childhood book, Gods, Graves and Scholars, by C. W. Ceram, there is a description of the 19^th century excavation of an Etruscan tomb in which the heavy human-form cover of the sarcophagus is lifted and falls back to reveal an Etruscan warrior sitting, fully fleshed, as if he had been placed there a day earlier.  Once the air touched the corpse it dissolved, leaving nothing but some dust and armor. I was reminded of this fairy-like story while visiting the studio of Carin Riley, to look at a series of drawings and paintings she was preparing for her exhibition Adaptive Traits at the Smudajescheck Gallery in Ulm, Germany.  Riley has focused many of her drawings and a grey and white acrylic painting, Grey and White Athena (2013) on the fibule, a highly practical piece of jewelry that was a centerpiece of Etruscan attire. Literally and figuratively this giant proto safety pin was the center that held the costume together.  So I reasoned there was probably a fibule on that gloriously ephemeral warrior’s chest.  And when he melted slowly into clouds of dust, his bodily form became an abstract assemblage of hammered gold.  Riley’s paintings are exactly this: an abstraction and diagramming of natural forms, the fibule linking a constellation of shapes which are both abstractions of limbs, but also concepts—the passage of days and seasons and the elements.

Adaptive Traits, which is on view until the end of October 2013, is an amalgam of Carin Riley’s preoccupations: the evolution of cognition; Chinese astrology; and classical and pre-classical form and symbol.  In the end she returns to the idea of the emblematic medium that represents the idea, and then the further iteration of that medium represented in paint or drawing.  Her wood appliqué drawings utilize paper-thin slivers of wood that unite a monochromatic ink drawing.  Wood is one of the five Chinese elements, but within the context of the drawing it represents not only the growing living element (versus fire, metal, earth and water) but a nexus and center-point in a drawing that is part diagram of the cosmos as well as map of the human psyche. As Riley says, “It’s a way in.” The bulbous circular drawn forms revolve and expand from the wood, imitating its shape and cellular structure. They pay homage to the “real” object, even which wood it is: walnut, teak, or cherry, much as the Etruscan-themed paintings utilize the fibule as an object as well as an idea.

Riley’s studio is a long white space, a corridor of sorts.  One drawing and one painting are worked on at a time, and though she works in series, each piece is not a variation of its predecessor, but a completely different entity—this becomes apparent when the pieces are dissected intellectually—though visually similar, the metaphysical groundings vary wildly, and incorporate multiple textual and cultural readings.  The forms may be taken from a classical Roman torso, but the silver in the grey background activates the metal element in Chinese orthodoxy. Roman mosaics are the newest source of inspiration; a floor from a Villa at Tor Marancia—a menu-like composition of fish, fowl, dates and asparagus.  The sense of volume and color that was achieved by ancient craftsmen placing multicolored stones adjacent to each other, a truly abstract process, are deconstructed in Riley’s grey and white palette. In her words: “It was stop-start, the mosaic created a new way of breaking up the space.” Images from mythology, symbols of bounty and prosperity, and the virtuosity of the medium, are transformed into simple fluid diagrams and abstractions in Conversation/Still Life (2013), a reversal of the assembling of the image in a certain sense—an insistence on destroying the illusion. That the Romans were obsessed with illusion—the walls and floors of their villas dissolved into landscapes and idylls, grottos inhabited by dolphins and sprites, is almost impossible to reconcile with our own concept of what art is, and Riley takes the Romans to task for their affection for what is decorative and ultimately escapist, demanding a more intellectual and symbol laden reading than perhaps the ancients were willing to admit, at least in the profane work with which they decorated their homes.

Carin Riley studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago in the 1970s with John McCracken, Richard Artschwager, and Robert Mangold. The simplicity with which these artists express themselves—the bold blunt statements, especially Artschwager’s doors and furniture pieces, can be seen in her dedication to the clarity of medium. Ink, though brushed and swirling in a calligraphic gesture, does not hide its natural predilection to flow and pool; similarly, the appliqués are a pure and honest use of the wood. For Riley, Lao Tzu sums it up when he compares living the right life (and here we apply this to painting and drawing as well!) to the flow of water: “of all things the most yielding can overwhelm that which is of all things the most hard.”

Knarr: The Vikings, a group show curated by Carin Riley is on view till May 9 at the Queens College Art Center. 65-30 Kissena Blvd. Queens, New York. Telephone: (718) 997-3770

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October 12 to November 30, 2011
18 East 79th Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York City, (212) 734-6300

Every visitor to the great display of Willem de Kooning at MoMA is aware of the extreme difficulty of understanding his development. Acquavella’s magnificent show of Georges Braque, presented on two floors of a grand Upper East Side townhouse, poses the same question about an earlier modernist. How and why, one wants to know, does an artist who develops one style very successfully suddenly abandon it and move on? There are three Braques in this exhibition: the early fauve master (1906-1907); the cubist who was Pablo Picasso’s collaborator (1907- 1914); and the senior figure who, after that relationship was dissolved by the Great War, developed a highly distinctive late style (1917-1956), which openly borrows from but looks surprisingly different from classical cubism.

Change is difficult, as every psychoanalyst will tell you, because most neurotics cling to miserably dysfunctional lives. How much more difficult, then, to understand how Braque, who at each stage of his artistic career was marvelously triumphant, twice abandoned his style to move on. The intense colors of  L’Estaque (1906) are given up in Harbor (1909), which reconstructs a beach scene in  monochromatic brown and gray planes. (Houses at L’Estaque (1907) shows that transition in progress.) The austere Analytic Cubist The Mantlepiece (1912) is very unlike The Pantry (1920), in which Braque opens up his picture space. In the later art we remain indoors, he never returns to the landscape; a distinctive dark palette, not however restricted to blacks, grays and whites emerges. And in The Billiard Table (1944-52) cubist denial of perspective and a post-cubist palette  present a distinctive new motif.

Usually Braque is taken to be a lesser artist than Picasso. Once their collaboration dissolved, while the Spaniard moved rapidly through Neo-classicism, Surrealism and highly personal erotic images, before finding his late style, often based upon appropriations from the old masters, the Frenchman’s career was more modest. If no John Richardson has been inspired to tell Braque’s story that perhaps is because there is less to tell. The ‘flesh-colored’ cock forming part of the woman’s body in Woman with a Mandolin (1937) is as visually daring as Picasso’s erotic inventions, but how different is the studio setting, whose colors might come from early Vuillard. Mostly, however, Braque avoids Picasso’s explicitly autobiographical concerns

This exemplary show, which retells an important part of the now historically distant era of French modernism, speaks eloquently to the present. Not, I hasten to add, with reference to the pictorial concerns of cubism itself: That visual culture is now distant. But what remains of living interest is Braque’s ability to radically develop, in ways that do not simply cancel and preserve his prior manner. When Frank Stella works in series, he works through all of the variations on a motif, which he then abandons. Robert Mangold, by contrast, develops his motifs in a more intuitive way. And after the early Abstract Expressionist abstractions, Richard Diebenkorn turned to figurative painting before embarking on the Ocean Parks. Braque’s very different, arguably more radical development is even harder to rationally reconstruct. In the 1980s, some most distinguished scholars proposed to eliminate ‘style’ from our vocabulary. This exhibition shows that you cannot understand Braque without stylistic analysis. Since Stella’s, Mangold’s, and Diebenkorn’s magnificent ways of developing now reveal their period style, maybe some daring young artist will find her inspiration in this exhibition.

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MARK GROTJAHN; BLUE PAINTINTS LIGHT TO DARK ONE THROUGH TEN
Anton Kern until February 28 (532 W20th Street between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 367 9663)

JOE FYFE
James Graham until March 10 (1014 Madison Avenue between 78 and 79 Streets, 212 535 5767)

Reductive art induces reductive histories of art.  When you think about art in terms of lessness and what is left out it is hard not to historicize, to see individuals in terms of a great march forward—or compromising retreat—towards or away from Minimalism. In this ne plus ultra1960s movement abstract art achieved its most severe exclusions, beckoning an end of painting, or its least its submission to the object, soon to be followed by the triumph of pure concept.

Individualists frustrate such neat theorizing.  Almost simultaneous with Minimalism was the movement that—logically—ought to have waited patiently in the wings for a few years: Postminimalism.  This word described the gradual reinvestment of personal touch, expressive feeling, rich surface, and human presence in nonetheless still radically pared-down artworks.

Despite the trumpeted demise of the medium, a new kind of painting emerged that stalked emptiness, as if torn between giving way to historical inevitability and resisting it.  Robert Ryman and Brice Marden fitted that description.  Another of the masters of that moment was Robert Mangold.  His whole career has been, so to speak, danced on a pirouette—his paintings are perpetually on the tipping point between reduction and regeneration.

Two elements stand out as the hallmarks of his aesthetic: the shaped canvas and the drawn arc.  To these can be added a third—whether stained in a color or rubbed using a drawing medium like graphite, he goes for an achieved (rather than simply given) surface.  While never overtly gestural, his art always recalls a hand that made it.   Cool, but not cold; impersonal, but not person-free.

Mr. Mangold also likes to flutter between the sensual and the cerebral.  His new show, at PaceWildenstein’s cavernous W22nd Street venue, offers a dozen  in a series of “column structures”.  They can all be taken in at the center of this vast space as a single gestalt, becoming highly architectural in the process; or they can demand individual space and time.  The supports are made from various joined canvases to form such shapes as a “T” in “Column Structure I” (2005), a trunk and branch in”IV” (the remainder of the series are 2006), a funnel-like shape in “V”, an anvil in “VI”, or less readily, or quite unnameable, shapes in others.  The ability or not to describe the shapes linguistically seems to determine different formal experiences from one column to the next.

The compositions are further complicted by scored lines that can easily be confused with the actual division between abutting canvases; the lines roughly adhere to some sense of a grid that stretches beyond the actual work, but no strict logic or system is apparent.  Each work is a singular color, stained in acrylic with even modulation but slight fluctuations—again, the hand is present but not insistent.

The curves, drawn by a superbly controlled hand, are neither mechanical nor organic.  They might be seen as responses to the shaped supports, but equally could be the formal force that determines those shapes.

The cumulative experience of all this back and forth between possibilities is a subtle, classical, and highly refined.  The Minimalist Sol le Witt, when describing his own return to more lyrical and sensually involved picture making, once spoke of wanting to make art he could show Giotto.  Mr. Mangold might want to show his work to Poussin.

Mark Grotjahn is a natural complement to Mr. Mangold—his supremely elegant show offers slight variations on a singular composition and formal idea, and a narrative sense of development as the eye follows this progression the Anton Kern Gallery (another elegantly sparse post-industrial space.)

My first visit induced a negative response.  Unlike this artist’s restrained installation of richly colored pieces at the Whitney Museum recently, the dark, barely scrutable canvases with their repeated compositional formula seemed gratuitous and stingy.  But a second visit on a sunny day revealed their subdued sophistication.

Mr. Grotjahn is fanatically committed to his chosen motif: a central vertical strip from the horizontal center of which emenate spokes of slightly thinner stripes.  Coming with modernist ancestry, this device is familiar from various Futurists and Orphists not to mention Marsden Hartley, and evokes a sense of a lighthouse emitting rays.

In the dingy half-light of my first visit this seemed like a series of black paintings but in fact they eschew black altogether to track a progression from a dark but vibrant ultra marine to an almost pitch black navy blue.  All painting needs light but these are enriched by the dependence, which they dramatize.  The strokes are compulsively even but the brush creates striations that seem to glisten under light, looking a bit like the sheen of black vinyl LPs.  (Jason Martin, the British painter who shows at Robert Miller and LA Louver in Mr. Grotjahn’s city of residence, LA, has made a life’s work from this effect.)

While the motif and its driving effects are always present and insistent, they eventually take a back seat as the slight and subtle differences between each work assert themselves.

Joe Fyfe is a brutalist.  His art is not so much reductive as severely blunt.  Often, the “canvas” is more striking than the paint: in “La Glorie” (2006), for instance, a picture painted in acrylic on terrycloth, felt, linen and burlap.  Colors and textures alike are instrinsic, in other words, rather than applied.  The composition has a central zip of various colors (painted bars or collaged strips of colored material) placed off center on a burlap ground crudely roller-painted in thin, dry white.  The surface submits to the support.

Historically he comes out of art of early 1970s: He was much influenced at the outset of his career by an exhibition of Blinky Palermo, an artist included in the National Academy Museum’s current “High Times, Hard Times” survey of painting in the wake of Minimalism.  He is also one of several Americans (others of his generation being James Hyde and Craig Fisher) who have looked hard at the French Support-Surface movement.  But his new body of work seems much less concerned with the semiotics of painting as earlier efforts.

The exhibition includes things made in the last four years and is more compositionally busy than the previous show at the same gallery.  Titles reflect his travels in Asia (a recent Fulbright took him to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos).  There is still an insistence on texture over shape, however; while “Hoan Kiem” (2006) seems almost pictorial in the way menhir-like shapes populate a white groudn with a gray skyline, the eye is still detained by the rough scrapings away and rude applications of paint accentuating the materials beneath, in this case felt, muslin, burlap and gauze.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 22, 2007 under the title “Minimalism with Feeling”

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