March 7 to April 25, 2015
171 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington streets
New York City, (347) 938 2931

One of the better consequences of the much maligned The Forever Now exhibition at MoMA has been to raise the question of what might really constitute significant painting today? With its snarky title, From Now On In, the show of seven mid-career painters at Brian Morris Gallery, attempts, if not a definitive answer, at least a very different kind of conversation.

Significant painting is so difficult to attain today because it requires a navigation of a dynamic that acknowledges arbitrariness while embracing specificity. Lacking an overriding ideology, there is no particular mandate anymore to make a painting any particular way with any particular subject matter (earnest exhortations from various painting sects notwithstanding). While admitting their methods are arbitrary, painters must then find a way to be specific, to make decisions that matter and elucidate a particular structure and feeling as it evolves.

The seven painters included here build their paintings in ways that are neither programmatic nor simply rendered, each one taking a very different approach to ambiguity. Alexi Worth, though always presenting a recognizable image, makes the “why” of his images disconcerting. How does a painting of a hand crumpling paper relate to one of a topless and faceless sunbather with a plastic iced tea container? The crumpling hand indicates creative frustration; perhaps the twisted form and obscured face of the bather indicate another kind of frustration. Or perhaps it was just intended as a Coppertone ad gone horribly wrong. Through his use of stencils and airbrush on an open-mesh nylon, Worth fuses a flatness of outline that contradicts indications of volume and perspective, and the missing face of the bather seems to appear as a silhouette formed by the line of a receding wave on the sand.

Fabian Marcaccio also uses unusual materials and grounds but in order to hide imagery that could prove disturbing. His paintings, composed of hand-woven manilla rope, climbing rope, alkyd paint, silicone, wood, and 3D printed plastic, overwhelm us with the scale of their physical presence while indicating an expressionist touch where one often does not exist. The woven ropes are like an enlarged canvas, and feel as if we were viewing a microscopic detail of a De Kooning. But from across a long room one painting suddenly coalesces into an image of a zombie head, while the other, In Vitro Transfer: Origin of the World, with its nod to Courbet, portrays the injection of a fertilized egg into a womb revealed by an open vagina.

Michael Berryhill obscures his imagery with fuzzy pastel layers of color on the rough weave of linen canvas. He uses figure/ground ambiguity – as does Worth– but with imagery that barely coheres, more like Marcaccio. In Full Blown TV Tray, brown X’s and concentrically scalloped brushstrokes help us discern a TV tray on a braided rug. But the tray supports an anomalous exhaust hood (apparently the Full Blown of the title) that is elucidated by a few yellow brushstrokes on scrapings of light blue over blood orange. Berryhill’s images seem familiar yet their juxtapositions are baffling, only making sense through a use of punning titles and the logic of painting.

Marcaccio’s and Berryhill’s paintings also converse with Steve DiBenedetto’s work. DiBenedetto has lately been rethinking the flatness that used to be the source of his imagery. By layering images on top of other images, the archeology of his painting creates both space and ground. In Feedback, the tentacles of a black octopus entwine with the blades of a black helicopter of equal size, carving out the space but creating a drama that could be a metaphor for the old struggle of nature v. technology.

The painting energy and construction of Lydia Dona’s paintings, with their layers of imagery, relate to DiBenedetto, but her work suffers in this setting. Unfortunately, compared to the other paintings, hers lack the structural organization to create clarity of scale that might make her ambiguity engaging, but in this context feels merely chaotic.

The struggle to develop structure is ultimately what unites the paintings in the show. It is how we make the connection between Carrie Moyer’s paintings and Tom Burckhardt’s. Both use biomorphic geometry to create allusions to representation, which also link them structurally to Worth. Moyer employs flat monochromatic grounds to isolate and unite the arbitrary collisions of more painterly areas into forms that seem vaguely figural and imperious. Moyers encourages these allusions with evocative titles, such as Mythic Being and Three Queens.

Like Moyer, Burckhardt also creates representation through geometric construction and translucent layering, though his biomorphic geometry references ‘50s decorative arts. But Burckhardt’s painting process alters these references to produce images on an intimate scale. Titles indicate that we are looking at an abstraction of a finger on a touch screen, or a buoy on water.

What is compelling about this particular exhibition is that it requires our attention to make sense. It is peculiar to realize how contemporary art so often ignores the idea that it should be looked at, and contents itself to being written about. But here we actually are invited to examine these paintings and think about why they are together, and then supply the cohesion. This is not an exhibition of “end-game” painters. While the paintings insist on their material presence, they also use that presence to create images. The very idea of an image presupposes a viewer, and particularly these images, which embrace the kind of ambiguity that tantalizes with unstable possibilities of resolution. Nevertheless, those possibilities create a spirit of hope here, and if painting might not be dead, then certainly the ghost of its former significance haunts this enterprise.

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How to stand out at or among art fairs: Art Basel Miami, Aqua, Seven

Works, visitors, galleries, memories: it is easy to get lost in the ubiquitous sprawl of an art fair. As if in collective punishment for the sins of modernism, all are victims of the grid.

Events like Art Basel Miami are staged in vast convention centers which are bizarre equalizers: top galleries that ordinarily inhabit swank, architecturally distinct real estate are barely distinguishable from country cousin private or provincial dealers willing to rent a booth of the same size. Visitors, meanwhile loose their bearings.  There are few visually meaningful landmarks.  You make a brash artwork into one and next thing you know, its gone.

The organizers of New York’s upcoming, 2012 Armory Show are savvy to this problem: they have contracted architects Bade Stageberg Cox (of National Academy Museum make-over success) to “spatially contextualize”  the piers’ fairs next year, which means creating memorable sightlines and trails.

Art Basel Miami know they have a problem too: they are victims of their own success. Miami-goers just love the overload, but still suffer its consequences.  Basel opts for neat Swiss taxonomy.  Their “sectors” help chop up the sprawl, either conceptually or geographically. Art Positions and Art Nova function as mini-exhibitions within the exhibition and get their own corner quadrants and placard color-coding.  But their discreteness is more evident on the map than on the ground.  Positions has booths for single artists presenting work on a singular theme, such as Sven Johne at Klemm’s with three circus projects in different mediums: photos he took of empty plots once the circus left town, pictures he found online of sleeping (or dead) circus animals, and an enticingly rousing video of an actor announcing acts that on’t actually materialize.  Nova is for new work by small groups, such as Murray Guy’s complementary presentation of Barbara Probst and Lucy Skaer.  Art Kabinett, meanwhile, is a trail you can follow of space delineated within participating booths for solo concentrations. It is more an honorific – like landmark status from a monuments commission-  than a tangible display within the display. And Art Video (to be reviewed here soon) is a segment of film work from participating galleries, curated by Artprojx of London’s David Gryn.

And yet, however much such sub-categorizing tries to negotiate overload, it actually contributes to it, sorcerer’s apprentice-style.  Rather than dividing the mass is creates a matrix of intersecting grids.

One way for booths to defeat the white cube effect is to wallpaper their way out of the problem.  As luck would have it, two spectacular efforts in this direction ended up next door to one another, almost defeating the purpose of the exercise.  L&M Arts used Warhol’s legendary cow and self-portrait wallpapers inside and out for their mini-drawings retrospective while Mary Boone had Barbara Kruger “textorate” their exterior with an excoriating statement about money making money worth less.  Although both visual statements yearned a sea of white to help them pop, the sightlines of one to the other were actually amusingly sumptuous.  Another way to subvert the ubiquity of the white walls – besides painting them black, as London’s Alison Jacques Gallery did to exquisite effect for her moving two-woman Lygia Clark/Hannah Wilke display, or inviting one of your artists to make a wall drawing, as in the case of the Viennese Galerie Nächt St Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder and Ernst Caramelle – is to have your artist puncture holes in your walls.  No one does that more artfully than Sarah Oppenheimer at Annely Juda.

And yet, however seasoned a fairgoer one is, the booth effect is draining upon aesthetic experience.  The pleasures of getting lost in the stacks wears off after a while.  The Seattle-based boutique fair Aqua offers an antidote. Recalling “The Waves” in it name and “A Room of One’s Own” in its organization, it achieves a stream of consciousness.  This courtyard-accessed two-story motel on Collins Avenue is perfect for Aqua’s 45 domestically-oriented galleries.  Each gets a similar, nicely-proportioned, emptied-out deco bedroom.  And this means they get what no one paying exponentially more in a convention-center fair can wangle: real walls and natural light.

As if in emulation of the modest modernism of these surroundings, stand-out  exhibits at Aqua included McKenzie Fine Art’s salon hang of Don Voisine; the subtle understated architectural white reliefs of Sarah Bostwick at San Francisco’s Gregory Lind Gallery, who was also showing Sarah Walker and others;  precisionist matchbox-sized grids based on Artforum ad page layouts by Norwegian Lisa Liedgren at Seattle’s Prole Drift; and the funky abstractionist stable of Conrad Wilde Gallery of Tucson, Arizona, amongst them the sensual encaustic monochromes of Joanne Mattera and the biomorphic reliefs of Ruth Hiller.

But some dealers are determined to go yet further in their bid to beat the grid with its  relentless compartmentalization.  For some years Soho gallerist Ronald Feldman and Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery shared warehouse spaces in the Miami Design District.  This year, for the second year, they have expanded to form Seven, with Postmasters, P.P.O.W., London’s Hales Gallery, BravinLee programs, and Winkelman Gallery. In a raw, sprawling industrial space on the North Miami Avenue  gallery street (Diana Lowenstein, Bernice Steinbaum, Hardcore et al.) the seven galleries have created a show where the labels alone identify gallery affiliation.  Curating is by “passive-aggressive consensus” according to one participant.  The fortuitous juxtapositions that arise by serendipity in a big grid fair are aesthetically composed here: the way a painting by Veteran West Indian-born abstract expressionist Frank Bowling sets off a dialog with a Fabian Marcaccio, for instance, or a Ward Shelley speaks to a David Diao.

Writing these notes prompts an observation about  journalism that relates the strange equalizing power of fairs to the ubiquity of booths: Fairs are like states in the UN or the senate.  However much the critic reminds himself that Art Basel is the main event and Seven is, well, just seven, one unit gets at least a paragraph the way Seychelles or North Dakota get a desk in the plenum.  But really, does Red Dot even warrant observer status?

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