January 10 to February 16, 2019
545 West 25th Street
New York City, marlboroughcontemporary.com

Davina Semo’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, “ALL THE WORLD,” her third there, marks a shift in tone from her previous work. Although the basic constituents of her sculptures remain much the same—industrial materials, fasti craft, appropriated texts used as all-caps titles—themes of control, eroticism, and violence have been tempered. Expressions of emotion and affection have swelled, and while those elements predate this show, they are given added, moving emphasis.

The show is built around two bodies of work: cast-bronze bells and brightly colored acrylic mirrors, all dated 2019. Three early bells were shown by Semo in Marlborough’s upstairs space in the winter of 2016 and 2017, and at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery in late 2017, though those were smaller and had other differences in their facture and hanging. Semo’s use of mirrors goes back to at least 2010, though those pieces often utilized obscuration as a tactic. Rather than those previous black or silver glass mirrors, these are bright pink, yellow, turquoise, reminiscent of mirrors by Sherrie Levine.

The five mirrors, each six-by-five feet, are embedded with two sets of radial ball bearings in overlapping constellations. One set of ball bearings is arranged in a grid; the other set is dispersed across the surface in spay-like disarray, recalling a backpack by Semo that has been repeatedly shot, shown at Marlborough in 2015. The mirrors capture, in subtly warped faces, the reflection of viewers and the bells. This is a lovely curatorial trick, reiterating and altering the perception of the work and the space. And the ball bearings take on multiple readings: the fearlessness of skateboards (they’re a part of the wheel system), the suggestion of mass anxiety signified by fidget spinners (they’re also a component of those toys), or, evading that dichotomy altogether, the cold reliability of machinery. Such allusions play up or run against the titles, which vary between grim and hopeful.

Semo’s bells, ranging from 20 to 33 inches tall, are made with a wax-casting technique that results in a bullet-shaped dome with eroded-looking rifts and drips on their thick walls. They’re tall and thin, patinated with a bituminous-colored finish and hung with chains that are powder-coated glossy black. Inside each is a wooden clapper attached to a thick, woven nylon rope. Visitors are encouraged to ring the clapper, but not touch the bronze, which, despite its robust appearance, has a very delicate patina. Each is attached at the ceiling while appearing to be slung through an eye bolt and anchored (save for one) to large bales of recyclable detritus, including aluminum and electronics cables.

Semo addresses both global and local concerns in this work. Close to home, the mirror SHE BECAME VERY SENSITIVE TO THE TASTE OF WATER FROM THE TAP reads, in its blue surface and epidemiologic red and black ball bearings, as an allusion to the ongoing Flint water crisis. A pink mirror is similarly dire, called IN THE REGION WHERE HE LIVED THERE WERE NO PLANTS AT ALL. Most frighteningly and directly, a bell in the center of the gallery held by two massive, stacked bales is called “BECAUSE WE ARE FACING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT AND THERE IS NO TIME TO CONTINUE DOWN THIS ROAD OF MADNESS,” SHE SAID, a quote from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Part of the horror here is the scale: those enormous bales were selected from among God only knows how many others, impressing on viewers a fraction of the resources used and wasted by people, which is an existential crisis.) Another bell, nearer to the entrance, is titled “IT IS HARD,” SHE SAID, “TO IMAGINE THE WORLD AS IT WAS”.

The anchoring bale of that latter piece includes reptilian-looking metal scraps that resemble works in Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s show of erotic and mystical sculptures in Marlborough’s viewing room, called “Towards an End to Biological Perception,” organized by Leo Fitzpatrick. The crushed aluminum, in places, looks like the snake-skin dominatrix shoe in P-Orridge’s Shoe Horn #9 (2016). There are echoes, too, between Semo’s work and P-Orridge’s use of snake fetishes made of curled iron, scaly dessicated fishes, or, for example, the mirrors in No Mercy (2019).

The one bell not attached to a bale is instead connected to a slab of rolled steel, with the words “ALL THE WORLD” (the work’s title) embossed on it in welded block letters. Bells serve for warning and mourning. Lament and alarm for the world as it is or was runs through several of the sculptures, ringing with the kind of sentiment found in John Donne’s famous “No Man is an Island,” apt for the moment in all sorts of ways, including the analogizing of coastal erosion and human suffering on both grand and individual scales:

No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Mourning and heartache are, almost certainly, impossible without the kind of compassion and love Donne expresses. Despite the distress found in works here, the exhibition is nonetheless suffused with love and reassurance—something like courage and hope when held against existential threat. A bell closest to the entrance is reassuringly titled SHE CAN SQUEEZE HIS HAND WHEN PEOPLE ASK HER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE. A mirror is called SHE LOOKED UP AT HIM, DIRECTLY, WITH TOTAL ATTENTION.

Bells also ring for celebration and contemplation. Among the people I saw tolling them, one of the gallery’s preparators was rolling the clapper gently around the lip of the bell, like a meditative singing bowl, making it hum. It’s hard to know how to address the beautiful and the horrible on Earth side by side, except perhaps to face what is awful, and to cultivate what is not.

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“What?”, he replies, incredulously. Mr. Kitaj has battled deafness for many years, but even so would have had difficulty comprehending this question.

The lady gestures towards the paintings and drawings on display. Many feature a voluptuous young woman, usually nude, often in the company of an older bearded man. On first impression, they do indeed seem to represent a cast of women, with different features and hair colors, rather than a single protagonist.

When finally the penny drops, Mr. Kitaj fixes his bewildered interlocutor a defiant stare: “She’s dead!”

An exhibition of new paintings by R.B. Kitaj is a rare event. For years, his slow output has been a matter of notoreity. Since his controversial retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1994, which traveled to the Metropolitian Museum, New York, and the LA County Museum, he has gone even more reclusive than had been his norm. The Tate show had been the occasion of a barrage of vituperative criticism. Mr. Kitaj, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, had lived in England since the 1950s.

In the “Tate War”, as he calls it, he lashed out at detractors, countering their cat-calls of “existentialist bullshit,” “namedropper” and “pseudo-intellectual” with his own charges, calling them “antisemitic, anti-foreign, anti-American, anti-intellectual.”

Amidst this furor, his much younger wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, also an American abroad, suddenly died of an aneurism. Sandra is the “beautiful women [sic]” of his “Los Angeles Pictures”, the group of works on display at LA Louver. He says that he doesn’t try to depict her exactly, but makes her up, from memory, as he goes along. In 1997, Mr. Kitaj returned to America, choosing as his base the city where he had met Sandra, where he had once taught at UCLA, and where his son by an earlier marriage, the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, and his grandsons live.

He took with him Max, his son by Sandra, who he has raised singlehandedly since the boy was ten. Both his sons were at the opening, along with their sister, Dominie, a decorated servicewoman just back from Iraq. David Hockney, one of Mr. Kitaj’s closest friends, was also in attendance.

I was in LA for the opening of his show and the last week of his friend Lucian Freud’s retrospective. During his period of mourning (arguably ongoing) Mr. Kitaj had sat for Mr. Freud, although neither of the portraits begun was completed. I was also in town to work on an exhibition of Sandra Fisher and her circle, for the New York Studio School in a couple of years. Sandra was a personal friend, and it was unnerving, the next day, at Mr. Kitaj’s new house, to see portraits she had made of me ten years earlier. Mr. Kitaj included a selection of Sandra’s work in a back room at Louver. She painted in an unpretentious, fresh, naturalistic style, favoring a cheery, fauve palette. Her subjects were portraits of friends and nudes of both sexes.

Mr. Kitaj now lives in Westwood. His house, formerly Peter Lorre’s, is overtaken by books. There are no easy chairs, “to discourage visitors from staying too long”, he tells me. I’m honored to be invited at lunchtime; a man of very strict habits, Mr. Kitaj habitually receives only at 4pm.

Rooms are given over to particular subjects. In one, he has created a shrine to Cézanne, for instance. He has all the prints (he prefers the uncolored version of the famous bathers lithograph) and an impressive array of first editions. Another room is his Judaica library. Volumes are organized according to an eclectic, personal logic. Looking at one particularly odd juxtaposition, Kitaj remarked: “My friend Leon Wieseltier was visiting, and he remarked that this is probably the only library in the world where you will find a set of Proust next to the works of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”

Raised in an agnostic, leftist household, Kitaj surprised friends in the mid-1970s when, just around the same time this some-time “Pop” appropriationist rediscovered drawing from life and the single figure, he also reconnected with his Jewish heritage. For sure, it was a secular Jewishness, having more to do with a spiritual identification with mid-twentieth century intellectuals, especially mid-Europeans whose lives were shattered or disrupted by the Holocaust, than with religion. (The name Kitaj belonged to his step-father, a refugee from Vienna.) He has come to be fascinated, however, by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs.

He is living proof of some traits his critic enemies picked up on: a promiscuous lover of big ideas, an inveterate historical namedropper. But he has always been aware of that. An early critic complained that his work was “littered with ideas”, and he has often quoted the remark with pride. What friends and foes alike often overlook in Mr. Kitaj is the ambiguity, irony and self-depracating humor that invariably go along for the ride with his grand theorizing and bombast.

In a corner of his Judaica library is a back copy of the Burlington Magazine with his 1980 pastel portrait of Degas on the cover. Degas has had to share with Ezra Pound, yet another hero, the typically Kitajesque epitaph, “my favorite antisemite.”

He explains to me how different antisemitism is in every country and situation. Degas’s anti-Dreyfusard stance, he feels, can be explained, even vaguely sympathised with, in the context of the national disaster of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Kitaj is both incensed and bemused by people’s reaction to his charge of the “low octane” antisemitism he feels he encountered in the British press. “Antisemitism runs the whole gamut from ignorant gossip in an English pub to the death camps, with infinite degrees and nuances along the way”, he explains, reaching as he speaks for a press clipping recently sent to him by a London friend. It is a diatribe by a tabloid critic who had given him a particular drubbing, this time against the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, a champion of Kitaj’s, and a Jew. “Time to be rid of this Trotsky of art”, ran the headline. “You see,” Mr. Kitaj exclaims, nodding sagely. “Trotsky! Not Stalin or Hitler, but Trotsky!”

To those who knew Sandra Fisher it can be disconcerting to witness her transmutation into a motif. She was blessed with a preternaturally sunny disposition, a Californian optimism to counter her husband’s studied pessimism. Kitaj dedicated his book, “First Diasporist Manifesto”, “For Sandra, who puts me down when I complain, replying she’d rather live in these times (as a woman and artist) than any other.”

Since her death, Mr. Kitaj has very publicly transformed her into a personal symbol of renewal and resistance. Mr. Kitaj is a great collector and reader of little magazines, and in emulation of them, he has launched “Sandra”, as a periodical manqué. Various projects, be they exhibition catalogues or installations, have appeared under a “Sandra” rubric, featuring the same beaming photograph from her youthful prime.

The first instalment of “Sandra” was a strange set-up at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in London, his farewell to the city. Surrounded by a personal selection of his “School of London” friends (he had coined the term himself in the 1970s), including Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney, was his own transcription of Manet’s Execution of Maximillian, in which he cast himself and Manet among the firing squad, returning fire at the dreaded critics. The LA Louver catalogue is “Sandra Eight: Los Angeles Pictures”.

In “The Los Angeles Pictures”, “Sandra and I became Lovers again”, he writes in a catalogue note. “I could make love to my angel with my paintbrush, fondle her again, caress her contours.” Some paintings are very graphic, as the couple make love in the bath, for instance. Others keep up Mr. Kitaj’s famous habit of referencing old master paintings, sometimes in composite, taking not just forms but the aura and association of the older work. Their two faces overlapping in a kiss (recalling Brancusi) actually borrows its format from a detail of Giotto’s Scrovegni fresco at Padua depicting the meeting of Joachim and Anna, Christ’s grandparents. “I detected Barnet Newman’s Zip in the line running between the profiles, so I emphasized it in the profiles of Sandra and me.”

He sees his pictures as “love stories”. “The Man-Woman Story has become quite rare in painting since the death of Picasso. Earlier, many painters had shown the woman and man in a love situation- such as Picasso, Munch, Schiele, Chagall, even Matisse.” But then the subject became rare. He puts this down to fact that many of the best painters recently have been gay or abstract. Even straight artists, however, have veered towards the isolated, individual figure, he says, citing his “School of London” friends. Sandra Fisher, he points out, was an exception, often painting nude men and women embracing.

An aspect of Mr. Kitaj’s Tate show which irked critics was his announcement that he had entered his “old age style”. They saw in this an impertinence, as it is not for an artist but for connoisseurs to decide when this had happened. Again, there was a failure to savor the intended irony, the heavy quote marks that surrounded such a stance. In earlier work, whether the tightly constructed fragmentary collage-influenced paintings of his “Pop” period of the 1960s, which first catapulted him to attention, or the more naturalistic pastels of the following decade, Mr. Kitaj was noted for his draughtsmanly finesse. Robert Hughes had famously said of him in the pages of Time that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive.” But in his self-consciously “old-age” style he opted for a loose, wobbly, tentative, unfinished look, and this carries over in his Los Angeles Pictures.

This doesn’t stop him from teasing me with a big assertion, typically one that raises a provocative thought about culture at large beyond its overt egotistical posture: “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived”.

This article originally appeared in the New York Sun, Monday June 30, 2003

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Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Marian Goodman Gallery
October 25 to December 3, 2011
24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, New York City, 212-977-7160

No one ridicules racial minorities, the blind or disabled people. But fat men and women are often the subject of jokes.  That shows a class bias. The grander the restaurant, the smaller the portions of food: and so most privileged people are slim. Until recently Fernando Botero who, like Thomas Kinkaid and Leroy Neiman is very successful commercially, was not taken seriously within the art world. It was easy to ridicule his signature style short fat people, often shown in take offs from old master paintings such as Olympia and Las Meninas. But in 2005, when few artists were able to translate their leftist politics into art, his Abu Ghraib series made him a figure worth reckoning within the art world.

In Precious (2009), Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe brilliantly plays an overweight teenager. We see such African-American girls, and so can accept that casting. The Gospels don’t tell Christ’s weight, but since in pre-modern cultures poor people were malnourished, it’s hard to imagine that he was fat. Botero is a gifted painter. Jesus and the Crowd (2010) shows Christ surrounded by a mob in modern dress; The Way of Sorrows (2010), presents him being beaten by a police officer in modern dress; and Jesus Nailed to the Cross (2011) depicts a soldier nailing his right foot to the cross. But in the end I was reminded, fatally, of an exhibition of crucifixions several decades ago also on 57^th street in which Keith Haring depicted Donald Duck crucified. Botero’s Christ in Entombment of Christ (2010) is a powerful image, painted with great feeling. And his admirable Crucifixion (2011) sets that scene in a park within a modern city. Like the Renaissance masters who depicted Christ and his disciplines as contemporary Italians, Botero recognizes that unless the New Testament scenes are presented in the present, sacred Christian art is dead. When Titian shows Christ as a handsome Venetian, his paintings come off. Christ was a Middle-Eastern Jew, not a Venetian, but Titian’s fiction works. But Christ could not be plump- that’s my unreflective prejudice; and so Botero’s fiction, setting Christ’s passion in the contemporary world does not fly.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Annunciation (2010), a thirty-three minute video uses three projected images to present the Annunciation.  An angel wearing wings, who is lifted aloft held by a harness, confronts a young actress playing the Virgin.  I don’t understand the idea, prominently cited in the gallery’s publicity, that living beings’ different worlds exist simultaneously.

We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world.  (Jakob von Uexküll, A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men (1957))

But I can see that Ahtila’s fiction works, for in this scene staged in her Finnish studio the Annunciation comes alive.

***

The Land of Light and Promise: 50 Years Painting Jerusalem and Beyond. Ludwig Blum 1891-1974 at the Museum of Biblical Art
October 23, 2011- January 15, 2012
1865 Broadway at 61st Street, New York City, 212-408-1500

According to Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) inaugurated a post-historical period, in which everything was possible. The Land of Light and Promise: 50 Years Painting Jerusalem and Beyond. Ludwig Blum 1891-1974 at the Museum of Biblical Art, shows that our pluralistic period started somewhat earlier. The Metropolitan’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, posted on their web site demonstrates that 1949 was a good year for painting, for Barnett Newman’s Concord, Max Beckmann’s Beginning and Willem de Kooning’s classic Black Untitled have entered the collection. As if in a parallel universe, Ludwig Blum,  (1891-1974), a Czech of Jewish origin who moved to Palestine in 1923 painted Jerusalem, View from Mount Scopus. His son was killed fighting; some of his paintings show the results of the battles, which made Israel independent.  But this picture, which has more in common with Bernardo Bellotto’s eighteenth-century cityscapes than the paintings by Newman, Beckmann or de Kooning shows Jerusalem looking peaceful. The Dome of the Rock is on the left, the black roof of Dormition Church near the center and the yellow-roofed Rockefeller Museum of Archaeology on the right edge. By presenting this show, originally organized by the Ben Uri, London’s Jewish Art Museum, an American Protestant institution provides an invaluable portrait of Christian, Islamic and Jewish culture in Blum’s adopted country.

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Will Ryman has transplanted a spectacular urban garden to the gallery floor, abloom with more than 100 mammoth hand-constructed roses in a vibrant palette of pinks and reds. Ranging in height from a couple of feet to seven and clustered in groups like at a crowded cocktail party, the flowers have a strong figural presence. While evocative of , the gray otherworldly creatures that densely populated Ryman’s earlier work, these sculptures feel completely fresh and unexpected in their riot of color, immediately recognizable yet strange in their outsized dimensions. Ryman invites us to step through the looking glass and navigate this immersive landscape from a bug’s eye view.

For indeed, we are not alone in the undergrowth. Ryman plants a meaty black fly on a column like a sore thumb. He tucks aphids, ladybugs, and giant bees amidst the curling and unfurling petals, magnifying nature’s pesty business. He litters the scene as well with man’s throwaway business—stubbed-out cigarette butts, a crumpled Coke can, a half-eaten hotdog, a Trident gum wrapper. It’s the kind of detritus that city dwellers tend to become oblivious to. But here—by flipping the relationship between the flowers and the viewers and blowing up the scale of these items—Ryman puts the evidence of our carelessness squarely in our faces in a bit of social commentary.

Yet Ryman clearly has affection for these contemporary artifacts, lovingly painted in every detail of the logos and reminiscent of the artist’s earlier meticulously wacky recreation of a New York newsstand (echoing Red Grooms’s “Ruckus Manhattan.”) They show his humorous, pop sensibility and his eye for urban detail. A lifelong New Yorker, Ryman has even loosely tiled the floor with his own textured steel squares that clank a bit as viewers move around and mimic the gritty feel of the city underfoot. What’s seems different here is how he applies humble industrial materials—wire mesh, plaster, house paint, metal tubing—to such a voluptuous, organic form as the rose, a universal symbol of beauty and romance as well as treachery with its prickly thorns. As in the films of David Lynch, a seedy underbelly lurks below the rosy landscape.

This defiled Garden of Eden seems an allegory of the city itself, with the roses—which Ryman intentionally leaves rough to underscore their manufacture—taking on an architectural quality as well. If the “new beginning” of the title refers in part to the new direction Ryman is taking here in his work, he may also be suggesting that the glorious city of New York, which has taken such a battering these last few years, is ready for a new day.

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On view as part of the artist’s solo exhibition, “From Afar,” which opens Thursday at Marlborough Chelsea (alongside the sculptural installation of artcritical’s September “logo artist” Will Ryman).  The title of Hershberg’s show alludes both to the long distances from which he paints his panoramas (click the image to see the full “cinescope” format of his eight foot-wide canvas) and to the fact that in Hebrew, “afar” also means “dust.” “All that dust in the aria hangs over everything, defining a seemingly endless nothingness into a measured and felt diaphanous volume of ether that starts where the eye begins to see,” the artist has written.  Many of Hershberg’s vistas revisit vantage points of Corot paintings, what he calls the C-spots, which presumably is a painter’s equivalent of hitting a landscape’s G-spot?  Hershberg is the founder of theJerusalem Studio School, an academy that fosters a traditional approach to painting, and which runs a summer program in Umbria.  A gala for the School will take place at Andrea Meislin Gallery on September 16.

This was an artcritical PIC in September 2009.

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Marlborough Chelsea
211 West 19 Street
212-463-8634

Through June 4, 2005

In 1937 Ivor Winters prefaced his analysis of free verse with an essay entitled “The Morality of Poetry.” He could apply the concept of morality to art without irony, confident of being understood by his audience. Winters was not referring to moralism but to what might be called the virtue of craft: the discovery of values which the poet-any serious artist- finds by grappling with the difficulties of his medium.

In the brief span of a single lifetime, public grasp of the communal function of trained, sharpened sensibilities has eroded nearly to oblivion. Navigating in the fine dust of disconnected particles, we can barely glimpse purpose in art beyond that of entertainment or self-expression. On view at both Marlborough galleries, uptown and down, are the mechanisms of that erosion at work for half a century in the art of Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

Rivers was born Yitzak Loiza Grossberg to Ukrainian immigrants in the Bronx. At seventeen, he began a career as a jazz saxophonist, changing his name after a nightclub emcee introduced his combo as “Larry Rivers and His Mudcats.” He played gigs around New York and studied musical theory briefly at Julliard until beginning to paint in 1945. On tour that year with a jazz band in Maine, he met Jane Freilicher, wife of the band’s pianist. Painting appeared a more opportune vehicle for creative ambition than jazz, dominated as it was by great black musicians. Back in New York, he and Freilicher drew from the model at the studio of Nell Blaine who encouraged them to study with Hans Hofmann. Rivers’ first show at the Jane Street cooperative in 1949 earned praise from Clement Greenberg and the artist was launched.

Through the1950s, into the early ’60s, he created some wonderful things but few are here. I miss “Double Portrait of Berdie” (1955), a resonant synthesis of figuration and modernist intentions and his sweeping hybrid structure “The History of the Russian Revolution” (1965). Also absent is “The Greatest Homosexual” (1964), a parody of Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon in His Study” but with a delectable surface that holds its own.

On view uptown are several sensitive portrait drawings and delicately painted heads from the ’50s, suggesting the emotional power Rivers soon relinquished to the artifice of Camp. Veils of pure color are whispered onto fine-grained linen, supporting and balancing passages of elegant drawing. Lovely and distinctive, paintings like “Head of a Woman” (1957) leave you lonely for what he could have produced if he had resisted the tongue-in-cheek detachment of Rauschenberg, Warhol and company. But Rivers never kicked the habit of burlesque.

He was a skilled performer, a great mimic and fine draughtsman who abandoned the problems of painting early, gravitating toward the random I-do-this-I-do-that of Beat sensibility. “Portrait of Frank O’Hara” (1953), keeps the flavor of his abstract expressionist origins. But by the mid-1950s, Pop Art had begun its advance against seriousness and qualitative distinctions. Jackson Pollock had already used Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace as a urinal; Rauschenberg was combining stuffed goats with his paintings and undrawing de Kooning (“Erased de Kooning” 1953). The moment belonged to bad boys. It wasn’t long before play hardened into pose and Rivers substituted waggish constructions and anecdotal interest, often with sexual overtones, for the language of painting.

The sculpted and painted foamboard relief “Modernist Times: Assembly Line” (1989-90), a cartoonish Charlie Chaplin amid the machine-like forms of Leger, is good fun; so is every foamboard piece here. But the shelf life of sight gags is brief. Looking at lampoons of Balthus, Matisse and Gericault you wonder: Where does the fun end and the damage begin? Rivers’ gibes are ultimately as transient as window decoration-a reminder that Warhol’s paintings debuted in Bonwit Teller’s windows in the early 1960s.

Cleverness is a thin reed in visual art; it looses currency fast. This show looks as dated as Teddy boy Edwardiana, Beatles-style chukka boots or Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Beat dreams of the free poetic life. By the time Mary Hopkins bumped “Hey Jude” down the music charts with “Those Were the Days”, Rivers was already copying himself. “Dutch Masters Silver” (1969) is the third rendition of a cigar box motif begun in 1963. How many times can Rivers bleed the same logo-Dutch Master, Camels, Webster-before life drains out?

Marlborough Chelsea displays his most recent work, a last hurrah for commercial glamor. Rivers ended where he began: in an ethos of fashion-obsession that celebrated style over substance. The downtown paintings recycle photos from high-end fashion mags, a brash ensemble strangely reminiscent of the 1960s. Twiggy resurrects in the the concave droop of the bony, cropped-haired model of “Fashion Seated” (2001). Mary Quant’s micro-mini skirt is back; only the tone of the models is different. Here is Carnaby Street on the skids with the gartered waif of “Thigh High Fishnets” (2000) or the black stockinged pickup of “In the Artist’s Car” (1995). In Mary Quant’s memorable phrasing: “Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”

Larry Rivers fastened on showmanship and attitude. Beyond the earlier works, few are more enduring than a low-budget Warhol movie or the Velvet Underground. He spent high talent on the carelessness of his era, one foreign to the ground of lasting achievement. Works of great communicative scale and meaning are not products of a cultural attitude epitomized by Rivers’ close friend, collaborator, and aesthetic apologist, the poet Frank O’Hara: “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to; if they don’t need poetry, bully for them.” And if they don’t need painting either, no big deal.

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Hunt Slonem: Recent Work at Marlborough Chelsea through October 23 (211 West 19 Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues, 212 463 8634)

Reed Danzinger at McKenzie Fine Art through October 9 (511 W 25 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 989 5467)

The phrase “mystical decoration,” by no means a perjorative, can be used to link painters as diverse as Hunt Slonem, with his expansive, whimsical and diffuse paintings of birds, butterflies and saints, and Richmond Burton, whose eye-candy abstraction probes a tantric psychedelia at the heart of organic systems and repeating patterns. This month and next painting that’s sumptuous in unabashedly pretty effect but nonetheless spiritually edifying in intention and power holds sway in other galleries, too: Robert Kushner’s flower paintings on sliding Japanese doors at DC Moore, also qualify under this rubric. And Caio Fonseca, who will show next month at Paul Kasmin, taps a similar aesthetic of decentered design and whimsical arabesque, although occult origins are unlikely in his case. While all these artists are happy to tease the viewer with an element of campness, what is more compelling and intriguing about them is that they usually back away from overt irony.

Despite marked differences in temper and taste, there are suprising commonalities between Mr. Burton and Mr. Slonem, in terms of repetition, the grid, and passivity. But then, Mr. Burton has an almost Zelig-like capacity to blend with almost any roster of artists his work brings to mind. Take the five recent paintings in the main gallery at Cheim & Read that reintroduce the grid motif banished from his imagery in the mid-1990s. They relate equally to the tight, obsessively realized pattern making of James Siena and the almost ferociously expressive nested lines of Terry Winters, forming a rare bridge between these disperate artists.

At first, this latest series by Mr. Burton seems a radical departure from the body of work which in previous years had confirmed him as one of the most exuberant and epicurean of abstract painters. Three pieces, created concurrently with the new grid paintings and presented in Cheim & Read’s chapel-like front gallery, recall the boisterous, curvaceous, florally inspired motifs of his “I am” series a few years back: “Solex,” (2003), a five foot square arrangment of three panels, has what can read subjectively as brilliant yellow stamen chased by filiaments of torquoise and purple and hemmed in by radically cropped, pulsating orange leaves. By Mr. Burton’s standards, the images in this room are unusually iconic (as redolent of Georgia O’Keefe as of Lee Krasner with whom his name is often linked.) Although very much in flux, the forms are centered in a way that intimates a bigger order and stasis.

The grids, meanwhile, caught on the diagonal, work in an opposite phenomenological direction, to insist on all-overness and the possibility of endless repetition. Horizontal in format, they intimate vistas, a shift in scale from the microscopic (although that remains a possibility.) They are more muted and restrained in color. But they are a long way from reduction or ubiquity: what actually animates these compositions is a sense of the grid transgressed, that waves of pattern and nascent forms are suggested by the contractions and expansions of this lattice-work. The organic is seen to grow from geometric decay.

The diversity of this show could equally demonstrate restless formal curiosity or a hedging of stylistic bets. A third space reveals yet another line of inquiry: “Freak Out,” (2004) is a confected, densely packed composition of yin-yang and comma motifs. A washed out feeling in the color and surface lends the canvas the remoteness of printed fabric. Like Karin Davie and Bruce Pearson, he is happy to play with connotations of retro décor. You then start to notice similar traits in works that had initially seemed more earnest. “Solex” can’t have been divided into three sections for logistical reasons: the intentionality comes across as a knowing nod in the direction of fin de siecle screens. By signalling applied art and thus playing with received ideas of genre hierarchy, the work retreats from claims to higher authority.

Hunt Slonem is a patrician savant almost in the same class as Francesco Clemente: immensely prolific, beloved in the world of fashion, unfazed by scale, at once fey and egotistical, he is knowingly sparing with his magical touch, seeming to inculcate nonchalence, if not cackhandedness, as an aristocratic virtue.

Mr. Slonem’s work is often impressive even if rarely-in internal formal terms-very satisfying. In a way, his activity is more performative than productive: what we see is painting as verb as much as noun. With each work we have a further installment of a unique personality, rather than a thing in itself.

His virtuoso touch isn’t to do with the loading or inflection of his brush. Actually, and more interestingly, his brilliance has to do with the way repeated forms like the rabbits in the aptly named and subtly punning “Charm,” (2004) poise themselves between expressive naivity and rubberstamp ubiquity. In a work like “Ascension,” (2004) there is almost a child-like glee with which the multicolored, primitive faces fill out the flanking segments of canvas. Similarly, the repetitive, laborious, but ethereally imprecise incisions of line denoting the cage magically animate his surfaces.

At the reception desk of his show at Marlborough Chelsea there’s a press package inches thick of fashion and décor shoots in Mr. Slonem’s grandiose residences, which include his sprawling studio in West Chelsea’s Starret Lehigh Building. One sees immediately that canvases are at the service of ambience, not the other way around.

It may seem unfair to over-interpret the fact that a wall of several dozen Picabia-inspired imaginary portraits of saints looks way more impressive than any single canvas in the melange. And yet, this signals a truth about his more ambitious paintings, including those in the present show: bigger and more is not only better, but essential. And that, of course, is a contradiction in terms: that essence be revealed in overload. Therein lies the mysticism, that when you are dealing with décor rather than image, where lightness of being takes precendence over strength of expression, an aeshetic of accumulation makes more sense than one of clearing away. It is the Zen of more being more.

Apropos of overload, the charming, exquisite, labor intensive, allusion packed, technically exhilerating work of painter Reed Danziger at McKenzie should not be missed. It is true, alas, that she disproves the inverted Miesean aesthetic that serves Hunt Slonem. In her case, moving to a second or third panel (she works her exuberantly miniscule forms in oil, shellac, pigment and other media on paper mounted on board) is like taking another dose of overdose. Caveat emptor- she’s worth a shot.

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Forum Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212 355 4545
through February 7

this article first appeared in the New York Sun on Thursday, February 12, 2004

Figure painting claims greater gravity and issues a tougher challenge than other genres. At its most humane, figuration asserts the primacy of life over the painter’s world of forms. Vincent Desiderio brings to the human figure grace of hand and, rarer still, grace of mind. Steeped in suggestion, his works are moral allegories. Realistically painted subjects function as signs whose meaning reveals itself to those responsive to the enigmas of the lived life.

Desiderio conveys the sorrow of living without sentimentality, morbidity or anger. “Contemplative Distance,” (2002), is a triptych balancing portraits of two broken men. One carries the marks of chronic pituitary disorder; the other bears the stigmata of Down’s Syndrome. Both are greeted with unfailing tact, their humanity ascendant over the mortifications of disability and disfigurement. Here, as in the finest of Desiderio’s work, nothing is in vain. Even the fetal x-ray of “Academy,” (2001), seems a formal gesture of salutation to the mortality we share with the rest of the organic world.

“Allegory of Painting,” (2003), builds a contemporary pietá from studio clutter. The artist cradles his brain damaged son with infinite tenderness. Surrounded by the sacramentals of his craft-optical devices, frames, photos, books, tools for making and viewing art-his attention belongs only to the child. All focus is on the limpid flesh of the boy and his bandages. White as the winding cloth in a medieval crucifixion, they simultaneously conceal and highlight his wounds. There is no bravura here. The painting is classical, not in its subject, but in its sanity and reticence. Its discretion is rooted in Desiderio’s own humility before the irreducible worth of this one frail life.

Only one painting strays from the source of his strengths. The inflated “Pantocrator,” (2002), is a grandiloquent tour de force, clever rather than convincing. The domination of space and of women, too, combine in a giant triptych better suited to the headquarters of Lockheed Martin than the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art which acquired it.

Much more compelling is the magnificent “Cockaigne,” (1993-2003), an ingenious echo of Peter Brueghel’s “Land of Cockaigne,” (1576). A monumental welter of art books scatters around a table covered with the shards of a meal. Pages fall open to paintings, a rollicking jumble of masters from the Florentines to the moderns. Human presence is insinuated though none is visible. Bones and crumbs-of art and food-are all we see. The pantagruelian feast is finished but what a romp while it lasted! It is a stunning performance, witty and cautionary.

“White Dress,” (2003), deserves mention for the incandescent beauty of it. So too, the luminous skull of “Isthmus,” (2000), unsettling in its delicacy. Overall, this is work that commands our gratitude. If he resists the pretensions of gigantism, Desiderio will earn his place among the masters he reveres.

Raymond Han is an accomplished still life painter, adept at depicting expensive things for expensive people: the just-so vase, exquisite china, exotic flowers. His current exhibition handles the human figure like any other still life. Han’s empathy with his subjects extends no deeper than their totemic value. These are images of class, psychologically vacant objects that nod to the good taste of the audience.

“Matthew & Alexandra,” (2003), offers bloodless props for a yuppie mail order catalog. Matthew is wan and bored. Chic Alexandra sits on the floor in her Manolo Blahniks, a signal that she never has to run for a bus. No furniture appears. The couple inhabit a genteel geometry: the circle of a mirror above, the rectangle of a portfolio below. The painting, like much else on view, is a greyed-down simulation of good breeding.

Nudity is a fact that figure painters must face on occasion. Han defuses the subject by pretending not to look. “Flora,” (2003), presents a sleeping female nude, composed with the same artificiality as the huge vase of lilies and amaryllis dominating the canvas. Here is a flower arrangement in two species, floral and human. Han’s male nudes, “Iannis I & II,” (2003), are posed discreetly sideways. No display of family jewels in the living room, please.

Han prefers artifice to living bodies. “Indigo Slip,” (2003), is a mannered riff on Balthus’ disquieting “Alice,” (1933), whose slip drops beneath one breast. Balthus’ figure is unconcerned by her own deshabille and exposure. Han’s model, by contrast, coyly lets down one strap, controlling the peep. Here is a single bared breast for the Better Sort. What could be finer.

The triptych “Three Women,” (2001-2), is another tease. In the first panel, the model stands in her gown. In the second, she raises it to reveal-what else?-a thong. You can almost hear, “Take it off!” The third panel gets to the point, frontal nudity. But instead of the frisson of nakedness, it is oddly funny. Shaved to fit the thong, her pubic hair calls to mind Hitler’s mustache. A Duchampian absurdity maims the image.

The double painting, “Rotation,” (2003), hints at what Han might do if he were engaged by his subject. The figure, a darksome young man, has a veracity that sets it apart. This single portrait is endowed with life, something distinct from banal imitation of physiognomy.

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Bruce Pearson: Paintings & Drawings” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts until June 14 (31 Mercer Street, at Grand Street, 212-226-3232)

It takes a real pro to pull together a group exhibition that identifies a significant trend in contemporary art. That is what veteran curator Maurice Tuchman (formerly of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has done in an important show, High & Inside, which closes this weekend at Marlborough Chelsea.

The ostensible commonality binding these nine artists, according to catalogue essayist Judd Tully, is “mapping, scheming, surveilling and plotting.” Each artist in his or her way balances the yin of the microscopic and the yang of the telescopic – although how quaint these scopes now seem in an age where DNA and satellites define our horizons.

However much they respond to the notations of geography, geology, sociology, or cell biology, these artists, who mostly emerged in the 1990s, are anything but a throwback to the systems-obsessed 1960s and 1970s. (Unless, of course, they are intent on adding a layer of retro-reference to already dense stylistic configurations: the peel-on readymade abstractions of Brad Hampton, for instance, simultaneously satirize the artistic formalism and techno-gimmickry of the 1960s.)

The artists in this show are post-conceptual in their concern to reintegrate the cerebral and the optical. Even the two flow-diagrammists among them, Beth Campbell, who makes tree of life configurations out of terse statements of variable outcomes to simple life situations, and Mark Lombardi, with his persnickety conspiracy-theorist constellations analyzing international monetary investments, avoid the anesthetic anti-form drudgery of vintage conceptualism. Their handwriting, their touch, has formal significance that integrates with the (superficially) predominant “message” or narrative in their work.

Others in the show veer in an opposite visual direction, towards overload: It is not form giving shape to information so much as information rendered as form. Steven Charles, for instance, paints gaudy, pseudo-psychotic contour lines that glow in enamel paint. In a meltdown of layers and categories, manmade roads and geological strata splice into one another.

In “High & Inside,” artists make raw form out of cooked information. In semiotic terms, they turn signifieds back into signifiers. You could argue, of course, that is what collage has been doing since Picasso and Braque discovered it. But here it is not just objects but systems that are being abstracted. Lisa Corinne Davis and John J. O’Connor make pretty patterns out of ugly data: racial stereotyping in her case, disasters and social vices in his. It is left to Fred Tomaselli and Daniel Zeller to force an equation between method and madness, making a magical connection between density of data and the zaniness with which their work is crafted. With Mr. Tomaselli, this has to do with the trance-like effect of his psychadelic collages, where high and inside are psychological states as much as depictive prospects. With Mr. Zeller, the nutty banknote-engraver obsessiveness of his renderings of aquifer retention maps unites form and content, as both bring to mind desperation and dryness.

***

Bruce Pearson’s new show at Ronald Feldman makes something truly sumptuous out of semiotics. Like the High Insiders discussed above, he comes out of an aesthetic investigation of language and systems. In terms of reduction versus complication, he and his peers are to conceptual art what Baroque was to the Renaissance. Put a better way, they put back with a vengeance the opticality shunned by conceptual art.

Mr. Pearson came to public attention in an important group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art project room in 1998, in which Mr. Tomaselli was a co-exhibitor. He is also part of the Williamsburg scene where the trailblazing gallery, Pierogi, exhibits Messrs. Charles, O’Connor, and Zeller. In Mr. Pearson’s work, however, it isn’t mapping but language that is deconstructed to head-spinning and eye-dazzling effect.

He appropriates wacko statements from the mass media. These have gotten tamer recently but a suitably off the wall example from the current show is “Cybergasm machines and male hysteria.” The typography is subjected to computer-generated distortion (not enough, regrettably, in some recent pieces where legibility threatens the balance of power between texture and text.) From these patterns, letters are hot wired in Styrofoam. The eventual carved and contoured surfaces are painted in scorching fluorescents and other funky hues.

His modus operandi and how it influences our view of what he is doing may seem to have a whiff about it of the kind of art for which you need to know the process to understand its point. But the first and last impression of a Pearson is sensual, not cerebral. Mercifully, in other words, there is madness in his method. There’s a compelling, psychedelic otherness at play in what could read as lunar landscape or nuclear fission.

One has to go back to Jasper Johns to find a visual artist so intently locking horns with type as a visceral, physical presence. It is almost tempting to read Mr. Pearson’s project as a riff on Mr. Johns, sending up the grayness and monotony of the older artist. But unlike so much art of the last few years, this isn’t conceptual art with a smile. Rather, there is a sense of something much bigger: the reinvention of abstract painting.

The key to understanding Mr. Pearson’s achievement – and that of the best among the “High & Inside” artists – is to realise that language and system and mapping are at the service of form, not the other way around. In a way, the semiotic and the systemic are to their abstraction what gesture was to the first generation New York School: something at once arbitrary and personal, determined yet unconscious, circumscribing yet unpredictable, and equally about structure and chance.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 5, 2003

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