February 9 to April 6, 2019
522 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, matthewmarks.com

What do we expect from the late work of great painters? If you are a Romantic, your proof of greatness might be evinced by a final letting go——a pure abandonment to the id, a total acceptance of the painter’s deepest urges. No second guesses, no capitulation to analytical thinking, no recycling of past successes; just allowing the body, with its supposedly pure inner wisdom, to do what it needs to do. A Romantic might appreciate the arid grace of dementia-afflicted late de Kooning, or the brazen “blend of slapstick idiocy and gallantry,” as the painter Carroll Dunham once wrote of libidinous late Picasso. For a Romantic, this might seem the heroic response to the knowledge that one’s time is about up.

But are we getting something different from the late work of Jasper Johns? Johns has never been a Romantic. Don’t expect to find a “rage against the dying of the light.” Which is not to say there is no passion in these paintings, it’s just that his relentless denials have conditioned us to be circumspect about making any claims about them at all. So how do we react to Johns’s late work? Despite the startling complex simplicity of his initial paintings of flags and targets, he has gradually developed a quality of rigorous self-examination and reflection on the processes through which he has created his work.

Alexi Worth, in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, discusses what he terms as Johns’s “scrupulousness”: writes of how

Johns seems to be allergic to the nervous approximations that characterize much art talk — not to mention ordinary conversation. He would rather say nothing than assent to a banality; would rather deconstruct a question than accept a false premise. The more one talks with him, the more his scrupulousness seems distinctively extreme: not just a mannerism, but a deeply ingrained reservoir of feeling.

Looking at these latest works, Johns’ scrupulousness seems to have intensified rather than been left behind. You can almost hear him ask himself, “What am I doing today?” or “Now what happens if I do it this way?” As the artist approaches 90, these questions take on poignant urgency. Though each image might address a new subject, every piece here is filled with references to images, marks, and tropes from earlier work. Even without the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons that peak out of many of these works, it is almost impossible to look at them and not think that here is a person patiently and systematically facing the prospect of death: The completion of the content of his artistic life.

A whole series of work in this show centers on an image of grief. The words “Farley Breaks Down After Larry Burrows,” stenciled on each of the untitled canvases and drawings and prints in this group, refer to an image in a famous LIFE magazine photo essay by Larry Burrows of Farley, a mission leader during Vietnam. Johns has chosen the particular photo of Farley burying his sobbing face in his arms after a battle where comrades were killed and wounded. But curiously, the original title of the Burrows photo was “Farley Gives Way,” not breaks down. What we see in these paintings, drawings, and prints is a literal breaking down of the image’s surface; not just an emotional breakdown but an actual disintegration of the image into marks and puddles of paint, and sometimes, silkscreened cartoons and play money.

Understanding this photographic moment of grief is not only about the grief, but the effect of death on the living. Each image can be seen as a completed text which — like a life itself — is unified, but composed of many small, seemingly random experiences whose relationships to each other, upon examination, become infinitely complex.

Other references to his own earlier works abound: For instance, the vase/silhouettes figure/ground optical illusion image. Do you see two symmetrical facing profiles, or the vase that exists as the negative space between them? Johns favors optical illusions that, depending on one’s attention, flip between two images such as a vase or a pair of silhouettes, or a duck and a rabbit, or (but not here) a young woman and an old crone. In the context of these paintings, the conundrum of contemplating these dualities of image from a single point of view could be a metaphor for one’s inability to imagine the disintegration of one’s own consciousness. We can grieve for the dead, we can know that we will die, but we can’t imagine being dead. It’s reminiscent of the title of Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

Not only do we have this examination of a man burying his face in his arms in the “Farley Breaks Down” paintings (ironically, the photographer himself later died in a helicopter crash), but there is also a series of works based on John Deakin’s photograph of a young Lucian Freud on a bed, with his face held in his right hand. The photo, which had belonged to Francis Bacon, is paint-spattered, creased, folded and torn. Johns already used this photo for a series of paintings titled “Regrets” that were shown at MoMA a few years ago. In it are newspapers on the floor, and a diamond patterned quilt on the bed. You can see why it spoke to Johns——it has so many iconographic elements that he already uses. The folds, patterns, newsprint, and splotches create a very Johnsian, mark-abstracting surface. Curiously, the resulting images in both these series reminded me of the way Bonnard broke down his painting surfaces into a series of abstract shapes and marks, which adds the possibility of another layer of meaning, as Bonnard’s paintings, though in a different way, also explored quotidian daily life. By horizontally mirroring the image of the torn photo, Johns further abstracts it and turns a part of a white wall into a shape that becomes a skull.

The ideas of mirroring and reflection have occupied Johns’s process for a long time. In treating an area as a mirror, he turns the formal idea of flatness into a more sophisticated and useful concept that the surface of the canvas is a field, with properties that the painter assigns to it. Mirroring might have to do with his long involvement with printmaking but it is worth remarking upon because it seems to be another way of breaking down an image, making forms abstract, and destabilizing a single reading.

Despite flashes of mordant humor – a whole series of dancing skeletons, for instance – we don’t have the pleasure in this late work of the lush encaustic surfaces familiar in early Johns, or the startlingly opaque conundrum of a simple, ubiquitous pop image to offset the lugubrious tone. Some of these paintings even have dispiriting harsh acrylic texture, and if you didn’t know the photographic references some were based on, you might not have a clue of what you were looking at.

Deconstructing these images is an endless task,  and trying to find the Easter eggs of hidden references and relationships keeps a viewer in a submissive, student-like relationship to the artist. For instance, Johns constantly references Picasso. The double silhouettes could be Picasso profiles, or Johns’ own profile, or both. There is a series that uses a Picasso figure with a hand to its mouth. Is the point to identify his artistic stature as equal to that of Picasso, or does he have other motives?

In place of solipsistic questions like, “Do those ASL hand signs of letters stand for significant initials?” or “What image did those stick figures holding torches or brushes come from?” we are better off asking “What do I feel when looking at this and why am I feeling that way?”

Conversely, we could also use these paintings to consider the nature of grief and mortality. What is a life? What is regret?  What is it that we grieve? Perhaps the feelings we are left with mirror our struggles with our own mortality. The paintings are the intense crackling evidences of a lively mind, pushing and probing and asking uncomfortable questions about what it feels like to be alive and continue to relentlessly produce, after having lived so long.

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February 25 to April 30, 2016
526 West 22 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 243 0200

Since the dawn of the medium, photography has been described as fleeting, a moment recorded but now lost. Photography’s instantaneity lends itself to fertile moments that could not be otherwise captured; Henri Cartier-Bresson built a cultural empire upon the revelatory instant, seizing the split seconds when visual harmony emerged out of chaos to create his iconic images. The visual stasis of the photograph preserves the past in unexpected ways: cameras are all-seeing, and at times seem to demolish history even while reconstructing it, forever throwing the acuity of our own perceptions into doubt.

Iconic images serve as documents of people, places now gone, whole eras ended, in effect recording time lost. The slicing of life into the fractional fragments of time recorded by cameras can alter the register of reality, bringing dignity to the inconsequential, wringing permanence out of impermanence. Luigi Ghirri worked in the inexhaustible present, his photographs favor neither the passing nor the seemingly fixed, and often allow the two to collide and conflate. In Ghirri’s photographs, timespans shrink and expand, featuring fads of the day as well as the eternal monuments of his native Italy — an original and its reflection, the false coexisting with the real.

In recent years, Ghirri’s stature has grown exponentially; a collection of his essays is forthcoming, while his work is being widely exhibited with a large touring retrospective planned for 2018. While well known internationally, in the United States Ghirri did not live to achieve the fame of many of his peers, dying in 1992 at the age of only 49. The American representative of Ghirri’s estate, Matthew Marks gallery, has mounted its third exhibition of carefully selected photographs, all vintage chromogenic and Cibachrome prints, allowing for further reevaluation of works long unseen.

A sunbather lounges by a public pool, face masked by an Italian newspaper; in the background, blurred by a shallow depth of field, azure water is punctuated by startlingly vivid towels of yellow, teal and red, draped over railings. A man dressed in a brown suit, his back to the camera, surveys a public garden near the Colosseum in Rome, the composition nearly swallowed by a large planting. In these photographs, Modena (1972-74), from the series “Fotografie del periodo iniziale,” and Roma (1979), from the series “Diaframma 11, 1/125 luce naturale,” respectively, what is being shown? Ghirri’s work shares, at times, the snapshot simplicity of William Christenberry, another prolific autobiographical documenter who for decades photographed and re-photographed his childhood home of Hale County, Alabama. Like another of better-known his contemporaries, William Eggleston, in Ghirri’s photographs, the personal is elusive: places and subjects are revisited, but other than the obvious love for the environments he frequents, little is fixed or concretely familial.

There is great precision to these photographs, and in their consideration of their subjects, there is sometimes startling intimacy. In Ghirri’s images our gaze is often stymied and redirected; while tangible markers exist (the logo of Italian Coke appears several times) specificity persistently slips, a fading away of traditional indication and hierarchy. In Modena (1971-73), from the series “Kodachrome,” a view of a cherry blossom tree is sheared by a concrete wall, pasted with a peeling fragment of a poster depicting lemon trees. At times, Ghirri’s images are filled with images of their own, or we see through glass, or into reflections and other optical abstractions; these are mediations of signs of all sorts, those intended to gain our attention, as well as repel it. Often, there is a reveal, a literal exposure of the constructed or the simulated, and yet there is never judgment rendered in these observations. The palette of the prints skews warm, a result of color photographic paper’s instability, creating tones that seem curiously outmoded to eyes now accustomed to computer-generated perfection. In these photographs, the rosy glow of the past becomes tangible, chemically induced reality.

In one image, Untitled (1975-78), from the series “Kodachrome,” a horizon is bisected by the fading contrail of jet engines, the view partially blocked by boulders stacked, not quite naturally, revealing the drilled blasting marks drilled through them. The picture presents dueling manipulations of the environment, both the rocks cleaved in half for construction and the vapor trailing in sky are alterations to our landscape that largely go unfelt and unnoticed but do have consequences. Ghirri’s vistas are marked by cracks in meaning that so often remain unarticulated, they comfortably reside in the space between the fictional and the documentary that all photography skirts, yet they reconcile little. These photographs are aggregates of the familiar and the strange that our days amount to, in each is a love of the moment and an acknowledgement of the knotted past that accompanies it, always linked in the plurality of time.

The post Revisiting the Never-Ending Now: Luigi Ghirri at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

February 26 to April 30, 2016
523 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 243-0200

Many of Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, shown here in an exhibition of 31 gelatin silver prints, ingeniously feature the kind of geometric shapes that distinguish the late artist’s painting and sculpture: the triangle, trapezoid, rhombus, rectangle, curve and plank. Several prints are suggestive of the artist’s virtuosic plant drawings. The prints were produced under Kelly’s supervision just months before his death in 2015, and they were shot between 1950 to 1982. Over this long period, a singular attention to abstract elements in the everyday world remained constant whether the location was overseas or the US. In an essay from 1991 reprinted for the exhibition catalog, Kelly noted,

Two things interest me in particular; one is the way a frame — a window, an aperture — changes what you see. You can focus on things differently and frame them differently; your vision becomes fragmented. The other aspect is stereoptics — the fact that we have two eyes, and that we see things differently out of each. It’s very mysterious, but we tend to take that aspect of vision for granted.

Although the artist wasn’t referring to photography per se in this comment, his references to aperture, framing, and optics do relate to special things the camera can do, as well as to human vision. But no matter the tools or techniques, Kelly sought to study the world by cultivating his powers of observation. With regard to photography, he remarked,

Photography is for me a way of seeing things from another angle. I like the idea of the interplay of two or three dimensions. My photographs are simply records of my vision, how I see things. My ideas develop from seeing, not from photographs.

Kelly often noticed physical shapes in proximity to their shadows, or to voids. He made inventive use of camera optics and framing devices to translate ephemeral situations into enduring compositions. For example, the weathered, closed barn doors at the left of Barn, Southampton appear to be painted white, while the matching doors at right were folded open when the image was taken, so that the absence of light inside the barn printed black in the photo. Viewed across a wheat field, the barn’s middle gray tones offset this pair of white and black rectangles under a triangular roof. It may take a moment to register the roof and rectangles as abstract shapes within the scenery. But once you do, you’ve got your Ellsworth Kelly goggles on straight. As Kelly himself remarked: “Photography is about seeing in three dimensions and trying to bring it into two dimensions in a way that recalls the third. The process takes place in the mind.”

This comment is also pertinent to Doorway Shadow, Spencertown. A rhombus-shaped shadow falls from peaked boards onto a plywood sheet, where knots and grain gleam as if hand-polished. Their indexical texture is at odds with the flat black angle that dives to center. Seeing the world through the mind’s eye of Kelly’s camera offers an opportunity to understand a great artist’s work more fully.

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In 1963 William Rubin identified in the work of Ellsworth Kelly “a particularly American combination of hedonism and the puritanical.” Kelly, who died December 27th, aged 92, at his home in Spencertown, NY, was, indeed, an artist who defied easy categorization. An exponent neither of minimal art, color field abstraction nor hard edge geometric abstraction, Kelly’s hybridity was equally typified by his diversity of medium, ranging from three dimensional layered canvases to free standing, flat, sometimes folded, painted metal objects. Always deceptively simple, the focused acuity of his work could be mistaken as reductionist, or purely formal, if viewed too quickly or carelessly. He settled early in his career into a preoccupation with observed line and shape, often realized in exactingly defined forms with intensely saturated color, or through the contrasts of black and white. He continued to explore such subject matter with the same urgency his entire life. In a recently -filmed interview we see him gesture towards paintings in his studio that he had to finish, he said, within his lifetime. There was no letting up, for this artist, exhibiting in all four of Matthew Marks’ gallery spaces in May and June of this year.

Before moving from Paris to New York, in 1954, Kelly had spent the previous six years working and traveling in France—a hugely formative experience that set him apart from the Abstract Expressionist scene, setting him up for the independent orientation that would characterize his position in the city he where he would soon be living and working. In France it was the non-performative abstraction of Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi that most absorbed Kelly. An appreciation of Romanesque churches, meanwhile, led to an awareness of painting’s relationship to architecture. The move to New York was, in part, inspired by a favorable review of Ad Reinhardt that signaled possibilities for his own distinctly non-gestural work back home.

The spare and rigorous beauty of Kelly’s paintings continued a process of refinement and depth that was unabated. The search for shapes and colors that correspond to the memory of selective visual events made his art thoroughly life-engaged, a way for memory to remain in the present tense in relationships between forms and colors. Though his paintings were often derived from things actually seen—the source admittedly not usually evident—in the sublime plant drawings the source was, of course, abundantly clear. But the same visual pleasure and intellectual curiosity in found or revealed form evident across his oeuvre, whether in drawings, paintings, collages, carved reliefs or painted objects. His works derive from, and bear, deep contemplation,

The select number of artists truly able to sustain passionate reverie in distilled form makes one realize, how difficult and rare is the ability to expose emotion and poise in subtly modulated, streamlined form. Blinky Palermo, himself indebted to Kelly, is one such artist. Another example would be the late cut papers of Matisse, . Kelly’s project for the design of a chapel offers comparison to Matisse’s own Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the Côte d’Azur. Kelly’s chapel designs, dating from the 1980s, were gifted by the artist earlier this year to the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas which is working towards its realization. Fittingly, the chapel brings full circle Kelly’s French connection. In 1951, he had made a trip to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles where he had noticed the large colored panels on the façade. “I didn’t want to use color for decoration but I liked the idea of color used in architecture,” he has said. After a lifetime of producing dynamically balanced paintings and sculptures, it is anticipated that architecture and the colored light from colored glass windows will add to and combine with the experience of a suite of black and white paintings in Kelly’s chapel. As with Matisse’s chapel, another great colorist and innovator will offer us an immersive, sensual encounter that amounts to the deletion of boundary between physically felt space and visually allusive color and light—a spirituality, embodied in the continuous present.

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The promotional video shows the five exhibitions discussed by The Review Panel, March 13, 2015 at the National Academy Museum. Scroll down for the media files to hear what the critics had to say. The next panel takes place April 17 when critics Sharon Butler, Noah Dillon and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss the Triennial at the New Museum and the Invitational at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The post March 2015: with Levi Strauss, Samet, Viveros-Fauné, and moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

In 1973, Candy Darling invited the photographer Peter Hujar to her hospital room at Columbia University Medical Center. She was dying, and she wanted him to take her picture. The resulting photograph, the last taken before her death, appears very still. The velvety blacks and satin whites of the gelatin silver print render a glamorous woman lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers. It is, in a word, beautiful. After the initial captivation of Darling’s gaze and the sensory pleasure of the photograph loosens its grip, this aesthetic quality, however pure, quickly begins disintegrating into an image saturated with contradictions.

Born in 1944 as James Slattery, her youth was filled with the banal tyranny of the suburbs in Long Island, followed by several experiments with different transsexual identities in New York City, Candy Darling entered the world in the early 1960s. The duality of Darling’s identity gave her no shortage of discrimination and misunderstanding, yet there are countless stories of people overcoming their close-mindedness because of her undeniable beauty and femininity. When Darling’s mother, Theresa, first confronted James about the rumors she heard of him cross-dressing, he left the room and returned fully transformed into Candy Darling. Theresa later recalled, “I knew then… that I couldn’t stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”

Through Darling’s early realization that she was destined for something more important and more fantastic than the paths of her bucolic peers, she idolized classical Hollywood starlets. She was fascinated by Kim Novak and her piercing presence; in a home video of Darling reciting Novak’s lines from a scene in the 1955 film Picnic, Darling morphs into the character with total commitment, then says to the others in the room, “She was so strong, that’s what I liked about her. Something stable and so strong… but Kim was also vulnerable.” The combination of strength and vulnerability defined Darling throughout her short life. She filled pages of her diary with manifestos of tenacity: “I will not cease to be myself for foolish people. For foolish people make harsh judgments on me. You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.” As well as descriptions of her despondence and hardship: “I feel like I’m living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming. Can’t visit relatives. Can’t get a job. Can’t have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison.”

Despite consistent poverty and frequent homelessness, Darling’s determination carried her to the stardom she so desperately desired, albeit briefly. In the five years during which she starred in several of Andy Warhol’s films, and in Tennessee Williams’ play, Small Craft Warnings (1970), Darling got a taste of the life she always wanted. But it all fell apart when Andy Warhol lost interest in her, claiming he did not want to use “chicks with dicks,” instead, he wanted to use “real women.” When Warhol made his film Heat in 1972, he did not invite Darling to play any roll, which left her devastated. Two years later, Darling was diagnosed with lymphoma. Those close to her suspect it was caused by the hormones she took to grow breasts — at Warhol’s suggestion. In the ultimate tragedy, it may have been her effort to transform into what she believed was her true self that killed her.

As she faced the last days of her life, she received one final, perfect tribute in the photograph, Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1973) by her friend Peter Hujar. Fran Lebowitz — a friend of both Darling and Hujar — recalled the day they visited Darling in the hospital, and that she was too scared to see her friend so close to death, let alone photograph her. But Hujar was uniquely suited for the act because he had an innate understanding and appreciation for subjects in liminal states of contradiction. Lebowitz said: “No one else could have taken that photograph. Peter never thought of Candy as a freak… I think that’s why Candy responded to Peter. He thought of her in the way that my mother thinks of her best friend or anyone she would meet, the most usual kind of person. Candy loved that.” That was typical of Hujar in both his life and his artistic practice; subjects that existed outside the norms of orthodox culture fascinated him, but they were not abnormal to him. They were mysteries he wanted understand, and knew that the camera could help him reveal their enigmatic secrets. In both his portraits of humans and animals, Hujar captured an unconcerned openness and intimacy; there is an understanding and collaboration between the photographer and his subjects. Candy Darling On Her Deathbed, considered by many to be the apotheosis of Hujar’s career, contains everything that made Darling’s personality and Hujar’s photographs so alluring.

Technically, the photograph is masterful. Hujar expertly rendered the high contrast between the darkened room, Darling’s alabaster skin, her dark shirt, the white hospital bed sheets, and the fluffy white chrysanthemums floating on a darkened back wall, recalling the classic Hollywood glamour she loved so dearly. If the photograph were in color, the sconce above her would cast the room in a sickly florescent light, but in black and white it glows softly. The title of the photograph, despite being purely descriptive, carries a lyrical quality when spoken aloud; it is almost impossible not to sing it. Mirroring the content of the image, the sweetness of the title’s cadence and of Darling’s name fractures with the inclusion of her dying state. In her reclined pose, common to Hujar portraits, Darling looks as though she could be relaxing in her own bed if it were not for the strange sterility of the hospital room décor. With her perfectly applied make up and famously blond hair, Darling looks ready to go to a party, but upon remembering her illness, her dark eye make up and angular physiognomy turn her face into a skull, prophesying her impending death. The image complicates its viewing — continually shifting between seducing with its beauty and repelling with its morbidity. Darling lived and died in that space; when John Waters compared Darling to other transsexuals at the time he said: “The others were freakish and she was beautiful in a way that really put people off and drew them to her because she confused them.”

Hujar captured this confusion of expectation, reality, and fantasy that permeated Darling’s entire life with an eloquence that no one else could have matched. The combination of Hujar’s open-minded inquisitiveness with Darling’s undeniable magnetism infuses the image with a charisma worthy of them both. There is something magical that happens when a photographer and his or her subject share a generosity and willingness to be honest; it’s something ineffable that can only be felt, like the haunting sense of déjà-vu.

The post Candy Says: Remembering Two Artists and One Image appeared first on artcritical.

Though trompe-l’œil in its purest form is generally considered aesthetic froth, a stream of modern practices from Op Art to Arte Povera found new ways to exploit perceptual enigmas born of visual confusion. But it was Jasper Johns whose painting opened the neo-Duchampian era by combining a deft painterly touch with a more cerebral version of the same parlor trick. Depicting the already flat image of a map, or painting the word blue with red paint introduced philosophical inquiry under the auspices of a visual gag. But significantly, Johns remained a painter, meaning the self-depreciation implied in his paradoxes reveals a shared confusion between artist and viewer, reflective of both painting fluency as a medium and the human limitations of perception. Johns’s early work represents the watershed moment between the fall of self-discovery inherent in painting and the ascent of the assured and declarative, if not dogmatic tone of what became conceptual art.

What’s interesting about Paul Sietsema’s exhibition at Matthew Marks this month is how it begs comparison to Johns, as Sietsema, with similar confidence in painting as a visual medium, takes the viewer beyond visual gags to again provoke difficult questions pertaining to the meaning of a painted image. Where he differs from Johns is in his uneven use of painting as a method, which he applies brilliantly in some pieces and to almost no effect in others. The discrepancy has to do with Sietsema’s apparent wish to be both painter and pure conceptual artist. Consequently, he is divided against himself.

The gallery, in synch with the artist’s often-articulated purposes presents the work with typical speculative hyperbole as, “… address[ing] the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, and the systems in which these objects circulate” — a program meant to train the viewer’s focus on attendant associations accompanying images of telephones, coins, newspapers, and industrial labelling. However, like any artist, Sietsema’s technique best reflects his intuition and sensibility, and is apparently hands-on and informed by a painstaking construction of visually juxtaposed realities. Regrettably, these elaborate processes sometimes prove irrelevant to the efficacy of his final image. The result is that some pieces are far more compelling than others because their technical complexity provides the greater part of their visual and conceptual punch.

The more successful canvases — as Johns often were — pair common imagery with the viscous medium of thoughtfully applied color, yet with the significant difference that Sietsema’s paint is itself depicted by a trompe-l’œil manipulation of the medium. Where Johns used a leaden encaustic membrane to keep the paint layer foremost in the viewer’s mind, while allowing flat imagery to rest uncomfortably on the picture plane, Sietsema creates convincing illusions of paint puddles and painted objects that function as a layer in a peeling deconstruction of the picture plane itself, advancing beyond what Johns did 60 years ago.

White Painting (2014) joins the illusion of a floor or table surface with the linen surface of the painting, then places on this visually amalgamated plane the image of an old telephone, coated with the same white paint that forms the puddle in which it sits. The surface beyond the perimeter of the paint puddle is scumbled with a duller white, revealing a section of bare linen at the bottom of the frame. One’s grasp of the illusion is then challenged by the fact that the shadow of the phone halts at the edge of the puddle, leaving the remaining painted canvas as flat as one knows it to be. Its effect is truly bewildering.

Closer to Johns’s preference for flat imagery like maps and flags, Red Painting juxtaposes several small areas of exposed linen within what appears to be a physically disturbed puddle of dried red paint. Optical confusion ensues as the light, masterfully implied in the modelling of a disturbed paint surface, is contradicted by the texture of the actual linen, which appears to be bathed in the even light of the gallery. There are other canvases that play with coins slid through paint puddles and across newspaper fragments.

Ironically, by raising the bar with real and determined skill, he manages to make his other work shallower by comparison. The link in these other pieces between the medium used and the subject addressed is missing. What he refers to as drawings — paintings made with ink — do not transcend their obviously photographic source material. By a transfer technique inadequately described in the press release, Sietsema paints black and white photos of studio activity, reminiscent of late-1970s performance art; he uses halftone patterning, which has long been a cliché in both conceptual art and commercial design meant to mimic “serious” art. Wrapping the image around the frame, as Sietsema does, merely adds a conventional assertion of postmodern cheek.

Several paintings, apparently products of a similar method, depict the rutted surface of weathered stones carved with a single date, yet neither offer much more than the mystery behind the dates. Like On Karawa’s Today paintings, Sietsema’s use of paint as a medium for these images is void of any purpose specific to the medium of paint itself. The artist’s hand is all but invisible, leaving one with the reliable supposition that in spite of how many hours of brushwork it must have taken to complete the image, the viewer remains, in essence, confronted with a manipulated photograph. In similar fashion, several films in the exhibition fail to transcend their considerable technical dependency, leaving only their deadpan content. If anything, Sietsema’s few genuinely marvelous paintings suggest that painting cannot be used as just another visual medium for addressing preconceived ideas. Painting’s timeless relevance is inseparable from its contrary and uncooperative nature.

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Are we experiencing a summer of love for ceramic sculpture?  In the last couple of months there has been a critical mass of shows by sculptors that exploit, in vessel-free form, the timeless medium with zany, inventive, lusciously glazed and chromatically exuberant results on view in New York. We’ve seen exquisite essays in eccentric dexterity from Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy; sumptuous, monumental biomorphs by the late Ken Price at Matthew Marks; restrained yet insouciant clay reliefs by Joyce Robins at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. Not to be missed in this rich, sweet vein, in a somewhat under the radar gem of a show at a stunning little space in Williamsburg, Ventana 244 at 244  North 6th Street on the corner of Roebling, through June 14 — is Californian ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen in her second New York outing since 2010.  These monumentally goofy tours de force of constructional complexity and formal singularity include sculptural personae that are as defiantly present as they are elsusive or ambivalent to characterize.  A garden gnome that  could a scholar’s rock; a Guston painting come to life that is also an explosing of loo rolls and fruits; and in Mallo, 2013, a crackle-glazed and cracking up (what a riotous conceit) molten snowman who is revealed to have a heart of bubble-gum.  DAVID COHEN

Annabeth Rosen, Mallo, 2013.  Ceramic, 14 x 13 x 12.  Courtesy of the Artists and Ventana 244

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September 13 t0 October 26, 2013
523 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 243 0200

This exhibition presents – in a finely tuned installation – sculptures, paintings, and drawings from the 1970s, many of which haven’t been exhibited since that decade. Early in her career, Washington-based Anne Truitt’s work was positioned in opposition to Donald Judd’s and Carl Andre’s Minimalism by Clement Greenberg, who had been introduced to her by Kenneth Noland. Washington was also home to Morris Louis, another painter exploring color in abstraction, and it was with the potential of color and painting rather than the principles of sculpture that Truitt was determined to find her expressive medium. The result, painted rectangular wooden objects, neither followed the cubistic vocabulary of David Smith, (a friend and supporter of Truitt’s), the found object/vernacular pop of Warhol, or the machined constructions of Judd. It was this independence from both Greenberg’s desire to see her work remain within the sculptural tradition of assemblage, and a rejection of the anti-handmade alternative that makes fitting Truitt into one category or the other impossible.

The pastoral sense of existing within a landscape (think Milton Avery) was very strong in the gallery’s three rooms, not only because of the orientation of the vertical column-like objects and horizontal floor pieces, but also because of the soft and shifting temperatures of Truitt’s color. As sightlines changed in passing through the exhibition, relationships were reconfigured between the individual works. Not only are the individual pieces an externalization of interior experience, their isolation in a shifting context – one that as a group they provide – allows an identification with our own situation in the world to be comprehensible only as flux and change.

The first work encountered on entering the gallery is the painting Februare, 1978. It recalls both Agnes Martin’s and Barnett Newman’s use of line to establish a compelling illusion of space through simple placement and color. Openly handmade, rather than hard edged, it already suggests a three dimensional equivalent that eschews neutral facture. It was on seeing Newman’s and Ad Reinhardt’s paintings in 1961 that Truitt turned to geometric form from figuration. Februare embraces in its chromatic range of cream, lime green and white, a pastoral rather than primary pallet. The green horizontal line is taken around the edge of the frontal surface stressing the objectness of the painting. It was a bold step from this acknowledgement of the edge of the support to the work that Truitt developed, exploring painted surfaces as part of free-standing colored objects that can be experienced actively, no longer images in themselves but now relating to their surroundings dynamically. The vertical columns make the floor, as it meets a wall behind them, an active changing horizon dependent on where the viewer is located.

The titles reaffirm an idea of movement or journey in the second room, three of the four works are called: Jaunt, 1977, Landfall, 1970 and Echo, 1973. Schubert’s song. Der Wanderer, composed in 1816, describes restlessness and estrangement within the context of a search for positive identification with nature, seems apposite in relation to Truitt’s externalization of emotion through colored isolated objects around which we move in order to behold.

In the final room Second Requiem 1977/1980, only reveals its color sequence of vertical slices of green and dark red bordered pink when the viewer circles the piece.  It floats, as do all the column-like works, to effectively free the color from the floor, like a suspended painting, whereas if it were not raised, it would interact as one plane of color meeting another.

Within the exhibition, each group of works establishes a strong and particular sense of place. Take, for instance, the room containing the four white paintings from the Arundel series, all 1975, one on each wall surrounding the black/blue floor-based  Remembered Sea, 1974. The white rectangles of the paintings with their subtle graphite lines are like snow or ice banks around a sliver of deep water, bleak but beautiful, like the sublime moments of Casper David Friedrich’s paintings created from multiple views that were assembled in a single work. Truitt talked of an artist’s work as being a distillation of a life, of the work out-living the artist. In this exhibition her experience of life seems generously well articulated and alive.

The post Finding a Place: Anne Truitt from the 1970s at Matthew Marks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

Elisabeth Kley, Hearne Pardee, Martha Schwendener joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Matt Bollinger at Zürcher Studio, Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks Gallery, Sergei Tcherepnin at Murray Guy, and Sylvie Fleury at Salon 94 Bowery

The post April 2013: Elisabeth Kley, Hearne Pardee and Martha Schwendener with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.