On view until July 2 in the project room at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in a show of Friedman’s Sumi ink drawings presented in conjunction with her “Overlook Paintings” in the main gallery.
526 West 26th Street, Suite 215, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 924 5770

This was an artcritical PIC in June 2009

The post Barbara Friedman at Michael Steinberg Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.

Ellen K. Levy has figured out how to represent the jumbled, moment-to-moment confusion that is the visual experience of our times. Her intricate paintings reference invaluable relics stolen from Iraq’s national museums, as well as the quick con game of three-card monte found here in New York. Her technical practice is as advanced — and complex — as her vision of art, and warrants precise description.  Levy begins with art historical references; her images of painted glances and hand gestures are taken from paintings by historical artists such as Carravagio and La Tour, while the relics derive from the Internet’s database of looted objects from Iraq. Printed words originate with military strategies such as surveillance and navigation; and from current gaming strategems. Levy makes a drawing and creates a digital print much smaller than the wood it is mounted on. By cutting and repositioning the print on wood, she is able to put out a maze of figure/ground reversals, rotations, and line displacements. The consequences are disorienting, both visually and thematically.

But Levy isn’t finished yet. She paints on top of the print, obscuring and highlighting as she sees fit. Doing so reinforces new connections, but with the result that the original locations of the forms are hard to see. Other, competing foci occur. The decision to employ Old Master eye and hand gestures contrasts sharply with what they hold– the missing Eastern artifacts. In Fleeced Chariot (2008), the points of view are disorienting but reference exquisite looted Iraqi sculptures, including a relief sculpture of a chariot. On the left side of the painting is the phrase, “System and method for deceiving enemy forces in battlefield.” On the top left the viewer sees hands playing three-card monte; underneath that image is a row of windows, most of them jaggedly broken. Despite the shards of imagery, the logic of this highly political painting is accessible. By correlating the tragic loss of ancient objects in Iraq with the raw tricks of the hand in a card game, Levy underscores the violence of the Iraqi war, which is referred to in the highly abstract military phrase given above. As in many wars, a violent ideology tends to precede actual combat, and one way of showing this violence is to clutter the picture plane with scenes and points of view that interfere with each other.

In Conning Baghdad (2008), the multiple, even endless perspectives work out a pattern similar to that seen in Fleeced Chariot. Here there are two barred windows that clearly make the scene a jail; a single spotlight sheds illumination on a large vase with a lion depicted on it. Off to the right there is a stone relief of what appear to be Middle Eastern slaves, their heads held between two long poles. In the bottom right, the three-card monte game appears again, with the person’s hand holding both a card and an ancient sculpture of a lamb. The complications of scale bring about violent contrasts and juxtapositions, many of which make little evident sense; this is, I think, a metaphor for the anarchy of war, as well as the dishonesty that provided moral cover for those politicians who originally wanted to invade Iraq. In a third painting, Jack of Hearts (2008), a hand holds that card, but superimposed upon it is a picture of a monkey—an image taken from the looted objects, many of which have permanently disappeared. Further below, in what looks like the clean room of a systems operation, lies the stone fragment of a face of royalty. The meaning here is clear: we are responsible for looting the culture of Iraq, and as we also destroy it, we lie to Iraqis and ourselves about the hypocrisy of our mission.

To make sure we get the point, in the gallery’s black project room Levy has placed a single white shelf, which holds a printout of the missing antiquities of Iraq’s National Museum. The point is also reinforced by the inclusion of a flash animation, the result of Levy’s collaboration with neuroscientist Michael E. Goldberg, who researches visual attention. In it, the flashing hand movements of monte players make it highly difficult to see the antiquities in the background, which disappear from our sight. Disorienting us with so much to see, Levy ensures inevitable blindness—tragically, a similar lack of insight took us to war.

The post Ellen K. Levy: Stealing Attention at Michael Steinberg Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.

September 8 to October 8, 2005

Katia Santibanez, a painter based in New York, has spoken of her work as “the relationship between nature, architecture, geometry, and the power of the mind.” Often organizing the picture plane into a series of rectilinear compartments, the artist adds motifs that suggest fur, grass, or other organic forms. Her current exhibition on view at Michael Steinberg Fine Art is an engagingly process – driven show.

The size of Santibanez’s work ranges from intimate to small. Several perfectly crafted, optically scintillating paintings on view in the main gallery measure just 12” square. We can see for ourselves how the DNA of these paintings relates to a number of pencil sketches and black line engravings displayed in a separate room, where they freely converse.

Santibanez creates a continuous circuit of process and execution that feels open ended. Watercolor or gouache has been applied to some prints. The color is tightly contained but rich, as in an engraving where columns of saffron blades whip up and down invisible plumb lines. Throughout the show, her ductile line has a piercing quality in some works; in others, it seems to gently drag or flow around a magnetic force.

Resolutely abstract, Santibanez’s mix of symmetry and freehand drawing is nonetheless metaphorically complex. Curved forms dominated Santibanez’s last solo exhibition in New York in 2002. At the time, they were reminiscent of grassy lawns or hedges, having been painted flat dark green. In fact the botanical theme and geometic pattern were highly suggestive of Italian or French formal gardens, which were designed to reflect the rational organization of the king’s power when seen from a palace window as well as provide hidden spaces for intrigue on the ground. It’s a possible reading for the work, considering Santibanez’s French birth and training at the School of Art in Paris.

Since then, through the alchemy of abstraction, Santibanez has begun to spin straw into gold. Her parterre format and botanical themes can also suggest pure energy. In Red Duet, red-hued lines seem to flutter like seaweed fronds wafting out from a central stem. Upon closer inspection, the eye and brain become enmeshed in their volubility, as if watching a cardiogram being traced, or the distaff of the Three Fates spinning out the thread of life.

Santibanez’s mesmerizing techniques have great reserves of wit and conceptual depth.

The post Katia Santibanez appeared first on artcritical.

Mar 5 – Apr 3, 2004

Sometimes things change so gradually we don’t see it at all until we first look away and then, returning our gaze, do we find that nothing is as it was. This can be the case with places, people or things – a little bit here, a tiny bit there, and suddenly everything is changed forever. A common experience for most of us; yet the accumulation of nearly imperceptible alterations into a new reality can have uncanny effect.

Julia Jacquette is one of those artists who make the smallest of changes from one body of work to the next. Many of her shifts are so subtle that one would have to be very astute to notice them, even in works done a few years apart. What a shock then to see her recent exhibition at Michael Steinberg Gallery where, after a particularly long hiatus between solo exhibitions, all of those tiny steps have added up to one very large jump.

There is, of course, the growth in technique. Jacquette has grown over the years from a young painter with adequate skills to a mature painter of exceptional technique. That a painter should, via long experience with their materials, become ever more proficient makes sense, but as it is not a given among today’s artists, it is worth mentioning. I’m not one of those who believe that painting is all about technique (especially with young artists). However, if painting matters, then ability of the artist to tune and align their technique to their content would logically lead to more potent artworks.

Conversely, while being a good painter may make one a good illustrator, it does not necessarily make one a good artist. As Jacquette has always mined illustration for subject matter, the line between rendering, image, and content is a pivotal issue in the understanding of her work. Indeed, her earliest works presented this three part dialogue in fairly unadorned terms.

A typical painting from that time might be of an intricate dessert, such as a Napoleon, presented on a plate dead center in the composition. The surrounding area would be a solid color devoid of perspective, while just below the plate would be a short, simple hand painted caption along the lines of “your eyes”. Think early Pop art with a more overt sexual agenda, with a dash of Magriette thrown in for good measure.

Jacquette eventually dropped the text, but her interest in found images, specifically those used in advertising, intensified. The works grew larger, and she began to break them into grids. Works from this period might be composed of twenty hands or sixteen eyes or thirty-six sets of lips – all apparently lifted from fashion illustrations. It was as if the artist was creating lexicons of consumerist images, while the loving care that went into each painting left no doubt that consumer number one was Jacquette herself.

The eight main paintings in Jacquette’s most recent exhibition continue to make use of the grid, advertising images and even, in some cases, desserts. They are, in short, superficially identical to the artist’s preceding works. Yet even a cursory viewing leaves the viewer with a far different impression than the early works, and one is sent scrambling to ascertain how, if so little has changed formally, what is responsible for such a radical shift in perception?

The answer resides in Jacquette setting up a greater juxtaposition between two aspects that one might naturally assume to be mutually exclusive. Specifically, the new paintings are far more abstract, while simultaneously the imagery has become more precise and thematically layered.

In explaining how the artist pulls this off, it is easier to start with the abstraction which is, to be honest, the result of a clever slight of hand. As was the case with the earlier work, these paintings are made up of grids. Inside each square in the grid is an object, and the same type of object fills the entire painting. For instance, one painting is all cakes; another painting is all bouquets, while another is all dresses. What Jacquette has done differently, though, is to enlarge each image so as to make it appear as a detail that fills its respective box. The result: identity is retained, but contours are destroyed. More importantly, not only is the overall form of the discreet object negated, it is replaced with the outline of its container, the grid, and made to butt up against related, identically manipulated images on all sides. Whereas the works that came before presented their grids as self contained chapters, the grid fragments in the new works now form a highly abstracted, unified whole.

The narrative layering of the imagery is more subtle, but ultimately functions in a similar manner. Again, as with the earlier works, Jacquette’s overarching concept remains the same and she continues her playful exploration of desire and consumption using found images from advertising. The image selection, however, has become more tightly focused. As the titles suggest – “White on White (Nine sections of wedding cake)”, 2001; “White on White (Sixteen kinds of flowers), 2002; “White on White (Wedding Dresses) II, 2002 – the series’ subjects are unified by the color white (a formal tongue-and-cheek evocation of both Sargent and Ryman) as well as theme. These are not just cakes, flowers, and dresses, but wedding cakes, wedding dresses and bridal bouquets.

As Jacquette was recently married it might, at this point, seem clever to assume a personal agenda on Jacquette’s part. To do so risks underestimating the artist’s intent – a long running and broad cultural commentary – and definitely under appreciates her wit and humor. Look closer and we see that besides the bouquets, the decorations on the cakes and dresses are flowers as well. The artist has, in fact, painted flowers and representations of flowers in every painting.

Jacquette levels the imagery via her choice of a single, unifying, “white on white” palette and floral imagery. In putting everything into a comparative grid, she has effectively flattened the meaning of icons that are supposed to represent a special moment for our culture. Not a wedding cake, but wedding cakes, not a bride but brides; each thing special, but not unique. And it can be taken further, for it is not just the pastries and the bouquets that are being equated, but the brides as well. Together they are all beautiful, sweet, and luscious – not to mention packaged, commodified, and sold.

Previously, Jacquette would entice viewers with clever images and pointed questions. Seduction via butter cream brush work is now her preferred form of attack, while her subtext, like a worm in an apple, remains hidden.

The post Julia Jacquette appeared first on artcritical.

“Jeremy Blake: Autumn Almanac” at Feigen Contemporary through December 20 (535 W 20 Street, between 10 and 11th Aves, 212 929 0500)

“Aristides Logothetis: Speculative Grammar” at Cue Art Foundation through January 24 (511 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Aves, 212-206-3583)

“Augusto Arbizo: Rise and Fall” at Polytechnic at Michael Steinberg Fine Art through December 23 (526 W 26 Street 9F (between 10 and 11th Aves, 212 924 5770)

“Urban Baroque” is an astute, focused four-person show at Plane Space, the handsome, year old West Village gallery. London-based curator Lisa Ivorian Gray has brought together three established young Brits, Ian Dawson, Anya Gallaccio and Steve McQueen, and an emerging American, Drew Lowenstein, in a refreshing, intelligent mix.

While the title has a good ring to it, the use of the word Baroque doesn’t bear too close scrutiny. It ought to connote emotional excess, knowing rule subversion, and theatrical directness. Roman bells and smells can also help. The artist who best most evokes this last attribute is Ms. Gallaccio. She has been active on the London scene since the 1980s and has devoted her career, to the best of my knowledge, to a single idea. Luckily, it’s a cute one: She arranges fresh cut flowers in a modernist grid under a sheet of thick glass, either on the floor or, as on this occasion, on the wall, and leaves them, over the course of an exhibition, to their inevitable, inexorable decay.

Mr. McQueen is a Turner Prize winner and video artist of subtlety and depth. Alas, his somewhat slight contribution here conforms to a stereotypical (think Damien Hirst) view of young British art: pristinely executed renderings of vague nastiness. The seven C-prints sealed within plexi that capture rolled up rags rotting in gutters are hardly Carravaggio. On the other hand, Mr. McQueen and Ms. Gallacio set a tone of slick rot which the other two artists extend in more suggestive ways.

The juxtaposition of Mr. Dawson’s enigmatic sculptures and Mr. Lowenstein’s graffiti- and Sci-Fi-inspired lyrical abstraction is what makes this show worth the journey. Mr. Dawson, who was given a solo exhibition this summer at Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery, subjects found plastic industrial containers to the blow torch to produce weird contortions, a kind of postmodernized Arp. The sense of nature reclaiming artifice with avengance connects with the flowers and rags, but Mr. Dawson’s rich, ambiguous work is more individual and laive than his copatriots’. His sculpture has just the right mix of banality and otherness.

Drew Lowenstein is genuinely Baroque in his collision of salon abstraction and street attitude. He favors raw canvas and seemingly arbitrary stains for his grounds and a highly developed calligraphy (plus occasional bursts of cartooning and graffiti) for his figure. His mark-making is at once fastidious, fiddly, expressive and aloof. It looks as if he has mastered some lost semitic script, and like Islamic or Jewish micrographers, who arrange text into motifs or geometric patterns, he has his marks accumulate into vaguely depictive forms: In his case, what could read as space ships or ancient cities are poised on the brink of legibility. By showing Mr. Lowenstein with three emissaries of Cool Brittania, Ms. Ivorian Gray has emphasized both the funkiness and earnestness of this underrated New Yorker.

If Urban Baroque puts you in the mood for perfidious Albion, be sure to catch Jeremy Blake’s retro riot of a DVD, “Reading Ossie Clark,” on show at Feigen Contemporary through this weekend. Clark was the great celebrity fashion designer of 1960s Swinging London.

Choice quotes from Clark’s recently published diaries (“Marianne bought a suede suit trimmed in python with a fluted peplum and never asked the price”) are narrated in a suitably plush, Julie Christie-like accent by New York artworld impresario Clarissa Dalrymple. Phrases like “She comes in color” and “One snort of cocaine makes me into a new man, and that man wants two snorts” rub up against a montage of period film clips and fashion plates over which abstract psychedelic animation is louchely layered in correspondingly gaudy hues.

The result would have been nine delectable minutes of an acid trip down memory lane were it not for the fact that you have to pass a display of puny paintings to exit the gallery. Mr. Blake’s whimsical and ephemeral vision is perfectly suited to the editing room, but his painting, in the now ubiquitous knowingly inept “it’s okay that it’s crappy because it’s only from photographs” style is a real let down. You need to watch your back if you’re painting Celia Clark, Ossie’s Missus and the muse of David Hockney.

For more fun and games with clothing, check out Aristides Logothetis at Cue, the admirable new non-profit space in West 25th Street’s Whitehall Building. Cue awards debut (or “too long since”) shows to emerging or neglected artists who are picked for the honor by guest curators. Athens-born Mr. Logothetis was the choice of William Fagaly, former assistant director of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Mr. Logothetis orchestrates a rapturous interplay of forms in paintings and sculptures that reference DNA models, microscope slides, fashion, and Fifties decor. One piece, “Protein,” (2003), a five foot high open-form sculpture made from Bermuda shorts joined at the leg openings and filled with foam and cement, puts you in mind of a giant cell structure, perhaps the protein of the title. The pulsating blobs and lozenges of “Tabla Bubbly,” (2001), a riff on early Ad Reinhardt or Bradley Walker Tomlin, assume a new significance in company with the assemblages.

There is a cheeky subversiveness to the back and forth banter throughout this show between garish plaids and minimalist grids. The deft interaction of tennis balls and fabric in “Blorb,” (2000), in which bright colored stripes are suggestively pulled and stretched, looks like an unlikely collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Ellsworth Kelly. There is all sorts of nifty play with biomorphized handbags and writhing neck-ties. Never has the modern sculptural convention of the “disagreeable object” looked so agreeable.

A more sedate set of connections, sanctioned by art history, nonetheless produces sumptuous and suggestive results in the work of the Phillipenes-born painter, Augusto Arbizo. His show, entitled “Rise and Fall”, marries the romantic landscape idiom and abstract expressionism.

Readers of Robert Rosenblum’s classic text “Modern Painting and The Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko” would be forgiven, however, for pointing out that this couple have already been living in sin for quite a while.

Mr. Arbizo starts his large, weird, glossy canvases with chance gestures which he proceeds to interpret, discovering in the congealing paint a glowing moon within forlorn trees or a dense forest of algae.

Of course, this strategy extends much further back than Professor Rosenblum and his romantics (original and latter day) to Leonardo, who extolled the suggestiveness of stains and accidental patterns to the landscapist. While Mr. Arbizo more closely recalls Rorschach tests, Max Ernst’s forests, and Jay DeFeo’s legendary Rose (currently on view at the Whitney incidentally) than Leonardo, he adds a welcome contemporary twist to the occult strain in landscape painting.

The post Urban Baroque at Plane Space, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary, Aristides Logothetis at Cue Art Foundation, Augusto Arbizo at Michael Steinberg appeared first on artcritical.