October 7 to November 15, 2015
36 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets
New York City, 212 995 1774

Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus has, for a long time, been the subject of much interpretation. In her present exhibition, Rebecca Quaytman further opens up that process. Two years ago, when visiting the Israel Museum, she discovered that Klee had glued his painting, which is a monoprint, directly on top of an old engraving, identified with a date in the 1520s and the initials LC. Walter Benjamin’s much-discussed essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) uses Angelus Novus to stage discussion of a Marxist vision of historical progress. Benjamin owned that painting, which then after passing through the collection of his friend, Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, entered the museum in Jerusalem. The picture, Benjamin wrote,

[S]hows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. […] This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] A storm is blowing in from Paradise. […] This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin says that the angel looks out at past events, which are in front of him. But the engraving found by Quaytman is behind that angel. And so now the analysis must become still more complex. Normally interpretation of a painting is written, but sometimes an artist may be said to interpret prior paintings; think of how Picasso re-interpreted Poussin and other old masters. Responding as an artist, Quaytman offers a series of painted variations on Benjamin’s commentary, which constitute an unexpected interpretation of Angelus Novus in light of her remarkable discovery. She presents here a number of rectangular, painted-wood panels, some containing an inked, rectangular silkscreen, as in Preview of Angelus Novus (2014). These paintings display Klee’s painting along with the underlying print, in perspectival constructions that open up the picture space. And some of her works on display — for example an encaustic titled O Tópico, Chapter 27 (2014) — provide information about the scientific techniques (x-rays, thermography) used in the investigation of the print.

“[Haqaq], Chapter 29” (Haqaq, in Hebrew, means engraved, carved or inscribed) is something of a tease. Suppose that LC are the initials of the 16th-century German painter Lucas Cranach—and perhaps the portrait shows Martin Luther. What would that reveal? The gallery says that a full report on Quaytman’s discovery must await the publication of her catalogue. Perhaps! Meanwhile, however, a reviewer must report on what he sees. Quaytman’s paintings don’t really tell us how to understand Angelus Novus. Rather, it seems that interpretation of Klee’s painting has become an open-ended process. Inspired by her, allow me to take analysis one-step further. She is the daughter of the distinguished late abstract painter, Harvey Quaytman, who loved to paint cruciforms. His 1998 exhibition at David McKee surprised Leo Steinberg, who found it “astounding to see the most familiar of signs de-semanticized, de-centered, de-Christianized, and emancipated to exercise its own territorial power.” Here, then, Rebecca Quaytman extends what has become a familial tradition, playful visual exegesis of Judeo-Christian iconography. The meaning of Klee’s picture remains elusive.

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Ken Johnson, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to review Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, R H Quaytman at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery, and Mary Heilmann at 303 Gallery.

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The motif of a reading light recurs in “chapter 12: iamb,” R. H. Quaytman’s rich and strange exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery. Indeed, the viewer’s tendency is to approach these dissimilar yet interrelated works textually, to pore over the smallish, reticent, meticulously crafted panels and puzzle out their collective meaning. The show’s title suggests that each work may be construed as a metrical foot of verse, making the assembled 14 the equivalent of a couplet in iambic heptameter. (For the record, here “chapter 12” refers not to bankruptcy but to the twelfth distinct body of work this accomplished, mid-career artist has to date produced.)

Formerly a director of the now defunct Lower East Side gallery, Orchard, Quaytman mainly works in a mode of painting/silkscreen hybrid, an at once middle-brow and mass-produced liminal form that is ideologically adrift between the elite and the unique in a way that recalls Warhol. The show quietly crackles with ideas about production; perception and legibility; the nature of the “image;” and the play between painterly and photographic values.

Retinal issues are aired in the very first painting the visitor encounters, the intriguingly contradictory Chapter 12: iamb (Fresnell lens). The image itself is a blur, a blue field faintly ruffled by pale streaks as wispy as cirrus clouds. Narrowly spaced, concentric rings, visible only at close range, impart an optical buzz; a corruscating coating of “diamond dust” (finely ground glass) refutes,in persistently material terms, the painting’s intimations of immateriality. Warhol comes to mind  again, as the Prince of Pop added sparkle to his canvases with this stuff throughout the eighties. (Fans of the work of Rebecca Quaytman’s father, Harvey Quaytman, will recognize in this surface treatment’s tactility his masterful use of rust.) It also recalls the reflective, “night vision” treatment used on street signs and emergency workers’ gear. The painting confounds vision, yet its title refers to a 19th-century advance in lens technology that allowed light to be focused and projected — and perceived at great distances — as never before.

In five other, generally grainy photo-derived paintings, that ultrafunctional modernist reading light shines dutifully but inadequately on grid-based works, the originals of which hang nearby, as if to signal that a clear and cogent “reading” of these works is not going to be possible. With its hot glare and enveloping penumbra, the bulb provides either not enough illumination, or too much: we are blinded by the light. Linguistic and pictorial meaning may coexist but are of different species, sometimes of different orders. One painting here — among several titled simply Chaper 12: iamb — is one of the best ever to address the epic battle (or guerilla conflict) between painting and photography. In it, the gooseneck lamp, as ominous as the alien spaceship in War of the Worlds, casts its nasty glow on nearby, grisaille painting. A juicey, vertical, house-paintbrush-wide stroke of safety yellow partially obscures the image of the bulb, mimicking the sun flare of the camera’s lens or the video monitor’s feedback.

The superimposed stripe, which is both distinct from yet convincingly melded with the underlying photo, has a ghostly presence that recalls the heyday of “spirit” photography, when hoaxers (capitalizing on the layman’s unfamiliarity with double exposures) laid claim to the camera’s alleged ability to portray the invisible. In that form, a photograph’s pictorial, visual meanings were given over entirely to their anecdotal, evidentiary value.

This show divides into two classes: primary or source “Quaytmans,” and derivative works depicting those source works in situ. The source paintings are gorgeously impersonal: tight checkerboard grids suffused with whispering chroma (rose fading to mustard) or the subtlest of moiré patterns. The aspect ratio of many is derived from the Golden Section, the proportions the ancients took to possess divine harmony. Chapter 12: iamb (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field) straightforwardly presents an optical illusion known as the “scintillating grid,” in which a white dot is placed at every intersection of a pale gray windowpane pattern on a black field. A dark afterimage eclipses every dot surrounding the one that the viewer happens to be looking at, a mildly maddening effect.

In a smaller painting derived from a photo of this work, the optical jitter survives. In this case, the camera doesn’t lie. The same source panelreappears, barely emerging from low-resolution shadows, in Chapter 12: iamb (blind smile) in which Dan Graham, mentor of the Orchard crowd and master of the two-way mirror, appears trance-like or in ecstacy as he beholds it. He is bathed in light, himself a “text;” we read his response. He luxuriates in the cascading photons, as if in a shower of gold. Or: he looks like an unkempt sage, Diogenes with his lantern. Or: a burly Lucia, patron saint of the  sightless, whose eyes were gouged out, whose name means “light,” and whose attribute is a flickering lamp.

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