January 10 – February 16th, 2019
534 West 26th Street, between10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, miandn.com

Nothing pulls you into a gallery like a six-foot chicken giving you the side eye, nor keeps you in front of a work longer than giving you something to do, even if it’s just reading text. With these two strategies Karl Haendel introduces Masses and Mainstream, not with a curatorial hang that pulls you into the center of a space and lets you wander, but by arresting the viewer at the entrance. There is a compulsion to use the works there as a lens through which to see and interpret the rest of the exhibition. How Do I Sell More Art pairs with Chicken within direct line of sight from the door and the two are impossible to ignore, melding into a single piece: A framed text piece operates like a word-bubble in such close proximity to the terrifying and terrified giant chicken, in graphite on cut paper stuck to the wall from the floor up.

This cluck-cluck shotgun diatribe against the absurdities and unfairness of art world economics hits all of the themes encapsulated within the exhibition: politics, identity, family, consumerism, humor, and value. More powerfully, it replaces rehashed snarky and dispassionate conceptualism with a thin veil of sarcasm barely masking believable and deeply personal desperation. Haendel’s pleading orients the artist and viewer as flesh-and-blood people within the breaking world instead of just critiquing the paradoxes of that world from afar.

The exhibition alternates sprawling, sumptuous works in graphite, and unconventional groupings of drawings, more or less photographic realism with the occasional graphic or illustrative element thrown into the mix.

Through the lens of Sell More Art / Chicken the larger-than-life works read as pinnacles of American conservative thinking shifting from ostensibly banal idealism to more polarizing stances: a stack of lawnmowers, a pile of football players, a series of childlike hand gestures, a monument to a civil war general, a graphite duplication of a Breitbart news article denigrating leftist academic absurdism. These works span multiple sheets of paper and are stapled to the wall along their seams, usually surrounded by crude frames of MDF strips. Richard Serra has presented work in a similar fashion, but here there is something much more violent, shot through with palpable frustrations. The great implication of the sequence implicates programming within banal Americana that foments if not outright produces our current divisions and angst.

The smaller clustered works are less direct, perhaps more scattered, but certainly less pedantic in their arrangement. The strongest of these become personal. Am I Jared Kushner answers questions brought up by Sell More Art through a comical list of attributes shared and unshared by the artist and the president’s son-in-law. In Richard Nixon’s Childhood Home Annotated by My Daughter, the otherwise flawless depiction of the picturesque home that produced the defamed president is brought to life by stick figures and scribbles in bold black marker scrawled across a pencil drawing. In another cluster a simple thought bubble reading “How do I make more money?*” changes nearby images of WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg and child king Edward VI into the conflicting American views concerning income — competitive mobility, strength, earning it, and paradoxically, inherited wealth.

One could jadedly argue that really all these flailing attempts and desperation are just vapid cravings for more money from an artist whose work is listed in the low five figures (low by Chelsea standards and no one else’s). But that desperation seems underpinned by a frantic search for any evidence whatsoever to backup Haendel’s seemingly intractable belief in some phantom of a merit-based system — an American dream still at work — that one should at least be able to game the system if not play the game and win. The exhibition as a whole makes the art world an analogy for the fucked-upness of the rest of the American and indeed global class structure. It’s as though the artist is slowly admitting to himself, right in front of us, that despite the incredible draftsmanship and significant amount of labor behind each of his works that none of that equates to financial value. That he has the intelligence to address big, timely concepts, but that no one wants to hear it right now. That he cannot transmute his identity as an American Jewish father into any economic weight. And that he can no more easily change his fundamental ways of working (high labor, high technique, graphite, graphite, graphite) than he can change any other aspect of his identity.

There is one work hidden amongst the reeds that may represent the show at its most eloquent, a circle drawn freehand over and over again, a dark hard-pressure line spiraling back on itself on standard size paper. The free-hand circle was Giotto’s proof to the Pope of his technical mastery, Rembrandt’s defiant evidence of artistic genius, Shisui’s perfection beyond the death poem. In so many ways it represents a pursuit of craft that should as it has in the past be rewarded. But Haendel’s circle is different. It is as though it is drawn with teeth clenched and in brooding repetition. There is just the faintest shadow far beneath it that makes it spectrally levitate, the ghost of an attainment that transcends the punchline in Masses and Mainstream. The rules of merit have passed on, but their memory still haunts Haendel and the American people.

The post Making It in America: Karl Haendel on the absurdities of the Art World appeared first on artcritical.

October 19 to November 22, 2017
534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, miandn.com

For several decades now, a notion has been advanced that history is a subcategory of literature– not the other way around. Like storytelling, history, in this reckoning, is invested in interpreting accounts of events focused to a purpose.

In her deservedly celebrated Post-partum Document (1973-79) Mary Kelly put her son’s linguistic and cognitive socialization, and her reactions to it, within the frame of a discourse and rendered it the object of a six-year study.  For her current exhibition, Kelly herself is the object of self-study, framed loosely as she once understood herself in the world.

“The Practical Past” is a memoir from the artist’s current perspective on her life in the collective spheres she inhabited in the 1960s and ‘70s and their relation to events before and since. Much of this is writing made visual through letters from that time reflecting concerns and worries about how to live the engaged feminist life, These are transposed in digital projections that nonetheless reflect Kelly’s decision to do a kind of cottage-industry piecework.  In a slightly mismatched gridded array, the overall text of handwritten correspondence renders originals as multiple iterations. What appears to shade and fade into historicism is also stuff.

In days of yore—i.e. before digital technologies became the lingua franca of art schools—protest literature was much seen on newsprint, in an affinity with posters of the avant-garde and their cheap card stock. In the current show, Kelly’s homage to the journal “7 Days” has the look of such protest technology, although it isn’t print at all (we are told), but rather an assemblage of vinyl templates and lint.

At the other end of craft are framed notes, written on letterpress luxury stock, , authored in a diarist’s voice that allows Kelly to lay down her thoughts about her identity with respect to the engaged life without rehearsing the latter’s ideological endgames. The largest evident arc of the story establishes world historical events through photography—or that it how it initially appears to the viewer. Specific images, celebrated for capturing cultural eventfulness in modern history, are seen projected large on gallery walls as if to situate personal practice within collective memory. The perennially profound steadfastness of booklovers standing amid ruins of Holland House Library during the London blitz in 1940 is an eloquent argument for literacy and its necessary purposes in reading to understand. Also in universal collective memory is the raising of the French flag on the eve of the general strike in Paris, 1968. These images of European consciousness to be held in universal experience establish the scale of history in the mind of the individual activist, writing letters and essays in ephemera substantial to herself.

The story Kelly tells in visual terms is dispersed. The several modes of discourse each in composite techniques, some not at all apparent, render the elaborate exhibition hermetic within an allegorical postmodern historicism. That almost all images are comprised of screens of lint is a fact of manufacture to be discovered in reading matter of the checklist and press release, and otherwise so understated as to be unsaid. The TV “snow” projected is aptly present and clearly so, a device for placing the archival images of eventful history in the transmission of information. Interesting to debate, then, is how the sequence of observed encounters with Kelly’s images affects the sense and meaning of them. If one starts by identifying larger pictorially realized political events and progresses through her personal letters, a framework of activist initiatives in history unfolds. But if one starts, instead, with the read information of the lint, this changes the terms of engagement: the frame is now women’s work, with the artist subject to the initiatives of others.  What is up for debate is whether understated complicated crafts articulate the theory-in-practice more adroitly than brutally overstated, spectacular room-size installations dedicated to the polis and its grievances. After all, in what other modes of praxis can history conjoined to literature be effectively visualized?

One thing is certain: “The Practical Past” is a refreshing study. It is also an antidote to the super-sized party-favors in the art world—meant to divert the adult daycare center and its caretakers who are the enablers of dangerous behaviors.

The post Visualizing Historicism: Mary Kelly’s Personal Reckoning appeared first on artcritical.

December 13, 2014 through January 24, 2015
534 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 744 7400

This three-woman exhibition consists of very different, though interestingly related, approaches to the use of recognizable subject matter. The subject matter is variously displaced, distorted or fragmented. As a consequence, the paintings and sculptures present combinations of recognizable parts that function abstractly, at once both generalizing, through reconfiguration, and particularizing, through new formal relationships absent in the original context. The new frameworks created represent likenesses, now estranged and somewhat alienated.

Formal echoes and conceptual conversations are found repeatedly between paintings and sculptures throughout the exhibition, for example Diane Simpson’s 2011 sculpture Neckline (extended). Its vertical, rectangular fiberboard planes surround an empty triangular section at center, lined with gray and reminiscent of a revealing dress or blouse. There are arm-like extensions at either side, made of curved, linear aluminum. The sculpture could be a distant relative of the geometric figures found on a Dessau Bauhaus theatre set of the 1920s. Anna Neukamp’s Insert (2014) hangs behind this sculpture and to its right side. Insert features just that: the appearance of an insert central in the painting’s composition, together with a depicted, angled metal armature held by a large red schematic hand. The two works, so different in most aspects, still share compositional and associative characteristics. Elsewhere, Baer’s triptych contains grey vertical shapes against an ocher ground that are repeated — inexactly, of course — in the end view of Simpson’s Underskirt (1986), placed nearby. Even Neukamp’s 2014 sculpture Latz (“bib,” in English), with its vertical, leaning, threaded-through segments, reverberates with the same shapes as Baer’s triptych. Remarkably dissimilar, the works nevertheless display connections despite such obvious diversity.

For Baer, a key issue is how to release ideas through painting. The triptych Facing, Turning (Intro/About), Cleaving (Apart/Together), from 1978-79, evinces an interest in antiquity and prehistoric times seen in Baer’s earlier drawings, but not paintings her from this period. The elemental shapes in Baer’s paintings function like signs, and subtly rendered images of animal or human parts recall cave paintings while remaining mysteriously cryptic. Her mostly earth-toned palette used enhances this association. In moving through the sequence of canvases, a possibly ritualistic narrative is implied. After the Minimalist works Baer became known for, the turn to what she called “Radical Figuration” seems completely apposite in the context of this exhibition’s constituent aggregations of abstract and representational divides.

Simpson’s exquisitely invented objects present both an acute sensitivity to aspects of construction and specificity of materials. The titles orient the viewer to one source of the form, now reinvented as an object independent of function. The potential readings, given the hybrid quality of her sculptures, include historical, sociological, psychological or architectural. Take Mesh Bonnet (1992), which is a basket- or bonnet-like object made of pinewood, cotton mesh and waxed linen thread: suspended from above by the thread, the bonnet is now transformed and suggests anthropomorphic, historical and architectural referents. What would have been a chinstrap appears to be held by two downward-reaching arms. The body of the sculpture forms an enclosure on the shelf upon which it sits, like a shelter or canopy. Formalist and Duchampian, Simpson’s appropriation and nuancing of familiar forms enrich an understanding of inherent complexity in objects of common (or once common) use. The finely crafted construction retains an essence of the sourced object, which is simultaneously heightened, refined and expanded.

Neukamp’s boldly graphic and compellingly illusionistic paintings scallop and contort pictorial space. In Crook (2014) a rhythmically doubled image is seen as situated on an abraded surface. What is represented in the paintings and what the origins are is not revealed. The typically scoured surfaces that intrude upon obscurely familiar shapes — like brand logos or instructional symbols — leave us to meditate on the fictive spatial events at which painting can prove so proficient. Unsettled figure/ground relationships are further complicated by the roughened surface, which not only contrasts with the sharp graphic delineation of the two repeated black-and-white, highly illusionistic elements, but also crosses over onto them, contradicting the established illusion. Another Berlin painter, Frank Nitsche, sometimes comes to mind in looking at Neukamp’s paintings as another artist who creates paradoxical spatial structures with abstracted representational components.

There is integrated reality and paradoxical purpose inherent in the works by all three artists. The simple play between perception and physical surface in two and three dimensions is amplified through a deferred knowledge of origination. The thinking required to translate the various substitutions and transformations engages many strands of thought — there are no simple answers. Pleasure, in tactile surface, elusively fragmented shape or coexistent facture and form make the process of viewing this exhibition as much about being embodied as being able to project or embrace ideas. Here, sensuality is of equal consequence to the intellectual conundrums posed, and separating these two aspects is simultaneously impossible and pointless. They are active and compounding; they define each other.

The post Like This: An Exhibition of Near-Representations appeared first on artcritical.

September 26, 2014 saw the season premiere of the tenth year of The Review Panel with newcomers Alexander Nagel and Dorothy Spears joining veteran guest Robert Storr with David Cohen moderating as ever.  The shows under review were of Allora & Calzadilla at Gladstone Gallery, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner, Angela Dufresne at Monya Rowe and Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

In discussing Angela Dufresne’s exhibition, Robert Storr introduces the work of Jane Corrigan, showing at Kerry Schuss next door.

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Maybe the Jeff Koons portrait of Louis XIV triggers the association, but Labor Day always reminds me of the Sun King: “après moi, le deluge.” We are certainly in the thick of back-to-school excitement in New York City.  The need for critical clarity and a roadmap are all the more acute. So, welcome to the new season from artcritical.com

With artist duo Allora & Calzadilla at Barbara Gladstone getting off to a singing start last weekend (literally, enlisting the service of boy choristers) all four shows selected for the season premiere of The Review Panel are now open for inspection. Newcomers to the program, Alexander Nagel and Dorothy Spears join veteran Review Panelist Rob Storr and myself September 26 at the National Academy Museum for an evening of critical debate.

The other shows under consideration are Angela Dufresne at Monya Rowe, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner and Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Can you believe it’s the tenth year of The Review Panel? It seems like no time has passed since Jerry Saltz and Ken Johnson locked horns that October night in 2004, with Walter Robinson and Alexi Worth heckling from the back row that we weren’t doing our job properly. The Review Panel now seems like an institution. The event also enters its fourth annual season in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy, next month. Details of all the dates, speakers and venues are at artcritical with links to a decade of podcasts.

Our other big news at artcritical is that we have a new Associate Editor: Noah Dillon. Noah, who is also an artist, is a graduate of the Art Criticism and Writing MFA program at SVA, and both he and that program’s director, David Levi Strauss, will appear on The Review Panel next Spring. Noah’s critical acumen and intellectual ambition have already made themselves felt in our pages over the summer. He replaces our first Associate Editor, Nora Griffin, who is now a contributing editor. To get a flavor of his mind, check out his contribution to BOODMARKED, the series where writers and artists show us the scope of their online reading.

David Cohen, Publisher and Editor

Selected articles posted recently: Irving Sandler in conversation with Franklin Einspruch, discussing the show he has curated at Loretta Howard Gallery; Alexandra Nicolaides brings a forensic eye to bear on media representations of the tragic shooting in Ferguson, MO; Lilly Wei remembers critic, curator and dandy Edward Leffingwell; Barry Schwabsky on Danielle Tegeder, in our Essay series of catalogue publications from significant solo exhibitions in public spaces outside New York.

And a few to look out for in the coming week: Hearne Pardee writing from Paris on Martial Raysse; David Carrier on Harry Roseman getting a haircut; Jessica Holmes on Monika Sosnowska’s Tower at Hauser & Wirth; David Cohen on Matthew Ritchie, and John Goodrich on Geoffrey Dorfman. To get the fastest scoop on postings, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post “Après moi, le deluge”: The Review Panel in Its Tenth Year appeared first on artcritical.

May 5 to June 18, 2011
534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 744 7400

Leon Kossoff’s paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash show the octogenarian British painter continuing to work in portraiture and landscape, with a brush loaded with oils as if they were tar, favoring a palette based on a sooty, British gray. In that, there has hardly been any change in his work for decades. But comparing these works to those in the gallery in 2009, which were from the period 1957 to 1967, one can see a brightening. He has admitted green into the paintings, a verdancy unmixed with ashes as would have been his wont fifty years ago.

It was perhaps necessary to offset the unavoidable symbolism in the recurring subject of his work over the last decade, a tree propped up on two stakes as if upon primitive crutches. A note from Kossoff dated July 2010 explains, “These paintings are about one tree. A cherry tree in a garden that may have been part of an orchard before the nearby house was built. One large bough was deteriorating and should have been removed. Instead, we decided to support it with stakes. As time passed it seemed as if the stakes had always been there. This subject, so different from other subjects that I had been involved with through the years, became my working life. Time passed, and paintings of the tree emerged together with the [models’] heads…”

The artist gives us no reason to interpret the tree as anything but itself. But there it is, ancient, half-toppled, held up by human interventions, and yet growing upwards and outwards in fine weather hardly ever seen before in Kossoff’s oeuvre. Cherry Tree, Early January (2004), though its surface is no less clotted than is typical of him, is suffused with yellow warmth. In Cherry Tree, with Diesel (2004-5), a train speeds by in the background, brushed out in smears of paint that lend it a Futurist velocity. Life goes by; the tree persists, reclining in the sun, if not leisurely or wholly by choice. It’s as fine a metaphor for a good old age as anything ever painted. When other paintings of the same subject return to the overcast norm, they get a boost of vitality for the artist having proven that they appear as such due to his command, not out of habit.

Christchurch Spitalfields, the Hawksmoor church that Kossof has studied with a sustained intensity that recalls Monet’s serial meditations on the facade of Rouen Cathedral, gets similarly refreshed treatments. The gray outlines and pitched perspective of the architecture is there as before in his work, but in a five-foot panel from 2000 it appears sandwiched between a hesitantly blue sky (cheerful by Kossoff’s standards) and a mighty green canopy, presumably a line of trees of which we see the trunk of the first.

Longtime sitters John and Peggy reappear as well. The artist’s portraits can come off as vicious. This is especially true of the early works – with all the slathering of gray oils, people in Kossoffs sometimes look as though they’ve been portrayed as a pile of octopuses.  But even here the colors have sweetened into pinks and greens, and the Venetian red line that holds them together verges on the calligraphic. A tenderness and humanity has entered into them where there was once a predominance of bombastic, albeit gifted, brushwork. After a series of head-and-shoulder portraits of John, the full-length one from 2006 depicting him in a wheelchair, alongside a dozing Peggy, comes as a shock. But the greenery beyond the window and the glad blue of the floor set him up for consideration akin to the cherry tree, assisted, but still participating in life.

“Everyone has talent at twenty-five,” said Degas. “The trick is to have it at fifty.” So what’s the trick? No one ever willed talent into being. (Skill, yes; talent, no.) One can only sow effort year after year and hope that one’s creative soil is rich enough to produce. Kossoff, who would be in a position to note that the real trick is to have talent at 85, shows the way. The persistent, vigorous exercise of his gifts has resulted in a visual spring at a time when one might expect an artist’s winter.

The post Late Spring: Leon Kossoff at Mitchell-Innes & Nash appeared first on artcritical.

Soft-spoken, reticent-seeming eighties art star David Salle has two speaking engagements in New York this season.  He is the second speaker in the American Federation of Arts 2010/11 series at Christie’s, following Will Cotton who opened the series last month.  The event takes place at the auctioneers’ Rockefeller Center premises at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, from 6.30-8.00 pm.  Tickets are $15 ($10 students) and reservations are required at arttalks@afaweb.org.  Salle is also a panelist at a discussion about the work of Roy Lichtenstein in conjunction with the show, Roy Lichtenstein Reflections, with the Pop master’s widow Dorothy Lichtenstein and art historian Graham Bader at the Chelsea branch of Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 534 West 26th Street, on Saturday, October 16 at 4pm. This one is free but reservations are requested at alina@miandn.com.

Another historic figure subject to round-table reassesment is dealer Leo Castelli whose legacy is to be discussed at the Jewish Museum in their books in focus series by biographer Annie Cohen-Solal, who recently published Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, who will be joined by scholars Robert Pincus-Witten and Barbara Jakobson, at the museum, on Thursday, October 7 at 6:30 pm.  For tickets, reserve here

The New York Institute for the Humanities and the Gallatin School at NYU are presenting three lectures this October by the 85 year old polymath and cultural commentaror Harry Berger, Jr.  On Tuesday, October 5 his topic is “Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo’s Cve: Vasari and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship,” at 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, at 6 pm, with a response from Patricia Rubin, director of New York University’s Insitute of Fine Arts.  The following Tuesday, on October 12 at 6pm. his topic is “Caterpillage,” which delves the topic of 17th-century Dutch floral still lifes.  That talk, with a response from art historian John Walsh, takes place at the Casa Italiana at 24 West 12th Street.  And finally, back at Cooper Square on Wednesday, October 27, at 6pm, Berger addresses his Shakespearean interests in a talk titled “The Mercifixion of Shylock”.  The respondent on that occasion will be Barry Edelstein, director of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare Initiative.  For more information on these three talks, which are free, contact nyih.info@nyu.edu

The post David Salle sallies forth, round table on Leo Castelli, and troika from polymath Harry Berger, Jr. appeared first on artcritical.

New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced that it now exclusively represents the estate of American Color Field painter Kenneth Noland.

Noland, who died in January 2010 of kidney cancer in his home in Port Clyde, Maine, was one of the best-known Color Field painters to emerge in the 1960s. Art critic Clement Greenberg championed Noland’s signature stripes and chevrons on unprimed canvas for their clarity and the energy of color.

Noland studied under Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was part of the generation of American artists that succeeded the Abstract Expressionists, which included Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.  Later in life, he developed great friendships with Anthony Caro, Paul Freeley and Jules Olitski, all of whom taught at Bennington College, VT.

The artist was honored in 1977 by a major retrospective which was shown first at the Guggenheim museum in New York and then traveled to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington DC, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash plan to mount its first solo exhibition of the artists work in 2011.  The gallery is located at 1018 Madison Avenue between East 78th and 79th Street and 534 West 26th Street in Chelsea.

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On view at the artist’s solo exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

through January 9,
534 West 26th Street, New York
212 744 7400

This was an artcritical PIC in December 2009

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In this unabashedly gorgeous show, Enoc Perez uses the contours of modernist architecture and feminine beauty to explore ideas of longing, nostalgia, optimism and melancholy. These large-scale canvases faithfully reproduce the dynamic forms of utopian buildings such as the Palacio da Justica, Brasilia, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, or the nude torso of a woman, yet the unnatural palette—by turns high-keyed, brooding, and shimmering—pushes the emotional content and abstraction further than in the artist’s previous paintings.

The San Juan-born, New York-based artist continues to construct his paintings without using a brush. Working from reproductions and photographs he’s taken, Perez makes multiple identical drawings with the aid of a projector and transfers each individual color to canvas via oil stick on the back of the drawings in a process akin to color printing. While this painstaking method of building images layer by layer can produce grainy results, typical of his earlier paintings, here Perez experimented as well with broad swaths of thickly applied pigment.

In “Alma Bank, Georgia,” for instance, the futuristic-looking structure, crowned by two crossing arches, is rendered in a thin, streaky manner evocative of old color photographs from the 1960s. Yet the sky is a vivid, richly textured marigold yellow that seems to be enveloping the flying curves and dark foliage in the background—or is the black landscape eating into the unreal sky? The ravishing image, idealized yet wistful, feels plucked from memory.

The dramatic undulating façade in “Teatro Popular, Niteroi, Brasil” is even more removed from time and place. The pale pinkish-white ribbons of architecture, with a sketchy plaid of brown, blue, purple and yellow defining an indeterminate foreground area, are suspended in murky black space that heightens the pure sculptural voluptuousness of the subject. In another canvas nearby, Perez treats the sensuous architecture of a woman’s torso viewed naked from behind similarly. Her white skin tone, flecked with bits of pink, yellow, blue, purple, red and brown, seems illuminated against the black background. In his boldest move toward abstraction, Perez paints a solid deep purple biomorphic form running up her side from one buttock to the shoulder and down the arm and another purple ovoid shrouding her face peering over her shoulder. In both paintings, he captures the promise—of love, of a better tomorrow embodied in modernist projects—and its slippery unattainability.

The standout of the show is “Pavilion of the Soviet Union, Expo 67,” of an outward-oriented structure built for the future that Perez paints with a melancholic glamour. The glassed-in pavilion glows a fiery yellow that seems to give off heat under its soaring cantilevered roof and is cloaked with a saturated teal sky signaling dusk or the end to happiness. In the foreground reflecting pool, Perez paints an expressionistic tour de force of dazzling color and light, suggesting the artist is loosening the yoke of his painting method and enjoying the application of paint unhinged to representation.

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