March 30 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, (212) 563-7821

In an early episode in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the novella’s quixotic antihero, Frenhofer, is adding masterful corrective touches to a painting by Porbus for the benefit of the narrator, the young Poussin. “Look my boy, it is only the last stroke of the brush that counts; no one will thank us for what is underneath.” The history of modern art, it could be argued, is a riposte to such certitude. Abstraction, while often making the contradictory assertion that what you see is what you get — that the surface, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, is to be penetrated at peril — actually trades quite aggressively in the values that have been circumscribed. Heroics of elimination and purification might be intimated physically in the form of pentimenti; or else, in works that achieve non plus ultra reductivism, they are conceptually implicit.

Beguiling, enticing even, as the paintings of Nathlie Provosty are, it took this viewer three visits to be convinced by the totality of the artist’s vision. On the first visit, a troika of large, dark canvases, each seven feet high, dominated this sumptuously austere gallery space: West, Gilles and Twice Six (all works cited, 2016). Their declarative restraint established pictorial subtleties with such calm authority that the scattered smaller canvases seemed like intrusive souvenirs or afterthoughts. On a second visit, however, taking on trust the monumental severity of the big three, the eye could adjust to the busier, tightly knotted smaller compositions. These seemed to apply the lessons of their larger counterparts — or, one could equally say, anticipated the breakthroughs, for why assume that less always follows more? Inevitably, the fuller lexicon of colors and textures in the smaller works eclipsed what might seem like neat contained solutions in the bigger ones. But the experience of both visits yielded such satisfactions as to demand a third, which in turn rewarded this devotee with a sense of synthesis. Degrees of reduction or addition seemed determined in each canvas by particularities of emotional ambition rather than mere strategies dictated by size.

The three larger paintings each present a U-shaped black form in glossy application against a matt ground of similar hue. As befits paintings that glide effortlessly over the retina yet draw the viewer back again, the shapes variously resemble a boomerang and a magnet. If the initial impression, from a distance, of black shape against black ground, might recall the reductive late paintings of Alberto Burri in Celotex, that was belied, on closer inspection, by Provosty’s subtleties of texture and composition. Process in these “black” paintings hovers between deletion and accretion. The eye quickly becomes attuned to the survival of obscured, subcutaneous shapes and zones, and indeed colors, without compromising the surface’s serenely achieved sheerness. In this respect, the enigmatic black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, with their cruciform substructures, inevitably come to mind, as do the contingent emerging complexity of Suzan Frecon’s irregular geometries. In Provosty’s case, in counterpoint to the play of glossy bent shape against allover matt ground, an off-kilter vertical axis serves to further destabilize monochrome finality, adding uneven slivers of exposed canvas to outer edges of the rectangle to give resulting shape to what would otherwise have been merely accepted as a given, a field. These are complicatedly simple pictures.

The smaller paintings could equally be viewed, therefore, as models or as elaborations; as studies or as clarifications. Their titles intimate states of contrast in relationship to each other: “Assonance,” “Dissonance,” “Consonance,” “Resonance.” The dislodging of the bisected rectangle (now on both axes) and the misregistration of its segments is more explicit — perhaps, indeed, axiomatic — than in the three big paintings. The coloring of different shapes, and more crucially the contrasts in tone of shapes of the same color caught in axial division, offer clues about what lies beneath that tarmac-like top coat in the “black” trio, or what could result from the evisceration of that surface. Tight busyness results, paradoxically, in greater legibility, although that can be questioned if what the viewer ends up reading was unintentional. In Consonance II, for instance, tapering shapes that could signify shading add the illusion of pictorial depth to an upside-down magnet shape; in Assonance, the fractionally dislocated curves assume a marching limb schematic (bringing to mind Don Voisine and the prints of Willard Boepple).

Ultimately, it is hard to say which body of work is richer. The smaller works are more traditional in their density and the larger ones more modernist in their singularity — they seem, respectively, to evoke avant-garde (pre-war) and institutional (post-war) phases in the history of abstraction. If so, it is the dynamic of the relationship of the two that makes this striking exhibition feel relevant in a moment where Provosty’s peers amongst younger abstract painters are too often driven towards the extremes of rhetorical neo-formalist statement and intentionally irresolvable open-endedness.

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Inspired by Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and bringing in elements from Russian Constructivism as well as Modernism, Ohad Meromi ignites a passion much needed in today’s commercialized art scene. In his current solo show at Nathalie Karg Gallery on Great Jones street, Meromi presents works in mediums such as sculpture, installation, and video, creating a space oriented towards participation and gathering.

When entering, the gallery’s raw space seems quasi-empty. In the center of the room a 75-inch totem titled Grave Digger #23 (Primitive B, 2014) stands solitary. The totem is a gray primitivist female figure made of cast aluminum and mixed media, sitting on top of a plinth made of carved wood. The figure is in a squatting position; its eyes, brows, mouth, and nose are painted black, as well as its nipples and genitalia.

Meromi’s series of figurative “Grave Digger” sculptures was initially presented in 2010 at Gallery Diet in Miami, and was inspired by Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit (finalized in 1930 but published only in 1987 due to censorship). The iconic novel traces a group of workers who are digging a foundation for an ideal building that epitomizes a picture-perfect future. In the novel, the pit becomes a political commentary towards the brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture, and is eventually revealed to be a grave for the diggers themselves. According to Marx and Lenin, the term “grave diggers” refers to a rising revolutionary class that will overthrow the ruling bourgeois order. The symbolic sculpture stands silent and erect and serves as guidance for the possible revolution of the proletariat, or as we will soon recognize — of the cultural producers in contemporary capitalist society.

Further in the gallery is Half Modular Dome (2010) made of wood, industrial paint, and concrete. The structure appears as a behind-the-scenes theatre construction. On its backside (facing the viewer entering the gallery) are yellow stickers of numbers and letters as well as assembly and re-assembly instructions that trace the dome’s previous functions. When built a few years ago, the dome was designed to transform Meromi’s studio into a rehearsal space, and to adapt to different venues to create a performative stage. Here, the dome divides the gallery space in two: a primitivist presence on one side and an improvised amphitheatre on the other. The centerpiece of the show, a 20-minute-long single-channel video called Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2010-2013), is situated behind the dome. The video combines stop-motion animation with recorded participatory performances from workshops held at Meromi’s 2010 solo show, “Rehearsal Sculpture,” at NYC’s Art in General. Meromi meticulously created all the elements in the film: the props, the architectural models of the protagonist’s hangouts, and even the complementing electronic video-game music and graphic intertitles. The story is pretty simple: a factory worker (performed by Jessica Lin Cox) wakes up in the morning, goes to the factory to produce American Spirit cigarettes, goes to the supermarket to get groceries, and then goes home to rest. The cycle of “production” is completed when the worker finds out she has lung cancer and is sent to a healing facility.

The notion of “work” and “rest” preoccupies Meromi and is addressed in a theatrical manner in this video in the form of the worker’s cigarette breaks. The cigarettes themselves then play various roles: they are the central element in the “working” process, they are the “resting” tools, and they are the toxic hazard that leads the worker to the resting resort. Meromi also uses text in the film in the form of placards based on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s actors-training method, called “Biomechanics.” These short texts, rewritten by Meromi to suit his narrative, raise questions regarding the existing division between labor and rest, and whether this division can be transformed. In one of the placards Meromi writes: “Every worker tries to expend as few hours as possible on labour and as many as possible on rest.”

House of Culture (2010), a 15-by-14-inch architectural model made of glass, concrete, and mixed media, is situated in the front gallery’s windowsill. The miniature building’s colorful stained-glass windows bring transcendent light into the gallery and a glow of utopian idealism into the exhibition space. In the last scene of the featured video, the worker gazes at the House of Culture from afar, and Meromi writes: “The very craft of the actor in an industrial society will be regarded as a means of production,” bringing the show’s vision to a final conclusion.

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