May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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January 4 to February 2, 2013
529 W 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212.463.9666

The abstract collages in Mario Naves’ previous shows at Elizabeth Harris spoke eloquently of a particular approach to image-making, one involving a mixture of the tactical and the serendipitous. Constructed of painted and torn bits of paper, the collages were small in scale, but broad in their explorations. Their ragged contours and repositioned sections of brushwork probed formal possibilities within larger investigations of texture, materiality, atmosphere, and the allusive potential of shapes. For me, his highly tactile surfaces occasionally overwhelmed the formal events within.

Naves’ sixth show at Elizabeth Harris reveals something new: a change in medium, and a more efficient attack that privileges composition over texture.  Although still abstract, the works on view are all paintings with highly orchestrated geometric shapes. Close inspection reveals overpainting of areas of many canvases, but the smooth surfaces minimize the show of struggle. The physically layered depths of his collages are gone, replaced by another kind of depth, one purely pictorial in nature. This movement from suggestive textures towards definitive form brings some notable rewards.

Most gallery-goers will be familiar with Naves’ extensive writings on art, and the formal rhythms of these paintings brim with the same directness and conciseness of thought. Newly evident is his eloquence of color, apparent in measured sequences of hues that run the full scale of tones and temperature, and most of the full range of intensity. Surface rhythms intensify the action of these colors. In Louder than God (2011), for instance, the retiring luminosity of a large, medium-blue plane partially surrounds a disk of a barely lighter, more exuberant purple, turning it into a buoyant punctuation mark. A wedge of heated yellow-brown counters it at the canvas’ opposite edge; shards of lighter hues deploy across the crest of the blue. But the chief competition is a red circle—identical in size to the first but more insistent in hue—that, perched precariously above the blue, seems miles from its secured, purple twin. Together, the pressures of color and shape impart fullness to the rhythms: varieties of scale, necessity of location, contradictions of presence.

This is exciting to someone who, like myself, sees painting as a formal art revealing itself in irreducible elements of color and line. With these ingredients taking the lead, each painting in the exhibition follows a new tack: the deck of cards deals itself anew, so to speak.  In Sundays Only (2012), broad polygons—limpid green, subdued blue-gray, ruddy terracotta, ethereal cerulean— descend luminously from huddling disks at the canvas’ top. (As for most works in the show, the title perplexes, even as the image convinces.) In Outsourcing Picabia (2011), a tower of seesawing triangles lifts a “background” blue, despite the sinking pressure of a dark, orange-rimmed disk.

At times compositions seem driven more by ideas than visual exigencies. The dominant event of “Obscure Reference” (2012), for example, is its horizontal division into planes of deep red-orange and warm gray, with the in-between contour continuously curling and kinking in a long journey to a singular blue swirl at the opposite edge. Though playful in design, for me the curls and kinks simply signify a conversation among elements rather than embodying it through color. This imparts to the canvas a somewhat over-pondered effect. In some paintings, the variety of color slackens when it comes to the highest-pitched intensities.

More typical of this revelatory exhibition, however, is my favorite painting, A Pigeon in Catalonia (2011). Here, variously inclined shapes—pure white, heated rust-red, a pale, absorbent gray—commune noisily at the center before launching an ochre-and-cerulean wedge to the canvas’ edge; a small, sedate package of triangles observes from above.

The full impact of such works, however, eludes words.  Best to see them in person, in the flesh, where they speak as only colors and lines can.

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Carly Berwick, Michèle C. Cone, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review El Anatsui at Jack Shainman, Damien Hirst at Gagosian, Yvonne Jacquette at DC Moore, and Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim.

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Mario Naves, Joan Waltemath, and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss Frances Barth at Sundaram Tagore, Marlo Pascual at Casey Kaplan, Susannah Philips at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, and Stanley Whitney at Team.

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November 14, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Ana Finel Honigman, Joe Fyfe, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman, Sue Coe at Gallerie St. Etienne, Ron Gorchov at Nicholas Robinson, and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum.

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Collage is inextricably linked in historic consciousness with poetry in no small part because of the intimacy of its artistic inventors with poets. Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the inventors of the medium, were championed and inspired by poets like Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the last of whose verbal experiments invariably entailed play with typography—arrangement of words on the page could be as much a visual as a verbal gambit. Among the Dadaists and Surrealists, there were no union demarcation lines between painter and poet preventing wordsmiths from picking up their scissors: The poets of those supremely literary movements made collages and “found” objects, just as many of the visual artists wrote — in the 1930s, during his close association with Surrealism, Picasso devoted much energy to verse.

Is there something intrinsic to the appeal of collage to writers — to moving bits of paper around in startling, revelatory juxtapositions? The coincidence of two shows of collages by writers of markedly different ilk – a sometime poet laureate and a member of the third estate – begs the question. John Ashbery is the subject of a display of collages made from his undergraduate days at Harvard in the late 1940s to a series from 2008 that use chutes and ladders boards as their support. Mario Naves, who is perhaps better known as art critic for the New York Observer, has his fourth solo exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery since 2001.

The coincidence, and the connection with writing, intensifies around the identification of both men with the postcard. Mr. Ashbery is a consummate collector of postcards, and receiver and sender of them, too. Many of the collages in this show use a postcard as the support; they are framed to allow sight of the recto text, appropriately for objects as likely to be collected for their literary as artistic interest — and with Mr. Ashbery, as we are dealing with images and impulses, the distinction between the two is refreshingly fuzzy. Friendship plays a profound role in his collage activities: the 2008 chutes and ladders collages use source materials gifted to him by the late Joe Brainard and are unquestionably an homage to that poetry world artist.

Mr. Naves, who in this show returns to a welcome intimacy of scale, calls his collages “Postcards from Florida,” as they date from his brief tenure as Professor of Drawing at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota.

The types of collage Messrs. Ashbery and Naves favor occupy different ends of the spectrum in relation to the key issue with this medium: the legibility and relevance of the source material. In Mr. Ashbery’s images, the sources are virtually pristine. There are figures and objects cut from historic engravings or old magazine advertisements and then placed in equally intact though incongruous, dreamlike scenes and settings. In “Diffusion of Knowledge” (1972), for instance, a pair of comic strip action heros flex their muscles on a postcard of the Smithsonian Institution. There is a strange misregistering of the buildings in the background, as the familiar tower seems shadowed by a stenciled doppelganger in bright orange. But there is no confusion about the sources, only the encounter.

In Mr. Naves, by contrast, the imagery is entirely abstract, and the source material, which consists of painted tears of crumpled papers, is fabricated for collage purposes by the artist himself. Where Mr. Ashbery comes from the collage tradition of Max Ernst and Braque, Mr. Naves looks more to Henri Matisse’s late great cutouts and Jean Arp. The emphasis is on shapes created rather than figures isolated; it is more an aesthetic of unity than incongruity, and is less subversive.

Paradoxically, it could be argued, each writer tends to the opposite extreme in their visual and verbal work. Complicating this idea is the fact that besides his poetry, Mr. Ashbery writes clear, precise, accessible prose commentary on art and literature, but the work for which he is best known and admired is deeply, notoriously difficult. His collages, on the other hand, are formally bright and transparent, tending towards immediately accessible story lines and inherently attractive source materials.

Mr. Naves, by contrast, a journalist whose opinions are as bright and punchy as any editor could wish for, makes jolie-laid abstract art that is rough at the edges, scruffy, almost nonchalant in its casual disregard for any sense of a central organizing principle. The historic collagist he most closely resembles is the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (whose example also enthused the Harvard undergrad according to Mr. Ashbery) in drawing upon detritus whose desuetude survives the alchemy of its artistic transmogrification.

True, Mr. Naves’s “crap” consists of studio stuff, as opposed to bus tickets and candy wrappings from metropolitan streets, and it was originated by the artist for intended transformation. But the result constantly stresses distress and arbitrariness — papers are crumpled as if underfoot; there is never “pure” color but instead the contingency of splodges and brushstrokes are always manifest. The initial impression of the scarred, battered surfaces of Mr. Naves’s collages is of a segment of billboard where layers of old posters have been stripped and scraped away — a form already made into art by the Italian pop artist Mimmo Rotella.

So, two highly accomplished visual artists who just happen also to be writers? That seems too easy a conclusion. Mr. Naves – in contrast to public perception of him – is an artist who also writes, whereas with Mr. Ashbery, self and public perception coincide around the fact that he is a poet who makes collages, in the Clausewitzian sense as poetry pursued by other means. Mr. Ashbery’s collages, in contrast to his verse, is eminently likeable and legible. Even his coy hints at pederasty are sweetly whimsical. Mr. Naves, by contrast, makes tough, itchy, irksome collages which are strictly for aficionados of abstraction.

It could be said that these are “difficult” writers in very different senses. Mr. Naves is a maverick dissenter as reviled by the art world establishment as Mr. Ashbery is beloved of the poetry world’s. The one is difficult in the sense of being a nuisance, the other in the sense of being brilliantly obscure and impenetrable. Collage presents a means of intensifying his efforts to the one, and of providing gentle relief from them for the other.

Tevor Winkfield, whose solo exhibition in the main space at Tibor de Nagy complements the project room display of Mr. Ashbery’s collages, makes paintings that betray a collage mentality while totally eschewing its touch. His paintings are seamless, sealed-in, and automobile-like in their glossy finesse. But his vocabulary is intimately informed by the aesthetic of collage, bringing together both commonplace and esoteric objects in startling and suggestive juxtapositions. He could be called a conceptual collagist, cutting and pasting within the mind’s eye.

Mr. Winkfield is a natural double act with Mr. Ashbery as, since 1988, works by this expatriate Yorkshireman have habitually graced the covers of the poet’s new publications and reissues. His style is unmistakable: high contrast, high chroma arrangement of forms that are radically contrastive in scale and source executed with the clean precision of a graphic designer. He has associated closely with the poetry world, and twice instigated small but influential journals for poetry: Juilliard, in the late 1960s, and Sienese Shredder, since 2007.

Mr. Winkfield’s aesthetic is essentially heraldic: objects are flattened to the extent that they are not allowed to threaten the two-dimensional picture surface, even as they busily overlay one another. “At the Gates,” (2004) is a triptych that sees areas of pink, yellow, rust, and grays and blue occupy distinct but interconnected zones, with objects as diverse as a metronome, a fan surmounting fluted columns, and a shattered vase holding court in each.

While flatness of overall design is strictly policed, the shadows of individual forms are almost scientifically rendered. Also undermining heraldry is the non-hierarchical nature of his compositions, the all-overness of his spreads recalling abstract, color field painting as much as any historic source.

His artistic origins are actually firmly rooted in a European pop sensibility, and are thus at once formal and literary. He trained at London’s Royal College of Art where students a few years ahead of him included Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield, whose precisionist advertising style set the scene for British pop art. Eduardo Paolozzi, Valerio Adami, and the American Richard Lindner are also points of reference.

In a way, Mr. Winkfield suffers from the fact that his work reproduces too well. He draws on graphic design, and provides graphic design solutions for book covers. But the experience of his paintings in the flesh underlines the richness of his saturated color and the vitality of his paint application, neat for sure but by no means mechanical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 4, 2008 under the headings “Gallery Going:  Bits and Pieces Brought Together” and “Art in Brief: Trevor Winkfield”

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Arthur C. Danto, Mario Naves, and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to review Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone, Christo and Jeanne Claude at the National Academy, Carroll Dunham  at Barbara Gladstone and Tom Otterness on Broadway

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Patricia Tobacco Forrester: New Paintings
A.V.C. Contemporary Arts Gallery until October 11 (41 E. 57th Street, fifth floor, at Madison Avenue, 212-888-1122).

“Mario Naves, Collages,”
Elizabeth Harris until October 4 (529 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666)

That installation art had its origins in a set of values which were essentially anti-aesthetic makes Judy Pfaff a doubly remarkable figure. Not only was she one of the pioneers of the new medium; as a consumate aesthete, she also represents, a dissenting strand within it. Whereas the impulse behind installation for her countercultural, iconoclastic contemporaries was militantly antagonistic towards the object, in Pfaff’s hands, as Clausewitz might have put it, installation is painting and sculpture pursued by other means.

This is not to portray her as a counter-revolutionary or to deny her personal connection with the avant-garde of the 1970s. That she brings formal concerns to installation doesn’t make her a formalist. But, at the same time, she takes an abstract delight in readymade materials (she is the crucial forerunner to Jessica Stockholder and Sarah Sze in this respect.) In Ms. Pfaff’s work, there is an ambiguous back and forth between indulgence in the sheer shape, color, and texture of her appropriated bric-à-brac and poetic awareness of actual, redolent things in the world.

Her latest installation, at Ameringer Yohe, is her first exhibition in New York City since 1997, when she showed at Andre Emmerich, which has since closed. It is also the first opportunity for New Yorkers to see a significant change in direction, first signaled at the 1998 São Paolo Bienal, where she represented the United States. If her work in the 1990s had tended towards sculptural unity, her new approach revives the radical informality of her earlier forays into environment.

“Neither Here Nor There” falls roughly into four interconnected zones. , though the installation is far from visually unified. From scaffold, architectural ornaments, and found objects, Ms. Pfaff and her assistants have created structures that are at once dense and sprawling, and they have painted, stenciled, and collaged the walls with a panoply of decorative detail. While one room is dominated by grids built out of tape on the floor and a floating frame of plywood, the style in another room is determined by circuitry, with vaguely Islamic motifs zig-zagging around the room in welded metal strips and plaster vase-forms. But despite a density of spatial and referential layers, despite a cornucopia of materials and a corresponding abundance of style and touch, from delicate intricacy to studied nonchalance, , there isn’t the overwhelming sensuousness one might imagine.

In fact, the work shows remarkable expressive restraint. Forms are built up or broken down with disarming poise. Even where architectural trimming is deconstructed to expose its underlayers, this incident forms an isolated phrase on the wall. If a room is an installation artist’s blank canvas, Ms. Pfaff leaves much of the canvas bare, despite the seeming alloverness of her approach. This is where the new work contrasts with her 1990s sculptures, with their Frank Stella-like exuberance and deliberate over-stimulation. Environment has become her support again, but without a corresponding ambition to envelop the gaze. Instead, the eye is left to roam around on its own, to find scattered effects rather than lose itself in the visual forest.

It is bizarre that such a “material girl” as Judy Pfaff should remain so cerebral in this way. The sense of deliberation, of isolated phrases and interventions, brings to mind Katharine Hepburn’s reported criticism of Glenn Close and Meryl Streep: you can hear them thinking. But in Ms. Pfaff’s case, that may not be a criticism. At Yale her mentor was the problematizing abstractionist, Al Held.If her subsequent tastes and preoccupations took her into the company of the “pattern and decoration” artists of the late 1970s, and if her use of materials is poetic as much as it is formal, at the end of the day her vision still remains heady and hard-won.

***

Down 57th Street at AVC Gallery in the Fuller Building, Patricia Tobacco Forrester does equally remarkable and inventive things within a chosen medium at the opposite end of the trendiness spectrum, watercolor. Ms. Forrester was a few years ahead of Ms. Pfaff at Yale, where classmates included Richard Serra, Rackstraw Downes, and Janet Fish. She has not only made watercolor her exclusive medium, but made the exotic landscape her chosen motif. In a way, it was as brave to join a genre that attracts so many illustrators and amateurs as it would have been to pioneer a new medium such as installation.

What makes Ms. Forrester’s work so compelling is its unpredictability. Technically speaking, these paintings achieve their intensity through outsize scale, strong inner light, formal complexity, dramatic cropping, and high-octane color – abetted by the artist’s fearless decision to expose her paper unglazed. But what makes them so demanding and satisfying has to do with obsessive attention. And it’s attention not so much to detail as to nuance.

“Beech/Birch” (2003), a 10-foot-wide triptych, has both alloverness and depth. The painting depicts a violent competition between the tree species, in which growth entails strangulation in a way that mirrors the precarious vitality of watercolor itself. A painting like this bathes the retina in chromatic luxuriance, but Ms. Forrester holds back from a sentimental view of nature. She collides passages of precision and ambiguity managing at once to summon the immediate presence of wood and to evoke the ethereal movements of water. In her paintings, such strange bedfellows as vibrancy and mystery are encouraged to cohabit.

***

Artist Mario Naves is a critic for the New York Observer, so perhaps it’s fitting that his chosen expressive medium, papier collé, should entail a degree of cutting and tearing. Joking aside, he is a collagist of great charm and sophistication, whose fresh, intriguing works at Elizabeth Harris are at once delicate and pack a punch. Although he prepares his own stock of painted and impressed papers rather than finding materials out in the world, the fiddly intricacy of his touch recalls Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist who appropriated bus tickets, matchboxes, commercial labels and the like in his quirky constructions.

The more obvious source of inspiration, of course, are the late cutouts of Matisse. Other modernist strategies come to mind, particularly those pioneered by the Surrealists, such as frottage (rubbing) and decalcomania (a form mirror imaging itself through folding and impressing.) While Mr. Naves remains an abstractionist, his affinity with Surrealist collage encourages a sense of narrative in his lively compositions. Anything but polite essays in spatial dynamics, these teasing, voluptuous objects of desire might just be subjects of it, too.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 25, 2003

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September 4 to October 4, 2003

AN ART CRITIC NEEDS NO PRACTICAL TRAINING, no personal immersion in any aspect of craft. In theory, it is enough for a critic to know his history and to have an eye for the particular cycle of sensibility that marks his own time. The contemporary critic’s job is to articulate that ambient sensibility, increasing its self-awareness and confidence. And he is expected to encourage public recognition in a language useful at table and the lectern.

But there is more to schooling an eye than the horse races of art history. More, too, than shelves of theory, donnish jargon or-as an instance of same-strategies of discourse. So much depends on the ways in which an artist’s hand serves or stymies sensibility. A good critic knows from within how a hand functions as an extension of the eye. Without that fundamental empathy, criticism is no more than a circle dance performed by critics for each other. It is no accident that the most illuminating commentaries on painting and painters have been penned by practitioners. From Vasari to Ruskin, André Lhote to Fairfield Porter-to name only our betters-the experience of painting is often communicated best by those who have lived some time with the terrors of the studio.

Mario Naves, art critic for The New York Observer, has both an eye and a hand. That was apparent two years ago at his first exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. This current show confirms my initial regard for his art and deepens my delight in it. In his artmaking, as in his criticism, his primary concern is for the way a thing looks, not for one or another formalist theory.

On view are nine collages, modestly scaled, their complexity increasing as size diminishes. Paint is the starting point. Naves admits that his collages grew out of dissatisfaction with his own painting . It is a disarming admission, one that prompts him to paint “by other means.” And the means are simple. Paint is dripped, scraped, scumbled, sponged, patted and brushed on pieces of paper that are then torn and rearranged. His technique preserves the accidental aspect of the painting process while it subordinates all randomness to the cognitive, disciplined basis of traditional painting.

Naves’ method relieves him of every painter’s struggle to achieve a particular touch. It saves him from over-painting and the hazards of sustained brush-work. His texture derives from the quality of papers, their creases, folds and variety of over-lapping edges. Color is already dry, fixed on the paper, when he begins to manipulate it. This obviates any risk of slurred or muddy passages. It frees Naves from the pressures of mark-making, permitting him to concentrate exclusively on color and form.

The result is both sensuous and discreet-all calculation hidden by the alchemy of his composition. Everything hinges on shape and placement. His working method is nothing if not deliberate. Yet the overall impression suggests playfulness and the illusion of spontaneity. Each work develops by a process of accretion, like a coral reef, around whichever color piece was fixed at the beginning.

The delicacy of Naves’ touch and the sensibility that drives it reminds me of the work of Kenzo Okada. A Japanese-American painter blessed with an unerring compositional sense, Okada created intricate, gossamer surfaces built on keen attention to nuance and a love of Abstract Expressionism. Naves shares Okada’s gift for subtle tonal shifts within each color area. Every collage on view is a record of delicate refinements, one inextricable from the next.

I only wish the titles [e.g. Boy Genius, Hobnob] were less precious. The watch-while-I-toss-this-off arbitrariness and arch tone is out sync with the intuitive, lovingly observed adjustments that accumulate into an image.

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