April 4 to May 25, 2018 (extended)
67 East 80th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, victoriamunroefineart.com.

Laura Newman makes abstract paintings whose points of departure are instances in her life. She draws upon the world around her, from memories and places or from speculative reality. While her work has always been characterized by a remarkable range of mediums and techniques, her latest show, at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, presents a shift from the recent planar distillations of built and natural environments to an all-over sense of dispersion. A number of new elements and approaches generate paintings and works on paper that reinvigorate and update discourse concerning the tension between brushstroke and overall image. A similar dichotomy emerges between distance or remove (of the hand, for instance) and the literalness of surface. An allusion to deep space collides with taut flat areas of color hemmed in and held in place by a variety of lines and textured planes.

Those familiar with the artist’s 25-year plus career will recall the way that structure was presented in earlier works as hard edged geometric forms, crisp lines, transparent planes and flattening of form. In more recent work, nameable things such as billboards, houses, doors, and, in and swooping landscapes, fields were identifiable. What now establishes guidelines for the viewer are colossal strokes, elongated collage-like shards of color and thin exploratory lines. Compositional ambiguity, a thickening of atmosphere and a sense of disruption add to an already robust list of qualities and information that establish spatial inversions, engendering a sense of negation and contradiction. Just as collage cracked open Matisse’s practice, so too it is having a similar effect for Newman, only in her hands, collage elements are in fact sly trompes l’oeil of collage, shapes such as those aforementioned shards, that expand the facture of the work and reflect an understated ease and mastery of materials.

Newman conjures varied moods in this show that lead us on non-verbal paths of visual exploration. One painting suggests night walks in a city under construction; others suggest dreamscapes of layered experience; others still are closer to being pure abstraction. Despite being as varied and inventive as they are eccentric and awkward, all her images feel tangible. We can locate ourselves in them.

In Ghost Ship (2015), Newman uses rough, near brutal, black strokes over prepared white ground in a way that puts us in mind of a master of Japanese brush painting. Flat brown shards cluster into an A-frame against an impossibly bright, deep blue sky. Areas of intentionally unpainted raw linen become planes of light and air captured between what could be described as masts. There is an upward thrust to the composition lending these ‘masts’ a menacing quality. The feeling of the blue is at once optimistic and threatening. The roughness of the dark strokes is softened only by elegantly painted jewel-like shards of color, as in much of the work, larger brush strokes, convincingly conveyed as dry brush marks or rendered as flat planes, are deployed to organize increasingly smaller elements in a pulsating space.

Open framework, shards recalling construction tags and flags and the titles themselves suggest that the built environment continues to concern the artist. Rome Studio (2017) places the artist in the “la citta eternale,” itself a wonder of all things built, designed, rebuilt and reinvented. Camera (2017), whose title could either allude to a room or the tool with a mechanical inner eye, and Slice (2017), each contain elements that evince a focus on the layering and widening of time and space, of humanity’s trace on nature and the environments we occupy.

Located in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), the artist has witnessed at close hand and warped speed the shift of scale (economic and physical wrought by social gentrification. Glass curtain-walled ky scrapers sprout in every direction and scaffolding abounds. Steel framing of the next building under construction and girders, planes and machinery dotting the landscape inform structures in her works, while bright safety colors of orange, yellow, green and neon pink seem to have crept into her palette. Reach (2018), at five foot wide one of the largest canvases in the show, has thinned black paint forming a window-like structure opened to an abstracted watery vista. Thin strips and strokes of color pass through the structure in a twisting dynamic as if caught in a powerful gust of wind. Black strokes made with a dry-brush originate at the top of the canvas where they suggest a window frame that turns into thin lines resembling feet as the eye follows the strokes to the bottom of the image. Thus, as is often the case in Newman’s work, planes, marks and strokes perform double duty, typifying her disregard for the separation between abstraction and representation by weaving identifiable forms into an abstract image.

The idea that an abstract painting can be proportionally real is not new per se and yet how it is achieved here feels vital and urgent. Newman upends our often-precarious grasp on what we might think we are seeing, as much in terms of medium as image, by blurring boundaries, for example, between collage, drawing and painting. Her work inverts expectations of depth and flatness co-mingling foreground with background.

I have have come to think of Laura Newman as the abstract companion to the realist Catherine Murphy, whose terrific exhibition at Peter Freedman this winter served as an encyclopedic statement of contemporary life. In Murphy, images are wholly realistic while the attitude and ideas they arouse are highly abstract. We peer closely at details of a frontal portrait of a stack of books while being nudged to feel or to think about a myriad of concerns, whether the legacy of minimalism or the fate of pharaonic libraries carved in temple columns, or the advent of eBooks. The multiplicity of technique and perspective in Newman’s work has comparably far ranging philosophical and metaphorical implications: her concerns for local populations and the changing environment, for example, are channeled through formal innovations and inquiries—long a hallmark of New York painting culture. A great deal of contemporary painting seems freighted by concepts that have scant bearing upon what it actually delivers: think of those politically heavy handed curatorial statements in the New Museum’s Triennial with their attempt to force meaning. In Laura Newman and Catherine Murphy’s work, the experience of how someone is thinking and being in the world is manifest.

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A version of this essay appeared in the catalog for the July 2010 exhibition, Laura Newman: Glass Walls and Billboards at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Never trust a Laura Newman vertical.  It might be the edge of a house, the tilt of a glass plane, or a door handle; it might indicate a painting within a painting, or a skeletal tree trunk that grew in from somewhere, and, oh, by the way, it also doubles as the cord of a wrecking ball and a stray power line.  Newman’s verticals and orthogonals function like unreliable narrators:  they fool the eye and throw basic spatial frameworks into question.  In her work, closeness looks far away, flat planes might be cut-outs, transparent windows open out to nothingness, clouds act as people, wisps of breeze arise from nowhere, and whole pictures are tilted off-kilter by triangular shims lurking in eccentric corners.

Technically speaking, the parallax view is the apparent displacement or difference in the position of an object when it is viewed along the two different lines of sight.   Newman pictures the world as a correspondingly parallax place.  Newman never settles for a monocular kind of vision or a singular kind of meaning.  If you scan your eye down any of her sightlines, you will find recurrent jump cuts and double entendres all along the way.  Her images are everyday ones, portrayed in a manner of seeming benevolence or almost cartoonish serenity – houses, walls, fences, windows, horizons – but they are rendered with intentional spatial implausibility and absurdity.  This is a world seen from the mind’s eyes, and I say the mind’s “eyes,” plural, on purpose, to propose the metaphoric parallax of Newman’s paintings, with their purposefully displaced or different way of being.

Take, for example, the painting Winter Scene (2009).  Here we are confronted with a large empty picture plane, either a painting on an easel or an in-your-face billboard.   Fair enough:  a picture within a picture.  But the flat image that nearly fills the painting is shifted over, not centered, leaving approximately 20% of the left side of the painting as a rather eccentric vertical column of “background.”  The vertical spine that lies between the figure and its “background” is therefore the most important spatial axis in the painting, but in place of a simple vertical line drawn along this border, Newman has sketched a stuttering line with stops and starts, and that complicate, rather than clarify, what would ordinarily be a simple binary space.  The ensuing complications of here vs. there make for a kind of pictorial sight gag.  Newman’s paintings are rife with such slapstick spaces and objects, where you might literally bump into a glass door or try to walk through a wall.  As unreliable as the space itself is the wooden-looking structure that holds the billboard, which seems to have been built by a carpenter as illogical as the space she lives in.  This billboard appears to be made from generic 2x4s , but they are attached asymmetrically, one from behind and the other from the front.  And, by the way, what time of day is it?  The sun, as capricious as the things it shines on, illuminates some of the surfaces of the 2x4s and not others, while the rest of the painting lives on in a placidly motionless white light.

The picture (or billboard) in Winter Scene has four colors that are arranged in a horizontally descending sequence that reads like a list:  leaf green, maritime blue, baby blue, bright red.  These colors seem almost indifferent to each other; they do not mingle into each other or interact precisely, but settle tolerantly near each other, each color with its own slightly different temperament or action, by turns notched, extended, billowing, and reclining.  Meanwhile, the uncertain boundary of these color-forms is the vertical strip on the left side of the billboard, along which different things happen to different colors:  mossy green lies adjacent to leafy green, two blues transmogrify into two different blues, and red comes to a concrete end.

If one considers the notion of the parallax view as a function of this work, one quickly arrives at the flipside of the parallax coin: the blind spot.  Sure enough, though seeing is key to Newman’s work, at its core is the implication of a psychic blind spot.  The emphasis on sight, through the many vistas, vanishing points and spatial geometries, implies that there must be some witness, some beholder, some subject at the heart of the action, a gaze that must proceed from SOMEWHERE.  But this spot goes undescribed, and is located only at a vortex of blindness.  There is at the center of Newman’s work a sense of silence, of immobility or non-inflection, as though the psychic subject of her paintings is a gaze from a void.  It is this strangely voided subjectivity in the work that gives Newman’s paintings their feeling of serene, almost majestic, anxiety.  The qualities of emptiness and flatness seem to stand for seeing itself, and a subject who has, to a certain extent, disappeared.  This self is therefore equivalent to the mind’s eye(s): paradoxical, interior.

Self as disappearance is a contradictory effect in a kind of painting with such strong ties to subjectivity and embodiment as Newman’s.  Her work owes much to a tradition of muscular painterly gestures and the trial-and-error procedures of expressionism.  But as Newman’s work often functions through its dualities – its sets of opposing images, like double windows or walls, twin bands of color, or twin sets of cloud formations – by extension, this is not a simplistic kind of expressionism.  The overarching tension in her paintings is located in a dynamic opposition of presence vs. void, seeing vs. feeling.  It is as though her paintings describe a place between forces or events, like a big optical hug, where two arms come to hug you and yet never quite cross over each other to exert any physical pressure or weight.  A Lacanian would have a field day with this voided location; a Freudian would go to town with these dynamics of parent and child; a Zen monk would love the underlying implication of emptiness; a slapstick director would go crazy for the way everything is on the verge of falling apart.  Newman is a little bit of all of these.

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