July 7 to August 12, 2016
1 Rivington Street at Bowery
New York City,  info@onstellarrays.com

In Keegan Monaghan’s paintings city life is solid and luminous, forms are dreamy and rounded, and subjectivity is submerged into surfaces that sparkle with thick oil. On view during the heat wave of July and August, the artist’s debut commercial solo show at On Stellar Rays consisted of five canvases (all 2016) and one free-standing sculpture of painted wood, foam, and resin. Each work depicts a specific point-of-view: a movie theatre crowd; a police car at night; a stone façade framing a view into a domestic interior; a plate resting on a lap. A pleasurable structural integrity unites the series—all of the surfaces have a stuccolike quality and a dark violet atmosphere pops against touches of bright green, orangey pink, and rich indigo. The rectangle shape and scale of the work, roughly the dimensions of a subway station billboard, engage the viewer on a bodily level.

The paintings flash a vibrant density across a room, but as figurative scenes they are surprisingly complex. In Security grey monolithic stones frame a rusty-orange window that bears a resemblance to a picture frame. A metal grating over the window offers a bisected view into a pink living room. Monaghan might be suggesting a personal incarceration, but it is an appealingly goofy one—as if Peter Halley’s “cell paintings” of fluorescent grounds and hard-edged squares had been re-imagined with freshly optimistic eyes. The ubiquitous materials of the city, concrete and metal, are lovingly realized with bits of color built piecemeal like a 21^st pointillism. The smallest detail of Security is a painting on the wall of the room, rendered in a few daubs and strokes. Perhaps this painting-in-a-painting is the real “security” here, and art can exist as a protective center within these industrial blocks we inhabit.

Another ambiguous urban message is conveyed in The Sign Post, a portrait of a police car that has the presence of a mascot in this series. The chunky cruiser is all round edges, caught in the warped space of an intersection that makes it the center of the universe. The street is empty of people with the exception of a pant leg walking out of the frame. It’s a Sesame Street moment that comes up against the loaded symbolism of the car. The vehicle’s red and blue glowing lights are reminiscent of Jane Dickson’s Night Driving series of cars on the road. Painted with oil on Astroturf, Dickson’s cars convey an elegant pathos connected to an expansive narrative about loneliness and American highway culture. In Monaghan’s world the car is a more benevolent form, a factual character like the other paintings’ plush furniture and houseplants.

Art is on view as the feature presentation in Thriller, a work that depicts a movie theatre audience raptly watching a rectangle screen of a pointing Philip Guston paw-hand. A slight nostalgia comes through in the rendering of the red, velvet-curtained space. The crowd might be packed into an Art Deco cinema palace, a nod to a time when the collective experience of looking at moving images was a dramatic event in itself. The exhibit has its own burst of drama when the fourth wall is broken by a life size sculpture of a purple desk holding a fabricated green lamp, newspaper, coffee mug, and donut. The piece looks beamed-in from the film noir cartoon Who Framed Roger Rabbit and stands as a touching intermediary between our world and the space of the paintings.

This vision of urban life moves into the fuzzy space of lived experience with the most visually nuanced work on view, My Place. The painting seems borne directly from the artist’s head with two round holes cut out of puffy orange brain matter that look outward onto a well-appointed living room. But the “brain” has it’s own living room too, replete with furniture, rug, and art. Is there no escape from the rooms of the self, and would we want to escape them even if we could? This puzzling Russian doll syndrome is the human condition, and it’s thrilling to see a young painter address it with formal mastery and playfully knotted humor.

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May 5 to June 16, 2013
133 Orchard Street, between Rivington and Delancey
New York City, 212 598 3012

Winding through the airtight spaces of Maria Petschnig’s video installation gives you a sense that you’re entering the artist’s body. Multiple close-up views over her shoulder or hip, expanses of soft-flesh-colored material and self-referential subject matter create an engulfing interiority that is both disturbing and funny.

The fake paneling and drop ceilings that greet you at the door make you think you’re visiting a plumbing supplier rather than a gallery. Tawdry images in the exhibition’s first video, Vasistas (2013) adds to that sense. A suited, mustachioed man sits behind a desk, while in the foreground a trench coat-wearing Petschnig performs an exhibitionistic dance. Figures in another scene lie on gray shag carpeting, and in a third, the artist stands in front of stacked boxes, her body wrapped in packing tape.

The artist’s back is almost always turned toward the viewer while the material she is facing is blurred. What you see, in fact, is not full-fledged video but footage of the artist superimposed on still photosby green screen. It’s as if you are tagging along on Petschnig’s daily routine, but instead of seeing the world through her eyes, you view a parade of backdrops she has assembled for her own amusement.

As you proceed through a labyrinth of paneled corridors, the feeling of being absorbed into the artists’ physical being becomes palpable. Light levels decrease toward the interior of the building and colors are rendered more uniform. The tan sheets of Mycroft (2013), a mattress plastered on one wall, cover bulging forms that vaguely resemble body parts. Holdmetight (2012) has more bulging forms made of stuffed pantyhose that hang at waist level through the ring of a towel rack. The bulbous material resembles insect larva although thanks to the stockings’ flesh tones it is also penis-like.

Nowhere is flesh more abundant—and more uncomfortably close—than in the final chamber of the exhibition. Here the video Petschniggle (2013) shows figures in various states of undress and of interlock. Two women lather each other up in a tiny tub, their bodies partly sheathed in plastic. The same pair appear later in a tiny shed whose wooden walls resemble the paneling from the gallery walls. With bodies partly cropped it is not clear exactly what the couple is doing but their position is suggestive of “69-ing”

It is shocking but strangely fitting to learn that Petschniggle stars the artist and her twin sister. The installation coalesces as Petschnig’s personal echo chamber. She casts herself in dramas whose other actors are either still photos that she selected or persons whose DNA matches her own. She even titles the work using made-up, self-referential language. What is a Petschniggle, if not a dance done by people named Petschnig? After wandering through this flesh-colored universe of a gallery of ultra-close-up bodies shot in closet-like spaces, you emerge as if ejected from someone’s insides. Fortunately Petschnig’s humor—from the choice of déclassé materials to the Seussian terminology—saves this installation from being angst-ridden, pornographic, or simply grotesque.

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The half-and-half English/French name of New Galerie  signals a foot on each side of the pond, perhaps, of a Paris-based gallery with a presence in the Film Center building in Hell’s Kitchen.  They are exhibiting for the first time at NADA, the New Art Dealer’s Alliance fair at the Deauville Resort, Miami, with a two-person collaboration that extends this binary thing: Danish artist Maiken Bent and Angelino Lizzie Fitch made art together that responded to their conceptions of each other’s work. Bent contributes the conceit of fair-ready art, taut with packing pulleys and bungee ropes; from Fitch, another kind of tautness, with fierce-looking D-rings connecting fused plywood elements, a wax-cast lower leg, flowing printed fabric.  The rhetoric is provisional but the look is finessed, in a Frenchn (or Danish, or LA) kind of way.

Nicelle Beauchene, the Lower East Side dealer, has drawings by Louise Despont of almost outsider artist intensity: heraldic, decorative, made up of geometrically-elaborating architectural elements delivered in a cross-hatched almost obsessive, micrographic hand. Lisa Cooley, a gallerist from the same neighborhood, has a four-person show that includes Alan Reid’s Disco Lyrics, 2012, a portrait at 40 inches high of a young woman, wistful alike in demeanor and colored pencil dispatch, upon whom are superimposed cutout impasto-painted foamcore horns, an homage of sorts to Francis Picabia’s transparencies.

In similar nod-to-art-history-but-feeling-very-current mode, Cologne’s DESAGA has French painter/sculptor Nathalie De Pasquier’s Purist stiff-life colored wood constructions and creamy flat oil paintings that put me in mind of overlooked Cubist master Amédée Ozenfant in their nursery-hued idealism.  More literally on the subject of classic moderns revisited, Rome dealer Federica Schiavo’s booth was dominated by a full-wall wallpaper installation by Miami-based Bhakti Baxter (he is included in the current show of new work at the Miami Art Museum) in which a 1930s biomorphic Henry Moore mother and child is placed in a tropical jungle, as if to repatriate the pre-Columbian influenced English master’s creation.  In a similar ploy, incidentally, Moore liked to photograph maquette of his figures against rolling hills to reveal their monumentality.

On Stellar Rays, yet another LES dealer has a compellingly-weird animation piece by digital artist Brody Condon.  The artist modifies game technology, inserting figures of his own invention.  A dancing female figure recalls Cranach in her \angular mannerist distortion while the tattooed gawking males are pure frat boy geeks.  The artist finds that the spatial organization of the game technology owes more to the northern than Italian renaissance conceptions of landscape, I am told.

With all the manipulation, obsessiveness, collaborations, deconstructions and hands-off aesthetics at play, it is a miracle to find there is still pure expression that can grab you by the eyeball—like the Viennese Stefan Sandner’s simple, clean yet seismic white lines on chalkboard green/gray, on view at American Contemporary.

American Contemporary, I’m embarrassed on writing up my Nada impressions to recall, is yet another outfit from New York’s Lower East Side. Is this a case, I wonder, of “you can take the art critic out of the ghetto but…”?

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Lush Life is an exhibition curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud which takes place at nine Lower East Side (LES) galleries: Collette Blanchard Gallery, Eleven Rivington, Invisible-Exports, Lehmann Maupin, On Stellar Rays, Salon 94, Scaramouche, Sue Scott Gallery, and Y Gallery.  Lush Life adopts Richard Price’s 2008 novel to title and organize the exhibition.  The novel is set in the contemporary LES and through a murder investigation exposes the dynamically changing community of the neighborhood, which despite its evolution retains a ghostly and vital link to its layered past.  The deep and varied history of the LES now includes the LES galleries as new community members, and the premise of community is reflected in the cooperative nature of the galleries’ and artists’ participation in the exhibition which uses Price’s novel to critically consider concepts of neighborhood and change.  Each gallery will be a sub-exhibition reflecting the idea of one of the nine chapters in the book.

Sue Scott Gallery – Chapter One: Whistle.  June 19 to July 31
On Stellar Rays – Chapter Two: Liar. June 23 to August 3
Invisible-Exports – Chapter Three: First Bird (A Few Butterflies). June 25 to July 31
Lehmann Maupin – Chapter Four: Let It Die. July 8 to August 13
Y Gallery – Chapter Five: Want Cards. July 8 to July 25
Collette Blanchard Gallery – Chapter Six: The Devil You Know
Salon 94 – Chapter Seven: Wolf Tickets. June 29 to July 30
Scaramouche – Chapter Eight: 17 Plus 25 Is 32. July 8 to August 7
Eleven Rivington – Chapter Nine: She’ll Be Apples

Artists: Christopher Drager, Claudia Weber, Coco Fusco, Dana Frankfort, Dana Levy, Dani Leventhal, David Shapiro, Derrick Adams, Elisabeth Subrin, Erik Benson, Ezra Johnson, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Jackie Gendel, Jackie Saccoccio, Jayson Keeling, Jessica Dickinson, Joanne Greenbaum, Jose Lerma, Judi Werthein, Justen Ladda, Kai Schiemenz/ Iris Fluegel, Karina Skvirsky, La Toya Fraizer, Leslie Hewitt, Manuel Acevedo, Mario Ybarra Jr, Matthew Weinstein, Melissa Gordon, Nana Debois Buhl, Nicolas Di Genova, Nina Lola Bachhuber, Oliver Babin, Patrick Lee, Paul Gabrielli, Paul Pagk, Robert Beck, Robert Melee, Rudy Shepherd, Scott Hug, Tim Davis, Tommy Hartung, Xaviera Simmons, among others.

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