Last spring, a crowd of art critics gathered in TriBeCa to discuss the state of criticism. I was surprised at how many writers bashfully admit to shying away from bad reviews. Most of these people are much older than me and have been doing this sort of work professionally for a long time, but they have the same reticence that I think a lot of art critics do, despite our collective reputation as hatchet-wielding brutes. And, in fact, negative reviews do seem pretty rare, with many writers apparently preferring to champion the artists they like than censure those with which they feel at odds.

However, at The Review Panel, the kid gloves come off. Friday sees the first night in the tenth annual season of this popular forum, moderated by David Cohen, with Alexander Nagel, Dorothy Spears and Robert Storr. A large part of what makes these events so exciting is that panelists and audience members are encouraged to take a position, argue with one another, and, if they feel that way inclined, pan a show that doesn’t work for them. To be critical, in other words. That’s not to say the discussions lack levity, wit, mutual appreciation, or joy even. It was enormous fun last year to see the artist, critic, and curator Stephen Westfall, at his combative best with Cohen’s other guests, Roberta Smith and Ara Merjian. Or, in March, I was very excited to see artcritical’s then Associate Editor, my predecessor, Nora Griffin with Drew Lowenstein and Barry Schwabsky, none of them shrinking violets. I will find myself on the panel next spring, with Sharon Butler and John Yau.

I’m still very new to artcritical, but beginning to make my mark. Some readers may have seen the new Instagram account (@artcritical.editors) I set up. Writer Eric Sutphin recently posted some really cool stuff he’s seen during Berlin Art Week, and we’ve been posting some of the exhibitions we see around New York, as well as announcements about new and previous features and reviews. Please follow us there, on Twitter, or on Facebook for immediate notification of the latest posts at our site. And I’m encouraging writers to submit negative reviews, to take on assignments beyond their comfort zone, as this is the other face of Janus in the mission of the critic. With those, as with all that we publish, we encourage you to comment — we want to hear your voice and engage with you on the subject of art, a serious matter for us all. Come and tell us why we’re wrong or what we got right, or ask us the tough questions we know you have.

See, for instance, our recent reviews by Saul Ostrow, who wrestles with the career and turbulent psychic undertones of Jeff Koons’s work at his Whitney retrospective; Juliet Helmke’s excellent survey of the arts scene in Australia, now threatened with severe cuts to government funding; Collin Sundt’s beautiful architectural criticism of the form and function of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum; and artist, writer, and critic Peter Scott’s review of “13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair” at the Queens Museum, which looks back at the politics and aesthetics of the Pop artist’s installation at the World’s Fair, 50 years ago. As well, we have a dispatch by David Carrier, writing from Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg and David Carbone’s take on Stanley Lewis at Betty Cuningham. Plus, poet Adrian Dannatt has contributed a very tender essay on the paintings by Paul Pagk, on display in three concurrent shows in New York and Paris.

We look forward to seeing you this at Friday’s panel, or reading your comments at artcritical.com and our social media pages. Come join in the exchange of ideas. Quips and barbs welcome.

The post New Kid, Gloves Off appeared first on artcritical.

Group show at (harbor) Regina Rex
Opening September 21, 2014
221 Madison Street (between Rutgers and Clinton streets)
New York, 347 460 7739

Material Way at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College
September 30 through December 1, 2014
81 Barclay Street (at West Broadway)
New York, 212 220 8020

A cult figure, a painter’s painter, the critic’s favorite, Paul Pagk is an artist whose import is whispered rather than shouted, a secret shared by connoisseurs, his name like a clandestine password amongst an entire younger generation now exploring abstraction. His appeal — for students, graduates, artists, and other initiates — is understandable because Pagk’s work is all about doubt as well as strength, about uncertainty and perhaps even a deliberate clumsiness, the chance of the marvelous in a mistake, the freedom to make a mistake and remake it. A painting by Pagk is almost an exercise in thinking aloud. They allow us to see the artist slowly make up his mind and then shift, like a giant ocean liner changing course, leaving the rich wake of its decision trailing through blue water, the long process of composition left as a physical presence.

Paris has always been a center of gravity for Pagk; as an itinerant Anglo-Czech child he attended the storied École des Beaux-Arts. He was a precocious young student and went on to live the full mythic bohemian life in a squat studio worthy of Louis-Henri Murger. Thus although he has been based in downtown Manhattan for the last 25 years, and is considered a quintessential New York artist, Pagk’s work somehow maintains a European resonance, a sort of Parisian “punctum,” which makes his exhibition of recent work here resoundingly right. His show at the generous Galerie Eric Dupont, in the Marais, is pure Pagk: both absolutely straightforward and oddly unsettling, off-kilter. Pagk’s work can also be seen in group show’s at Two Two One and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The artist hung the show himself, and has laid out with great care the relationship between the works, all the contrasts and continuities in his oeuvre. Their procession is established with a simple sight line from the entrance right through to the large back room, which contains the biggest paintings. To arrive there one moves through a small antechamber with a few smaller canvases. That room is followed by a long, luminous gallery with a wall of pinned, unframed drawings, some in pink gouache, others of graphite, and others with pure pencil or ink lines. They use many of Pagk’s common devices: geometric painting with a free hand and loose edges, occasionally employing reiteration of compositional elements in horizontal tiers across the picture plane. Many have diagrammatic compositions that resemble circuits or the lines of sports fields. Several of the untitled drawings have anxious hashmarks repeatedly scratched into their surface. They’re set next to a small oil painting, Untitled Yellow (2014), and face a large painting Untitled Yellow, Pink and White (2013). The varied works in these two rooms can be sensed at the same time as the dramatic final chamber with its imposing presence.

The two rows of drawings, challengingly asymmetrical, with eight on the top row and seven on the bottom, and Untitled Yellow, challenge any grand gesture, with their intimacy and hesitancy, their off-hand elegance, thumb marks on the white paper — all these accidents and accents which are perhaps carefully plotted, the secret “plot lines” indeed that run through this whole exhibition from beginning to end. This sequence is in fact infinitely subtly calibrated, like a musical composition, suggesting that all of its cumulative elements are contained in the last large works, even if we can no longer recognize them under the weight of their palimpsest of paint. We can make connections, if we concentrate, between the shapes and contours, the reversible geometry of these works, as they share a clearly connected language, a grammar not of ornament but intent.

The Pagk Paradox remains: work that is both seemingly casual, gestural, spontaneous yet also deeply pondered, solemnly crafted, weighted, freighted with their own history. The last room rewards us with heavily worked, multi-tiered large oil paintings (each 65 by 74 inches). The Meetin’ (2012), Untitled White Yellow and Grey (2013), High Tide (2012-13), and the bright fuchsia Once Above Once Below (2008-14) have delicious, glossy patinas built over months from layer after layer of hand-mixed paint, decision after decision, their white scumbled lines like contrails through the sky.

Pagk is not aiming for consistency but for a more challenging sort of complexity. He balances the sheer smoothness of certain surfaces (as in Once Above Once Below or The Meetin’) against the rough-hewn, clotted and dense presence of other paintings (such as High Tide or many small paintings like OGLS 128, 2011). He asks us to follow his path as if it were continuous, kept moving beyond the picture plane and extended invisibly, structurally, through the whole gallery space, a mesh of infinite, intangible perspective. Perhaps this is part of Pagk’s appeal to a young generation of painters: his work seems at first rooted in a long tradition of old-school abstraction (American AbEx and European movements from Constructivism to Support-Surface) but then reveals itself to be an open system of free-floating signifiers altogether appropriate to the contemporary digital environment. Even the sheer surface of Pagk’s larger paintings have something of the deep sheen, the reflective (in every sense of that word, giving space for reflection) smoothness of those screens before which many of us now spend our lives. But these are handcrafted, infinitely meticulous and altogether human screens porting the presence of all the many stages of their making.

Pagk plays between the “worked” and the provisional, mistake and certainty, the heroic and the throwaway, the build up and the letdown. As a result, his work contains a kind of layered time, a deep map of its own making, as if all the marks ever drawn between the Etch-A-Sketch of 1962 and the latest iPhone app were still extant, eternally present, tangible somewhere at some unfathomably distant, unlocatable level, within the surface of the very screen.

The post Our Secret: Hidden Master Painter Paul Pagk appeared first on artcritical.

But residents are fighting back, many artists among them . With the aid of Tribeca Trust, they are now petitioning for landmark protection with MoveOn.org.  They already have over 1500 signatures.  And they have organized as weare67vestry.com, with strong presence on social media.

The historic building Rosen proposes to demolish was one of the first large purpose-built warehouses in New York, its defenders argue. Built in 1896 for A&P, a related A&P warehouse in New Jersey by the same architect,  Frederick P. Dinkelberg, is already landmarked. Frank Helmle, architect of the Bush Terminal Sales Building, added the two top stories in 1910. Honoring it as a landmark supports Washington Street and Washington Market historic preservation.

Rosen has a mixed reputation among art lovers. As the New York Times wrote of him in 2006, “Unlike many New York real estate moguls, who simply tear down the old to build the new, [he] has established a track record of acquiring architectural touchstones like Lever House, the Seagram Building and the Gramercy Park Hotel and renovating them, at considerable effort and expense.”  His Vestry Street project would seem to contradict the impression of a faithful steward of artistic heritage, argues Roland Gebhardt, a conceptual and minimal artist who has lived at 67 Vestry since 1974.  “If [Rosen] really was interested in doing something iconic,” he says, referring to a statement by the developer in The Architect’s Newspaper where he speaks of adding an iconic tower to the Tribeca skyline, “the iconic thing to do would be to preserve this iconic buildings that created an iconic neighborhood.”

Currently, 12 of the tenants at 67 Vestry Street are visual artists, writers, designers, architects and musicians. Artists who live or have lived there over the years include Jack Beal, John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, Marisol Escobar, and Dan Flavin.  Warhol had a studio on the second floor for a year, and his assistant and chief painter at The Factory Ronnie Cutrone was a longtime resident.  Other illustrative creative types associated with the building include the gallerists Miguel Abreu, Heiner Friedrick and Tim Nye, musicians Lennie Kravitz and Howard Johnson, and dancer, Lucinda Childs. Wim Wenders filmed inside and outside the building in The American Friend  and Robert Wilson collaborated with Phillip Glass on Einstein on the Beach on the 8th floor.

When painter Paul Pagk,  resident since 1988,  moved to Tribeca, with Chinatown and Pearl Paint on his doorstep,  Paula Cooper and Leo Castelli were still within walking distance, he tells artcritical.com. “Most of 67 Vestry was rent stabilized in 1977, and the second and third floors came under Loft Law as Interim Multiple Dwellings (IMD) in 1992.  By 2012 the entire building was rent stabilized and the landlord was granted a Certificate of Occupancy. Now Rosen may ask for building permits and permission to demolish the building, which he couldn’t do when we were loft tenants under IMD.” The tenants are being timed out by laws that protect owners but ignore the tenants’ investment of time and money and their cultural network that has lasted nearly 50 years.

Another resident, the writer, architect and urbanist Jacqueline Miro, recounts that “in the 1970s, when David Ellis acquired 67 Vestry for very little money, he encouraged artists to move in and placed ads in The Village Voice to attract them. Artists were able to have large, well-lit studio spaces to work in all kinds of mediums; they made the lofts livable at their own expense, increasing the property values with a minimum of expense to the owners. City government agendas for downtown renewal center around CULTURE and the lure of the artistic persona.”

For Aby Rosen, art collector and philanthropist  whose RFR also holds the Seagram Building, Lever House, and Gramercy Park Hotel, this is not his first brush with cultural conservancy issues.  In early April, The New York Landmarks Conservancy won a temporary restraining order to prevent Rosen from removing Le Tricorne, the fragile Picasso curtain, from the lobby of the Four Seasons Restaurant. The Four Seasons and the Seagram Building in which it is located were landmarked in 1989, but while the NYLC owns the Picasso curtain, permanent protection for the piece has yet to be decided.

Lever House, landmarked in 1982, showcases Rosen’s and Alberto Mugrabi’s art collection (Jeff Koons, Tom Sachs, Damien Hirst et al.)  with installations that often mock consumerism, power and entitlement, taking full advantage of the expensive and glassy Park Avenue setting. The Bruce High Quality Foundation, for instance, installed a twelve-foot-high, bronze union rat in 2012 while Barbara Kruger wallpapered the walls in the same year with “You make history when you do business,” and “A rich man’s jokes are always funny”

And there is a connection between Lever House and Vestry Street.  John Chamberlain’s giant, recycled-car-metal piece, Hedge,was exhibited and included in the Lever House Collection in 2013 after his death. Chamberlain lived on the 6th floor of 67 Vestry Street in the ‘70s. The New York State Council for the Arts mission statement reads: “Sustaining a vital ecosystem of individual artists and cultural organizations that supports the creation, presentation, critical review, and distribution of the arts and culture.”

By that criterion, landmarking  67 Vestry Street would help keep art innovation within the footprint of New York even as artists leave for Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other more affordable cities.

The post The Battle of Vestry Street: Art Collector and Philanthropist versus Working Artists Past and Present appeared first on artcritical.

CHAMPAGNE ON ICE

A remarkable swell took place after the doors opened, and not just fare-goers making for the various courtesy bars. The powerful and glamorous A-list crowd amassed quickly, imbibed, and prepared to consume art. The mood was generally upbeat and optimistic, if not exactly replicating the feeding frenzy of the “bubble” years.

INEFFABLE OBJECTS OF DISPLACED DESIRE

THE SWEET SMELL OF TRANSGRESSION

Power Londoner Jay Jopling’s White Cube was right at the entrance, with a “real” Damien Hirst skull painting, a wall-scaled Gilbert and George and a seductively ominous work by New Yorker Phillips.

DEEP CONVERSATION

Perhaps they are discussing how you can display a giant yellow swastika and not have that be offensive. McEwen’s solo, “I Am Curious Yellow,” complete with matching carpet, aimed only to please.

SHIVER ME TIMBERS

Paris’s Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin continues to showcase flashy theatrical work from a cutting-edge international stable, very art-fair friendly. New Yorker Coffin’s absurdist hero was one of the few literally over-the-top pieces to be seen this year.

HAVE NUDE, WILL TRAVEL

Veteran master of pop figuration Wesley made a statement with this utilitarian suitcase at the booth of Chelsea gallerists Fredericks Freiser.

GERING IN FLIGHT

57th Street dealer Sandra Gering, now partnered with Madrid’s Javier Lopez, showcases a range of punchy, graphics-oriented work, including this wall-scaled gouache and graphite piece by James.

PYROTECHNICS AND PASSIONS

Nares strong solo at the large, centrally-positioned booth of Chelsea’s Paul Kasmin, featured huge iridescent iconic brushstrokes isolated against dark saturated colored grounds. One of Nares’s movies, with its percussive formal manipulations, was also on hand, adding ambience.

STRIPES AND STRIATIONS

In from St. Louis for a brief 36-hour stay, abstractionist Lundsager was working with Greenberg Van Doren Gallery to plan her solo exhibition, slated for the weekend. A representative work hangs behind her in the storage closet. “I love being here,” she said of New York and its buzzy environs, formerly her home.

A DISCERNING EYE

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR

“They’re acrylic with silver plating,” he explained. “They’re very temporal.” Best of all, “they kind of record you,” he elaborated. This might explain their popularity. Both works were sold—and Kassay is among the fair’s “hot” young artists.

ALL DRESSED UP AND…

It turned out the lattes were free, if you know Armory Fair-founder Paul Morris, or had another “in.” It seemed like more people were “VIP” than not, judging by the shortage of seating. We’ll see how many make it to the MoMA party, still standing.

The post The Armory Show 2010: A photo journal appeared first on artcritical.

Something about abstract painting attracts dogmatic criticism. Figurative painting is understood to belong to millenia-long traditions in which so much is possible that a degree of pluralism is inevitable. And yet, despite abstract painting’s rich 100-year history, with roots deep into visual culture beyond that brisk century, its champions still fall for the habit of issuing damning strictures as to what abstract painting is, should be, and ought not to be.

So, if you happen to support artists who make romantic, swirling, spatially ambiguous paintings, just let it be known in no uncertain terms that an opposite mode, such as diagrammatic flatness for instance, is anathema. The blame for this mode of criticism, by the way, lies with abstract painting itself. With so much emphasis on starkly specific formal means, abstract painting often feels didactic — as if its line of inquiry is a program or an agenda — in a way that is less likely to apply to painting with pictorial subject matter.

Two abstract painters of the diagrammatic tendency have strong shows up right now that mix this sense of intellectual mission with an idiosyncratic, whimsical personal touch that any romantic lyricist would be proud to possess. The two, Eve Aschheim (whose show closes this weekend) and Paul Pagk, tie in nicely with the current Robert Mangold exhibition at PaceWildenstein, reviewed some weeks ago: Like the veteran postminimalist with his serenely hand-crafted geometric abstraction, these younger artists revel in the tensions between line and color, flatness and texture. At once coolly schematic and expressive in the way materials are put down, all three make work that teeters between aloofness and investedness.

Ms. Aschheim, who is head of the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University, has a suite of drawings at Lori Bookstein in a two-person show shared with the sculptor Karlis Rekevics. Bothartists are at once hard-edged and robust, abstract and architectural. Mr. Rekevics uses cast plaster and electric lights to produce sensations that are at once ubiquitous and otherwordly (common-seeming street furniture rendered in aloof textures). Ms. Aschheim uses a similarly restrained palette, working in black-and-white gesso, ink and graphite on Duralene Mylar paper, giving her work an initial impact akin to architectural plans. As such, they are more like rough sketches than presentation drawings — offering a sense of spaces taking shape, of possibilities and eventualities being worked out.

Her marks have the quality of handwriting — as much as they take on the appearance of plans and diagrams, they can come across like elaborate geometric calculations, or scores for experimental music. But again, the score or the code is ever in transition. Her mark-making hovers between tentativeness and authority. The semi-transparent nature of her plastic-coated paper support is brought into play—working both sides, and sometimes it would seem inverting a page worked one way recto to complete it the other, verso, gives the impression of receding space, of layers, of and corrections.

Ms. Aschheim favors poetic titles like “The Summer Caesura,” “Industrial Strength,” “Guess Back It,” and “Plural Blur,” which a note explains were provided after the event by the poet David Shapiro. The fact of wanting poignant titles but not providing them oneself is of a piece with the strange mix of warm and cool, of purposive and nonchalant that permeates these enigmatic drawings.

In comparison with Ms. Aschheim, Mr. Pagk opts for forms that are solid, relatively contained, and emphatic about where they belong in relation to the surface and the frame. But this leaves plenty of space for an enriching sense of local decisions, of intuitive play.

Each canvas is painted predominantly in one strident color that forms its ground. The paint is oil tempera, a medium that, at least in Mr. Pagk’s handling of it, seems at once succulent and desiccated, and is laid down thickly, but without expressive impasto. A motif is then imposed upon the ground (it reads as if carved out of the impasto) — a shape that implies either a three-dimensional object or phenomenon, or a plan. Often the line is haloed by a third color, or blank canvas, or white underground. Each canvas is almost exactly square — off by 1 inch. This is typical of the kind of rule Mr. Pagk likes to set for himself, which could account for the way he comes off as both funky and programmatic.

“Lexicon Series #90” (all 2006–07), for instance, is 25 inches by 24 inches. In the top half of the canvas, a low rectangular box is described by somewhat rough, slightly off-kilter lines, reading like an projection of an architectural space. In the front plane, a suspended white rectangle pairs up with a similar rectangle below the box form. The solid shapes are thus flat against the implied depth of the open, linear structure.

In “#87”a drawn gray shape against a light pink ground is made up of strips of parallel lines that intersect to form an hourglass shape. Like the room in “#90,” the viewer is looking down at the shape at a diagonal of 45 degrees, although the shape is once again place high within the composition, forcing the average viewer to look up at something depicted as if it is being looked down at. Like Ms. Aschheim’s titles, Mr. Pagk’s strategy gives off an attitude that leaves the viewer danglingdangles between involvement and remoteness.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun,  March 8, 2007 under the title “Gallery Going:  Idiosyncratic Intellectualism “

The post Eve Aschheim at Lori Bookstein Fine Art and Paul Pagk at Moti Hasson Gallery appeared first on artcritical.