“Robin Richmond: Sacred Geographies” at Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art until June 5 (86 Walker Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street, 646-613-1252)

“Eric Holzman: The Sky Is Crying,” at Jason McCoy Gallery until May 31 (41 E. 57th Street, 11th floor, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-319-1996)

There is something about impasto, the expressive layering or encrustation of paint, that is indelibly linked in the critical mind with romanticism, or with its twentieth-century derivative, expressionism. Larry Poons, however, is an artist who overturns any preconceived idea about impasto that aligns the device to emotional investment.

The compact overview of his oeuvre at Jacobson Howard stretches from the mid-1960s to last year and covers a gamut of surfaces from crystalline opticality to visceral tacility, from the transparent to the opaque. In following his career via these pictures, the imagination travels from outer space to the earth’s core.

You don’t think about the medium for a second when you look at “Stewball,” (1967): Paint is a vehicle that carries the eye to color esspressimo.. Chromatically close calibrated balls and ovals bounce around within a field of luxuriant, saturated red. The scale of the painting (it’s over ten feet high) keeps you far back enough from noticing the weave of the canvas, let alone any paint application.
All that seems to change overnight with “Big Purple” (1972), a gushing, dripping, painterly splurge. Paint has been put down with joyous abandon, yet miraculously the color is not muddied. Where Jackson Pollock painted with a stick straight from the bucket, his latter-day disciple dispensed with the stick even.

To achieve such melding and meshing of bright, contrastive color – scalding oranges and yellows in the foreground with succulent striations of lilac higher up – you’d imagine the artist must be in league with the devil. There is none of the murk or gloom that occurs when color is left to its own devices in such volcanic eruptions.

Mr. Poons has always had a penchant for quirky color. His works of the 1960s had an almost Pop brashness, and the 1970s were marked by funkiness. But by the late 1980s, the time of the two paintings that dominate this show, “Merton Eaves” (1988) and “Smith Train” (1991), Mr. Poons had entered what can be described as a jewel-encrusted bog.

The orgasm of “Big Purple” is over, and as Cicero said, every animal is sad after sex. The extreme hapticity makes you feel you are groveling in some kind of cavern. But as soon as the eye adjusts to the new light conditions, melancholy disperses. These are still as much about color as they are about texture or tone; there is still food for the retina.

These 1980s paintings envelope you in their vulgarity. The surfaces, built not just of hubristic heaps of pigment but padded out with found and sculpted objects, are liable to disgust viewers with the ambiguity of their otherness. But they excite just when they repel, in a way that aligns this scion of polite, refined post-painterly abstraction to the brash neo-expressionists upcoming at the time of these works.

But, then, some of his erstwhile 1960s peers went the same way, most noticeably Jules Olitski, whose glutinous glittered impasto of the 1980s was the harbinger of a full-blown neo-romanticism.

The first impression made by Robin Richmond’s paintings at Paul Sharpe’s homey TriBeCa loft gallery is of an improbable collaboration between Mr. Poons, say, and a neolithic cave painter. The rawness of the loft space accentuates this association.

Ms. Richmond is a painter whose meanderings into the twilight zone between color and texture inspire an oxymoronic reaction: glowing gloom. Initially, these seem like strangely murky creations, but – as with a 1980s Poons – the eye needs to adjust. A better way to describe the experience would be that of entering a gloomily lit church to discover a luminous fresco lurking in a corner chapel.

The metaphor is doubly apt in this artist’s case. Ms. Richmond, a London-based American painter, is the author of a series of books on Renaissance painters for young readers. She has been “on the road” for the last two years, traveling in India, Italy, and America, and the show has something of a travelogue quality, with quotes of Piero and Indian miniatures creeping through the collage- and skein-encrusted surfaces.

Sometimes this gives the viewer the magical feel of making a fleeting, momentary discovery. The biggest find from Ms. Richmond’s travels, however, seems to be the sensibility she picked up from her decades in England: Her spatial and chromatic ambiguities are redolent of the St. Ives artists and their romantic fusion of landscape and abstraction.

“All art is at once surface and symbol,” Oscar Wilde warned in the preface to Dorian Gray. In Eric Holzman’s mesmerizing but enigmatic exhibition at Jason McCoy you penetrate either at your peril. The artist has given this show, his third at the gallery, the fey, wistful title, “The Sky Is Crying,” which is also used for several paintings. His favorite motif is the nebulous space between clusters of trees.

Quoting Wilde seems apt in Mr. Holzman’s case, as he seems at first like a symbolist who has accidentally strayed into the wrong century. It is as if he were Gustave Moreau trying his hand at abstract expressionism. The paintings have a scale, decenteredness, and fascination with spatial ambiguity that makes them contemporary, but the tone, touch, and mood are very much “fin d’un autre siècle.” The charcoal grid still visible in his large painting compositions recalls the functionality of Old Master drawings, but also gives his endeavor a 1970s serial edge.

Mr. Holzman’s beautiful painthandling is a kind of fool’s gold. He enjoys the swirling arabesque sensations to be found in van Gogh but replaces that artist’s compelling gestalt and dynamic color with a twee tonality and distended alloverness. Mr. Holzman’s palette, at once earthy and ethereal, has a warmth that puts you in a nostalgic mood. His impasto, in which tumult is depleted of angst, belies a rococo sensibility.

Yet there is much more to these strangely compelling images than retro whimsicality. There is an element of a lament for painting that recalls the more gutsy but similarly elegiac French artist, Gerard Garouste. The big, washed-out landscapes in the back room look like Correggio drawings that have been left out in the rain.

There’s a scene in a Fellini movie where visitors to the Catacombs chance upon long lost Roman murals that disappear the instant they are unveiled. In similar fashion, Mr. Holzman revels in the sensation of chancing upon a long-lost masterpiece at the frustrating yet exquisite moment of dissipation.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

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“Julie Heffernan: New Paintings” at P.P.O.W until November 8 (555 W. 25th Street, second Floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-647-1044).

“Laura Harrison: Building Portraits: Surface and Space in Landmark Structures” at PSCA until November 1 (86 Walker Street, Sixth Floor, between Broadway and Lafayette Streets, 646-613-1252).

There is a noble tradition of Bad painting with a capital “B.” It is a modern spin on mannerism: Instead of merely accenting their work with distortions of perspective, color, composition, and so forth, some artists attempt to will themselves into a state of ineptitude. A noble tradition, and Julian Schnabel does not belong to it.

There are basically two branches of Bad: the anal and the incontinent. Artists of the first variety ape the hackneyed horrors of Sunday painters and thrift-store finds, and are essentially conceptual in their iconoclastic intent; Francis Picabia and John Currin are Bad painters of this stripe. Those of the second are more ambitious, expressive, and risky. (Sloppy-joe messiness is more ambitious because, beyond kindergarten, excesses with paint tend only to occur in a fine-art context. Mind-boggling meticulousness, by contrast, is a defining characteristic of Outsider art.)

The masters of fast-and-loose Badness are artists who have entered their “old-age style”: Painters such as Picasso and Philip Guston were proven masters before electing to become desperados. Like clowning, the appearance of goofiness requires a special kind of control.

However much Julian Schnabel seems to aspires to the beastly sublime, it is painfully apparent with his latest show of lethargic, gratuitously outsized doodles that he is merely bad with a forlorn, bedraggled, lower-case “b.” In his handling of the genre, neo-expressionism has ceased to have any vitality or purpose. It has become, like cigarette smoking, a pathetic and outdated habit.

PaceWildenstein, at its Chelsea premises, are showing five of Mr. Schnabel’s recent “Indian” paintings -based on turn-of-the-20th-century portraits of native chiefs – and half a dozen gargantuan sculptures of the 1980s. Though the latter take up more space, and are greviously unoriginal in the faux-dionysian bravura, they are somehow less offensive. Totemic turds crudely pierced with found-object heads and limbs have been done already, and far more convincingly, in the sumptuously primitive sculptures of Cy Twombly and Joan Miró. But any 13-foot tall patinated bronze of vaguely archetypal shape and rough surface will make an impression. Not so smeared paint.

On every inch of his canvases, some of which stretch up to 9-feet high, Mr. Schnabel indulges in a hubris he wouldn’t tolerate from himself or his minions in a single frame of his finely crafted movies. (“Basquiat,” 1996, and “Before Night Falls,” 2000, are the pictures this artist should want to be remembered by). His new paintings revisit territory more than amply explored by Mr. Schnabel’s superiors in the neo-expressionist camp, namely Malcolm Morley and Georg Baselitz.

To explain what’s wrong with Mr. Schnabel’s paintings, it is not enough to say, for instance, that the drawing is limp and illustrative: Those are precisely the kind of dubious intentions and calculated strategies that, when purposive and thought through, can be interesting. Genuine mannerism is about testing endurances, twisting language, pushing against medium, and then suddenly capitulating to it. It’s about really good painting that goes bad, or vice versa.

Mr. Schnabel gives himself nothing to resist (not even some smashed up crockery, as in his trademark early paintings). He splurges blobs of paint over an underlying sketch that is itself nothing but a splurge. There is no push-pull between quality and mediocrity because with him it’s all the latter. He is like a B-movie karate-fighter kicking at an open door.

***

There is welcome relief just across the street at P.P.O.W. Julie Heffernan is a “natural mannerist” – an oxymoron, of course, because mannerism is per se unnatural. Forced, stylized, strategic, and effect-driven, it exploits the received rather than the discovered. Yet within Ms. Heffernan’s camp idiom, she achieves genuine intensity and richness of expression.

In this show, her third at the gallery, her technique is dazzling in a modern-academic kind of way. “Self-Portrait as Agnostic II” (2003), for instance, is a tour de force in its handling of reflections in a polished floor and a warped antique mirror. This may be John Koch rather than Velázquez, but Koch is a good place to start.

Technique is inconsequential if not harnessed to vision; Ms. Heffernan’s most marvelously is. In golden, glowing aristocratic interiors that date anywhere from the High Renaissance to the Rococo, mysterious dramas are played out: Gorgeously attired ladies spontaneously combust, birds descend in flocks, alchemical landscapes sprout from bedsheets.

All Ms. Heffernan’s paintings announce themselves as self-portraits. They are also allegories of sorts, engendering dialogue between touch and self, consciousness and imagination, style and expressivity. Best of all, Ms. Heffernan has the quirkiness of magical realism without the sordid silliness of so much latter-day surrealism. With her, mannerism is definitely a price worth paying.

***

Laura Harrison’s debut show at the offbeat Tribeca loft gallery of Paul Sharpe is a must-see. She, too, is a mannerist of sorts, eking out poignancy and nostalgia in the very act of painting. In thrall to vintage photographs, especially those of destroyed buildings (such as the old Penn Station) or Venetian palazzos, she plays the painterly alienation card like an old violin. Her images, sparsely painted with a dry brush, bear a strong resemblance to those of the British painter, Merlin James, while a sense of the precarious and the ephemeral ties her to Belgian Luc Tuymans. She also looks to respective forebears of these two artists, Sickert and Hammershøi.

But Ms. Harrison already has a voice of her own. Although some unresolved experiments in larger scale and crudely shaped canvases mar this selection, a group of six medium-sized canvases in the gallery’s inner sanctum is profoundly moving. These have the delicate, knowing slightness of Elizabeth Peyton’s portraiture. Not despite but because of their fragility and seeming inconsequence, they are real tear-jerkers.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 23, 2003

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