April 25 to June 22, 2013
20 West 57th St, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 244 6055

Particularity: some paintings have it, some don’t. In a painting that has it, specific material and visual attributes eclipse whatever genre, medium or aesthetic ideology that work might embody. The viewer’s experience of such a painting is rooted in the minutia of its physical constitution, rather than in its significance as a statement of purpose, an intellectual position, a conception of space, or what have you. Particularity is located somewhere in triangulation with Michael Fried’s “presentness” and John Waters’ definition of beauty as “looks you can never forget.”

And there is sometimes a fine line between particularity and its absence, as John Zurier’s current exhibition at Peter Blum’s new 57th Street space demonstrates. On view are 11 paintings dated 2012 or 2013 and one from 2007. In that earlier oil on linen, , Oblaka (for Mark), a pale bluish film of paint is methodically but imperfectly scraped over viridian green underpainting, leaving green glitches that might remind you of fingerprints on a steamy mirror, or skittering fish beneath the water’s surface. The painting measures 38 by 31 inches.  What is interesting to me is that the six paintings in the exhibition that are smaller than Oblaka (for Mark) are far more memorable than the five that are larger, and the difference, I think, is owing to the smaller paintings’ particularity.

The very smallest canvas, Sorgin (21 by 15 inches), painted in a close range of pungent reds, attests to Zurier’s coloration of touch. A dense, though not particularly thick, cloud of brushstrokes — both fast and slow, fat and lean — gives way to raspy pinkish areas at top and bottom where the brush has barely swept the surface, or missed it entirely. A faint impression of the stretcher bars, which painters generally try to avoid, inflects this quizzical painting’s skin with a reminder of its rudimentary mechanical infrastructure.

Öxnadalur (oil on linen, 72 by 44 inches) is ten times the size of Sorgin, but that size does not translate into a commanding sense of scale. To be sure, it is beautifully painted—in a silvery-purplish gray broadly worked wet-into-wet over a whitish ground—but it lacks the density of Sorgin’s material factuality. The paintings do, however, have in common a faint representational suggestion: a rough trail, angling up from the bottom edge (hence into pictorial space) and into a bosky wood indicated by silhouetted treetops.

This footpath scenario is even more distinct in A spring a thousand years ago, a painting in glue tempera on cotton. Brushily painted in a watery slate blue, the image exhibits just enough variety in mark making to break down spatially into the classic foreground/middle ground/background landscape organization. The inclination to interpret sparse compositional cues as a representation of believable space is more interesting as a study in the psychology of perception than as metaphor for the act of painting as a trek into unfamiliar territory. In any case, what particularity this painting possesses emerges not from the spectral sylvan iconography but from a few slightly discordant, strictly ruled horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that echo the painting’s framing edge.

A less literal order of narrative is embedded in the odd Mosfellsbœr (distemper and oil on linen), where the fabric support itself, puckered along the right side as it meets the stretcher, contributes to the story of the work’s making. A translucent whitish wash, loosely applied, backs a constellation of five tiny black rectangles resembling bits of electrical tape which in turn align in an upward-curving sweep as if caught in a current of wind or water. Nothing about the painting feels arbitrary. The very fact that, when working small, Zurier apparently avoids standard formats supports the impression that their every detail is the more considered.

The two largest paintings, Hellnar (108 by 75 inches) and Härnevi (75 by 108 inches; both distemper on linen) are the most generalized, nearly monochrome, and placid almost to the point of dissipation. While they may well have one foot in the sublime, so to speak, they nevertheless lack the visual crackle of, for example, After Paolo Schiavo. Named for a Quattrocento Florentine painter, this compact work (17 by 21 inches) succeeds in depicting an expansive, mysterious space in a very few variations on blue-black. It is horizontally bifurcated by a surprisingly concrete horizontal stroke of the brush, which, amidst the exhibition’s abundant atmospheric effects, looks solid enough to do chin-ups on. While Zurier’s quite lovely larger paintings may be seen as contemporary examples of lyrical abstraction or color field or neo-monochrome, a painting like After Paolo Schiavo defies categorization.

The post One Foot In The Sublime: John Zurier at Peter Blum appeared first on artcritical.

David Reed, one of New York’s best abstract painters, is presenting more than sixty recent working drawings and color studies at Peter Blum’s long, rectangular space in Soho. The drawings themselves are filled with information and speculation; done on graph paper, they record the artist’s musings and concerns for individual works: phrases such as “thinking of Resnick” and “thought at first that this would work—no longer sure,” as well as highly specific, technical considerations of color, crowd his working sheets. Yet, as interesting as these notes are, the heart of the exhibition lies in the small number of oil and alkyd paintings on show, which are wonderfully clear and distinct examples of Reed’s style. Luckily, we can see in the same exhibit the results of his plans in paintings that continue the New York tradition of abstract, expressive art.

Showing off the artist’s methods enables Reed’s audience to ponder the kinds of decisions he makes as he goes about constructing his art. For one painting, with a working title of #571, Reed devotes four pages of directed thought. On the top of the first page we see four dabs of color; beneath them, written in pencil, are notions about color—what to use that will work. In the middle of the page is a rough graphite sketch of the painting’s forms, with notes about the work’s color and structure on either side. Reed’s art has always been about the innate expressiveness of the brushstroke, even when he was painting landscapes at the beginning of his career. This concern with the tactile results of the brush is again taken up in the second working drawing, in which a column of three of the four yellows dabbed on the first page is painted over his easily recognizable twists and twirls of light and dark. While the result cannot be called a finished work, its exploration of color and structure demonstrates his thinking process very well.

Still, as I have said, it is not the technical aspects the viewer turns to in this vivid show; instead, all the written work leads up to images marvelous in their vibrant hue and overall effect. Reed remains a painter above all else, and his efforts over many years show him to be a superb practitioner of his art. Today, many feel painting is no longer valid as a vocation; nevertheless, it remains stubbornly alive in the hands of serious artists like Reed, Sean Scully, Louise Fishman. Their work is neither anachronistic nor overly historical because they have found a personal idiom that resonates with the past while moving forward in the present. While no one knows which way painting will turn, Reed does an excellent job of keeping its energies contemporary. It should go without saying that painting is neither a folk art nor a scholarly activity. Fortunately, we have painters who continue to prove that true.

Reed’s lyricism never seems overstated—in Color Study 43 (2009), roughly 16 by 8.5 inches, we are confronted with a rough column consisting of ribbons of paint, primarily curves and turns of green over red, with a couple of patches of dark blue in the upper right and a slim purple pole going down the middle of the composition. It is an emphatically explosive piece, whose imagery is linked to an appreciation of the brushstroke’s own forthright energies. The overlaps of paint, done on illustration board, result in a complex play of forms that is at once volatilve and restrained. Color Study 45 (2009), painted on museum board, is 12 by 8 inches in dimension. Again, the orientation is vertical, with curling waves of green painted over a red column. On top of the green is a small, double black-and-white emblem, with a black brushstroke on a white ground and beneath it, a white brushstroke on a black ground. It is exciting to see abstraction bring forth so much undeniable beauty in a current idiom. Reed shows us that there is still much to be done in the field of nonobjective art.

The post David Reed at Peter Blum (Soho) appeared first on artcritical.

Helmut Federle’s exhibition at Peter Blum encompasses the first five of a series of nine works done in early 2009. In a revealing interview in the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail, the artist states that the recent works are “God-related” and were made after a considerable period of time not painting.

Born in a mountainous community in Switzerland, near the Austrian border, Federle was not trained as a painter but studied sculpture, photography, architecture and typography in a school of the applied arts, a significant fact in the understanding of his work.  Another theme that emerges from the study of his career relates to his travels in Asia and elsewhere, as Federle’s predominantly abstract paintings are informed by an evocative visual language developed from other traditions and cultures. Boldly graphic, quietly brooding neo-plastic amalgams sometimes heavily, carefully rendered or marked with splotches, textured roller-marks and dragged brushstrokes began appearing internationally in the early 1980’s. Many were mural-sized, others diminutive, and could be construed as lone units, or often as part of a progressive series.

The present group evidences a lighter touch and perhaps involves the sustained variation of a quasi-illusionistic image for the first time. Each 23-5/8 x 19-5/8 inches (60 x 50 cm), they depict a variously illuminated five-sided figure that glows at various wattages from deep within an angular, chiaroscuro cave-like chamber.  The dusky, greenish-gray tonalities of most of the canvases are reminiscent of the dull patina of bronze sculptures. Color comes from the same basic palette that Federle has utilized for most of his forty-year painting career: white, black and yellow. Here, it has been sponged, swiped and brushed in dirty washes of acrylic or oil that has then been washed off in places and repainted. The thinly applied paint collects in furrows of the canvas weave, while in other spots, the raw canvas remerges as the paint is rubbed away in the revision process.

The precedent for this series can be found in a 50 x 60 cm work from 1985 titled “Innerlight”, a Turneresque depiction of a spiritual light breaking through darkness from a great distance. To anyone familiar with Federle’s work at the time, this painting appeared relatively anomalous, but here, twenty-five years later, the initial glimmering of a theme has been developed. It is significant that it has been installed in such a way that the paintings may be considered key elements of an architectural/conceptual continuum.

Each painting is progressively hung a greater distance from the previous one based on multiplication by two. There are three on the left wall, progressively further apart;one on the narrower back wall; and one around mid-point on the right hand, long wall. The hanging of the work is based on the Fibonacci sequence. This numerical progression is often found in nature, in the upward spiraling of stems on a plant or in the horizontally spiraled interior of a sunflower, for instance. The sequence was also the basis of many geometric-decorative patterns in Islamic art, where it was meant to evoke the creator, as imagery was prohibited.

The installation also reflects on some of Federle’s recent architectural projects, of which I have visited several. One is large relief on the side of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin, which molds cement into a familiar vertical /horizontal bar motif familiar from Federle’s geometric paintings.  Another, realized in the lower reception area of the Museum Rietberg Zürich, (specializing in art from Africa, Asia and Oceania) is a long, very deep concrete wall relief that museum patrons can slowly gilt by purchasing rectangles of gold leaf.

From this perspective, it appears that working in architecture in actual space has freed Federle from evoking the monumental, an aspect of his earlier, large paintings. It has also enabled a more fluid interaction among his triadic praxis: space, metaphor and measurement. The placement describes a spiral within and beyond the gallery space, as it magnifies the spiral movement within the individual works.

Federle’s attempt to create an atmosphere of spiritual mimesis makes this current installation a fairly unique event among what is currently being offered by abstract painting. One would have to go to the work of contemporary composers such as John Taverner or Arvo Pärt to find similarities to Federle’s current intentions.

The post Helmut Federle: Scratching Away at the Surface at Peter Blum Soho appeared first on artcritical.

JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE
Gray Kapernekas until June 17
526 W. 26th Street, no. 814, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-462-4150

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI: WORKS ON PAPER
BravinLee programs until June 17
526 W. 26th Street, no. 211, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-462-4404

STEPHEN MUELLER
Baumgartner Gallery until June 7
522 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-242-4514

Joseph Marioni is a monochromist who seems to be trying to kick the habit. Each of his paintings resonates to the name of a singular hue. Whenother colors lurk beneath the surface and occasionally peep through it is to be the exception that proves the rule.  The first and last impression is of one color.  At least, that is the way things used to be.

Mr. Marioni works in acrylic, applying thick layers of it to big, often square canvases with a housepainter’s roller. The resulting surfaces, mottled and sticky looking, differentiate him from the legion of monochrome painters who prefer complete impersonality and evenness. And the indulgent richness of Mr. Marioni’s colors in their glistening state separates him from those uncompromising conceptual-minimalists like Alan Charlton, for instance, who favors gray house paint precisely for its anonymity.

Mr. Marioni’s surfaces arouse ambivalent responses. Because of the size and association of his chosen tool, we tend not to think of the brushstrokes as “expressive,” yet painting’s busy edges bristle with personal, local, intuitive decisions. The incremental surfaces may seem arbitrary, but combined with the warmth and specificity of his colors, they induce empathy. The eye wants to linger and involve itself with the complexities of the surface.

His new body of work — the inaugural show in Peter Blum’s new Chelsea gallery space — represents a departure for Mr. Marioni. The typical square has given way to a landscape format. And the hovering background colors, which the final surface all but covers, assert themselves with newfound boldness. Mr. Marioni’s trademark strategy has given way to something altogether more imagistic: The singular, top color is now presented as a shape inhabiting a field defined by another color, which achieves some degree of equality, albeit within a figure-ground relationship.

These new works are all obstinately titled “Painting 2006.” In two of them, tree trunk-like forms fill out their base; colored silvery and pinkish white, respectively, they also resemble sheets hanging out to dry, fluttering against very dark, almost black grounds. Such illusionist readings are abetted by the differing degrees of saturation of the strokes that suggest volume.

These veil-like shapes put me in mind of the poured, stained canvases created in the early 1960s by the Abstract Expressionist Morris Louis. Has Mr. Marioni joined the traditionalist fold? The fact that he has recently found an eloquent champion in the veteran formalist critic Michael Fried — in contrast with his more conceptually oriented followers and collectors in Europe — encourages such an impression — as does the sumptuous, resonant lushness of these works.

Although Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, like Mr. Marioni, has emerged in the wake of minimalism, he represents a different tradition of painterly abstraction, connecting to older models (Kandinsky, for instance) while also seeming more *au courant.* His four canvases happily crowd the tight Gray Kapernekasspace , both among themselves and internally. Whereas Mr. Marioni needs the cavernous Blum barn for his grand statements, Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe benefits from the forced intimacy of this gallery.

These paintings, each 70 inches square, are unabashedly pictorial. In them, Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe manages to reconcile the sensibilities of a color-field painter and a miniaturist, exploring a remarkable range of touch, temperature, attitude, and scale.

For Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe, monochrome is a delicate achievement rather than an act of defiance. He is more inclined to closely related hues, or cheeky contrasts, such as the expanse of vermillion and strip of purple in “Step” (2004–05). The bigger areas of color are separated by a ziggurat form — it looks like a skyscraper at its base, then tapers to the right, into the vermillion zone — made up of fastidiously painted strips of color.

“The Chameleon and the Wraith” (2003–04) presents suitably contrasting treatments for the creatures named in the title — though which is which is open to conjecture. One area has neatly dispatched little squares and rectangles, the other a heap of sticks in the process of coalescing into some kind of figure. These contrasting geometric and organic activities cohabit within a pink-and-blue ground into which they sink, or from which they emerge.

Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe’s intimacy of touch, his quizzical scale, and the patient way he builds his picture from abstract shapes and sensations relates him to Thomas Nozkowski, one of the contemporary masters of abstract painting.

Mr. Nozkowski’s latest show is gorgeously installed in BravinLee’s railway-carriage gallery. Two blocks of six drawings face each other in the first room; the next displays the drawings from his recent collaboration with the poet and critic John Yau, the 2005 “Ing Grish Suite;” a luminous set of recent etchings occupies a third room. These works on paper don’t have a traditional relationship to painting — they are neither preparatory, nor a release for tangential interests. And there is nothing tentative about them.  The dozen drawings in the front room fill the page as much as any Nozkowskipainting does its canvas.

These drawings, each approximately 22 inches by 30 inches, are remarkable both for their consistency and for the variety of imagery and palette, The consistency comes from Mr. Nozkowski’s insistence on a strong figure-ground relationship: His quirky forms seem deliberated, as if representing something temptingly specific while obstinately eluding actual figural associations.

“Untitled (Q-14)” (2002) has a flattened, yellow shape resting on a brown mound with what could read as landscape behind (purple surmounted by green.) The yellow shape might almost read as an animal of some sort, lying sidesways to display its breast. And in another cheeky flirtation with literalism, “Untitled (Q-55)” (2004) has two voluptuous shapes in harlequin patterns that want to read like lower, stockinged female legs protruding from behind the picture plane.

Stephen Mueller is a close cousin of both Messrs. Nozkowksi and Gilbert-Rolfe, sharing with the first a penchant for emblems and with the second a cheery palette of lyrical, slightly camp contrasts. But Mr. Mueller has an altogether more whimsical attitude toward figure-ground relationships.

On the one hand, he paints emphatic shapes that float within receding space. On the other, he deploys patterns as a means to frustrate credible readings of volume and depth.

“Mneme” (2006) plays a cosmic game of push-pull, in Hans Hofmann’s sense of the phrase. The background is a melding rainbow of watercolor-like strokes in pinks, purples, and mauves, over which a transparent gray orb floats, as if the shadow of a planet in eclipse. Superimposed are various flat forms: two pink eggs striated in a spectrum from light to dark; a blue rectangle, framed in white and red; and a typical Mueller shape that reads like three vases—joined at the hip—that is internally united by thickly painted, brightly colored stripes.

The smaller canvases are capable of more focused contrasts of flatness and depth. “797 Untitled” (2006) is a gem. Against a red ground, a bright green, pineapple-like mandala shape crescendos toward burgundy at the top. The shape is filled with raining diamonds, in oranges and reds that are hued to the ground. The different sizes of the diamonds denote depth, despite the flatness this pattern simultaneously achieves.

This is gorgeous painting, yoga for the eye.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 25, 2006

The post Joseph Marioni at Peter Blum, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at Gray Kapernekas, Thomas Nozkowski at BravinLee Programs, Steven Mueller at Baumgartner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

JAMES SIENA
PaceWildenstein until January 28, 2006 (534 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 929 7000)

BARBARA TAKENAGA
McKenzie Fine Art through December 17 (511 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 5467)

SUZAN FRECON
Peter Blum through January 14, 2006 (99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring, 212 343 0441)

James Siena is like a one-man lost civilization. An odd mix of diversity and unity, his work is uniquely his own, yet charged with a suprapersonal force more familiar from enthnographic artefacts.  His first exhibition at his new gallery, PaceWildenstein, offers a dozen new paintings and two dozen drawings that extend a pictorial language he has made familiar in the last fifteen years of complex lattices, at once tight and wayward, and repeating patterns of mesh, of herring bone, or of bento box-like structures of rectangles within rectangles, Russian-doll like in their endless succession. His use of sign-painter’s enamel on metal lends his compelling, enigmatic works surfaces of cool succulence, glowing but distant.

There are numerous shades of other artists and cultures—this viewer is reminded, on the collective side, of African textiles, Maori tatoos and Tantric art and such individuals as Gustav Klimt (his decorative backgrounds), Joaquin Torres Garcia, and the obsessive outsider artist Friedensreich Huntertwasser.  Rather than coming across as referential, Mr. Siena seems something of an outsider himself, plumbing his own depths to arrive at an authentic, primordial intensity.

He couldn’t be less of an outsider, as it happens: a Cornell graduate, a star of the last Whitney Biennnial, and an acknowledged leader of his generation, he’s as clued in as any artworld insider.  But his abstract language has a remarkable freedom from either the old fashioned modernist fusion of disparate primitive and prehistoric influences into a generalized soup of Ur-forms, or a postmodernist deliberate cacophany of styles.  Instead his weirdly exquisite, compulsively detailed, fanatically methodical designs seem disarmingly practical, charged with the kind of energy you might get in a precolumbian proto-computer, or cosmologies from a vanished religion.

This purposiveness is hard won, for Mr. Siena works within stringent rules. Homo ludens—the man who plays—his drawings are elaborations of what he himself describes as visual algorithms.  Each work has its own predetermined set of procedures in relation to which the results both adhere and deviate, as a title like “Coffered Divided Sagging Grid (with glitch)” reveals.  Despite his art having great warmth, charm and empathy, Mr. Siena is, par excellence, a conceptual artist, as he is interested in seeing what happens if you submit your art to the realization of a preconceived idea.

Some pictures, like put me in mind of Mr. Close’s almost occult portrayal of a Svengali-like Lucas Samaras.

The nutty, trippy, transcendentally labor intensive aspect of Mr. Siena’s work places him in the company of a broad spectrum of contemporary artists whose art taps a finely wrought psychedia. Peers in this realm would certainly include Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli. The Whitney Museum’s recent “Remote Viewing” exhibition of painters of invented worlds, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of art that explores the narcotic, “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” point to a spaced-out strand in the zeitgeist.

Barbara Takenaga is a priestess in this cult.  She creates sumptuous decorations of mind boggling complexity that fill you with a sense of awe not just because of the exhilerating cosmos they depict but because of a sense of the heightened consciousness required for such creation. Once the eye adjusts to a sense of gaudy overload, and overcomes the prejudice of feeling you might have seen such imagery on the cover of a molecular chemistry textbook, it becomes clear that she is an image crafter of formidable power.

Each of the fourteen paintings on display, which range from 12 by 10 inches to 70 x 60, a significant jump in size for this artist, must have required staggering feats of patience and mental organization.  “Rubazu” and “Corona #2 (Golden), both of 2005, are spirals packed with vibrant balls of radically disjunctive scale.  At the heart of each vortex are tiny little dots that such the eye into infinite space.

She favors a much tighter, neater delivery than we get in Mr. Siena, with a bright, dense all-overness and dazzling synthetic color.  As a result, we don’t get the sense, as we do in Mr. Siena, of a hand leading directly to mental presence.  But for an art that seems at first to be all about special effects there is a surprising amount of surface pleasure to be had in Ms. Takenaga.  This comes out especially in a play of solid against acqueous paint, which corresponds with a theme of flatness versus depth, as in “Gold + Red” 2005, where the orbs, distributed in an almost Paisley-like spiral, each have a sense of being a contained world, filled with wobbly light.

While Ms. Takenaga complements Mr. Siena’s near-psychotic obsessiveness, his timeless, archaic quality resonates with another remarkable exhibition opening today, also a debut with a new gallery, Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum. She has half a dozen large paintings, three of them in fact diptychs of horizonal canvases stacked to nine foot high by 87-3/8 inches.

Her art can be described, in a contradiction that also recalls Mr. Siena, as hand-made hard edge: Patiently crafted, unegotistical, lovingly carved-out forms whose sense of the definitive feels personally won rather than merely given.

A consumate colorist, Ms. Frecon concocts her own mixtures of oil and pigment, favoring subtly discrepant tones rather than contrastive hues.  “composition with red earth and red earth,” 2005, uses the stacked canvses to posit one tone of terracotta against another, the top slightly more paprika, the bottom chocolate.

While some of the forms are strictly rectangular, a favorite motif is a curved shape of vaguely Islamic reference, somewhere between a turban and a dome, depending whether you read them in positive or negative against their ground.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 17, 2005

The post James Siena at Pace, Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art, Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum appeared first on artcritical.

“Alex Katz: Cartoon”
Peter Blum until November 15 (99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring Streets, 212 343 0441).

It’s hard to know what the early Twenty First Century has done to deserve so good a painter as Alex Katz. The kind of paint wizardry shot through with compelling aesthetic purpose that his art represents seems to belong to an altogether different era. Actually, he seems outside of any given zeitgeist, for he combines the insouicance of a primitive with the style jinks of a decadent. But then, a juggling of opposites is the essence of his mercurial paint personality.

On the one hand, there is a high octane bravura technique going on, with big machines completed in tour de force wet in wet painting sessions. (If you know something about painting, the sensation of contained speed captured in these habitually ten or twelve foot long canvases is bewildering; if you don’t, the images are still compellingly complete and self-contained.) At the same time, his svelt surfaces seem to breeze by with nonchalent finesse. He is an artist with a fully rounded, personal vision, and yet his style is insistently cool, classical, impersonal. You can tell an Alex Katz from a mile away, and yet there’s diversity within his oeuvre, a willingness to take risks, to push acceptance levels.

His latest show of paintings, at PaceWildenstein’s uptown space, explores his preoccupations with landscape, and in particular, with flowers. Landscape goes back to the outset of his career, in the 1950s, and he has painted flowers since at least the 1960s, but still, exhibiting in just these genres shows some indifference to public expectation, for Mr. Katz’s most memorable images remain his iconic, diffident, billboardish yet humane portraits. Those missing the human dimension in Mr. Katz can enjoy a rare exhibition of his working “cartoons” at Peter Blum in SoHo, most of which are of figurative subjects.

***

The speed and economy of a Katz painting belies its painterliness. In a way, he has always been the victim of how well his works look in reproduction. Because they are great images – despite being wilfully cropped and decentered, they are well-composed – we think we are getting the full deal with a photograph. But to be with these paintings is to realize how much of their staying power derives from his investment in brushstroke and his pleasure in the residual qualities of paint. This comes across in a painting like “Yarrow,” 2002, with the flowers and grass disposed on a marigold yellow ground: the actual hairs of the brush aid and abett a choreography orchestrated by the breeze.

However much Mr. Katz has his trademark devices and systems, there are no safe bets in his art: he seems contantly engaged in high wagers. He is happy to court absurdity, as in his almost anthropomorphic portraits of roses against a railing. And technically, he plays off the literal and undisguised fact of paint on a flat surface and the depiction of deep space. “Grey and Green,” 2001, for instance, is almost a catfight between flatness and depth, as exuberant, succuluent, squigy brushstrokes suggest the leaves dancing in front of our vision looking upwards into tall trees against the sky.

We like to believe that the best abstract painting somehow distills all the insights of depictive art from centuries past. This requires a leap of faith. The beauty of Katz, it seems to me, is that his realist painting really and demonstrably does capture the essence of abstraction. This relates back to his inbetweenness, perhaps, his working perceptually in the tradition of the New York School, somehow bringing together the energy of Pollock and the mystery of Hopper. Of course, a partisan of abstraction would insist this is a somewhat philistine assertion: what you lose when you put back representation into abstraction is the lessness, the reduction, achieved by abstraction. But Mr. Katz somehow catches a whiff of that. He embodies reduction {I} within representation.

This point is well understood in relation to “Woods in Twilight,” 2002. We get three silver birch trunks, probably in Maine, against a strident green ground, drastically cropped to their torsos (no roots or branches), with a restrained array of leaves and falling twigs. However pared down and implied these forms are, however, they are not signs for “tree,” “leaf,” “twig,” so much as symbols- living, breathing, contingent. The leaves have a seriality about them, like notes on a stave, yet they also have a strange and compelling individuality, achieved it seems through multiple and varied slights of the wrist. This gives the image the strange status of being at once written in the artist’s hand and anti-personal in that touch is detypified. The ground also has this at once generic and specific quality: it’s a near monochrome, but there is just enough variance in tone at the sides to imply space, with a sense of atmosphere and recession. Above all, it’s light that makes the scene perceptually credible: the different shades of sharp and soft green for the leaves catching or repelling light, and the horizontal strokes of white against the smooth verticality of the tree trunks. Like garments, the patches of shiny bark belong with the body and yet retain their autonomy.

***

Early in his career, Mr. Katz came up with a phrase to describe his painterly ambitions: “Something hot done in a cool way.” This collision of temperature metaphors identifies him with his generation: Jazz, particularly the clean, technically precision and sauve gaiety of bebop, was an early touchstone of his endeavor. Although his cultural interests moved on to the dance and poetry, jazz remains the best analogy to the fusion of improvisation and control in his painting.

His highly evolved, elaborate modus operandi finely balances perception and artifice, the sketch and the design. He will start with plein air oil sketches, in the case of landscapes, or drawings executed from life, in the case of portraits. These will be worked up in scale, and like a renaissance master, as the works get seriously big, he will create a cartoon.

The use of this term in relation to Katz adds an unintended frisson of Pop culture, as this is an artist, after all, who was once compared to a cross between Giotto and Krazy Kat. A drawing is made on cheap brown wrapping paper and then perforated with pin pricks, through which dust or charcoal is “pounced” onto the canvas, thus fixing the composition in outline. The paints will then be mixed ahead of the single session marathon of the final execution.

Films of Mr. Katz at work show him nonchalently trashing the cartoon once the painting is finished. Some have nonetheless been preserved, and Peter Blum, who has published several print editions by Mr. Katz, has had the idea of staging an exhibition of fifteen of them, pinned, unframed, to his SoHo walls.

These drawings have a ghostly, otherworldly feel to them. It is as if one is seeing X-rays of images one knows so well, only washed of color and painterliness. They also lack the finesse of his familiar drawing technique and the transparency of his prints. But they are extraordinarily powerful presences. You soon forget about them as working studies, which is an academic interest anyway. They have their own energy, as the artist is felt to be searching for the perfect placement of lines which will eventually disappear into seamless inevitability. The faces are quite literally masks, but they are imbued all the more with sharply observed traits that betray their maker’s bid to give them life.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 9, 2003

The post Alex Katz at PaceWildenstein and Peter Blum appeared first on artcritical.

Alex Katz: Cartoon
Peter Blum
99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring Streets, 212 343 0441
until November 15

The painter Alex Katz, now 50 years into his career, is a kind of artist that only comes along every hundred years or so. He’s in a line with the 18th Century’s Francois Boucher and the 19th Century’s Pierre-Auguste Renoir, artists who are authoritative painters within a world view that they established early in their careers. Theirs is a distinctive, sensual world that deftly apotheosizes what is considered “gracious living” by the dominant class of the period. Boucher’s art centered itself around the boudoir fantasies of the nobility. Renoir updated some of Boucher’s themes, but reflected the rise of the bourgeois, producing many picnics and maternal domestic scenes among his abundant paintings of nudes.

Katz concentrates mainly on images of what New Yorkers are or aspires to be: attractive, quasi-bohemian materialists. Katz paints us in our urban milieu or out of town in verdant summertime scenes. Like his predecessors, Katz is a tough-minded poet and consummate professional with an intellectual energy that rivals the stamina of an athlete. Like them, he continues to find interesting problems in his chosen project. There is continuity in the high quality of the work.

Katz’s landscapes are sometimes unpopulated. In Alex Katz: Flowers and Landscapes a dozen of these very large paintings are on exhibition at Pace Wildenstein gallery uptown. In the painting “Roses on Blue” the odd red shapes of the flowers rush at you like punchy kisses. Katz has an inimitable New York aplomb that couples brute elegance with surprising sweetness. His surfaces are just brushy enough that the paint has a presence, a physical forthrightness that supports the slight, everyday aspect of the imagery. This attachment to the moment as it passes touches on another unique aspect of this artist: though a straight man, he had no bones about adapting the casual, offhand sensibility of the primarily gay New York School of poets. This was in the fifties, a time when the dominant painting ethos was myth-mongering and macho.

Downtown at Peter Blum gallery an incidentally simultaneous exhibition of Alex Katz: Cartoons, drawings that were used to transfer an image to canvas, contain much of interest as well. Here, in a group of works never intended for exhibition, (Katz says he found them under his bed) the artist looks like an old master. The sepia-toned dustings surrounding the linear figuration hearken back to Boucher’s charcoal and red-penciled drawings, a show of which, also incidentally just opened at the Frick.

The post Alex Katz appeared first on artcritical.