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Barbara Ess: Someone to Watch Over Me
Magenta Plains, 94 Allen Street, New York – magentaplains.com

Sharon Horvath: Where Owls Stare at Painting’s Busted Eyeballs
Pierogi, 155 Suffolk Street, New York – pierogi2000.com

Peter Krashes: Contact!
Theodore: Art, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn – theodoreart.com

Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn – brooklynmuseum.org

The post Podcast of The Review Panel from May 2019 appeared first on artcritical.

Barbara Ess: Someone to Watch Over Me
Magenta Plains, 94 Allen Street, New York – magentaplains.com

Sharon Horvath: Where Owls Stare at Painting’s Busted Eyeballs
Pierogi, 155 Suffolk Street, New York – pierogi2000.com

Peter Krashes: Contact!
Theodore: Art, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn – theodoreart.com

Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn – brooklynmuseum.org 

The post REVIEW PANEL NEWS: Line Up of Speakers and Shows for May 1 appeared first on artcritical.

September 9 to October 9, 2016
155 Suffolk Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
New York City, pierogi2000.com

For the past 20 years, Sarah Walker has been developing super complex paintings that speak to the technological imagination—webs and labyrinths of densely layered patterns and lines that hum with things we’ve never quite seen, but intuitively recognize.  Networks and nerves, conduits and constellations, all mash up in a hovering, aerial perspective.  Her work alludes, also, to a scientific, radiant mental space of indeterminate scale and equivocal organization, one that reverberates more brainbow than intergalactic awe.

Her multiple realities are hard-edged and clear. It is essential to her purpose that the work function at the edge of overload, dazzling and hypnotic.  Her paintings have been described as orgasmic and psychedelic, and they’re only getting more so, on both counts.

“Space Machines” is Walker’s 5th solo show at Pierogi gallery, and her debut in the gallery’s new Manhattan space. In the new work, the superimposition of forms has become more pronounced, with an increased implication of motion and depth.  Hot orange and yellow clusters of circuits, organs, or perhaps a cyborgian combination of both, orbit from a central spot, lifting off, or maybe levitating from the painterly ground, mapped with coagulated acrylic pools.

I met with Walker in her Brooklyn studio where she works and lives with the artist Andrew Ginzel, and their son, Walker, now 10.

MARY JONES: I want to ask about your father. He went from medicine to neuroscience and then to psychiatry and you’ve described his way of thinking as an important influence on your work. Does that account for your merging of the technological with the psychological?

SARAH WALKER: My father was in some sense the initiator of how I regard space and how I think through process in my paintings. I remember my childhood foremost as the dynamics between people, which solidified for me- a visual thinker- the reality of mental space and its “objects”. In abstraction this might be described as a grasp of embodied patterns of occurrence. I often view technological space as an extension of mental space. Space and pattern are key elements for me.

Do you feel a relationship with other artists with a similar aesthetic?

Though different from mine I feel connected to the work of Bill Komoski, Tom Burckhardt, Sharon Horvath, Glenn Goldberg and Barbara Takenaga.  Each in their own way coalesces from their spaces “figures” that blink into form, but just. I respond to these as selves in the midst of multiple forces, both material and nonmaterial. It’s my way to describe to myself living in the midst of change.

There’s a greater duality in the new work, more separation between the figure and ground. 
Are you relating to a mind/body dialectic? I thought of Gaspar Noé’s film, “Enter The Void,” while considering your hovering compositions.

It’s a growing preoccupation, this momentary contraction of space into object, which could be described as figure and ground or self and other. Held within the architecture of the painting a multifaceted occurrence flickers into being, emerging from multiple fields yet somehow separate and unique. This may be coming about because the painting’s physical aspects adhere to psychological principles. I’m interested in gravity as attraction; the gravitational pull of one form wanting to be next to or merged with another. As this process happens, other things will get displaced, repressed, projected; they move around through the layers, alternately subsumed then revealed by way of psychological movements.

Does the “Space Machine” of the show’s title refer to anything specific?

I use outer objects to describe inner ones but I don’t think people will necessarily see literal machines. Instead, the paintings themselves offer a way to move through lots of spaces or states at the same time. I hope they work on the viewer’s psyche as visual devices.

Are these mandalas?

Yes, perhaps in how they function. I feel the title “Space Machines” is relevant here, in that my work can generate a different sensibility of existing in space, an alternate form of cosmos.  I feel they can operate as useful filters for complexity. We have a simplified perceptual structure that filters out information to aid our survival. It seems, however, that the terms of survival are changing fast, and we have to be more porous and flexible in how we view the intersection of all the different kinds of material and nonmaterial realities that exists around and inside of us.  What happens when all these are influencing one another in subtle and not so subtle ways is how these paintings are built, nothing goes away, it all sticks around.

Surface seems very important to you, the canvases are very considered, smooth and meticulous, a synthesis and compression of the painterly events that really show your control of the medium.

I suppose it’s a sensory thing- riding the line between seeming flawlessness and the ardent physicality of liquid pigment feels really good. The zone I’m after is where the surface seems dematerialized yet is thick with visceral activity, gritty yet flat, expanding and contracting simultaneously. That place is the seam between mind and body, technology and reality; the physicality of one’s mental space that’s shot through with feelings and textures, time and memory. That’s what I’m after.

How intuitive are they? How do you begin?

Intuition is a great tool. I begin with a totally fluid situation, pouring on a lot of very thin paint.  The drying pattern is important.  Sometimes I’ll flood the surface with water and drop color into it.  I allow those events to flow in whatever direction the surface chooses.  Once dry those chaotic liquid forms become the skeletal structure of the painting and they remain emphatically visible through all its layers.

To what degree does the process determine your images?

In the beginning to a great degree, then in the end there’s more negotiation. The paintings are formed slowly over time, arising from all that’s happened on the first liquid layer. It’s parallel to how a child grows into an adult. You don’t get to set the terms so much in the beginning, but one gets to play one’s hand more or less effectively as time goes on. The more risk, the more interesting and transformative the choices must be. The more wayward, awkward or poor those choices, the better the chance the painting will turn out vivid and come bundled with some new language. I can’t game the system, I must make my wrong turns and deal with unintended detours. It’s very important to me that I save the voice of every layer, even the disappointments, so they influence everything that comes after. Save everything, keep building.

I think of you as having a signature palette, in particular a very warm blue. Is this an intentional metaphor for space?

Yes, when I use blue it underscores space itself. Increasingly technology’s screens reinvent space to be even more blue, more cool, narcotic yet sleepless. Then I find myself using orange and other warm colors to tug in another direction. There’s an urge to make the oldest or least solid layer appear to be the last thing added- what should be sinking pulls forward and vice-versa. The painting breathes with this conundrum.

What are the rewards of complexity?

Multiplicity is what I’m after. My favorite position is where I can entertain several very different trains of thought at the same time, or be able to grasp something holistically as it’s happening.  My paintings help me do that. They create a context for me to actually build the state of mind I most enjoy. That place is ambiguous, not one thing or another, maybe it is “yes, and…”.

Is science something that you follow alongside your work?

Science, also fringe science even pseudoscience. I’m intrigued by how people arrange information to create their facts. The edge of physics now is particularly fraught with ambiguity and contradiction, which makes it so fascinating. I decide to take seriously beliefs or certain worldviews if only for a period of time. I marinate in several of these narratives and the work adopts the shapes that arise from their collision or collusion.

For instance…  

A recent favorite is the asteroid narrative, “Planet X”, for which I named my last Pierogi exhibition.  We don’t know what Planet X is, but a lot of people think they do, and project upon it. Whole world-views have been assembled around this possibly totally fictional entity crashing into Earth or that it is an alien space craft, or our sun’s binary star on a dangerous elliptical orbit, or… So it’s an open ended scholar’s rock, a mandala, a narrative generating machine. It sparks fires in the limbic system, and can adapt itself to any association it meets. It’s always due back any day now, and ironically it was supposed to smack into our planet on my birthday, July 29th.

What was the narrative for this series?

Among other things I was reading on reincarnation. Thinking about a cyclical view of the human soul lent its language to how I approach the painting process.  Alongside this I was entertaining the idea of morphic resonance, as developed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. For him memory is stored outside of the brain in electromagnetic fields, the brain being the receiver. His idea is that you tap more specifically into that which is most related to you, and then less so the more general the connection. Preoccupying myself with these things provides me a way of moving through the painting process- it’s like choreography.

Do you think these narratives and ideas are discernible to the viewer?

No, I hope they fall away. The ideas were scaffolding. Narrative structures that play in my imagination, like color choices, guide the process. However where I cared and where I pushed away, or focused and then fell apart, what I loved and then rejected that nonetheless returned- people can feel those movements. The weave of decisions and positions is dense enough so that the painting can assemble itself for each viewer using their own unconscious diagram. Each painting is different, allowed to develop through improvisation along its own path. Each is like an egg; carrying with it the nutrients needed to sustain scrutiny. They are sturdy enough to exist anywhere and still transfix someone, anyone.

The post Brainbow: Sarah Walker in conversation with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

April 3 to May 8, 2016
155 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 646 429 9073

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” referred to a zoological taxonomy translated from a Chinese encyclopedia. The citation was in fact invented but reportedly, this system divided the animal kingdom into 14 categories, including “Those that belong to the Emperor,” “those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush,” and “those that, at a distance, resemble flies.” Borges parodies the irrationalities of classification systems, which govern biological science. In his current shows at Pierogi, “The Felicific Calculus and “The Last Library” (a collaboration with Douglas Paulson), Ward Shelley presents two bodies of work — a series of acrylic paintings on Mylar and an installation, respectively — that draw on the absurd beauty that can be found in the visualization and classification of knowledge by presenting different views of its organization.

The term “Felicific Calculus” emerged as part of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism: it was a pre-digital algorithm for determining the degree of pleasure, or greater good, a given action would cause, providing an illusion of rigor in judging the ethics of any action. This method of turning something abstract, like pleasure, into a quantifiable value predates today’s mania for “the quantified self” by about two centuries. Today, similar processes are used for “sentiment analysis,” a method of analyzing speech to get a quantifiable value of the feelings expressed in a corpus of text, albeit for marketing purposes rather than for Bentham’s “greater good.” Shelley’s “Felicific Calculus” paintings are similarly intertwined with the material history of consumerism. Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic), v.1 (2013) renders a timeline of the 20th century as a dissected frog, its guts and limbs spread horizontally and labeled with political, social, and technological developments; the mass media forms its nervous system, its arteries are labeled as “mass production.” At the far right of the chart — the present day — the organs merge together to form a incomprehensible pink soup devoid of any obvious organization.

The chaos of the current moment is a recurring theme in these paintings, such as Extended Narrative (2014) — a painting that expands on and re-imagines Alfred Barr’s canonical schematic of Cubism and abstract art as a weather chart, with the ominous thunderhead of “Postmodernism” looming over the present day. Most of the charts are organized as timelines, with events illustrated in a linear fashion with historical time as its X-axis. Events are shown merging together or branching off into further nodes, but all of them are constantly moving forward. This merges the imagery of these paintings with their subject matter, a consumer culture that values such “progress,” and the profit it brings, over life itself.

The body of work that accompanies the paintings, The Last Library, takes a Borges-like view of time. Interspersed with the paintings, the walls of the gallery are lined with shelves, each filled with “books that should have been written, but have not,” according to the press release. The spines of these books all recall mid-20th century graphic design tropes, featuring muted colors, black text, and conservative typefaces. Their titles are variously absurd (I Sniffed Your Wife), anachronistic (Puppies, Kittens, and the Internet), and self-referential (The Felicitous Calculus). This body of work recalls a similar project by Agnieszka Kurant, Phantom Library (2011-12), in which non-existent books that had been mentioned in other literary works (such as a volume by Pierre Menard, described by Borges) were written, printed, bound, assigned ISBN numbers, and put on display. Unlike Kurant’s piece, The Last Library doesn’t feature actual books: any illusion is destroyed by a simple shift of the viewer’s perspective, revealing the thin strips of paper-covered wood that constitute each “book.”

Like most libraries, The Last Library is organized and categorized, but rather than using the Dewey decimal system, Shelley has opted for a scheme that recalls Borges’s Chinese taxonomy of animals. The various classifications are written on bookplates placed on the shelves: “Pointing Towards a Singular Truth,” “No Missing Pages,” “Books With 12 Chapters,” and “With Teeth Marks” are some of the categories by which the library is supposedly organized. The Last Library presents a different view of space and time than the paintings do: Shelley’s charts are representations of systems that can be drawn in two dimensions, while the Library’s idiosyncratic organization pokes fun at these methods of visualization. Each body of work provides a perspective through which the other, and the world at large, could potentially be seen.

The post Library of Babel: Ward Shelley’s Complex Taxonomies at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.

January 8 to February 7, 2016
177 North 9th Street, between Bedford and Driggs avenues
Brooklyn, (718) 599-2144

Mike Ballou seems never to have met an artist, writer or musician he couldn’t collaborate with. Or a pet: in his current show at Pierogi, Ballou turns dog-chewed plastic toys into rhizomes—damaged germs from which the artist engineers tentative extrusions and wiry growth. These wobbly taproots, which he then fattens with clay and epoxy, can subsume the identity of the original object, especially since Ballou unifies the aggregating forms with a single richly-saturated pigment: dry cobalt blue or cadmium yellow; a rubbed clay color; a dusted brown color

In some cases, Ballou links up extrusions into simple hoops which are leaned or wedged like kids’ toys, or wall-mounted like an ogre’s earrings. More often, the linkages complexify into geo-figural-botanical puzzles, at which point the sculptures begin to wrestle with themselves. A tabletop piece called Round (all works 2013-15) seems to depict a beheaded action figure in surrender to more powerful forces, or a martyred saint on bended knee (kindred spirit to Mary Carlson’s gracefully clunky figurines). Here the rust-colored extrusions suggest the umbilical casting tubes of a lost-wax bronze left in place. They bind him, pin him down, all the while giving him life.

Other Way, larger and intensely blue, is more antic, frazzled. It might be a time-lapse diagram of a hog-tied prisoner struggling to put on his glasses. The masticated premise of these works lends them a quality of goofy calamity somewhere between Robert Rauschenberg and William Wegman. There are also affinities with the Giacometti-redux guano sculptures of Charles Long, and by extension, with what Andrea Scott (reviewing Long in Time Out) identified as the “scatological lineage of modern sculpture” of Piero Manzoni, Dieter Roth, George Maciunas, Paul McCarthy, and Tom Friedman.

Besides collaboration, crudely competent improvisation, as on a sketchy construction site, is the hallmark of Ballou’s approach. Several sculptures perch on rough plaster ice floes supported by a tripod of bendy scraps you might use to stir paint. The sculptures dip their toes over the side and even intertwine with the precarious engineering below. Other works cantilever off the top of a table or hide under it (where one can also find rubber-stamped copies of a prose poem by Kurt Hoffman, a stealth collaboration). Several hook into the ceiling and hang like snakes that have given up the ghost, or just want you to think they have. They lie in ambush, perhaps, for the meatiness of Louise Bourgeois’s hanging works, or the pure ponderousness of Julian Schnabel’s.

In one gallery of Ballou’s 2013 “Raw/Cooked” exhibition, which infiltrated the Brooklyn Museum on every floor, the artist turned canine handiwork into hideously charming ceramics that were installed alongside Colonial American dinnerware. I should mention my own participation in the Brooklyn Museum show as one of five writers of accompanying texts; I have collaborated in various ways with the artist over the years, like scores of others, and I make no claim, here or anywhere, to be objective. But it’s worth noting that the full spectrum of Ballou’s artistic energies would remain invisible to critical dialogue unless reported on from within; only a beneficiary of his lightly magnetic hand in organizing ephemeral performances and collaborative events can evaluate Ballou’s commitment to art as a medium for “fostering conditions of exchange” (as he recites in a 2011 James Kalm YouTube interview).

A range of Ballou’s multifaceted activities, many collaborative, were on dispersed display in his Brooklyn Museum show –– including an avalanche of portrait dog masks; a quick and witty window treatment which sprinkled hallucinatory color across an elevator lobby; and freshly-minted super 8 films accompanied by a live band. The general public must have gotten some idea of Ballou’s “let’s put on a show!” attitude, but without actually having participated, even astute viewers could hardly be expected to grasp how the artist stirs up “scene” energy as a moral and creative precept.

The sculptures currently on view at Pierogi are part and parcel of Ballou’s refined ambivalence about making beautiful things, an attitude inseparable from his stubborn optimism about the studio as an unpretentious laboratory/clubhouse with a semi-open door. Ballou’s small East Williamsburg compound remains intact as “luxury” towers rise on every side, and the adaptable artist credits the sea of crappy stucco as inspiration for the new sculptures’ dangling, jerry-rigged restlessness. Coincidentally, Pierogi will be moving its main gallery to the Lower East Side after this show (Pierogi’s The Boiler remaining open, for now, in Vegas-ifying Brooklyn), so let’s just call it a closing party for the Williamsburg Scene, which, to the extent it existed, ran through Joe Amrhein and Susan Swenson’s Pierogi and Mike Ballou’s numerous collaborative projects.

In its swan song, the gallery’s secondary room seems oddly enlarged (John Phillip Abbott is on view in the front gallery) and I found myself wandering through Ballou’s installation as though it were a cumulative, radiant, 3-D painting. Bending space with weirdly animistic strands of pure color, Ballou might be a “Rope Dancer,” who “Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows” to quote the title of Man Ray’s optically enthralling, chance-assisted 1916 masterpiece. The other Man Ray, Wegman’s canine muse, has left his chewy mark too, just in case anyone starts to take this stuff too seriously.

The post Swansong for the Williamsburg Scene: Mike Ballou at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.

When I went to David Brody’s show at the Boiler — the project space of Pierogi Gallery — I was at first nonplussed. Things would have been clearer if I had read the quote at the beginning of the projected animation, the main feature of his installation, which is taken from St. Teresa of Ávila: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at times into my heart, and did pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and leave me all on fire with the love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

My first impression was one of annoyance at how flat the piece looked compared to other 3D animations of Brody’s that I had seen, and that the yellow was too light to indicate shadows.

But as the deep breathing at the beginning of the film took its effect, relaxing my body into a meditative state, I soon saw this animation as absolutely flat and yet three-dimensional at the same time. I marveled at how Brody could stride that tightrope with such assuredness. “In the animation 8 Ecstasies,” he writes, “two longstanding pipe dreams of mine came together: making a moving drawing, and pushing uncanny correspondences between sound and image as far as possible.”

The soundtrack established itself right away as something really original. The music, by experimental video artist Zig Gron, who also has Hollywood credits to his name as a music editor, including all three of The Matrix films, is a vital component of this piece. Gron’s soundtrack went seamlessly with Brody’s animation, articulating the way the flat lines and three-dimensional ridges separated. A very sudden and drastic shift in the ridges was accompanied by the sound of an earthquake. Gron sampled obscure tunes I did not know that added appropriately exuberant joy to 8 Ecstasies. I came away at the end with the impression that I had seen a masterpiece.

Brody had met Gron when they were both students at CalArts in the 1980s. After viewing 8 Ecstasies I watched the time-lapse animation of his drawings; the animation was projected high up against a brick wall, while the drawings themselves were to be found in a foyer-like space at the Boiler’s entrance. Brody’s drawing constitutes a halfway mark between his paintings with their dense architectural allusions, on the one hand, and his straightedge renderings in black and white, to be found in his animations, on the other. There was something (ironically) unruly in the ruled lines and certainly the background was pure gesture. The time lapse of the drawing had the pure pleasure of ones I have seen of flowers speedily unfolding. I was fascinated to see how his drawings were made. (The drawings, printed in editions of 15, come on a thumb-drive of 8 Ecstasies inserted into their frame, as well as a video of that particular drawing being drawn.)

The untitled orange-red sculpture, a ziggurat construction suspended from the Boiler Room’s high ceiling veiled by draping swathes of bubble wrap, had an apparitional impact like seeing a ghost in a haunted house. I had never seen a sculpture by Brody before, and yet it immediately held the force of another masterpiece in his oeuvre. I should qualify this statement with the admission of not being especially devoted to his paintings, which hitherto has been his primary means of expression.

One other piece should be acknowledged as part of the production of this multi-media exhibition, the newsprint catalogue with a text by Nick Flynn titled [salvaged process notes for david brody’s 8 ecstasies]. Culled from Brody’s notes to 8 Ecstasies, Flynn’s piece reads as a stand-alone poem.

The post “Leave Me All On Fire”: David Brody at the Boiler appeared first on artcritical.

March 22 to April 21, 2013,
177 North 9th Street, between Bedford and Driggs avenues
Brooklyn, 718.599.2144

Sarah Walker’s art is like visual quicksand. From a distance, these pulsating, energized paintings with their alluringly complex, multi-patterned surfaces seem rationally concrete and firmly structured. But upon closer investigation, subtle incongruities quickly leave us unmoored.

Colors that appeared transparent reveal themselves to be opaque, and lines that seemed to float on the surface turn out to be artifacts from earlier layers. Metaphors mutate from the cosmic to the subatomic. A form collapses into a hole, and patterns cohere into gateways to other dimensions. Each painting is a labyrinth: trying to deconstruct how these works are made could lead to madness. Nothing is ever what it initially appeared to be. Surrendering one’s mind to Walker’s twisted relational structures is to become a mental fly caught in a sticky web of visual contradictions.

Planet X, Walker’s title for her fourth show at Pierogi, is neither about the solar system nor X-rated, although her work can feel, both cosmological and orgasmic. There are nine small acrylic paintings on reverse-beveled wood panels, and a constellation of works on paper from a series called Near Earth Objects. The paintings are abstract, but not in a conventional sense. Though they do not represent figures, still-lifes or landscapes, the language used to describe them is resolutely pictorial. Allusions to quantum fields and cellular processes spring inescapably to mind, even though no actual scientific principles are illustrated.

Volatile Compound (2012) – a painting that is easy to overlook, exiled over Pierogi’s flat files in the gallery’s outer vestibule – is a vital bridge between the other panel paintings, with their allusions to subatomic energy fields, and the Near Earth Object series on paper which seem to depict “floating objects” —— “objects” which don’t float so much as emerge from fogged over fields like a detail from a forgotten memory.

Initially, Volatile Compound, at 20 by 22 inches, presents itself as a planet-like form occluded by clouds. But like some crazy Rorschach blot, the form continuously morphs from a flat patterned ellipse to an ovoid, to paired fetuses, to fungus-engulfed egg, to an aperture through which can be seen some kind of electromagnetic field. And the “clouds” which, too, change from misty to flat and textured, seem to reveal a “sky” that looks like a ‘50’s textile. But the variable ultramarine shapes are actually painted on top of both the clouds and the form, and upon this perception, they become fin-like appendages to the ellipsoid.

Layering is the obvious key to Walker’s transformations. The advantage of Walker’s paint of choice, acrylic, lies in its ability to be quickly applied in translucent layers. Building up her image, the artist is combination surgical scrub nurse and tattoo artist, continuously mopping up puddles of half dried paint that she has randomly poured and tilted to form drips, and then carefully filling in the dried edge of a spill with a different colored puddle. Walker employs layers not only physically, but metaphorically, too.  The pleasure in viewing her work lies in the constant perceptual shift induced by competing interpretive fantasies.

Walker challenges abstraction’s canonical values of flatness, simplicity, and suspicion of control. She evokes an alternative historical lineage for herself which, in contrast to that of many of her peers, starts with cubism and references important artists that have also rejected status quo painting, such as Al Held.

Walker has adopted many of Held’s abstract pictorial strategies, such as creating space by recognizing that diagonal lines, trapezoids, and ellipses can have a dual pictorial identity—–these lines and shapes can be both flat and spatial simultaneously. And also that negative space can be transparent or opaque depending on what it reveals or conceals.

Walker also shares with Held a similar reference to classical architecture as evinced by an etching of the Pantheon she keeps on her studio wall. But though Walker’s paintings are as complex as Held’s, her work is intimate both in scale and feeling.  But unlike Held, her universe is discontinuous and hints at a disturbing irrationality at its core.

With Walker, the most contentious painterly issue is control. She vacillates between wanting the paint to behave in a natural, fluid way and dominating the hell out of it——alternating painting personas of Cinderella and her evil stepmother. Part of this results from her desire to preserve elements of every successive layer she uses, which she has amusingly attributed to her upbringing in the households of hoarders.

The resulting visually complex surface invariably strikes an anxious note for many viewers. But managing information overload has become our contemporary condition and Walker masterfully structures these paintings both physically and metaphorically to accommodate fickle attentions spans. But whenever complexity threatens to overtake her painting she fogs over the offending areas with her painterly equivalents of Klonopin, so we can relax and prepare to be sucked in once more.

The post Quantum Fields and Cellular Processes: Sarah Walker at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.

For his fourth show at Pierogi, James Esber invited around a hundred friends to retrace —  crosshatch-by-crosshatch — one  of his masterfully Byzantine convolutions of caricature.  The results, colorfully framed, are hung en masse and interspersed with Esber’s own radiantly garish drawings, paintings, and Plasticene wall pieces, the latter achieving a new bulbous physicality.  In the group project, Esber tests the limits of the art world’s prevailing social contract, since a curmudgeon might see his shackling of others’ hands to his own inimitable rhythms as an enactment of a passive-aggressive fantasy (most participants being working artists – though not all, as if to sweeten the sting).  In this view, Esber salivates over total world domination from his impregnable artistic bunker while making claims to higher purpose – perhaps tellingly, Osama Bin Laden’s grotesquely contorted portrait is Esber’s chosen graphic for slavish replication.

Speaking as a participant, I did find the task irksome; deprived of spontaneity, one could only come off worse than Esber’s freely-stroked prototype, yet how sophomorically predictable – and time consuming! – it was to subvert the draw-by-number rules with some cleverness.  To have refused would have been unsportsmanlike. Perhaps others felt the same sense of coerced duty, yet plenty of participants, pro and amateur alike, acquit themselves nicely: Tom Burckhardt, Phong Bui, Darina Karpov, E.H. Gery, and Fiorenzo Borghi, among other standouts, rise to the occasion with ingenuity, enthusiasm, and a spirit of collaboration.  The effect of the piece as a whole – the collective recitation of the sacred text –comes down optimistically on the side of artistic individualism adapted to communal purpose.  And yet, Esber’s “Who, Me?” megalomania is the fly in the ointment that keeps the group portrait intriguingly corrosive, less about world politics than the art world variety.

James Esber: You, Me & Everyone Else is at Pierogi Gallery, November 14 to December 23, 177 North 9th Street, between Bedford and Driggs avenues, Brooklyn, 718.599.2144.

The post Who, Me? James Esber and the Megolomania of the Group Portrait appeared first on artcritical.

You might have the momentary impression that Daniel Zweller and Ati Maier’s concurrent solo exhibitions, composed mostly of mid-sized works on paper, are quintessential Pierogi shows. It is no secret that many of the gallery’s artists adhere to a brand of obsessive, often intricately restrained, markmaking akin to that “Brooklyn aesthetic” once dubbed by David Cohen as “School of fuss and fiddle.” While Zweller’s show broods over a fanatical, labyrinthine precision, however, Maier’s paintings and drawings (both formats originate on paper but to different scales and densities) express meandering, pulsing meditations on the terrestrial and planetary, virtual and physical. While the paper works take a central axis, they orbit in a constellation of a wall installation and video animations.

Based in processes of chance and discovery, Maier works successive layers of airbrush, ink and wood stain into contracting and expanding spacescapes that accumulate scientific theory, satellite imagery, graphic advertising sensibilities and geological models. Visualizing these often virtually perceived territories, Maier’s imagined spaces recall the internet ether paintings of Benjamin Edwards or the wry architectural palimpsests of Julie Mehretu’s “Gray Area” paintings as recently seen at the Guggenheim.

While retaining an equally terrestrial and otherworldly character, Maier’s most recent work is denser than previous and more varied in its markmaking. The imagery is increasingly abstracted and acquiescent to less identifiable and circuitous patterning. Works such as Disappeared Time and The Great Dipper (both 2010) are interplanetary roller coasters for the eyes and the mind, as unclassified otherworldly visuals coalesce and collide with recognized sources.

Hovering clusters of laptop/turntable-sized framed works hang on the gallery’s longest wall. Painted in an enveloping black rectangle with rounded corners, the wall echoes the work’s paper edges and suggests an allover imbrecation of worlds.  There are various compositions of orbs within one another and others that are consolidated as a single aesthetic pictorial observatory. The rounded rectangular shapes have an ergonomic sleekness and design, recalling Maier’s 2003 plexiglass capsule frames and, although it may be a stretch, the lozenges of candy raver/DJ pill culture.

Nearly buried in this installation on an office wall near Maier’s exhibition are Maier’s video pieces “Space Rider” and “Event Horizon” (2009 and 2010 respectively). Subverting the white cube and occupying an ambiguous temporal space, “Event Horizon” was installed earlier this fall atop the ceiling of a grand staircase in a disused philharmonic building in the Lodz Biennial in Poland. A synthetic skylight, digital

planetarium, or android/dendroid-like organism, this video installation visualizes what one might imagine of her painting’s construction: a circular raveling and unraveling of lines from the center to edges, the endless accumulation of data and aesthetic happenstance. The pulsing of this digital creature is the interweaving and interlaying of three warped and transposed landscapes. Inspired by science and the eleven stringed dimensions of reality in the M theory, Maier brings her work contextually and conceptually into new realms.

Between the cluster of works on paper and of video animations, Maier’s work loiters on the fringes of an all-immersive installation. I can easily imagine double-sided drawings of various scales encapsulated in rounded plexiglass rectangles, suspended from the ceiling at different heights and angles. A video such as “Event Horizon” could occupy a concaved ceiling, as she originally intended for this animation.  This isn’t intended to be prescriptive; it’s simply clear that as Maier moves back and forth from three-dimensional to illusionistic space more freely, additional aesthetic, conceptual and contextual possibilities will continue to emerge.

The post Beyond Fuss and Fiddle: The universe according to Ati Maier appeared first on artcritical.

James Hyde is a painter who can rarely contain himself within two dimensions.  His semiotic explorations of the medium have taken him in the direction of paint filled Plexiglass vitrines that approach the condition of sculptural installation, Styrofoam supports as deep as they are high or wide, and furniture.  When he does play within a conventional painting support, as often as not found objects are affixed.  But he will as good as ask you to step outside if you question his membership of the painting guild.

His latest series, on show at Pierogi 2000’s quirky Williamsburg/Greenpoint project space, the Boiler Room, is as flat as he’s been seen in quite a while.  But the language games are anything but suspended.  Now the play off is between the painterly and the photographic.  The Stuart Davis Group are high jinks riffs on that jazzy pioneer of American abstraction’s painterly syncopations upon commercial signage.  Hyde has taken close-up photographic details of Davis’s almost confectionary-thick impasto and these he has blown up and printed on billboard material over which he has selectively painted shapes and areas with flat, even modulation.

The joke is quick to get: what reads as textured is flat, synthetic and photographic, while what registers as sheen is actually hand-applied.  And yet the joke never falls flat as it proves the starting point of pictorially intelligent curiosity about shape, gesture and sign, and about intentionality.

Until June 27, 191 North 14th Street, between Nassau and Whythe avenues, Brooklyn, 718 599 2144

A version of this article appeared at the New York Sun, June 22, 2010

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