Julian Kreimer at the Lux Art Institute

January 24 to March 21, 2015
1550 S. El Camino Real
Encinitas, CA, 760 436 6611

I pulled onto a narrow dirt road in Encinitas, CA. This was not the entrance to the Lux Art Institute, and I was told later that it’s a common mistake. The wrong road took me to a private tennis court, surrounded by vintage cars and succulents. I turned around, trying to appear as if I wasn’t trespassing. A couple minutes later I parked on the neighboring hill. It was pretty suburban — not exactly what I picture when I hear the phrase “en plein air.”

Julian Kreimer paints outside and also in the studio. Some of these paintings are skillful observations of a tree or a building and some are abstract. Kreimer’s first West-Coast solo show, at Lux, is organized to articulate this. His vacillations between naturalism and abstraction present a dichotomy within painting that can sometimes sound dated, perhaps even comic to artists who don’t paint. While guiding me through the Lux grounds, Kreimer mentions that the abstractions developed within the context of technical color exercises. He likes to talk about exercises; his role as an educator of young painters sparks many tangential conversations and we talk about East- and West Coast art pedagogy.

Kreimer became an educator just after he had finished school himself. “A painting a day” is a common assignment. It’s a good exercise, he says. Students learn to observe and respond, to release overwrought thinking. They also learn, as if they need to be taught, about pleasure. There is the rush to replicate precarious color relationships as the light fades, as Kreimer also pursues in works such as South #1 (2015). Students learn the bliss of coercing suspended and mobilized pigments to resemble something in front of them; Kreimer’s satisfying single-stroke brambles in Turquoise Fence (2011) tackle this same problem. And of course they learn how the thrill of exhibitionist performance is fueled by a fear of getting caught. This is perfectly exemplified by the wobbly coral two-by-four ribcage of a school under construction depicted in Construction #4 (2015): yes, the artist was trespassing and yes, he did get caught.

But what if all this doesn’t add up to a good painting? Kreimer returns his unsuccessful surfaces to the studio and reworks them into abstractions. While searching for the remains of observations of a deciduous forest beneath scrapes, oversaturated pinks and yellows, and large imprecise swaths of studio-floor gray, I wonder again about the conceptual relationship between the two bodies of work. There is a marked difference in the paint handling; the landscapes have a viscous, sexy quality to them, speed to a climax, anxiety of completion. The abstractions embody a different kind of performance: time is embedded under scrubbing and methodical but casual horizontal brushstrokes. This group asks for patience and delivers the pleasure of excavating actions made in an indecipherable amount of time. Even the title of one of my favorites expresses this sentiment: Maybe Someday, Without Knowing It (2013), I continue the thought silently, “…you will find yourself committed to this painting.”

The gallery is dominated by mostly small paintings made on the grounds of the residency. Kreimer’s close-cropped images of prickly pear cactus piles steal the show, even among a salon-style wall arrangement of 20 or so gems. The green scraped cactus paddles are striking, with canvas tooth pricking through paint, and the gooey shadows surrounding them are just as good; my arms feel scratched up just looking at them. Kreimer shows me the cactus on the Lux grounds. It’s at the edge of the driveway, very unromantic. Each paddle eventually becomes hollow, brown webbing, the decayed matter providing the remaining cactus body some nourishment. I think about Kreimer’s dead, unsuccessful landscapes awaiting a palette knife in the studio.

Is routine exercise, such as making a painting each day, an attempt to escape narrative? By remaining in a state of constant practice, Kreimer draws out a narrative impulse within the viewer — what is he doing? In Our Claim to What Is (2013) a car in a forest could be an abandoned wreck or simply the artist’s transportation to a Thoreau-inspired walk. When given a little, it’s hard not to project. Perhaps it’s obvious to proclaim that each painting is a document of time and space within his experience, but these studious and delectable works seem to ask more from painting than they know how to communicate individually. Perhaps that is why they work so well compiled on one wall, like cactus paddles. Some artists find excuses to make paintings; Kreimer channels his questions through the medium.

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George Billis Gallery
521 West 26th Street
New York City, 212-645-2621

Anyone who has encountered Elizabeth O’Reilly’s work, even if only through a handful of her eight solo exhibitions at the George Billis Gallery, will find in this latest collection both an intensification of the artist’s passion for abandoned places and a prodigious expansion of her ability to interpret the ephemeral effects of light with a minimum of fuss. After experimenting for a time with a hybrid of collage and watercolor, O’Reilly is once again applying unbound oil color to ground, guiding her brush with just the right viscosity to imply in a single stroke the effects of texture, shadow and form on surfaces as simple as distant tree tops and as complex as the rude and weathered clapboarding of a seventeenth century farm house.

This latest exhibition consists of several groups of paintings, including a series of pictures completed on the grounds of St. Mary’s City, a restored colonial settlement forty miles south of Annapolis, Maryland. O’Reilly concentrates here on the dark, somber silhouettes of relic farmhouses that seem to trap the brilliant Chesapeake sunlight in triangular black holes. So effective is the contrast between their mysterious gloom and the brilliant hues of the surrounding environment that one is tempted to make more of the gothic context than the paintings actually address. Designed centuries ago to shelter the inhabitants from what was then the mortal hazards of weather and landscape—precisely the elements that frame those same buildings today in bucolic stillness—O’Reilly bends her focus away from a conceptual presentation of the site’s historical circumstance and trains it on the stillness that remains.

A consistent theme in O’Reilly’s work is the study of derelict locations, but her focus as a painter is always on presence, on what is actually there more than the haunted absence of what was. In Black House and Shadow (2012), it is apparent that the artist faced into the sun to create her image, confronting the façade of a gabled structure similar in form to one of Monet’s haystacks. However, unlike the impressionist’s exploitation of shadow in the service of color’s intensity, O’Reilly limits the higher keys of color to her rendering of grass and trees, while the house sits in its own windowless murk. The structures and their environment may remain at odds with each other, but her dovetailing compositions resolve themselves in spite of their incongruent sources. O’Reilly draws this tension to its limit in Red Chimney, in which an intrusion of dense, sooty umber almost dominates the composition, leaving hints of trees, grass and a footpath clinging to the frame.

White House, White Boat (2012), part of a series painted on the Maine coast plays to a higher color pitch. For instance, a tenacious stroke of yellow below the soffit of a small cabin follows along the top of a pale blue wall, recalling Fairfield Porter’s paintings of the same coastal region, as does the subtle pink, violet and greenish whites that enliven these distinctly sunnier shadows. Though the look of each series is radically different, what the Maine paintings share with the Maryland panels is a resolute encounter with what is actually there.

Filling out the exhibition of almost twenty paintings are several landscape views of the water’s edge that were painted on a trip to the south of Ireland. Here O’Reilly takes a cue from nature’s own articulation of presence and absence in the form of rising and ebbing tides. The perennially overcast Irish sky illuminating indescribable reconstructions of sand, water and stone have inspired the artist to produce horizontal canvases that approach pure abstraction. The range that O’Reilly can find within the parameters of plein-air painting is expanded even further with Gray House, Night (2012), a painting that offers the viewer a sense of what can be achieved with the barest means. As minimal as a Whistler nocturne, its muted and iconic understatement fixes itself in the memory as deliberately and as efficiently as it was executed.

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