It feels at first like Tom Friedman’s exhibition of new work, on view at Luhring Augustine in Bushwick, might be playing a trick on viewers. But it isn’t smoke and mirrors, it’s paint and Styrofoam. All of it; there’s nothing but those two elements adorning the gallery walls and floor. Yet it appears like there must be something more in the mix. There’s so much precision, so much detail. A microphone, chair and guitar without strings stand in one corner. It takes pretty close inspection to confirm that the wood grain is, in fact, the work of a paintbrush. In faux-assemblage wall pieces like Blue (all 2014) and Toxic Green Luscious Green — each comprised of a single color, with a dense section of detritus either clinging to the top edge or falling to the bottom — it seems unbelievable that everything collected in the messy, three-dimensional pile of scraps is only made out of the materials proclaimed by the exhibition’s title. The apple-core, the slice of pizza, the paper plane — all from flimsy Styrofoam?

Since the early ‘90s Friedman has been exhibiting his brand of inventively fabricated sculptures, which have drawn comparisons to 1960s Conceptualism, Arte Povera and Minimalism. But his work fits into none of these categories completely. Taking many different forms, they are unified by the nature of the material they are made from — inexpensive, ubiquitous and disposable — and the great care Friedman takes in crafting them. Earlier works (not on display here) have included an untitled self-portrait from 2000, appearing to be the artist’s body splattered on the floor after a horrific accident; it is painstakingly cut out of colored construction paper. Another self-portrait is carved out of a single aspirin. Thirty-thousand toothpicks stuck together form a giant starburst. Fishing line, sugar cubes, plastic cups, chewed bubblegum, roasting pans and soap inlaid with pubic hair have all been fodder for Friedman’s transformative hand.

As with those earlier pieces, here it’s in making something to marvel at, using very ordinary elements, that delights viewers at the outset. Despite one’s skepticism, assistants at the gallery assure that all the works in “Paint and Styrofoam” are made purely from these two resources. And the works here really are marvelous, but for reasons beyond their material trickery.

Each wall piece is monochromatic — frame (also carved of Styrofoam) and all. Tonal variations are created by texture and shape. What becomes clear is that Friedman is, in effect, painting with form. In Blue Styrofoam Seascape, the distinction between ocean and sky is made by the cusp of a subtle, beveled vertex that juts out towards the viewer, drawing a horizon directly across the baby blue surface. The sea darkens as it recedes, forming a perfect division between water and air.

Similarly, the self-portrait created for this exhibition is painted meticulously. The artist wears glasses and has a feather in his hat, looking out over his shoulder. It’s also painted in a blindingly bright canary yellow. Detail comes from the paint’s texture, as it does in the work exhibited directly to the left. That painting, Night, is recognizable to the viewer at once. It’s Van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece Starry Night replicated exactly, down to the folded canvas edges, but painted not on canvas, of course, and devoid of any color except for a tarry blackish-blue.

A bite-sized nick in the corner of the outwardly standard white plinth, upon which a bulbous, Pepto-Bismol pink sculpture snakes toward the ceiling, is the only moment that Friedman reveals what’s behind the curtain. About a foot off the ground, the break in the stand reveals just a few inches of the foamy, aerated plastic that’s all around, but covered everywhere else in a solid layer of acrylic paint.

Friedman refers to the wall works as “sculptures of paintings.” With the chipped plinth in mind, one can’t help but feel that the floor works are likewise sculptures of sculptures. They imitate what is traditionally found in an exhibition space: paint, canvases, frames, pedestals, items of worth and value because of their material expense, maker’s name, or historical significance. Some of these elements are here, legitimately. Others are a careful emulation of what we expect to see. But each piece asks to be questioned, opening exploration into the space between what is actually present and what can be seen.

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Accola Griefen Gallery
May 23 to June 29, 2013
547 West 27th Street #634
New York City, 646-532-3488

Bypassing a post-modernist disbelief in the sign’s capacity for truth, Susan Bee’s current show, titled Criss Cross at Accola Griefen, announces a sincere love for the image. Bee’s apparent faith in the capacity of the painted figure to truly say something flies in the face of stylish irony and dispassionate conceptualism. I see her practice as heroic: perhaps the devout image-maker in our climate of stagnant disillusionment is a post-millennial wanderer in sea and fog.

The signifying strategies of Bee’s visual vocabulary include sequential narration (i.e. storytelling), a modernist invocation of pure color as the sensual index of emotion, intertextual allusion (Bee uses images from Hollywood and 19th century European painting), and a consistent emphasis on the tension between those modes.  That tension is what accounts, in part, for the confounding beauty of the paintings that comprise the current series.  The story told in Out the Window (2011) can be read and perhaps understood but not entered into: its subject—a flatly rendered, plaintive girl—is behind glass; she and her audience do not share the same present. This painted scene (like many of Bee’s) makes explicit the encounter between the shallowness of the image-as-such and the deep space of lived experience. The story is always agitated by the unruly illegibility of painterly abstraction, which serves as its backdrop.  The deep space of Out the Window—the splotched and dotted background which sets off its protagonist—is a welter of hot, libidinous color and bristling textures; a crisply felt but ineffable present-tense.

Bee toys with the usual implications of the picture frame—to separate art from world, to corral an idealized other-reality and present it as an approachable object in the here and now—in her recurring invocation of the window.  The man in No Exit (2012) looks at us through the Mondrian squares of a modernist mosaic illuminated like stained glass.  The film noir pathos of his expression and the play of hot and cool in Bee’s palette, cast the space before the window—what lies between the character and us, his audience—in a shadowy solemnity.  This gap is both our outside and his, and it menaces.  It is an uncharted space, and the painting has no words for it. This ineffable beyond is re-iterated elsewhere in the exhibition as the turbid blur of the world when viewed from an automobile. In repeated cinematic renderings of people behind the dashboard—for example, Drive She Said (2011), Trouble Ahead (2012), The Trip (2012), Voyage (2012), and Wherever You Go (2013)—Bee envisions the menacing outside alternately as a swirling expressionist vortex, a patchwork of vivid geometric shapes, or a spattered web of aleatory drops. In this work she searches for the visual vocabulary with which to express the destabilizing sense-experience offered by the moving car; a phenomenon which, in the ‘40s and ‘50s (the Hollywood era Bee most often references) required the use of “rear projection” in order to be captured on film. The odd visual incongruity yielded by that technique—between the shaky, washed out external world and the sharper lines of the interior scene—is a glaring reminder of cinematic untruth, pointing to the dark functionality of the film studio. Film has always labored to mask its incapacity to immerse the viewer in airtight illusion; Bee, on the other hand, embraces the expressive potential of a kind of illusion that actively exposes itself.

In her images derived from European painters Caspar David Friedrich and Chaim Soutine, Bee again demonstrates that historical allusion in painting does not amount to an ironic disavowal of the source material, but instead indicates an impassioned wish to identify; a longing to feel and say what a painted character does.  Whereas Roy Lichtenstein’s rendering of Van Gogh replaced the latter’s emotionally-charged brushstroke with the utilitarian blandness of graphic design, Bee’s versions of Friedrich and Soutine re-animate a historical pathos via the aching brightness of her own style. Her paintings have an intensely contemporary feeling, which manifests itself as the straining for words, an effort which both turns toward the past and activates a new and radically particular visual consciousness.

Ruckenfigur (2013) breaks down the smooth narrative surface of Friedrich’s gloomily romantic Sonnenuntergang (Brüder) (“sunset brothers”) (1830) into a striated pattern of vigorous greens, oranges, and blues.  Here the distant sun which captivates the interest of the two brothers, lets spill its warm hues onto the foreground.  The observing figures are thus ushered into the very image they appraise; their wish to comprehend the beautiful object—Friedrich invoked Kant’s notion of sublime longing for the thing-as-such—is, in a sense, nullified, as they are shown to already participate in the beauty they so wistfully appraise. Bee’s painting exposes the false belief that one cannot get inside a work of art. The relation between an artwork and its audience always connotes a certain longing, and the image can ache along with the person, yearning to encapsulate the material of a passing experience that can’t be held.

Bee’s brushwork always articulates an immediacy of feeling troubled by the need for comprehensible expression. It is true that all images reduce the disorder of immediate experience to a definitely limited object. Action painting addressed the problem by favoring experience and rejecting the limitations of the object; Pop Art declared the dominion of the object and the inevitable, thorough colonization of experience. Bee’s work, on the other hand, maintains that the painted figure can resist the tendency to dominate and enclose. For her, the barrier between beauty and the ordinary that is erected by the fact of the frame becomes a glimpsed horizon line, an illusory limit that dissolves when approached.

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