March 3 to April 23, 2016
293 Tenth Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“James Nares: Portraits,” currently at Paul Kasmin, offers one of the more intriguing efforts by a contemporary artist to affect the portrait genre, currently enjoying a popular revival. Though appearing at first glance to be still photos, these portraits are actually shot with a special video camera that can record in excess of 300 frames per second, many more times a camera’s normal rate. Each portrait in the exhibition amounts to an extremely slow-motion video displayed on HD screens with their respective subjects posed mostly in conventional head-and-shoulders format. The result is that a viewer can track a subject’s movements as methodically as one can follow a snail on a branch. In acquiescing to this weirdly protracted form of observation, the effect is mesmerizing — just as mesmerizing as it was in Bill Viola’s “Quintet” videos 15 years ago.

The glacially slow movement of each subject certainly holds one’s attention, and to put this to use, Nares had each sitter accentuate a specific movement. Titled with the subject’s first name only, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Jim (2015) offers a turn of the head, while film critic Amy Taubin, in Amy (2015), augments a similar gesture with a smile that replaces a grave stare. These examples are mere fragments, as some of the videos last up to 20 minutes. Art critic and curator Douglas Crimp, posing for Douglas (2015), clasps his hands together just under his chin, sometimes interlacing his long fingers in a series of gestures that resembles the sort of unconscious movement a portrait subject is likely to indulge in when an appropriate gesture escapes them.

Others display more calculated gestures, like Jahanara (2016), in which a young woman in South Asian dress performs dance-like motions with her arms gently ascending and descending. More than the other pieces in the show, her gestures seem calculated to complement the camera’s artifice. And this is where the work’s more contradictory aspect becomes apparent. Though charming, her attempt to cooperate with the artist’s intentions manages to put even greater emphasis on the camera’s unusual interpretive bias, coldly thwarting her effort to create something personal.

Jahanara is a portrait of one of Nares’s three daughters participating in the series. The remaining subjects are all well-known art world figures and friends of the artist, suggesting Nares wished to lend his project the standing of celebrity along with a note of personal and emotional involvement. Visual aspects are ordinary. The lighting of many is stark but not exaggeratedly so — softly diffused and aimed generally toward the front. Whatever contrast it creates naturally changes as the subject turns from left to right, or right to left. Backgrounds tend to be dark. A deep charcoal blue for instance does the job of offsetting the platinum shock of Jim Jarmusch’s hair.

A temporal medium like video applied to a still-image genre like portraiture brings the viewer into an unsettling space where neither a feeling for cinema nor any sensitivity toward still images are much help in coming to terms with what they are experiencing, mostly because as a hybrid their individual characteristics cancel each other out. To watch Amy morph from a frown to a smile holds our attention to the tiny muscle changes that create her expression. But in doing so, the expression itself becomes secondary — it feels bypassed. What can be appreciated of her humanity is undercut by the camera’s mechanism.

As social animals we are super sensitive to, yet almost entirely unaware of, how we read facial nuance. I challenge any parent to actually describe the physical subtleties that reveal their child is telling a fib, though their ability to read them is usually unquestionable. In watching Amy’s face dissected into many small moments, one is witness to the mundane mechanics of what makes a smile, the muscle contractions splayed out in laboratory fashion. It’s worth noting that the camera — a Fastec Troubleshooter — was designed as a scientific instrument.

There is a mildly absorbing yet ultimately alienating strangeness in these videos. The ambiguity Nares produces — hardly an unwanted aspect of an art work — is reflective of how he places the viewer in a conceptual no-man’s-land between the time the subject expended posing and the duration of the video one sees in the gallery. One ends up hovering between methods of seeing, alternating between intimacy and voyeurism.

Voyeurism has deep roots in Western art, extending from Johannes Vermeer to Andy Warhol; the latter’s screen tests of the late 1960s are characterized as influential by the artist in an essay by Max Lakin in last month’s Vanity Fair, which coincided with the show’s opening. The Warhol reference seems an odd choice, since Nares’s ostensible approach to his subjects is the opposite of Warhol’s cold-blooded gawking. Nares clearly seems interested in creating genuine engagement with his subjects. And yet this clichéd use of slow motion actually pushes a viewer away from the subject and repositions them behind the artist, who is behind the camera, which functions according to the methodically relentless purpose for which it was designed.

If I were to seek the missing link to the connection Nares claims between himself and Warhol, I’d look to Richard Avedon’s deer-in-the-headlights celebrity portrait work of the last century. Though Avedon is a still photographer, he makes for a better precursor to an artist working in the portrait mode. In Avedon, as in Nares and Warhol, the blending of celebrity (real or imagined) confrontation and the supremacy of the lens renders the camera’s intrusion inevitable. If I am to accept the context of portraiture that Nares insists upon, I cannot ignore the fact that the only real video content is the plain evidence, in each portrait, of time passing, the banality of which is overcome by the fantastic properties of the super slow aspect — not what I can grasp of the subject’s humanity. For all their close-up beauty and dream-like dawdling, as portraits they are more weighed down than lifted by the camera’s obstinate scan.

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We don’t talk much about “art” when I see Jeremy Davis. We end up goofing around or talking about songs, movies, just about anything else. Sitting down with him in his Portland studio, I learned more about his philosophy and process than I ever would have otherwise. Davis has most recently shown his art at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University, with permanent installations of his work there, as well as The Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art.” During this studio visit, Davis and I got to talking about his most recent paintings and a few of his affinities found on Tumblr.

I walked in to see a massive painting he’d been working on. The painting brings together imagery inspired by the cover of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite; an Oregon State University student protest; portraits of John Coltrane, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus; a quotation from Ralph Abernathy; and a large black gestural stroke on an abstract background of yellow and orange hues. At eight-by-six feet, this commissioned piece goes along with 25 smaller portraits of black leaders for the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at OSU.

PAUL MAZIAR: What are you working on?

JEREMY OKAI DAVIS: These 25 portraits lining the wall and this painting that’s been kind of morphing over the past few weeks. I’m trying to keep things loose.

I was talking to a friend who was here earlier and was telling him I want to do a really gestural black stroke across the painting. It’s funny because I’m kind of over-thinking it, when the idea of gestural is to just do it. I think I need to be in the right mindset to be that free and loose. It’s kind of intimidating. Usually it happens if I’m working on something else. If I’m doing something, I’ll look over there and think, Now, it’s time.

Do you think that gesture has anything to do with the sounds you hear from the Roach album? It has a lot of moments…

Punchy moments. Maybe that’s what it’s gonna take. Like when Abbey Lincoln screams. Maybe it takes getting invested in those tracks to make me do something crazy. Like a moment. The painting is called Predicting a Movement.

You’re waiting for the moment to make that brush stroke… you want to get around doing it a certain way.

I want to make an actual gesture. It’s difficult, though. I want it to be gestural, but to tell yourself to be loose and free, you’re putting yourself in this box. And for me that mark is such an important part of the piece. I want it to be free, but it’s a big part of the piece so it has to be right, strange.

Where are these images from?

The OSU archive. In 1969, the Black Student Union had staged a walk-out, when Fred Milton, an OSU football player, was asked to shave his beard; he didn’t want to, and the coach threatened to kick him off the team. They did a lot of things like this, but this image is one I was really drawn to. The image of union and movement.

Is that what accounts for the drips and splatters in your figurative paintings?

I think so. For me the drips and that kind of thing make it feel more like a painting. When you get in close and tight on them, taking little squares out to look at, they’re a bunch of little abstract paintings. That’s how I come at it, instead of smoothing out everything.

When I go to galleries and museums, I enjoy myself more when I move around the paintings, seeing how the work shifts. The richness and buildup of the paint are super important to me. I get disappointed sometimes when I see something online that I really love, and I go to see the piece in person at an art show — and it’s exactly like it was on the Internet! Like a flat jpeg with a smooth surface, etc. — no improvisation. I think you hope for a new experience.

There’s this other element to your paintings that, to me, is shared with jazz, experimental music and poetry — where you return to it and see something new. Like you’ve never encountered it before.

I’m just now starting to get into jazz and investigating it, listening to Money Jungle (1963) a bunch; I’m getting so much out of it. Every listen feels different, depending on your mood. That’s the amazing thing about jazz: it’s timeless and location-less.

I see a lot of movement in Predicting a Movement. Has this album been a recent influence?

I don’t think one song in particular, but yeah, jazz in general has been.

I was going to bring up affinities. Your Tumblr has a lot of good stuff on it. Some of it seems to have a timelessness about it. Do you think much about tradition or trends?

No. I don’t think about that at all. Well, I do. I think about them and try to avoid them.

You’ve got a lot of powerful imagery here. How about the museum guard photograph, where the man is standing there looking at a painting?

That was a film shot at the Portland Art Museum. My friend Nate and I were just walking around and we saw him standing there looking at that painting for a really long time. It’s a really great painting: just the sea, that’s all it is. It’s one of those things you can just get totally lost in; the water starts moving if you look at it long enough.

Imagine how many times he’s seen that painting!

Maybe he does that every day; maybe getting lost in that painting is his break.

Vince Staples’ Señorita (2015) video is amazing. At the end where he opens up his coat and it’s just a black hole. That part is insane!

That is a crazy video. I’m super inspired by a lot of what’s happening in hip hop right now. There was a long period of time where musicians weren’t considering their audience, and the music videos weren’t considerate of the audience either. It seems like right now, more than the last 15-20 years, the artists are really thinking of the audience and this video is just another example of that.

Everything in that piece, considering the cultural climate right now, is really important. I think I posted two in a row, that one and Close Your Eyes and Count to Fuck (2014) by Run the Jewels. They share similarities. The Vince Staples video is like a zoo, basically, where people are just watching the chaos, like all the news reports right now. And with the Run The Jewels song, with Zach de la Rocha, the scenario is a young black man and a middle-aged cop. They’re just wrestling, moving through the streets; it’s a choreographed fight. They end up in a house pouring milk all over each other and end up totally exhausted at the end. It’s supposed to show a dance that cultures have been having for years and years and how we’re trained to fight, trained to be at odds.

It seems like you’ve always had cultural references in your paintings.

Definitely. Whether it’s just pop culture, celebrity news, or the real news that people want to pay attention to. I pay attention to it all. It makes its way into my work, always. But it’s never in your face. I’ve always tried to make sure my paintings aren’t grandstanding. I want people to see it, think about it, go home and let it stick. They hear a news report or they’re listening to jazz and might think of this painting. I just want these little moments in time with my paintings to kind of bubble up.

What’s the idea behind the series of smaller portraits?

I wanted to find inspiring African-Americans from history. Pictures of them, not as kids, but young, before they were legendary. The reason being is that I wanted them to be relatable to the kids who’ll see them. To show possibility: they were bright-eyed kids just like you. So it’s these and then the Lonnie B. Harris portrait with the rest alongside him.

What’s next?

My mom’s from Liberia and I am just now realizing I don’t know a lot about her. I want to do a body of work that’ll be an investigation of Liberia and her in some way, relating to the disconnect that I have from my mom and Africa. A charting of my education of where she came from in my paintings. I have images in my head of what it’ll be, but I’m not sure yet.

I’ve always tried to temper my excitement, but it’s hard for me to think about this work being at OSU for all time and not get stoked. This stuff is going to be permanently installed. As an artist, that’s kind of my goal, to inspire for all time. I look at someone like David Hockney, and a lot of these artists, the pieces they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I still call back those for inspiration. To think that the possibility is out there that some kid in 2070 might stumble into the Cultural Center and see my paintings and decide to be a painter, is pretty amazing. I think that’s the kind of the goal for me. It keeps the ball rolling, you know?

Are all children artists?

I think so. Everybody has a creative side. I think everybody can exercise that if they choose to. Some people don’t have the desire to exercise it, they have other things that are important to them, which is fine.

It takes a certain person to let it take over. It’s a fun thing to do, but to let art take over your life is kind of scary. To let it be the thing that you do can be kind of frightening. I think everybody isn’t a genius, but everyone has the capacity to be a genius at their chosen vocation.

The post Politics on the Canvas, Online, Now: A Studio Visit with Jeremy Okai Davis appeared first on artcritical.

June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

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February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

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Robert Janitz: Oriental Lumber at Meyer Riegger
September 17 through October 25, 2014
Friedrichstraße 235 (between Hedemannstraße and Rahel-Varnhagen Promenade)
Berlin, +49 30 31566567

For his first solo exhibition with Meyer Riegger, Robert Janitz shows a selection of his three favored forms: a plant sculpture made from cut sheet metal, a suite of portraits of the backs of heads and a selection of large format abstractions made from layered paint, wax and flour. Far from being disparate or eccentric modes, these three archetypal forms actually gather themselves around figuration as a unifying idea. Janitz work is indebted to de Kooning’s early black-and-white abstractions as well as the canvas-works of the Actionists from the 1960s. “Oriental Lumber” is an eccentric exhibition that shows an artist who flits back and forth between serious abstract painting, wordplay and dada-like witticism.

Janitz has cited his plant sculptures as a Duchampian gesture but in the context of this exhibition, Margiela Fontäna (all work 2014), seems more of an ironic commentary on glossy, “finish fetish” Minimalist sculpture. It is larger than an average human and placed casually in the middle of the gallery as a houseplant would be. Its sleek and polished surface makes it something of a decoration, though its slightly sagging silver fronds give it something of a comic, Oldenbergian character. The towering plant stands in for refined taste and a pristine sensibility, a possible counterpoint to the comparatively messy paintings.

On one wall of the main gallery, five paintings were hung close together, four of these were “portraits,” and the fifth was an abstraction the same size and format as the portraits. A messy grid of chalky white on black, Proprement Dit hung there among the portraits like an imposter, daring us to draw distinctions between it and its representational counterparts. The heads are amalgamations of coiled brush marks, calico surfaces and impasto patches. These link us to the abstractions by way of brushstroke — but far from being personifications, the portraits are empty signifiers. They are featureless, generalized and flattened. One possible reading is that they conjure the anonymity of urban life. In Berlin or New York, we leave our homes and studios and file into the conveyor belt of faceless heads: the back of the head is in effect a “blank canvas” or a space for projection. The anterior portions of the brain are the oldest and most primitive. Our basest necessities are addressed by the function of the hypothalamus, the brain stem (the brain’s houseplant?). In Audrey Hepburn as Dr. Double aka The Ornithologist Janitz clues us into the projection game that he is setting up. The two-shapes-and-a-background that comprise this small black and orange canvas could be a Hollywood icon, a cartoon character or a bespectacled bird-watcher (a surrogate for a compulsive gazer). Without access to an identity the surfaces become what they really are: combinations of shapes, textures and colors. Janitz puts the infrastructure of the portrait in place but it merely dangles over the paintings’ surface like a thin veil.

The remaining walls of the gallery showed Janitz large-scale abstract paintings. These works are physical insofar as they reveal both the action and the substance of their making. But theirs is a kind of physicality that is not seductive or rewarding. We can see that Janitz moves the viscous flour-wax-paint solution across a painted layer with a very wide house painter’s brush. But this is perhaps more of a commentary on utility (what good is a painting, anyway?) than it is about experiencing pleasure or delight in the painted surface. The surface of a painting such as Rhythmische Klangformen: Eine Studie ends up appearing more like an X-ray than an action painting. This association is aided along by the interplay between the jet-black painted ground and the yellowish paste-wash that is thinly applied in muscular vertical swathes. The cords of build-up that run up and down the painting’s surface in wide intervals creates a sequence of bone-like partitions in which blank, grey surfaces are carved out. These “empty” zones in the paintings are something like hollowed out reliquaries or porticos where one might insert an icon (think back to Audrey Hepburn’s cameo) or an image of a saint. At times, the striated towers that fill these surfaces appear like processions of solemn, hooded figures.

Janitz titled the show after the hardware store in Bushwick where he shops. He is interested in workmanlike materials, ungraceful products like glue and wax. These materials have become Janitz’s stock and trade and when he began to use them there was a sense of discovery and experimentation in his work. I get the impression that Janitz would like to move beyond these washy/pasty paintings into a form that combines his interests in craftsmanship, figuration and sculpture — but here he has settled to show three types of work that each make use of one or more of these elements. Anachronistically, the work here points us away from painting and into the realm of performance. This exhibition is Janitz’s first in his native Germany, so it makes sense that he would exhibit a cross section of these varied works. He flirts with relational aesthetics with his Oriental Lumber, a custom-designed pair of Nikes that he wears in the press image for the show. The sneakers are a fitting metaphor for a restless artist who seems to need to move around a lot.

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