In writing about the exhibition, I could have played very happily on my own in the domestic spaces of Niles’ paintings. However, I was intrigued by the relationship that Niles has to the people he paints and the pseudo-autobiographical content of the scenes. I felt this could be another lens in which to view work already rich in narrative and pictorial content.

Perhaps Niles’ greatest feat with this show was pinpointing emotional, psychological dynamics in and between the figures. As humans, we are wired to diagnose these dynamics and then situate ourselves within them. As we meet the eyes of the various figures in the room, we become part of their web of relationships, which can be off putting at times and also deeply affecting.

VIRGINIA WAGNER
Was there a first piece that started the series, that sparked it for you?

ARCMANORO NILES
The last show I did was all outdoor scenes. It was a tour of my neighborhood and the people in it. There was also a little tiny still life of a kitchen with nobody in it. And I just remembered thinking, ‘Oh, I never went inside the house!’ Then I started thinking about who was in there, thinking about different spaces in the house where I could walk in on people reflecting on their life. And from there, I painted my grandfather in the kitchen.

Can you tell me how you go about putting the paintings together?

Everything that is orange is the ground. It’s acrylic. You see these red lines here? That’s the drawing and that’s everywhere. It’s the second step. And in that red, I do the values.

Like a grisaille. You studied traditional painting at the Academy?

I did study this indirect type of painting.

And by indirect you mean…

Layering. Mixing optically. Painting it in different stages. Going back and painting a color and seeing how the color on top interacts with what’s underneath. Direct is mixing all of the colors on the palette. You always do a mixture of both but I lean more heavily towards indirect painting because each part is built in steps. And I like each step to be visible at the end. I put the texture on with a roller. And, after that, I cover the whole painting in gloss medium before using oil. It seals the glitter but also it makes everything smooth again. And then when I get to the skin there’s a subtle difference in texture to help with the space.

Did you use the same method and colors of oil paints for all the skin colors?

Yes. So even on the blue ground it’s all the same colors. Throughout school, I was always dissatisfied with my skin tones. I felt that there was a lot more color in darker flesh that I wasn’t pulling out. I don’t know if it was from an old photo, but I was going to make this painting and I was like, ‘Oh it looks orange, so what if I make the ground orange and paint it with the bright colors that I see in the skin and then go back and glaze it with brown.’ But I just never went back and glazed it. After that, I decided not to use any neutrals in my palette.

When I think about paint I think about it as built on oppositions — thin and thick, texture no texture, light and dark, cool and warm.

That’s how you get tension and resonance.

I also think about how quickly the light comes back to your eye. The acrylic is a lot more opaque and dry with less layers, so the light comes back to your eye quicker because there’s not much there. The skin is done in oil. It has to go through the red, through the yellow, through all the different colors, and then it comes back a little slower, and that’s what gives it the shine.

I would say glow more than shine. The acrylic has a reflective shine. The body seems to keep its light within it. It has a golden quality. Where do you see yourself in the work? That’s you in the painting, right?

Yes, a lot of them are me. I’m around and easy to work with as a model.

But how do you orient yourself to the figures of you?

A lot of this is stuff that I’ve experienced and am recreating. Or it’s something someone’s told me and I’m like, ‘What did that feel like?’ and I try to put myself in that space.

It’s almost like you’re casting yourself.

I think I used to want to be an actor. Or, I don’t think I did. I did when I was a kid.

Me too. I teach this class called the Bestiary about illuminated manuscripts and animal stories and we look at marginalia. All the things that monks drew on the edge, which are often tiny lude creatures– copulating animals, nuns lifting up their skirts, a tree growing genitals. Your little gremlins remind me of those.

I call them Seekers. I first started putting this Egyptian fertility sculpture – basically an orgy scene — in my paintings. I wanted the regular figures to be vulnerable and interacting with each other and whoever’s looking at the painting but then the other creatures, the Seekers, to be impulsive. Whatever’s going to make them happy in the moment, that’s what they’re going to do.

I was thinking about how (when I was young) my mom would always say never go too far from the porch and I felt that these other things were influencing her decisions. And also thinking about how sex and violence started to influence things that I did.

Kind of creeping in from the edges of your life?

Yeah. I would do things, but really it was more about this other thing. Even if I didn’t realize. I’d be up at night thinking, why did I do that?

It is a simple idea in some ways and yet as complex as anyone’s relationship with the invisible things that haunt us. The Seekers are so well integrated into the composition that they don’t actually look as strange as they are. At first, we don’t even question them. And then we’re disturbed that we didn’t.

And sometimes people don’t even see them, which I think is kind of cool.

I think they’d be happy not to be seen; they have their own agenda. And they probably register subconsciously. They’re also agents of perverse sexuality. This one feels like he’s riding the other creature. This one is like when you cut a worm in half and the other half wiggles out and..

.. becomes its own thing. He’s always chasing that thing and I was thinking maybe it’s a part of himself that he lost and is trying to get back.

You are letting us in and being very generous with what you are showing us emotionally and pictorially and yet some of the figures look at us like, ‘What are you doing here?’

I did want them to feel like they are engaging you, inviting you. Even if they’re turning away – I wanted it to feel like they are choosing to do that.

So, there is some agency in the knowledge that they’re in a painting?

Yes. You’re walking into their space.

I’m really interested in the gaze in ‘Does a Broken Home Become a Broken Family.’ Is this your family?

Yeah it’s my mom and my sister, my nephew, and me. I was thinking about what happens when a family doesn’t grow up together, because I didn’t grow up with my sister. So I wanted them all to be separated from each other. They’re separated by the counter. I’m separated from them.

I know some artists struggle with how much to reveal about the dynamics of their own life and the people closest to them. Because often that’s the richest source material they have but the process of exposing it could make them vulnerable.

Oh, I don’t mind.

Do they mind?

I don’t think they mind. Also, it’s just a painting and they’re all just sort of standing around in the kitchen so it’s not unfamiliar.

They are and they aren’t. There are these wild sexual and violent Seekers dancing around them. It’s charged.

I’m actually a super private person. So maybe, here I’m not. This is my way of connecting to people.

I also feel implicated in this painting. Because if you’re the figure on the left and they’re not looking at you, then they must be looking at me. I’m grateful someone let me in the door, but I feel put on the spot. And I need to weave between Seekers shagging and those with knives in their hands just to enter the kitchen.

I want you to feel like you are walking into the space. That you are a part of it. That you are just late to the party.

The post Paper Heart: Arcmanoro Niles discusses his work with Virginia Wagner appeared first on artcritical.

July 8 to August 12, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

Sticky, squishy, felty, rubbery. Plush, plump, porous.

Part cactus, part snowman-shaped Peep candy, a bulbous form stands a shy distance from the front doors. Shaded a dusty aquamarine, slightly blanched like the surface of freshly cut silicone, three cylindrical volumes perch one atop the other. In tumid contours, this shape vaguely gestures to that the class of object that contains canine chew toys, children’s building blocks, and paraphernalia for the sexually adventurous. Jayson Musson infuses Pedestrian (2014) with unexpected life, bringing the object to the physical scale of the human form. In the placement of this work, curator Feelings (whose book on soft art was published last year by Rizzoli) prepares us for the wealth of sensations to come, abstracted in objects that become bodily in their engagement of ours.

Temptingly tactile, Justin Adian’s works echo gestures that feel intimately human; in Yabba Dabba Doo (2016) a mitted hand crunches closed, while 2^nd Cousins (2016) gives a sidling sway that closes the awkward distance between a baby-boy-blue rectangle and a girlishly pink wave. Spongy, enamel-coated forms cling to gallery walls, creating pastel pop-out patterns detailed by crinkled material and real-life shadow. John Chamberlain’s Untitled (1967) seems to complete these flirtatious motions on the second floor of the gallery, comprised of two partial spheres that kiss, tenderly embracing to become whole.

Guy Goodwin’s cardboard cushions resemble the dotted patterning and depressions of upholstery, an allusion borne out in titles such as Springtime for Henry Grimes (2016). However, we are made sharply aware of the distinction between content and form as Goodwin’s cardboard amoebas stiffly sail through stippled seas. Weirdly plush in volume, these rigid surfaces model structures that they cannot possibly match, distorting internal integrity to achieve the uncanny quality of plastic food or fake hair.

The humble moving blankets that compose Sam Moyer’s series of Night Moves (2009) are impeccably folded, the original patterning of gray and neutral-toned expanses are divided by neat seams, joining one region to another. Regular, orderly ripples traverse each square plane. As with Goodwin’s unyielding bubbles, Moyer’s compositions fall eerily flat, less interested as they are in tactile pleasure, than in clean aestheticism.

Retaliating against hard lines and geometry, Lynda Benglis’s Untitled (1970) makes the fluid discrete in a colorful spill that fails to mar the floor of the gallery. Uneven blocks of color seep stickily in this flow frozen in diffusion, movement caught in permanence. By contrast, Erwin Wurm’s Internal (2016) dissolves that which should have integrity, warping the sturdy exoskeleton of a toaster.

Samara Golden’s pillowy figurative sculptures are tattooed with patterns that feel distinctly, embarrassingly American. Here is the body politic, striated by squiggly bacon strips, foreheads emblazoned with law books and hammering gavels. If we sit too hard and long on the couch — watching conventions, of course — will we too soak up its dull, grandmotherly floral ornamentation? The American flag flourishes across arms upraised in the pose of one of Picasso’s demoiselles. Eyes, painted over these designs and illuminated by a track of fierce gallery lights, look at us coyly sideways. Walk around to other side, and these same limp forms are illuminated by a blacklight that causes a very different relief to manifest: glowing skeletons, skulls, and bones fluoresce. Yet, for these two fronts, there is no substance, no interior.

Airy, insubstantial, empty, hollow, these various works find life in the inanimate and the object in the human. There may not be a whole lot in the way of content here, but that is proudly proclaimed by the exhibition title. This is about substance, but not the intellectual kind; texture is the name of the game and we are awarded with a crunchy, crinkly, plushy show that gives to our gaze as easily and as generously as it would under the weight of a hand. Touch with your eyes. I dare you to feel something.

The post Soft-Core: A Show of Sculpture at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

April 3 to May 15, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

For her fourth solo show at Rachel Uffner, in the gallery’s second floor space, Sara Greenberger Rafferty has made a series of mixed media works exploring domesticity, gender, fashion, and the page/screen. The show’s title, “New Works: Dresses and Books,” creates an immediate connection between the forms and contents of two kinds of consumables. The material combination is striking; Rafferty uses a combination of acetate, Plexiglas, inkjet prints, acrylic polymer, and hardware. Hardware is necessary for holding the work to the wall and is always listed as a material. There is always more hardware than is necessary, pointing to the necessity and the décor of objects.

The 10 works are of varying sizes and most take the rectangular or square shape of the page or screen. Dress (all works 2016), is cut to the shape of a dress itself, comprised of photographic images combined with acrylic polymer. They appear worn behind the glass. The images — vintage undergarments, designer dresses, and screenshots — are simultaneously flattened and thickened (each piece of Plexiglas is a half-inch thick). Rafferty points to dresses and books as generic objects: ones that require bodies to perform them. One of the books in the show — rendered in two dimensions, like the dresses, under clear acrylic — is Recommended Reading. The outline of Dress appears on the cover. A Hélène Cixous quote repeats down the length of the dress; it begins “I am entrusted with the dress,” and ends “I slipped them on to go to war.”

An artist’s book, and Recommended Reading (2016), with a text by Melissa Huber, accompanies the show. Its contents range from advertisements (current and old) to essays to clothing catalogues to collages. Rafferty shows us where she pulls some of her sources. There are drawings of dresses and bodies inhabiting dresses. There is a dress that contains a list to be checked off, with words wrapping around the body:

How do you feel?

CONFUSED
MODERN
NATURE-LOVING
SCARED
IN LOVE
OLD FASHIONED
MOODY
FAT
EXCELLENT
SPIRITUAL
CREATIVE
RESERVED
CYBERNETIC
SICK
EXCITED
DREAMY
INTELLECTUAL
BACKWARDS
YOUNG

ALL OF THE ABOVE

The image of the dress is empty but appears to be inhabited, the way that clothes are sometimes shown in clothing catalogues. The breasts are perfectly outlined and the dress falls to the ground as though there is a small figure inside. Rafferty astutely placed the above checklist on an evening gown-type dress. We inhabit clothing similarly to the ways in which we inhabit words. We know that fashion communicates, but Rafferty allows the stark pleasure of realizing again and again the ways in which consumer culture guides taste, preferences, the ways we feel about ourselves, and therefore the outside world. We can choose any combination from the list (confused, modern, moody?) or all of the above. Conversely, those terms are probably already projected onto the body inhabiting the clothing. Definitely women. Definitely those people in dresses.

In the gallery, Rafferty shows images of dresses and pages and screens; in the accompanying text, she makes visible her thought processes. Her Recommended Reading is simultaneously fashion catalogue and critique, process clue and question mark. There are two pages taken from Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863), a paean to fashion and modernity. We see highlights and underlines (presumably Rafferty’s), including this passage describing “Woman” in the abstract:

[She] is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible.

Placed on the opposite page, over the text, within a yellow square matching the color of the highlighter, is an image of a young woman in a similarly yellow bikini, holding a piece of paper over her torso. The word “women” appears across her eyes, from the section entitled “Women and Prostitutes” from The Painter of Modern Life. Large text stamped beside her reads: ARE YOU OFFICE PRINTER READY?

The post Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s Dresses and Books at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

Studio neighbors here make neighboring shows, one (Planck) in Rachel Uffner’s ground-floor space, the other (Armacost) in the upstairs gallery. Both are called “Open Time,” and despite their placement in separate rooms, and solo treatment on the gallery’s website, it’s unclear whether it’s a two-man show, or two one-man shows, which is an interesting trick. The hanging for each is weird and coy, placing a few artworks high overhead. Planck shows both his floor-based, mixed media sculptures and his silicone-slathered oil paintings, which are bizarrely fleshy. Unlike earlier work, these focus more on space and less on text, with his illegible, handwritten notations almost invisible. Armacost presents paintings in oil and charcoal, along with hanging sculptures. Both artists draw the imagery of their two- and three-dimensional images across the expected dividing line of picture plane/object feeding the one on the other. The press release notes that “Open Time is synonymous with a window of opportunity or potential,” and they fulfill this, opening each show, each means of working and medium, each artist to the other.

Rachel Uffner: 170 Suffolk Street, 212 274 0064, on view through February 21 (see The List for gallery details)

The post Nikholis Planck and David Armacost at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

October 30 to December 23, 2011
47 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand
New York City, (212) 274-0064

There is something deliciously grubby about the paintings and sculptures of Bianca Beck.  She favors distressed, punctured, encrusted surfaces, an earthy, at times visceral palette and painterly gestures that border on violence.  Lacerations, smudges and sgraffito incisions attack the paint as if in a last-ditch attempt to extract imagery from recalcitrant materials.

This debut solo commercial gallery show is titled “Body” and follows a spot earlier this year in the project room at White Columns. In but a couple of instances, the paintings are untitled, date from 2011, and are less than 2-1/2 by 2 feet.  The three oil painted sculptures – also 2011 and untitled – are roughly carved or perhaps found shapes of wood, arranged on pedestals, each not much more than a foot high.

Dance Painting is an exuberant aggregation of curlicues forming a web against what could register equally as a flower or an orifice, a red depression with a black and blue center.  A swirl of lines, seemingly dragged wet in wet through thin paint, sometimes sharp, sometimes smudged, is accented here by dabs and there by scratches.  Darker browns against the light tan of the panel support invite an association of pubic hair against flesh but without enforcing such a reading.  The painting has a compelling gestalt, an almost tantric center, and yet there is a sense of elements coming into being as we look at them, of wet, wayward squiggles coalescing into form.

The artist, who is in her early thirties, has been seen in a number of group exhibitions recently, including Le Tableau at Cheim & Read in 2010, a show that proffered affinities between contemporary artists from various centers and postwar French painting.  Beck’s work would make a convincing bridge in a three-person show with two otherwise formally dissimilar co-exhibitors in that show, namely Joe Fyfe (its curator) and the British painter Merlin James.  Readers aware of this reviewer’s ongoing attention to Fyfe and James will recognize this as a statement of praise.

Beck’s scruffy supports and mucky surfaces share with these artists an oxymoronic luxuriance in unprepossessing ingredients.  What is less immediately apparent in the younger woman than in the supremely history-conscious older painters is a way of reconciling studious awareness of precedence with a determinedly improvisatory expressiveness: knowingly making space for innocence.  Beck adopts a striking variety of approaches from piece to piece without a loss of personal style, managing simultaneously to bolster and destabilize authorial integrity.

Her primitivism is both “primitivism” in quotes, with a strong nod in the direction of postwar apocalyptical art informel and art brut, and at the same time an authentic-seeming venting of feeling, a connection to deep urges.  The allusions or affinities are with artists like Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier or Jean Dubuffet (in his brown phase), or with Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.  They are not with the Viennese actionists, Antoni Tàpies, or Julian Schnabel, with each of whom they bear some occasional formal resemblances.  This comes down to a matter of scale, not just size—or even for that matter bombast or speed.  The key is that Beck’s visual statements are contained.  Thus the sense of their being pictures rather than paintings; images rather than fields of experience.  Thus, too, perhaps, the title of the show: Body. The show almost feels like a vindication of Fyfe’s inclusion of the artist in his curatorial argument for a kind of abstract picture making that is a paradigm apart from Abstract Expressionism.

Art historical erudition is not the same thing as pictorial intelligence, of course, but these enticing objects – at once spontaneous and heavily worked, orgiastic in their immediacy and thought through in their local, formal implications – achieve a delectable balance of seemingly opposite impulses in painting.

The post Making Space For Innocence: Bianca Beck at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

September 12 – October 24, 2010
47 Orchard Street (between Grand and Hester)
New York City, (212) 274 0064

Pam Lins has long been aggravating the multiple personality disorder of the pedestal, a pathology she traces back to Brancusi. With quirky elegance she questions whether the pedestal is furniture or scale model, support or the thing itself. In her current show at Rachel Uffner, she ramps up the quirkiness while holding on for dear life to the elegance, going so far as to re-rebuild a version of the Romanian progenitor’s studio fireplace as diorama-ized at the Pompidou Center. Brancusi had crammed a monochrome painting onto the wall as a photographic background, notching it around the masonry. (A few of his diaristic studio shots are currently on view at MoMA’s The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, a superb show that crosses wires with Lins’ project repeatedly.) Lins makes sure to cement this literal overlap between painting, photography, architecture and sculpture; homage and appropriation get bricked up in the process. Oh, and fabrication to boot, since Lins commissioned the painting (from Jessica Dickinson).

With this particular hearth as backdrop, the six standing, ornamented boxes that fill the gallery, each with a painting (by the artist) propped like an eccentric little billboard on top, beg to be seen as restive Brancusian plinths whose placement and status are up for grabs. By hovering their hollow bulk aggressively over recessed base elements, and by treating pairs of vertical faces as body-sized painting supports, Lins nearly overwhelms the amiable panels above. Two pedestal faces are always left plywood-raw, joining to a crisply mitered edge, along which tangent geometries have been notched out, patched smooth, and painted white. These refined truncations are sculpturally enthralling in themselves; decisive content also inheres in their voids, for several suggest negative castings of the diamond modules of the Endless Column, and the others function as fluted niches awaiting a saint or a god.

Exactly such missing figures haunt the small paintings. While four panels exhibit marginally competent, fashionably impulsive typologies of abstraction from the gestural to the minimal, two crucial ones derive legibly from photographs of famous marbles: Bernini’s Medusa and French’s Lincoln Memorial (with Brancusi’s column crowding the martyr for good measure); à la carte panels in the back room suggest that other sculpture snapshots probably lie buried under seeming abstractions. In any event, Lins has been toying seriously with abstract painting for years, usually by way of infiltrating sculptural turf. In her 2009 Uffner show she wrapped her pedestals on two sides with vertical or diagonal stripes: Christmas present meets Anne Truitt. Pedestals in the current show are painted with a more open-ended version of hard-edge (tape bleed, asymmetry, coagulated drips), or else, antithetically, they are outsourced for a period-specific finish-fetish luster using vintage muscle car pigments.

To top off the show, Lins piles on elaborate frosting in the conceit of an erzatz textbook she calls The Fifth Leg: A Psychological History of Sculpture, existing only in the form of two unimpressive, commissioned photographs. In one, a nearly plausible mock-up stands on its softback edge, it’s cover sporting a monumental Assyrian winged bull caged by a jagged polyhedral abstraction. It would have been the best painting in the show, if it weren’t a rephotographed digital collage. In the other photo, we can peruse the ostensible table of contents. These cryptic fragments are a clever vehicle for a sincere, undigested meditation on the sources of Lins’ images and the metaphysics of sculpture. Printed versions of this text are available to visitors.

The “fifth leg” was the Assyrians’ proto-cubist solution for negotiating blind corners in bas-relief; the same regal, quasi-solid conciliation prevails around the edge of a Truitt column or an Ann Pibal canvas. By comparison, Lins’ pedestals are unruly, causing a dirty mind to wander to bawdier connotations of extra legs — and from there to overt phallic themes in Brancusi, and beyond. Given her preoccupations with the photography of sculpture and with a strain of sexual forwardness in its figurative lineage – double entendres aside, The Fifth Leg proposes topics such as “the wet T-shirt and mimetic cloth,” “sticking out and sinking in,” and “embarrassed pedestals” – perhaps we can next expect Lins to tilt at Rodin’s priapic Balzac, currently looming over MoMA’s ante-lobby. No contemporary sculptor is better positioned to blind-side that seminal muse of the modernist camera.

The post The Fifth Leg: Pam Lins at Rachel Uffner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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Michelle Kuo, Mark Stevens, and David Levi-Strauss joined David Cohen to review Mike Nelson at 303 Gallery, Joan Jonas at Yvon Lambert, Anya Kieler at Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Robert Ryman at PaceWildenstein.

The post March 2010: Kuo, Stevens, and Levi-Strauss with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.