June 4 to July 3, 2015
138 10th Avenue (between 18th and 19th streets)
New York, 212 750 0949

In his fifth exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, called “Corpus,” Bruce Gagnier continues developing his curiously articulated figures into a rugged opus of forceful, dignified gravitas.

One is greeted outside the entrance by a heroic bronze, Sys (2011), with a green-brown patina; inside, nine standing sculptures and a handful of drawings of heads populate the gallery. Gagnier’s deeply personal manipulation of human form has now become noticeably more subtle and comprehensive in the new work, even within this exhibition. For instance: whereas in The Boxer (1990-2000) the figure’s shoulders are starkly disrupted from the torso and the hands reduced to stubs, by comparison Lena (2015) appears almost graceful.

Contributing to the sculptures’ oddness is the startling dynamics of the anatomy. Skewed into opposing planes, the head, torso, and pelvis of each piece charge the figures with disturbing restlessness, albeit quieted from earlier works such as Princess Y (2008) or Emma (2007), both exhibited at Lori Bookstein in 2010. The feet, roughly hewn and solid, are often pressed right up against the edges of the bases upon which they rest. Curiously articulated toes grip the base and create a palpable tension that is shot upwards into the aggravated volumes of the body. The arms have an odd straightness and, spearing downwards, effectively oppose the surge from the legs and torso, projecting the head upwards. The entire complex of rhythms and counter rhythms that orchestrate the body find their full resolution in the head, where all of Gagnier’s inventiveness finds its fullest expression and the features are articulated into stunning configurations. In Yensine (2015), the face is opened up to reveal an astonishing distance between her right nostril and tear duct, which, coupled with a widened leap to the ear thus elongates the head horizontally to thrilling proportions, all of which triggers almost audible traces of bereavement or loss. In Yrsa (2014), the entire face is shifted to the right, the ears thrust far, far back and the head contorted into a surprisingly serenity.

To understand the palpable emotive impact of the exhibition is to recognize that Gagnier’s direction is not reducible to merely formal concerns, but seems to be triggered by what Leon Golub called “The Dervish Principle,” namely “that the prime elemental resources with the psyche have intense pictorial equivalents.” Every facet of each sculpture is conceived or driven by an overall purpose — that of creating and revealing the psyche of a persona, or character. Gagnier consciously works with such a purpose and feels a given sculpture is successful only relative to his having awakened a truly individual persona. In his studio, as he slices a compromising section of a thigh or torso off, shifting it to one side or adding it to another sculpture altogether, Gagnier is searching for a truly visceral construction of character.

Even as he finds a broader solution to the composition of new work, where one remarks the consistently leaning torsos, arms spiked downwards, low waists, squatting legs — Cleo (2015) and May (2014) being notable exceptions — he manages to tune each form to a convincing individual. In Ludovic (2015) the left leg advances, the left arm is thrust stiffly back and turned towards the thigh, the head solemnly level. In May, by contrast, the left leg is tentatively pushed forward, the left arm bent back behind the body, but now flexing outwards and the head is tilted up into a rather dreamy, hopeful pose. As all the forms of the body are eventually summed into a whole being, each formal equation being valued largely on the basis of its emotive and psychic possibilities, characters do emerge, and quite odd characters at that. Part of their peculiar power is that oddity. Each appears to be conceived in an almost distraught groping for a very specific arrangement of forms that will awaken within the figure and viewer those broad and deep fields of human emotions such as loss, redemption and pathos, Nothing light or effervescent is on display in this exhibition. The figures are then given names that for the viewer may be either laden with content or unnervingly foreign (they are, in fact, suggested to him, almost on whim, by his wife, the painter Tine Lundsfryd).

Inherent in an appreciation of this sculptor’s work is to feel their relevance within the great trajectory of sculptural tradition. Gagnier himself defines his efforts as shouldering-in among the powerful achievements of the past — be they northern European sculptures of the late-Renaissance, Edgar Degas’s small sketches of horses and women, or the monumental bronzes of Auguste Rodin. Gagnier allows his knowledge and his love of the history of sculpture to nurture and inform his work, while at the same time creating images deeply personal to him. His opus is an apt illustration of what T.S. Eliot speaks about in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” writing: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves… complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.” And that is exactly the experience of Gagnier’s oeuvre. The powerful surge of the past is, in the end, contained and expanded. The work has indeed shouldered the old order into a new configuration — a configuration that now allows for their scarred and battered, torqued and twisted, devastatingly soulful presence.

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There’s a paradox at the heart of how we experience art. While we may take pride in being art-literate, we absorb much of our knowledge of art (as for life itself) in unconscious fashion. Scrupulous study and debate may guide our understanding, but these are no substitute for the education we continuously and unknowingly receive through our eyes.

This is a very particular kind of education. Eyesight may be no more than the recording of countless ricocheting electromagnetic vectors, but it permits a startlingly rich connection with, say, a tree; the act of looking is a miraculous mapping of another miracle in the natural world. It’s an experience unknown to a person born unsighted, who may otherwise acquire every bit of knowledge about history, science, and human nature.

It’s no wonder that over a quarter of our brains are involved in processing visual stimuli, and that it takes new-born babies months to fully see. And no wonder so many great artists said they wished they could see like a child. Seeing truly, without habit or bias, was crucial. Many an artist could muster a sense of style and technique, but the masters surpassed at something more intuitive and unique to painting: the ability of giving pictorial momentousness to a figure’s gesture, or an apple’s location. Thank your eyes, then, and that quarter-part of your mind, if some mysterious power in a Titian, seen in the flesh, moves your sensibility in ways that defy your intellect.

This is an aesthetic not well suited to our time, when communications too often resemble talking points: fast, smart, exchanges that are instantly transmittable and promise quick mastery of a subject. We settle for very imperfect substitute-images in print and computer screens. Rather than asking ourselves if we are really seeing, we tend to seek new analyses of what we habitually see.

All of which highlights the indispensability of exhibitions like “Nature is the Teacher” at The Painting Center. “Nature lies in the faithfully observed motif and equally in the analytically invented form,” reads a sentence from the unsigned essay accompanying the show, and indeed the work of the four participating painters—Simon Carr, Stanley Lewis, Thaddeus Radell, and Deborah Rosenthal—argues cogently for the interdependence of visual awareness and artistic tradition. Connecting this diverse group of artists—and having become acquainted with each of them over the years, I can attest they are thoroughly different spirits—is the common urge to re-create nature in the language of paint. But their styles vary tremendously, and their diverse pursuits of narrative, symbolism, or process make for an exceptionally handsome installation.

Carr’s scenes of subways come the closest here to traditional realism. His heightened colors, however, lend remarkable robustness to figures, locating not just their physicality but their character. In one lushly scumbled canvas, the dramatic depths of a subway car interior, viewed from one end, encompass a nuzzling couple, kinetic drummers, and a distant LED sign, with colors somehow imparting independent life to each. In another, commuters bustle across a subway platform, but the scene centers about the yawn of a single child. In Carr’s canvases, all means of description and technique ultimately serve humanist ends.

Though his landscapes also depict real scenes, Lewis’ narratives concern the processes of observation and painting. Pictorially, the artist risks the most of any painter in the show, working with a kind of steady ferocity to rebuild appearances in fragmenting marks and planes. Weighted color and line yield poignant truths: a tree, thickly encompassing space among its branches, presides above a yard with a toy cart; totem-like structures punctuate the unfolding panorama of a public garden.

Radell’s surfaces, too, have the quality of weathered layering, but in more luxuriant, affirmative fashion. The artist constructs figures in arabesques of looping black outlines, with interior pinks set off by luminous blues and green-grays. The matte depth of his wax medium and his feathering colors conjure an idyllic atmosphere, with actual volumes mattering less than sensations of movement, light, and depth. Though identities are unclear—the figures might be warriors or shepherds—the paintings hum with the impulse to leaven modernist idioms of painting with echoes of tradition.

Although the most abstracted work here, Rosenthal’s compositions of organic, geometric forms and calligraphic marks abound with intimations of lyrical events. Peaked shapes, lofting across the upper portions of “Uphill and Down” (2011), might be distant mountains or sheltering tents. Exact significations are less clear, and less crucial, than the sense of a poetic journey and its attendant tribulations. The canvas is one of the artist’s two largest in the show, which both use color especially effectively, their varied, deep reds sounding against subdued violets and jolts of vivid green.

Time was, painters learned through their eyes, just as musicians did through their ears and dancers through their bodies. Due to the sheer complexity of nature, and the infinite possibilities of paint, it was a lifetime education. “Nature is the Teacher” reflects these four artists’ shared commitment to this learning, and reminds us how the one faculty of sight can lead to very different truths.

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