Thursday, June 10 at 7 PM
via Zoom

DAVID RHODES and MELISSA STERN join DAVID COHEN to discuss three Chelsea exhibitions:

artcritical.com/reserve

The post The Review Panel on Zoom, Season Finale, June 10 with David Rhodes and Melissa Stern appeared first on artcritical.

The unique work of Regina Bogat came to my attention at Zürcher Gallery’s Frieze New York booth presentation in 2015, and later, through a solo exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in autumn of that year. I was already impressed by what I saw before seeing the dates of the works. It is one thing to innovate retrospectively, but quite another to do it contemporaneously in response to the moment. The works seemed, so much, both of their time and of the present. They not only resonate with young artists now; they represent, given their quality and originality, what arguably should have been an acknowledged achievement in the 1960s and ‘70s.  

DAVID RHODES: You are a New York artist, how did you come to live in New Jersey?

REGINA BOGAT: I moved here from Manhattan in 1972 with my husband, Alfred Jensen, and our two young children. Our Division Street loft was slated for demolition to make way for Confucius Plaza. We found this artist’s house; it was purpose-built in 1906 by a German artist and his French wife. The top floor is a studio with large north-facing skylights. It was with reluctance that I left New York. Even though it is only twenty-five minutes away from the city by train, at the time I felt isolated and cut-off from my prior life.

Today artists and galleries are dispersed across the boroughs in a way that is totally other to the concentrated, intimate associations of the New York art scene in previous decades, especially the 1940s, when you began participating in this world. When you arrived, what were your impressions of the New York art world?

As a young student, the New York art world was exciting. Many galleries were opening showing avant-garde art, artists were opening coops and collectors were buying contemporary American art. American art came to the forefront of the art scene, which had previously been led by Europe. America was shaking-up the art world and New York was playing a central role.

You are fortunate to have experienced such an exciting time in American art history and I am fortunate to be speaking with you, a primary source! Did the New York art world seem diverse or was it established entirely around the Abstract Expressionists? I imagine there were different camps.

There was diversity even though the Abstract Expressionists were receiving the most attention. I went to many openings for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Al Leslie, Nicholas Krushenick and Grace Hartigan. The first generation Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack, Bill de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, were selling well and entering major collections. Articles about Abstract Expressionism dominated magazines, journals and the art sections of newspapers. I was most aware of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists’ competition with the first generation who already had fame and money from their work.

Some artists resisted action and gestural painting sticking to representational painting with regional themes and there were also those who continued emulating French Fauvism and Cubism. There were midtown galleries devoted to regional art like that of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper. At the Art Students League, Will Barnet was still doing derivations of Picasso. Some artists dismissed the abstractionists. I overheard Wolf Kahn refer to Abstract Expressionism as “spaghetti painting.”

The idea of various “groups” seemed to exist via the influential art writers of the period rather than being formed by the artists themselves. People were either for Clement Greenberg, who was doctrinaire, or for Tom Hess (of Art News) and Harold Rosenberg who were both more open to differing views about art.

The influx of European artists escaping WWII added to the diversity in New York. Did they influence your work?

Surrealists made a brief impact on my earliest work. I learned the technique of collage from studying Max Ernst. Although not an émigré, Giorgio de Chirico’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and concrete forms influenced me.

Neo-Plasticism was in the mix, led by Mondrian. He had his studio in Manhattan but passed away before I left College. At Brooklyn College, I heard a lot about him because the art department there was influenced by Bauhaus principles and its head, Harry Holtzman, was the executor of Mondrian’s estate. Perhaps I was unconsciously impacted by Mondrian. Bernard Zürcher, who is an art historian, has pointed out similarities in my geometric abstractions.

Duchamp, who later played an important role in New York, was playing chess on Fourteenth Street. I found his art amusing. This might have contributed to the playful dialogue I have with my work as it is made.

Did galleries have a strong role in differentiating various aesthetic tendencies?

Galleries that encouraged avant-garde art promulgated that aesthetic (at that time Abstract Expressionism). The traditional galleries showed conservative art espousing the representational aesthetics. Other galleries specializing in modern art represented aesthetics that were recently avant-garde.

There were two different art worlds vis-á-vis the galleries in New York. The galleries on 57th Street were commercial, while the galleries on 10th Street and the East Village coops were mostly artist-run. Neither world was exclusive to an aesthetic.

The art world became very complicated as more and more money was involved: the galleries looked towards the museums for advice on what artists to show; the museums looked to the galleries to see the latest developments; the collectors looked to both galleries and museums to determine the best work for investments. The critics stepped in to name the art movement of the day. The auction houses were there but they didn’t have the power that they have today.

Were the well-known artists accessible to you and supportive?

I had several wonderful friends in the art world. Some of them were well known. I went to openings, introduced myself to people and wrote for a journal called East. At first, I was in awe of the success of well-known artists. In time, I became friends with several who were accessible and supportive. Many of the well-known artists were erudite but never stodgy.

Was Elaine de Kooning one of these?

Elaine de Kooning welcomed me as part of her family as well as a fellow artist. She invited me to go along with her to visit artists’ studios and compare notes on the visits. She was free with her ideas about painting. She permitted me to stay in her studio while she was painting, something most artists forbid. She was communicative and supportive. She threw wonderful parties to which I was invited. This was invaluable because it was a place to network. Networking was very important as it still is today.

How about Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko?

I met Reinhardt at openings. He was friendly and attentive. I learned a lot about how to construct a painting from Ad. He was learned but not pedantic. Ad was using oil paint but wanted the paint to be completely matte; he drained all the oil from the paint. This made his work hard to conserve later. He revealed a lot about his painting techniques.

Rothko had his studio across the hall from mine at 222 Bowery and we became close friends. Mark taught me a lot about the art world: he taught me about galleries; he told me how to avoid shady dealers; he taught me how to prepare for a show; and, he showed me ways to care for and store art. I assisted him in his studio by repairing the edges of his paintings for his show at the Modern. He told off-color jokes which kept us laughing. Mark is often presented as off-putting; however, he really was quite warm, nurturing and could be very funny.

My husband, Al Jensen, was supportive and showed me the world of antiquities. For a young New Yorker, who had not traveled much, a six-month trip to Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Egypt was mind-boggling. He showed me that what we see as ornament was based on ancient symbolism. He shared his fascination with numbers, science and ancient cultures. My work was deeply influenced by these new experiences.

You mentioned you were writing about art for the journal East at one point. Elaine de Kooning was also writing. Were artists’ opinions the benchmark for each other over what critics were saying? Did artists’ writings contribute to the contemporary art dialogue by championing the less known, or by arguing for what was most important? These days, it seems the market bypasses the opinions of artists and critics while the collectors hold sway.

I have always admired John Ruskin, the result of whose brilliant support of Turner continues to amaze me. It’s hard to go from Ruskin to Saatchi; but, today’s art market was developed by collectors like Saatchi in his championing of Damien Hirst and the YBAs (Young British Artists). Nerve and money overtook quality and connoisseurship. Even so, some gallerists do a great job of supporting less well-known artists; Zürcher Gallery, Paris/New York, is one of them.

I was in London during the 1980s and 1990s when the YBA phenomena and Saatchi’s collecting was taking place; it’s only part of the story as you can imagine. What about New York artists’ writings of the 1940s and 1950s?

In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning’s art writings were deep, expansive and important. She wrote for Art News extensively. Her observations were sharp. She went into detail about an artist’s life and contribution whereas most reviews were overviews of exhibitions.

In the 1970s, when feminism really started, more women wrote. Feminist writers were celebrated. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan were musts. These feminist writers stirred and empowered women artists.

Artists are eager for attention and especially want to hear what people think of their work. Artists value studio visits: when Swiss painter Max Bill saw one of my geometric abstractions from the 1960s, he said that he “always tried to put red and blue together but here you have achieved it in your painting”; when, in 1982, curator and critic John Caldwell wrote in The New York Times about my show at Douglas College, I was tickled pink by “quirky” and “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Throughout your oeuvre, your work reflects the time in which it was made and has connections to other artists’ work of that time; yet, it is different. Since the 1960s, your use of materials other than paint, thread for example, extends the painting from its pictorial function; as in Eva Hesse’s work, these unorthodox materials breach the painting sculpture divide. Since my student days, I’ve been very interested in Hesse. Your use of strong color together with this three dimensional aspect is an approach that young artists are engaging now. The difference is you didn’t know where it might lead. How did other artists react to your use of materials at the time these works were actually made?

The best thing about being largely ignored in the 1960s and ‘70s, was that I was free to do as I pleased. There was no pressure to comply with particular expectations or “-isms.” My use of unusual materials was mostly intuitive and unconscious. I can’t explain it without returning to childhood recollections of household trimmings and the needlework children were taught. Justification came later when I read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (play is culture). Some of my contemporaries were also expanding into mixed media, painting with sculptural projection. My friend, Eva Hesse, pursued this extensively. Around the same time, Lucas Samaras also used unorthodox materials such as rainbow-colored wool.

In the early 1970s, I was chosen by a panel of women artists to participate in “Women Choose Women” with a painting, constructed in 1971, of dowels and rope. This was an affirmative reaction in action as a limited number of participants were chosen from many applicants.

Although collectors purchased my pieces shortly after they were completed, I don’t recall any artists’ reactions to the materials I was using during the 1960s-1970s when I first began using mixed media. Interestingly, now, the younger artists appreciate my work from that period very much. They are surprised to learn that I did the work in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it resonates with their work today. They like the threads, cords, wooden sticks and dowels. They are enthusiastic.

That doesn’t surprise me at all! Your works from the 1960s and 1970s are not only innovative and apposite to their time they are also prescient of some work being made today. This only happens with artists who have ability, vision, and of course it’s important to say, the courage, to do what they need to do, and remain undeterred if others don’t get it at the time. How did the various elements (dowels, sticks, threads, cord and so on) function for you?

The various unorthodox materials in my work function as the structure of the painting; they are never superficial ornaments. For example, in the untitled 1971 painting, shown at “Women Choose Women,” the dowels are my brushstrokes. In other paintings, the wooden sticks I have used function as lines. Artist and writer, Steven Westfall, pointed out that the sticks in my paintings create a chromatic haze. In my Cord Paintings, the cords are tactile, they add a sense of touch to the work. Although they shouldn’t be touched, people can’t keep their hands off them! All these materials are the structure of my paintings. They are not something I just attach to my work but rather they are the substance of my work.

Al Jensen based a lot of his work on a grid structure. I learned that the grid was a great organizing element and employed it in many of my works. It serves as the underlying format beneath much of the materials I use.

Let’s discuss your new work; what are you working on currently?

Beginning in 2013, I felt the state of the world was becoming so oppressive I could hardly breathe. My paintings took on a smoky, violent and sinister feel. I used a lot of red, black and black cord. Where my work of 2000-2010 was largely open and atmospheric, employing many colorful, transparent layers, in 2014 I began positioning an opaque board onto my work. The board was an emotional element, a closed door or the anxiety-provoking image of the little window to a solitary confinement cell. This work culminated in the Palmyra series of 2015, my response to the destruction of antiquities in Syria. I had never used painting to comment on a contemporary problem before, but the destruction of Palmyra and Aleppo alarmed me. The paintings suggest the vulnerability of the archeological site as they progress through stages of sadness and despair ending in final darkness. Invoking Zenobia, the third century warrior queen of Palmyra, who fought the Romans, is something else I had not done before in painting. The series will be on view at Zürcher Gallery along with the sculptures of Wang Keping through April 29, 2016.

My impression of the new works is that, on a metaphoric level, the qualities that you describe are certainly present, as we can now see in your Palmyra series with Wang Keping’s sculptures at Zürcher Gallery. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Regina.

“Face to Face: Regina Bogat, Wang Keping” continues at Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, through April 29

The post “I Was Free To Do As I Pleased”: Regina Bogat on her Life as an Artist appeared first on artcritical.

September 13 to October 22, 2016
45 East 78 Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

More than 25 years since they were made, the paintings in “Sean Scully: The Eighties,” now at Mnuchin, have lost none of their potency. In fact, for this viewer, they have only increased in resonance. The early ‘80s represented a transitional moment in Scully’s career, and by the end of the decade a mode of painting emerged that was assertively and recognizably the artist’s own. Moving to New York City in 1975, Scully worked in a stringent, hard-edged minimalist style. This changed definitively following a stay at the Edward Albee Residency on Montauk in 1982. Included in this exhibition are several works made on found wood during that residency. This resourcefulness proved to be of great significance for Scully’s development as a painter.

Bear (1982) is comprised of two vertically joined panels. The left panel is horizontally striped with alternate dirty white and black bands; the right panel is narrower, and while both panels are level at the top edge, the right half extends below at the bottom edge and is striped with broader blue-gray and black bands. The two sides appear to splice together contrasting realities, like montage in cinema. They picture an idea of simultaneous proximity and distance — a central concept in Scully’s painting from the 1980s. More can be said of duality in Bear as the two sides of the painting move at different visual speeds, the right panel tranquil in comparison to the agitated movement of the left panel. Oil paint is applied in an aggressive, rhythmic way, adding to the sense of musical interval and percussive measure. In paintings such as Bear, elements are already present that through variation and change of emphasis proved adequate to Scully’s ambition — any changes made are intuitive and responsive to paintings already made, rather than for the sake of change or embellishment. Shelter Island (1982) again contrasts bands of black and grayed white on two panels — this time on linen, one stretcher deeper and so more forward than the other — on one side the bands are vertical, and on the other horizontal. Typically, the painting is frontal, its surface actively worked in oil paint, wet into wet. This remains so for all other paintings in this exhibition, and it’s just as much in evidence in Scully’s paintings seen at Cheim & Read as recently as early 2015.

The off-white and black bands recur — take, for example, A Green Place (1987). In this instance, single bands of black and off-white occupy a rectangular segment inserted at the top right of the composition. Together they form a horizon line between what could be seen as a dark sky above and pale sea below. Horizontal bands of red comprise another rectangular section inserted on the left side, contiguous with the painting’s left edge. Together, these rectangles, like paintings within a painting, operate alternately as windows or figures within the surface. The vertical orange and green bands that otherwise fill the composition provide the wall or ground against which these shapes function. While remaining abstract, associations are not expunged. The painting recalls elements of a Henri Matisse painting and the indebtedness shared by both artists to fabric patterns (in Scully’s case, stripes) seen on visits to Morocco.

Two more paintings are entirely composed of off-white and black bands. Both somber and sensuous, they are possessed of an acute intensity. Triptych Aran (1986) is the more reductive of the two, whereas Empty Heart (1987) — consisting of three superimposed blocks of vertical and horizontal black and white stripes — is exposed and stark. A more chromatic atmospheric light is produced in other paintings, though there is always a gravitas that leans composition toward invention rather than playfulness. For instance, A Bedroom in Venice (1988) is muted with soft blue light that brings to mind the humid air and radiant light of that city and its effect on color sensation. Longing, melancholy and urgency all prevail in these paintings. This denies a place for complacency and evinces a drive and focus that both address art-historical connections, and the contemporary world vis-à-vis the particularity of Scully’s own experience, be it emotional or visual.

The post True Stripes: Sean Scully at Mnuchin appeared first on artcritical.

May 12 to July 29, 2016
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 941-0012

Five medium-sized paintings in the rear of the gallery break with Stephen Westfall’s familiar practice. Unlike more characteristic paintings such as Cortona (2015), with their coolly satisfying symmetry, the structure of these newer works display a strongly asymmetrical and relational pictorial composition. This exciting departure is a result of the artist’s experience of mural scale wall painting completed over the past several years where he has begun to break with pattern, to an extent, and has increased the role of white as a color. The site-specific murals completed at at Art OMI, Ghent, New York, in 2014 are examples of these.

There is also a faux comical undermining of seriousness, both in the titling of the show and in the deadpan paint surfaces. For a Modernist like Westfall, the strategy of linking high and low cultural narratives—constructivism and graphic signs—proves expedient in deflating grandiosity and productively opening influence to the vitality of quotidian environment. But originality is not dependent on novelty of technology and media. Westfall has achieved a singular style of painting that stands out for all the right reasons—it is compelling, arresting work—whilst not straying from already existing modes.

The diamond shapes, though recalling a harlequin design, represent an ostensible pattern that is broken through changes of hue and value. There is one color per shape, often now with the addition of white diamonds that when adjacent to each other create a context of figure/ground with the chromatically varied diamonds with which they cohabit. These consistent shapes, edited actively at the edge of the paintings’ rectangular limits, are converted into triangles of various sizes in proportion to the over all size of a particular painting. In The Future Advances and Recedes (2015), a central diamond shape is made up of four smaller diamonds, two aligned vertically, the top one deep purple, the lower one black. The horizontally aligned diamonds are a cadmium red and cobalt blue and can be read as eyes in a Paul Klee-like geometric head balancing on a diagonal of orange and yellow. The orange is a triangle formed by the lower edge of the painting bisecting what would have been another diamond. The orange and yellow flip to read also as a three-dimensional roof-like shape. The remaining triangle, taupe in color and to the left of the geometrical head as I describe it, skews what would have been otherwise a general symmetry of composition.

Color is liberated to function in a kinetic way through the simple devise of geometric shape. Thus articulated, color moves and reorganizes, as we perceive it, like a mobile turning through space. Like Stanley Whitney, an artist who structures color through geometry in a similar way, nothing is static in these works. Pages could be written simply to address what color does as one looks at it, the sensations it causes and the thoughts it elicits. An added quality is the perspectival lean that happens in a steeply vertical painting like Delta (2015): the narrow format and large scale of the contained shapes fragment the composition in such a way that there is no complete diamond visible, creating an almost sculptural column. That so much is possible still in the field of an expanded, inclusive modernism and its visuality is evident in considering this exhibition. Westfall’s change in direction only serves to intensify and enlarge his subtlety and range.

The post Diamond in the Smooth: Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg appeared first on artcritical.

June 27 to August 12, 2016
531 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 9100

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In “Shapeshifters,” now at Luhring Augustine, 19 artists are brought together who explore the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay “Art and Objecthood,” though some of the exhibition’s earliest works are from that moment. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, such as Martin Kippenberger, for example, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, as in Jeremy DePerez’s Untitled (Unknown) (2016), or in working with one form or another, such as Imi Knobel’s Kartoffelbild 15 (2012) leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

Among the large-scale works in the main gallery, David Novros’s extraordinary 4:30 (1966/2000) is a multipanel painting that extends horizontally in four joined parts, two panels running horizontal and two at an angle. The parts are stepped alternately, allowing the wall to form inducted negative shapes to the positive shapes of the panels themselves. The pale tone of the white pearlescent paint changes color to a pink as the viewer moves and the light hits its surface differently. The modular panels identify the piece as an object within an architectural context — it’s as far away from the notion of painting as a window onto fictional space as can be imaged. This is now nothing to do with a perspectival view set in a rectangular portal; it is an encounter with organized physical elements in real space. Above the doorway to the other galleries is Blinky Palermo’s Untitled (1966) a nine-by-eighteen-inch black triangle of muslin over wood. This small work punctuates the architecture like a subtle votive object, altering the straightforward experience of passing through a doorway into a consideration of passing through a particular architectural space.

Several paintings in this exhibition very successfully use actual gaps within the format of the painting itself: Kippenberger’s N.G.D. hellblau (1987), Richard Tuttle’s Red Brown Canvas (1967), and Steven Parrino’s Touch and Go (1989–95) all expose the wall behind within the painting to simple, and inventive effect. Parrino’s work shows painterliness in the form of stains and drips visible along the edges and in two cut-out segments. Ruth Root combines, in Untitled (2015), fabric, Plexiglas, enamel and spray paint in a piece that fits various planes at diagonals to each other that only in the top left corner conform to a rectangle. Elsewhere they simply amass frontally as if slotted and layered together. The feel is collage, the format a construction from disparate parts.

Although stacked vertically, like Root’s painting, 3 Part Variation #5 (2011–13) by Joanna Pousette-Dart departs methodologically. Three conjoined rounded forms contain curvilinear shapes; the relationship between them is seamless, as they appear to generate one another. The color relationships are also compelling; again, moving visually backward and forward, the colors seem to call each other into being.

There is no doubt that the artist list for this exhibition could be longer, I’m thinking for example of Joe Overstreet, Alan Shields and Al Loving, to name just three. There is much very good work to be seen already here and the point is well made that a standard rectangle is not only unnecessary, but alternatives await further exploration in any number of directions and for many reasons — one being that there is no good reason not to.

The post Shaped Canvases and Broken Rules: Shapeshifters at Luhring Augustine appeared first on artcritical.

Rhodes, who began his career in London, committed to New York almost two years ago after years of painting, exhibiting and critical writing in Berlin, Barcelona, and other European cities. His criticism appears regularly at artcritical and The Brooklyn Rail, and he’s also written for Artforum. I met with him at the gallery to discuss the developments in his work over the last few years.

MARY JONES: You’ve titled your show “Between the Days,” which is the also title of one of the paintings, the others remaining untitled, with the date and city of completion listed on every painting. What’s the reference?

DAVID RHODES: The title refers obliquely to time and recall, between one moment and another. And also, as the paintings quite often are completed in a day, between one painting and the next and the next.

You share a number of things with On Kawara: a painting completed in a single day, the use of black, frequent travel, and a consistency of process from painting to painting. Do you feel a connection to his work?

Rhodes: I do feel identification with his making a painting that is clearly about the day it was made. For me, that moment in time is important to acknowledge, and for years I’ve listed the specific date and city on every canvas. I don’t work on pieces simultaneously, so it’s a means of marking time, and although the paintings aren’t about that specific day and place, they’re subject to those circumstances, and because I’ve moved around so much, it’s important for me to keep this in mind.

I found Kawara’s Guggenheim exhibition last year very moving. It was interesting to consider the choices he made in painting the numerals and letters, which seemed to change over time, and in each painting one could see he was making very careful decisions about how they looked. There was a format, but in that format the paintings didn’t remain the same or become stereotypical. Inside the box made for each painting, he always put a sheet of newspaper from that day, so they must be intended to act as metonymic as well. Although they might read as formal and neutral, they’re rooted, both conceptually and by process, in everyday life. There’s a connection to mortality in this passage of time. I can identify with this, in and out of the studio.

One thing that’s very different from Kawara is the scale of your new paintings. How has scale changed your work?

The scale alters the way it’s possible to relate to the painting physically and conceptually. Because the space of the painting has become large enough to enter imaginatively, it makes a very different physical and emotional impact. It’s not a question of more complexity so much as a different kind of intimacy.

Could you describe your process?

The actual process of making contributes to how the paintings appear. There’s a degree of given structure. I make them in a way that allows movement and spontaneity, in that speed — the creation of circumstance — rather like a dance movement, creates something through the way it happens. The way the paintings are taped allows for each section to be made consecutively without too much deliberation. The vertical lines are different widths, but they’re always vertical, and from one section to the next go in opposite directions, like cross hatch. They are usually, but not always, done from left to right, and as each section is painted, the tape is removed, and in response to seeing that the next section is made. There’s no planning it all out beforehand. It’s a question of responding to the relationships as they appear. The reason for this apparent economy is that it’s possible to make comparisons to the repetitions and differences in each painting and from one to the next.

You’ve written about the work of Amy Feldman, and there are some interesting comparisons to be made. Her paintings are also very immediate, spontaneous, and done in a day. Feldman is well known for having many “rehearsal” drawings, a preparatory practice on paper before she approaches the canvas. Is this part of your process?

No, kind of the opposite. It’s important not to know what the outcome might be, and the tension it produces is transferred to the work. It’s a case of making these paintings in the moment and not knowing. But, because of the economy of means and the repetitions, a kind of armature is created for the differences to establish themselves. It’s those differences, the breadth of different emotional values or different formal incidents that makes them interesting. I paint myself out of the paintings.

Feldman is known to sharply edit her work, to allow failure into her process, as revisions aren’t possible. Do your paintings ever fail? Are you able to make revisions?

They do fail, but not so often, and there is a possibility for revision, though in a very limited way. It’s usually an adjustment rather than a wholesale change. If there’s a line that seems superfluous or a transition of space that doesn’t feel interesting, I can paint it out, and hope that it works. But I accept the accidents or failures; it’s a case of “Fail, fail again, fail better,” as Beckett said.

The color black has so many connotations; urban life and industrialization, as well as transcendence and negation. Are you using black metaphorically?

Not exactly, but the viewer will project what they will, and that’s fine. Before these paintings I was using a full range of color, and I felt the relationships that color offered, and its relationship to structure was such a subject in itself. I wanted to work in a way in which color wasn’t about its relationship with other colors. Even though I use black as a color, it’s more about light. In the current Philip Guston exhibition of paintings from 1957 to 1967, he reduced the color to black adjusted by white, so producing grey, and he talked about not wanting to use seductive qualities of color, but to work with light. I feel similarly.

Malevich formulated the black square to signify an absolute rejection of any possibilities for pictorial representation in favor of pure expression. Do you identify with this kind of abstraction?

Indirectly. The paintings have forms in them, but they’re really about relationships, either in time, or in space. They’re about the disjunction of different spaces and different moments and how these impact emotionally, and the implications of this intellectually, and how it might factor in a world view. But these issues arise because of the painting, rather than the other way around.

Can you describe this further?

I feel as if I follow the paintings. They’re not describing ideas that I have a priori, or illustrating something I desire to manifest through painting. I feel that they amount to a dialog, and in this they are smarter than I am. They’re not an expression of my ego: they’re interesting for me; they move me. I find the paintings of interest so I make more, and they surprise me. The relationships they establish and the resonance of the day-to-day world of abstract ideas are also very interesting. The issues come through the painting. They produce a philosophical position and so also reflect one.

Is it important to you that there be a feeling of urgency in your work?

It seems necessary. It’s how the paintings feel. With a different desire they’d be decorative.

How so?

They’d be passive. They could be viewed as decorative if it were in a violent way, as the decorative aspects of Matisse have been described, there’s pleasure, but there’s an urgency also.

The surfaces of your paintings are very straightforward, there’s no enhancement. It’s a surface that identifies its elements; it doesn’t transcend its materials, it underscores them. Is this in the service of immediacy?

Yes. It’s a very specific surface. It’s neither stained for layered, it’s somewhere in-between. It’s a resistant kind of surface, and it’s not a surface that has a kind of “drama.” My paintings don’t have an overt element of craft, they’re harder surfaces. They’re painted like a wall.

Is this a connection to the black paintings of Frank Stella?

When I was at art school, early on I came across a Hollis Frampton photograph of Stella kneeling in front of a painting with a house painting brush on his way to completing some rectangular concentric lines, and it made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t feel at that moment I could enter into expressionism or conceptual minimalism, there seemed to be too many assumptions that I didn’t yet connect to. But when I looked at these black paintings, they seemed to have an emotion, without relying on transcendence or a narrative. They’re pragmatic in their making, and they inspired me early on. I found myself returning to something that has a relationship to those paintings without being imitative, or admiring. My current paintings actually feel like a critique of his work, in the sense in those early black paintings, he wanted to move space out of the paintings evenly, and I would like space to be in the painting unevenly.

How does writing about art affect your practice?

It feels as if it accesses a different energy, and a different aspect of my relationship to the work that I see. In the craft of writing, ideas are produced. Actually, in much the same way as in painting, something takes over to a degree. In writing about say a group of paintings by another artist, unexpectedly different ideas connect, different associations are made that couldn’t happen any other way. It happens to a degree with conversational thinking, but in the isolated form of writing a text, it’s surprising how things occur. The craft and process of writing gives something back. It’s expansive. Also, it’s political in that you choose what you write about and you can support art that you think is worthwhile, neglected or misrepresented. I gave a lot of talks in galleries and museums in the UK before leaving for Berlin because people were speaking about artists I respected in ways that I thought were unacceptable, artists like Blinky Palermo and Mary Heilmann. Their work was important to me and it needed more than just some facts reiterated about the work for the audience.

Tell me what are you reading at the moment?

The collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop; I’m always returning to Proust, and Light Years (1975) by James Salter. I’m reading this last one particularly slowly because I like it so much. His writing is so beautiful, and there’s something about the style that’s moving and provocative. Economical, but also endlessly sensual and thoughtful.

The post “I Paint Myself Out Of The Paintings”: A Studio Visit with David Rhodes appeared first on artcritical.

Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

The post Roundtable: Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth appeared first on artcritical.

May 5 to June 18, 2016
547 W. 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 242 7727

Spanish painter Juan Uslé’s recent work, now on view at Cheim & Read, bears an inseparable connection with environmental conditions experienced out of doors, and out of an urban scape, perhaps. That low, raking illumination at dusk, the change physically in our receptiveness to color and tonal contrasts when surrounded by fading light in the transition from day to night, are all more intense, slower, and more subtle away from the noise and artificial illumination of the city. I say “perhaps” because in the city there is that incredible moment when fading natural light combines with electric light. All of this, it seems, both informs and is contained in, these new canvases.

There are only three sizes of canvas present, SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLORADO) (2016) is an example of a series of paintings begun in 1997 and is rendered in the largest size. The other paintings are considerably smaller, at 24 by 18 inches and 18 by 12 inches, respectively, and also belong to longstanding series in their own right. The earlier paintings often comprised vertical as well as horizontal brush marks that moved and stopped, moved and stopped, sequentially, to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat. These paintings, when made in New York are frequently made at night when the city is somewhat quieter, and the heartbeat can be felt in the silence, varying as it does, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, over time. At 120 by 89 inches, the field of this painting visibly absorbs light and reflects it at different intervals. The light reflected is modified by the paint that covers a prepped gessoed surface in uneven — fluid, abrupt or staggered — rhythms. The gradations recall the restless, wrist-driven, backgrounds of Goya’s Los caprichos (1797–1798) or the apparently black surroundings of Velázquez’s Cristo Crucificado (1632). The Velázquez is 98 by 67 inches, a large painting that presents an image of Christ on the cross in an isolated and classical contrapposto posture The apparently black surroundings, or ground, of the figure are not actually black but a kind of unfathomable green black consisting of a multitude of brush strokes that accumulate and with their different directions pulse and variegate the light that falls onto the painted surface. It is a surface alive with the repetitions of Velázquez’s hand in motion in a way like the stepped movement of Uslé’s hand as it tracks across a painting.

In Kayak (Aral 11) (2015), like the other small paintings here, demands its share of wall space. In regarding the space afforded between paintings in the installation, it comes as no surprise that the smaller works require as much wall space as large works. In Kayak shares the horizontal repetitions, each one above the next, of SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLARADO). However, the change in scale takes us closer to the painting in a different way, the view now close, like a person is close to the water in an actual kayak, something Uslé experiences regularly. Between each band of black horizontal translucent brush strokes that deposit the pigment loaded into a medium of vinyl at intervals, like silt, are lines of opaque paint of various colors. The final, bottom passage, though, is not, as might be expected, more translucent paint, but instead another band, this time of opaque black. One’s eyes have to adjust as if to perceive a shadow or afterimage. This increases the complexity of this painting in denying expectation, both in beauty and structure, exponentially.

In part three of George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), titled “The Propagation of Things,” Kubler writes:

The occurrence of things is governed by our changing attitude to the process of invention, repetition, and discard. Without invention there would be only stale routine. Without copying there would never be enough of any man-made thing, and without waste or discard too many things would outlast their usefulness. Our attitudes towards these processes are themselves in constant change, so that we confront the double difficulty of charting changes in things, together with tracing the change in ideas about change.

He goes on to state that a condition of the present is the acceptance of continual change. It is this that Uslé’s paintings embody, even celebrate, successfully, neither avoiding repetition nor denying difference. All the paintings in this exhibition are part of larger series, and each painting is assertively particular despite, or one could say because of sharing a continuity of formal elements.

The post Heartbeats: The Spanish Rhythms of Juan Uslé appeared first on artcritical.

The unique work of Regina Bogat came to my attention at Zürcher Gallery’s Frieze New York booth presentation in 2015, and later, through a solo exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in autumn of that year. I was already impressed by what I saw before seeing the dates of the works. It is one thing to innovate retrospectively, but quite another to do it contemporaneously in response to the moment. The works seemed, so much, both of their time and of the present. They not only resonate with young artists now; they represent, given their quality and originality, what arguably should have been an acknowledged achievement in the 1960s and ‘70s.  

DAVID RHODES: You are a New York artist, how did you come to live in New Jersey?

REGINA BOGAT: I moved here from Manhattan in 1972 with my husband, Alfred Jensen, and our two young children. Our Division Street loft was slated for demolition to make way for Confucius Plaza. We found this artist’s house; it was purpose-built in 1906 by a German artist and his French wife. The top floor is a studio with large north-facing skylights. It was with reluctance that I left New York. Even though it is only twenty-five minutes away from the city by train, at the time I felt isolated and cut-off from my prior life.

Today artists and galleries are dispersed across the boroughs in a way that is totally other to the concentrated, intimate associations of the New York art scene in previous decades, especially the 1940s, when you began participating in this world. When you arrived, what were your impressions of the New York art world?

As a young student, the New York art world was exciting. Many galleries were opening showing avant-garde art, artists were opening coops and collectors were buying contemporary American art. American art came to the forefront of the art scene, which had previously been led by Europe. America was shaking-up the art world and New York was playing a central role.

You are fortunate to have experienced such an exciting time in American art history and I am fortunate to be speaking with you, a primary source! Did the New York art world seem diverse or was it established entirely around the Abstract Expressionists? I imagine there were different camps.

There was diversity even though the Abstract Expressionists were receiving the most attention. I went to many openings for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Al Leslie, Nicholas Krushenick and Grace Hartigan. The first generation Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack, Bill de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, were selling well and entering major collections. Articles about Abstract Expressionism dominated magazines, journals and the art sections of newspapers. I was most aware of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists’ competition with the first generation who already had fame and money from their work.

Some artists resisted action and gestural painting sticking to representational painting with regional themes and there were also those who continued emulating French Fauvism and Cubism. There were midtown galleries devoted to regional art like that of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper. At the Art Students League, Will Barnet was still doing derivations of Picasso. Some artists dismissed the abstractionists. I overheard Wolf Kahn refer to Abstract Expressionism as “spaghetti painting.”

The idea of various “groups” seemed to exist via the influential art writers of the period rather than being formed by the artists themselves. People were either for Clement Greenberg, who was doctrinaire, or for Tom Hess (of Art News) and Harold Rosenberg who were both more open to differing views about art.

The influx of European artists escaping WWII added to the diversity in New York. Did they influence your work?

Surrealists made a brief impact on my earliest work. I learned the technique of collage from studying Max Ernst. Although not an émigré, Giorgio de Chirico’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and concrete forms influenced me.

Neo-Plasticism was in the mix, led by Mondrian. He had his studio in Manhattan but passed away before I left College. At Brooklyn College, I heard a lot about him because the art department there was influenced by Bauhaus principles and its head, Harry Holtzman, was the executor of Mondrian’s estate. Perhaps I was unconsciously impacted by Mondrian. Bernard Zürcher, who is an art historian, has pointed out similarities in my geometric abstractions.

Duchamp, who later played an important role in New York, was playing chess on Fourteenth Street. I found his art amusing. This might have contributed to the playful dialogue I have with my work as it is made.

Did galleries have a strong role in differentiating various aesthetic tendencies?

Galleries that encouraged avant-garde art promulgated that aesthetic (at that time Abstract Expressionism). The traditional galleries showed conservative art espousing the representational aesthetics. Other galleries specializing in modern art represented aesthetics that were recently avant-garde.

There were two different art worlds vis-á-vis the galleries in New York. The galleries on 57th Street were commercial, while the galleries on 10th Street and the East Village coops were mostly artist-run. Neither world was exclusive to an aesthetic.

The art world became very complicated as more and more money was involved: the galleries looked towards the museums for advice on what artists to show; the museums looked to the galleries to see the latest developments; the collectors looked to both galleries and museums to determine the best work for investments. The critics stepped in to name the art movement of the day. The auction houses were there but they didn’t have the power that they have today.

Were the well-known artists accessible to you and supportive?

I had several wonderful friends in the art world. Some of them were well known. I went to openings, introduced myself to people and wrote for a journal called East. At first, I was in awe of the success of well-known artists. In time, I became friends with several who were accessible and supportive. Many of the well-known artists were erudite but never stodgy.

Was Elaine de Kooning one of these?

Elaine de Kooning welcomed me as part of her family as well as a fellow artist. She invited me to go along with her to visit artists’ studios and compare notes on the visits. She was free with her ideas about painting. She permitted me to stay in her studio while she was painting, something most artists forbid. She was communicative and supportive. She threw wonderful parties to which I was invited. This was invaluable because it was a place to network. Networking was very important as it still is today.

How about Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko?

I met Reinhardt at openings. He was friendly and attentive. I learned a lot about how to construct a painting from Ad. He was learned but not pedantic. Ad was using oil paint but wanted the paint to be completely matte; he drained all the oil from the paint. This made his work hard to conserve later. He revealed a lot about his painting techniques.

Rothko had his studio across the hall from mine at 222 Bowery and we became close friends. Mark taught me a lot about the art world: he taught me about galleries; he told me how to avoid shady dealers; he taught me how to prepare for a show; and, he showed me ways to care for and store art. I assisted him in his studio by repairing the edges of his paintings for his show at the Modern. He told off-color jokes which kept us laughing. Mark is often presented as off-putting; however, he really was quite warm, nurturing and could be very funny.

My husband, Al Jensen, was supportive and showed me the world of antiquities. For a young New Yorker, who had not traveled much, a six-month trip to Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Egypt was mind-boggling. He showed me that what we see as ornament was based on ancient symbolism. He shared his fascination with numbers, science and ancient cultures. My work was deeply influenced by these new experiences.

You mentioned you were writing about art for the journal East at one point. Elaine de Kooning was also writing. Were artists’ opinions the benchmark for each other over what critics were saying? Did artists’ writings contribute to the contemporary art dialogue by championing the less known, or by arguing for what was most important? These days, it seems the market bypasses the opinions of artists and critics while the collectors hold sway.

I have always admired John Ruskin, the result of whose brilliant support of Turner continues to amaze me. It’s hard to go from Ruskin to Saatchi; but, today’s art market was developed by collectors like Saatchi in his championing of Damien Hirst and the YBAs (Young British Artists). Nerve and money overtook quality and connoisseurship. Even so, some gallerists do a great job of supporting less well-known artists; Zürcher Gallery, Paris/New York, is one of them.

I was in London during the 1980s and 1990s when the YBA phenomena and Saatchi’s collecting was taking place; it’s only part of the story as you can imagine. What about New York artists’ writings of the 1940s and 1950s?

In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning’s art writings were deep, expansive and important. She wrote for Art News extensively. Her observations were sharp. She went into detail about an artist’s life and contribution whereas most reviews were overviews of exhibitions.

In the 1970s, when feminism really started, more women wrote. Feminist writers were celebrated. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan were musts. These feminist writers stirred and empowered women artists.

Artists are eager for attention and especially want to hear what people think of their work. Artists value studio visits: when Swiss painter Max Bill saw one of my geometric abstractions from the 1960s, he said that he “always tried to put red and blue together but here you have achieved it in your painting”; when, in 1982, curator and critic John Caldwell wrote in The New York Times about my show at Douglas College, I was tickled pink by “quirky” and “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Throughout your oeuvre, your work reflects the time in which it was made and has connections to other artists’ work of that time; yet, it is different. Since the 1960s, your use of materials other than paint, thread for example, extends the painting from its pictorial function; as in Eva Hesse’s work, these unorthodox materials breach the painting sculpture divide. Since my student days, I’ve been very interested in Hesse. Your use of strong color together with this three dimensional aspect is an approach that young artists are engaging now. The difference is you didn’t know where it might lead. How did other artists react to your use of materials at the time these works were actually made?

The best thing about being largely ignored in the 1960s and ‘70s, was that I was free to do as I pleased. There was no pressure to comply with particular expectations or “-isms.” My use of unusual materials was mostly intuitive and unconscious. I can’t explain it without returning to childhood recollections of household trimmings and the needlework children were taught. Justification came later when I read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (play is culture). Some of my contemporaries were also expanding into mixed media, painting with sculptural projection. My friend, Eva Hesse, pursued this extensively. Around the same time, Lucas Samaras also used unorthodox materials such as rainbow-colored wool.

In the early 1970s, I was chosen by a panel of women artists to participate in “Women Choose Women” with a painting, constructed in 1971, of dowels and rope. This was an affirmative reaction in action as a limited number of participants were chosen from many applicants.

Although collectors purchased my pieces shortly after they were completed, I don’t recall any artists’ reactions to the materials I was using during the 1960s-1970s when I first began using mixed media. Interestingly, now, the younger artists appreciate my work from that period very much. They are surprised to learn that I did the work in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it resonates with their work today. They like the threads, cords, wooden sticks and dowels. They are enthusiastic.

That doesn’t surprise me at all! Your works from the 1960s and 1970s are not only innovative and apposite to their time they are also prescient of some work being made today. This only happens with artists who have ability, vision, and of course it’s important to say, the courage, to do what they need to do, and remain undeterred if others don’t get it at the time. How did the various elements (dowels, sticks, threads, cord and so on) function for you?

The various unorthodox materials in my work function as the structure of the painting; they are never superficial ornaments. For example, in the untitled 1971 painting, shown at “Women Choose Women,” the dowels are my brushstrokes. In other paintings, the wooden sticks I have used function as lines. Artist and writer, Steven Westfall, pointed out that the sticks in my paintings create a chromatic haze. In my Cord Paintings, the cords are tactile, they add a sense of touch to the work. Although they shouldn’t be touched, people can’t keep their hands off them! All these materials are the structure of my paintings. They are not something I just attach to my work but rather they are the substance of my work.

Al Jensen based a lot of his work on a grid structure. I learned that the grid was a great organizing element and employed it in many of my works. It serves as the underlying format beneath much of the materials I use.

Let’s discuss your new work; what are you working on currently?

Beginning in 2013, I felt the state of the world was becoming so oppressive I could hardly breathe. My paintings took on a smoky, violent and sinister feel. I used a lot of red, black and black cord. Where my work of 2000-2010 was largely open and atmospheric, employing many colorful, transparent layers, in 2014 I began positioning an opaque board onto my work. The board was an emotional element, a closed door or the anxiety-provoking image of the little window to a solitary confinement cell. This work culminated in the Palmyra series of 2015, my response to the destruction of antiquities in Syria. I had never used painting to comment on a contemporary problem before, but the destruction of Palmyra and Aleppo alarmed me. The paintings suggest the vulnerability of the archeological site as they progress through stages of sadness and despair ending in final darkness. Invoking Zenobia, the third century warrior queen of Palmyra, who fought the Romans, is something else I had not done before in painting. The series will be on view at Zürcher Gallery along with the sculptures of Wang Keping through April 29, 2016.

My impression of the new works is that, on a metaphoric level, the qualities that you describe are certainly present, as we can now see in your Palmyra series with Wang Keping’s sculptures at Zürcher Gallery. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Regina.

“Face to Face: Regina Bogat, Wang Keping” continues at Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, through April 29

The post “I Was Free To Do As I Pleased”: Regina Bogat on her Life as an Artist appeared first on artcritical.

Published this month, the catalogue for “oil painting and sun,” Suzan Frecon’s impressive recent exhibition at David Zwirner, is a fine record of the exhibition and contains a thoughtful essay by David Cohen as well as short texts by the artist that reflect on her process as well as on specific sources of inspiration. During a public conversation held in the galleries toward the beginning of the exhibition, Frecon and Cohen discussed the difficult issue of interpretation through description of her abstract paintings. What follows below is my attempt to add to this by looking in detail at the paintings presented in the exhibition.

Of the eight paintings present, lapis ordering adjacent blues (2015) and dark red cathedral (tre) (2014) are the smallest, both 29 5/8 x 24 inches. The titles, color and scale of the paintings bring to mind Frecon’s longstanding interest in the history of European painting — including Quattrocento panel painting. The half halos, as form at least — here without specific divinity — radiate color. Frecon works on graph paper drawn to scale to establish compositions with colors in mind and then in some instances makes a small painting first. Take dark red cathedral and the much larger book of paint (2015), for example. The compositional similarities are clear; the colors chosen differ however, evincing the intuitive nature of the process. Throughout the exhibition, movement of the brush and bleeds of oil from one color to the next are far from hard-edge abstraction: each change at the boundaries or variation in opacity of the color crucially adjusts a painting’s reading. A painting from 2005, four directions, can be viewed, as the title suggests, in all the orientations available for the painting. Here the painting is horizontal (the only horizontal painting in the exhibition). Its soft geometry interlocks in a maze-like way. Rectangular elements turn and repeat — subtle shifts of scale occur. It is typical that the colors (reds, blues and a green) have weight, and yet resist stasis because of both the musical or architectural stepping of shape and visible brush work. They appear “ineluctably suspended,” to quote the artist, on describing a quality she looks for in painting.

The galleries are lit with natural light for as much of the day as possible, and in the largest one are four paintings — one on each of the four walls. All the paintings measure 108 x 87 3/4 inches and comprise two horizontal, equally sized oil-on-linen panels. In each of the paintings the horizontal line where one panel meets the other is also a point at which there is a change in color. The curved shapes, situated above and below, are horizontally truncated, asymmetrical and specific to the boundaries of the panels’ abutment, which are the external edge and interior passage. The measure and proportions of the paintings — using both the geometry of the Golden Mean and an intuitive searching of relationships within it — determine size of shape, the shapes’ proximity to edge, and color. The size of the paintings insists on an embodied viewing, making it possible for the works to visually enfold viewers standing directly in front of them. The experience is physical, perceptual and meditative; each painting, as it responds to changes of light, incorporates a constant transience as perhaps corollary to the permanent fluctuation of states of being.

DUST (2014), seen obliquely on approaching and entering the back gallery reflects light from areas painted using tube paint with added oil, and absorbs light in matte areas: the relationship of positive and negative space is enhanced. Consequently, light falling onto flat surfaces that have been divided into areas of two different reflective qualities. The passage of light across a given surface is always shifting in Frecon’s paintings, becoming a component part of the paintings’ aggregated meaning. The dark reds and oranges shift tonally, and modulate light as much as the shapes themselves, that recur from one painting to the next.

A horizontal, oblate and earth-colored shape touches three sides of the upper panel of terre verte (2014). In the lower half of the painting, two greens, one lighter than the other, stretch from side to side at its upper edge; a slow curve echoes and inverts the oblate shape above. Its lower edge, a horizontal that, while forming a rectangle beneath, also appears to darken this zone along the base of the painting — like a sky before heavy rain. The idea of color is a key starting point for Frecon, so this change of color range, when compared with the warm hues of DUST, makes the impact of chroma on surface and shape emphatic. Within the relatively simple vocabulary, a variation in weight, complexity and illumination occurs that generates vivid differences. Taken together, Frecon’s work materializes the ideas that generate it — ideas about color, surface, shape and scale — the desire is for painting itself to make a self-referential, visual narrative, that is evocative of, rather than representative of, experience in the world.

In Cohen’s essay, the subject of words in relation to image is dealt with subtly and with regard to the paintings included here, while acknowledging the necessary difficulty encountered in communicating experiential and intellectual responses to some works of art. The role of light and its integral importance to Frecon’s painting is also expansively and insightfully described. Altogether this is a publication well worth waiting for and will contribute to the understanding of Frecon’s work, while marking the achievement of this exhibition.

Cohen, David and Suzan Frecon. Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015). ISBN-13: 9781941701096, 91 pages, $55

The post Light and Liminality: Looking at Suzan Frecon appeared first on artcritical.