In my favorite childhood book, Gods, Graves and Scholars, by C. W. Ceram, there is a description of the 19^th century excavation of an Etruscan tomb in which the heavy human-form cover of the sarcophagus is lifted and falls back to reveal an Etruscan warrior sitting, fully fleshed, as if he had been placed there a day earlier.  Once the air touched the corpse it dissolved, leaving nothing but some dust and armor. I was reminded of this fairy-like story while visiting the studio of Carin Riley, to look at a series of drawings and paintings she was preparing for her exhibition Adaptive Traits at the Smudajescheck Gallery in Ulm, Germany.  Riley has focused many of her drawings and a grey and white acrylic painting, Grey and White Athena (2013) on the fibule, a highly practical piece of jewelry that was a centerpiece of Etruscan attire. Literally and figuratively this giant proto safety pin was the center that held the costume together.  So I reasoned there was probably a fibule on that gloriously ephemeral warrior’s chest.  And when he melted slowly into clouds of dust, his bodily form became an abstract assemblage of hammered gold.  Riley’s paintings are exactly this: an abstraction and diagramming of natural forms, the fibule linking a constellation of shapes which are both abstractions of limbs, but also concepts—the passage of days and seasons and the elements.

Adaptive Traits, which is on view until the end of October 2013, is an amalgam of Carin Riley’s preoccupations: the evolution of cognition; Chinese astrology; and classical and pre-classical form and symbol.  In the end she returns to the idea of the emblematic medium that represents the idea, and then the further iteration of that medium represented in paint or drawing.  Her wood appliqué drawings utilize paper-thin slivers of wood that unite a monochromatic ink drawing.  Wood is one of the five Chinese elements, but within the context of the drawing it represents not only the growing living element (versus fire, metal, earth and water) but a nexus and center-point in a drawing that is part diagram of the cosmos as well as map of the human psyche. As Riley says, “It’s a way in.” The bulbous circular drawn forms revolve and expand from the wood, imitating its shape and cellular structure. They pay homage to the “real” object, even which wood it is: walnut, teak, or cherry, much as the Etruscan-themed paintings utilize the fibule as an object as well as an idea.

Riley’s studio is a long white space, a corridor of sorts.  One drawing and one painting are worked on at a time, and though she works in series, each piece is not a variation of its predecessor, but a completely different entity—this becomes apparent when the pieces are dissected intellectually—though visually similar, the metaphysical groundings vary wildly, and incorporate multiple textual and cultural readings.  The forms may be taken from a classical Roman torso, but the silver in the grey background activates the metal element in Chinese orthodoxy. Roman mosaics are the newest source of inspiration; a floor from a Villa at Tor Marancia—a menu-like composition of fish, fowl, dates and asparagus.  The sense of volume and color that was achieved by ancient craftsmen placing multicolored stones adjacent to each other, a truly abstract process, are deconstructed in Riley’s grey and white palette. In her words: “It was stop-start, the mosaic created a new way of breaking up the space.” Images from mythology, symbols of bounty and prosperity, and the virtuosity of the medium, are transformed into simple fluid diagrams and abstractions in Conversation/Still Life (2013), a reversal of the assembling of the image in a certain sense—an insistence on destroying the illusion. That the Romans were obsessed with illusion—the walls and floors of their villas dissolved into landscapes and idylls, grottos inhabited by dolphins and sprites, is almost impossible to reconcile with our own concept of what art is, and Riley takes the Romans to task for their affection for what is decorative and ultimately escapist, demanding a more intellectual and symbol laden reading than perhaps the ancients were willing to admit, at least in the profane work with which they decorated their homes.

Carin Riley studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago in the 1970s with John McCracken, Richard Artschwager, and Robert Mangold. The simplicity with which these artists express themselves—the bold blunt statements, especially Artschwager’s doors and furniture pieces, can be seen in her dedication to the clarity of medium. Ink, though brushed and swirling in a calligraphic gesture, does not hide its natural predilection to flow and pool; similarly, the appliqués are a pure and honest use of the wood. For Riley, Lao Tzu sums it up when he compares living the right life (and here we apply this to painting and drawing as well!) to the flow of water: “of all things the most yielding can overwhelm that which is of all things the most hard.”

Knarr: The Vikings, a group show curated by Carin Riley is on view till May 9 at the Queens College Art Center. 65-30 Kissena Blvd. Queens, New York. Telephone: (718) 997-3770

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January 18 to March 2, 2014
92 Plymouth Street at Washington?Street
Dumbo, Brooklyn, 718 834 – 8761

The factory floor that is Smack Mellon’s Piranesi-like main space cannot but play itself, and many remarkable installations have issued from the challenges of its remote nooks and crannies. The space seems particularly filled up in Rob Hickman’s emptied-out installation, DMMDIA. Spanning an enormous wall, Hickman’s 3-D, polyhedral mirror sculpture reflects, infinitely fragmented in its pyramidal teeth, one of the most extraordinary art spaces in the city, not forgetting its spectacular view.

Hickman adds no extraneous glitz, just a concentrated rectangle of it. Museum-scale horizontality is emphasized by the artist’s careful treatment of the sculpture’s 48-foot long top and bottom edges, cleanly sliced off by coincident planes of polyhedra. A regular march of spikes reveals itself at this surgical boundary. If the interior is somewhat “soft” in its razor-sharp geometry, these rows of protrusions bring to mind the rhythmic menace of a diamond-studded dog collar.

DMMDIA’s combination of savagery, elegance, and gaudiness can stand for a legacy of subterranean Brooklyn clubland, in which, for a quarter century, mirror-ball party culture has gotten enthusiastically satirized by DIY artist-entreprenueur-participants. Hickman is a first-wave insider of the Williamsburg scene, at any rate, and visitors are free to imagine DMMDIA lording it over a dark, noisy warehouse – a rave avant la lettre. But silence and broad daylight work just as well, the sculpture casting a glittery, fracturing spell over the eternal now –– like “retinal shrapnel” in the vivid words of the press release. Therefore, a suggestion to Smack Mellon: In the spirit of Warhol’s Empire and Marclay’s The Clock, why not schedule an all-night viewing of DMMDIA? Begin with a wild party and end with sleeping bags and hangovers.

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January 22 to February 22, 2014

515 West 24th Street
New York, 212-206-9300

Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle’s source images are most likely not trending on Instagram. His trademark subjects, when reviewed as a list, sound tearfully forgettable: parked cars, covered parked cars, middle class suburban houses, trees, peopleless streets. Yet, he conjures something moving and miraculous with these ascetic ingredients. The watercolor Six Cars on 20th Street (2007) centers on a beige, empty road that fills the picture to the brim, save for a small glimpse of blue sky in the corner. A few precisely placed, transparent cars are enjoying small patches of shade, leisurely anchored to San Francisco’s hilly street as if casually immune to gravity. It feels as if the very Californian sun it portrays dried off the paint. Bechtle’s nonfiction of the most overlooked moments in life can send viewers to the verge of panic about becoming enthralled by the beauty of sheer banal insignificance.

Bechtle’s current exhibition at Gladstone Gallery provides a much-needed respite in a world serving up artworks constantly growing bigger, louder, and more ingratiating. The artist himself sheepishly peers out from one of the few oil paintings in the show, Bob’s Sebring (2011), next to a silver convertible a bit too snazzy for his outfit, in front of a square garage. Born in California in 1937, Robert Bechtle seems to have arrived at his minimal subjects and technique after carefully rejecting all that was cool. He was exposed to German art while serving as an army private there in the 1950s, and enjoyed Pop art shows at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962. He purposefully avoided Richard Diebenkorn’s painting courses while studying at the California College of Arts, in fear of becoming influenced by his contagious energy. After some short-lived trials, he found his long-term subject: keenly scrutinized painted portraits of everyday cars and empty streets, based on snapshots. The paintings are furnished from a Kodachrome, sun-bleached palette, and a seemingly interminable supply of time.

Most of the paintings in the show are based off of images taken in San Francisco and the Northern California suburbs in its vicinity, where the temperature dial is locked at 55 degrees and the sun’s simplifying rays expel clouds, distinguishable seasons, and palpable deadlines. The time of Clay Street, Alameda (2013) appears to be just past noon according to its telling, jewel-blue shadows. The supposed subject matter lingers at the edge of the well-measured composition, perfectly skewed to avoid approaching the edge of motion. Car-lined streets extend to the horizon as people patiently await the discovery of worthwhile destinations. Brief, poetic painterly details do not awaken their enervation; rhythmic telephone wires drape past the sky like garlands, and the unevenly trimmed canopies are feathered by brilliant numberless shades of green. A dirty, rectangular blotch in the middle of the street hides an attempt to restore something -– what sort of excitement could have possibly disturbed this neighborhood? Meanwhile, the still sunlight embalms the scene like room temperature formaldehyde, so clear it’s practically negligible. The photographic qualities of this work are apparent, but the shutter’s ability to capturing fleeting moments is irrelevant as time itself seems to be immobile anyway.

For Bechtle, a stationary mobile car is a powerful symbol of ennui. The watercolor Covered Car on De Haro Street (2013) is accompanied by an almost identical charcoal incarnation, Covered Car on de Haro Street II, where every grain of paper is mobilized for expression. This miniature portrait of a parked car, humbly presented in a size befitting the deceptively minor subject, is possibly the most immediately arresting work in the show. In a view reminiscent of that from the spontaneous cropping by a surveillance camera, a shapely cluster of spectral yellow tarp covering a vehicle is suspended on a slanted street, triggering a gentle, engaging instability. There is something weighty and insouciantly sublime about this unmanned outline of a car and its Hopper-esque stillness. Momentarily, this effort to alleviate sun damage assumes the mysterious tick of a filled body bag, but imaginative viewers might be disappointed by its content: it is probably just another Sebring.

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