April 27 to June 8, 2019
31 Mercer Street, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, feldmangallery.com

For the seventh time, a Bruce Pearson exhibition fills Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho with deliberate and emphatic color, convoluted surfaces that verge on sculpture, and cryptic texts which might equally be profound insights or italicized clichés. Pearson has been sifting the airwaves for signals in the noise –– or perhaps  noise in the signals –– since the early 1990s, when he first began to make complex, layered abstractions that derived from the outlines of his titles’ lettering. Fear of Death Hope of Heaven Trip to Disney and Not to Interrupt your Beautiful Moment, (2018) from the current show are typically pregnant phrases the artist has plucked from the spectrum of incessant communication, whether talk TV, Language Poetry, self-help manuals or cultural theory. Pearson also works with more epigrammatic texts which lend themselves to reflexive double entendre, such as “Loophole,” “Already Gone,” “Soon Enough,” “Fat Chance.”

The exhibition includes a number of crisp gouaches, and some intriguing experiments with photography and collaboration, but the main event is a baker’s dozen of remarkable paintings on intricately carved layers of Styrofoam that follow Pearson’s well-established practice. The hand-drawn outline of a chosen text is the germ; to this Pearson adds interfering layers of more text, geometry, and/or traced images, the latter often derived from natural phenomena. Next, Pearson transfers the densely crisscrossing pattern onto Styrofoam sheets, interpreting every line as a fault which thrusts forward while slipping backward. The newly topographical surface that results is, lastly, lavished in acrylic and/or oils with painstaking attention to every bump, sidewall and niche.

Encyclopedia 6 and Encyclopedia 7 (both 2017-18) idiosyncratically obey the constraints of an ongoing series. In these spectacular oils, the lengthy texts (available in the gallery as subtitles) have been fractured into perhaps a thousand curvy cusps and hollows, each of which is lacquered in a different hue. This anti-formula, like an adjacent mapping theorem gone rogue, creates perceptual overload, but somehow also pictorial purpose, particularly in the lush, dappled Encyclopedia 7. The title text of Code Breakers (2018) is disintegrated by swirls of illustrational overlay in a similar manner, but here the color constraint is inverse: all surfaces must be unique variants of a seductive, but unreliable, white.

In some paintings, color defies the corrugations of the surface, creating its own imagistic counterpoint. Pools of consolidated whites, blacks and greens, for example, glide over the fractured text of Shadow Language (2017) –– although Pearson, ever the cognitive dissident, lays on the watery camouflage with an acutely dehydrated touch. More consolidated still, a single high-contrast image of stone buildings from a “legendary” Catholic pilgrimage site (as the press release informs us) meshes with the strange title text in Fear of Death Hope of Heaven Trip to Disney, calling attention to the ageless affiliation of religion and theme park. The true drama of the painting, however, is in the sculptural play of positive and negative projection. “Disney” emerges almost intact at the painting’s bottom, where the word is imposingly stamped like a huge cattle brand into the wobbly, whitish ground. But ultramarine blobs and sprinkles, residue of the image, invade the letters’ tops, flipping these areas meticulously forward like periods and commas on typewriter strikers.

Pearson includes an imageless throwback, Not to Interrupt your Beautiful Moment, (2018) which appears to be part of a grid-and-text series going back at least twenty years. Here the arch, if not contemptuous title is inscribed in a mod, concentric font that disturbs a checkerboard of luminous Albers yellows and oranges, blues, grays and greens like a musical pitch generating harmonic waves in a shallow pool of water. Despite the sobriety of grid and palette, the painting oozes with demented overtones of Op and psychedelia, two much-abused art movements frequently cited in Pearson’s critical response. I’ll add here that a number of Josef Albers’s dispassionate, pedagogical works were included in “The Responsive Eye,” MoMA’s definitive 1965 Op show, and that Victor Moscoso, a founding father of the psychedelic poster, studied with Albers at Yale –– a wonderfully tangled lineage that Pearson knots in a braid.

Some paintings can be read as commentary on their own making, such as Fat Chance, (2018) Trip in Progress, (2018) and A Fresh Pair of Eyes, (2019)  the last rendered as texting acronym and featuring a forensic splatter of red. The intrusion of what might be advisory text on the anxious artwork, of subject on object, calls to mind Sigmar Polke’s hilarious “Higher powers command: paint the upper right corner black!” which ratifies its title.

Yet Pearson’s impeccably realized works are the very opposite of Polke’s anarchic facture. Raphael Rubinstein, writing in Art in America in 2009, identified Polke with “Provisional Painting,” a term with both nuance and legs that the critic coined to account for “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling.” But Rubinstein himself had put his finger on the counter-trend some years earlier in the same publication. Placing Pearson alongside generational peers including James Siena and Fred Tomaselli (and we could add numerous others, such as Joe Amrhein, Mark Dean Veca, Lori Ellison, James Esber and Charles Spurrier), Rubinstein surmised in 2003 that “By employing often eccentric techniques that are minutely detailed and sublimely obsessive, artists such as these may be looking to establish orders of excellence that don’t rely on old-fashioned formalist criteria.” Instead they looked, in part, to underground aesthetics, not only for subject matter and vocabulary, but for paradigms of non-provisional, anti-modernist craft standards. Psychedelic posters and comics, for all their counter-cultural disruption, tend to adhere to populist “orders of excellence” in which every “I” is dotted and every “T” is crossed.

Pearson’s earliest Styrofoam paintings, before he began to use text, were looming extrusions (some projected two feet off the wall) derived from the artist’s manic, bio-Baroque drawing practice. In these early charcoal drawings Pearson’s line never stops wiggling and digging, and never settles for pattern. A dense graphic texture emerges nevertheless, with visceral forms shimmying forth like specimens of disease that Art Spiegelman or Robert Crumb might have drawn as medical illustrators. Pearson’s lively hand can still be seen, although at a technological remove, in the quivering delineation of letters punched by laser into photographic scrims (in intriguing collaborations with poets Claudia Rankine and Anselm Berrigan, and photographer Zack Garlitos). These experiments put the text forward –– literally, as if the poems were sculptures in a landscape. In doing so, they focus sharply on Pearson’s hand, and on its conceptual constraints. Who knows? This relentlessly inventive artist may one day constrain his hand to disappear entirely, or to go rogue.

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May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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Joining moderator David Cohen, the panel discussed Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, T.J. Wilcox: In the Air at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bruce Pearson: Getaways at Ronald Feldman Gallery, and Arcadia: Paintings by Bill  Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries.

To view Slideshows: While we sort out a minor technical issue, please click the “video mov” icon to view slideshows; the options underlined in blue are not currently working

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November 3 to December 23, 2011
31 Mercer Street, between Howard and Grand
New York City, (212) 226-3232

For her first solo show at Ronald Feldman, Simone Jones claims Marshall Berman’s book, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, as thematic inspiration. Through diverse examples, from Goethe’s Faust to Robert Moses’ public works, Berman articulates modernity as “a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal.” This duality causes an uneasy split—you can’t have ‘the good’ without ‘the bad.’ Otherwise, creative energies are snuffed out with destructive ones. Berman’s modernity is a balancing act and always on the move.

Jones’s video installation, All That is Solid, is an exercise in perpetual motion. Projected onto four screens propped against the wall, computer-generated 3D cubes, spheres, and reductive architectural models tumble vertiginously over film noirish photos of hallways and staircases. These uninhabited transitional spaces—facilitating movement from one thing to another—have the generic, institutional feel of school/office/hospital. Even if glimpses of this ‘real’ world did possess any distinguishing features, attempts to identify them are frustrated by the shapes, which continuously expand and contract, burst on the scene and disappear just as suddenly. While the photos of old, ossifed modernity pan horizontally back and forth, the geometric avalanche only moves one way: right to left. There is, however, an exceptional moment of resistance: a small cube makes a slow break but quickly succumbs to the leftward momentum. Is this the maelstrom of modernity at work in our digital age? If so, it takes time and attention—both uncharacteristic of the current moment—to catch the breach. Accompanied by a sinister soundtrack, this piece is distinctly dystopic despite trading in a techno-pastoral currency.

End of Empire is also sinister. While this 14-minute video mimics the conditions of Warhol’s eight-hour film, Empire, times have changed since 1964. Both pieces depict the Empire State Building, but Warhol’s locked-down lens fixates on (what was) an emblem of enduring glamour and success. Jones sees the Machine Age icon differently. Her camera pans up the landmark while her crane-like robot tilts the projected image onto the ceiling. In this position, it’s possible for viewers to assume the position of tourist—feet planted, head back—a stance rarely taken by locals who do not gawk at what they take for granted. The projector then tilts back down to the wall while the camera pans down to a murky, architectural thicket. Here, the grainy base of the city’s tallest building melts into air. Supposedly, this Toronto-based artist isn’t referencing 9/11—an impossible leap for any New Yorker. Rather, Jones shares Warhol’s sentiment, “I like old things torn down and new things put up every minute.”

Representative of quick, visually explicit turnover, Jones’s piece does not illustrate Berman’s split, it embodies it. When the video makes its second upward migration, the building is gone without a trace. Even Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire (1836) left some remnants in the ravenous, vegetal wreckage. Jones’s End of Empire is neither that literal nor is it as symbolically complex as Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 (2002). Jones’s modernity—today’s modernity—is digital dematerialization; it is both good and bad.

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Daniel Kunitz, Barbara Pollack, and Irving Sandler joined David Cohen to review Laurie Anderson at Sean Kelly, Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner, Bruce Pearson at Ronald Feldman, and Sue Williams at 303.

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“Sandy Walker: Large Ink Drawings” at Wooster Arts Space until February 14 (147 Wooster Street, between Houston and Prince Streets, 212-777-6338). Prices: $2,000-$5,000.

“Jacque Rochester: Paintings” at N3 Project Space until TK (85 North 3rd Street, 2nd Floor, Williamsburg, between Whythe and Berry Streets, 718-599-9680). Prices: $500-$18,000.

A trademark Leon Golub depicts agents of repression at their brutal business: torture, pillage, execution. But Mr. Golub’s familiar imagery is an absent presence at the octagenarian’s current exhibition. Instead, Ronald Feldman has brought together two groups of works that thematically and chronologically sandwich this subject.

Mr. Golub’s Graeco-Roman Colossi from the early 1960s predate his political thug narratives, which (appropriate image) kicked in during the Vietnam era. His “Erotica, etc.” series, from the last few years, shows another side of this “existential/activist” painter, as one critical champion, Donald Kuspit, described him.

If your politics are Mr. Golub’s politics, then everything is political. But you don’t need to share his avowedly leftist stance to see that politics is the prime mover in his painting. His political views energize or enervate his art in almost direct proportion to the viewer’s own.

This is not to say that Mr. Golub is a propagandizer. He wears his allegiances on his sleeve, but his art is charged with an indignant humanism. It invests every surface and every mark with pathos and grandeur. His violence is mythopoeic, mixing specific historical references with a sense of the perennial. Mr. Golub makes art, not agitprop.

Ironically, his early work is shot through with the character of “late style” Old Master painting: a telling fusion of bravura awkwardness in drawing and lovingly invested impasto that puts you in mind of, say, late Titian or Rembrandt. (More specifically, the Colossi series recalls French painters of the postwar period – Dubuffet, Fautrier and Eugene Leroy.)

The impasto would soon be jettisoned by Mr. Golub, sometime after the Colossi series, when he started to take a meat cleaver to his canvases to scrape away and distress his surfaces. Even in these earlier works, though, with their flickering, glowing accretions of paint, there is a sense that to make the work dark and heavy was a categorical imperative as weighty for the artist as a party dictum.

There is nothing elegaic in Mr. Golub’s appeal to the classics: His colossi are appropriately chthonic. The half-dozen suitably gargantuan canvases know how to pack a punch, generating power in both the what and how of depiction.

In the touchingly enigmatic and disturbingly raunchy erotic works in the second gallery, the personal becomes political. The sexual encounters depicted and the poses struck are as much about power play as any other kind. These small drawings actually renew the moral charge that had begun to become rather stylized in Mr. Golub’s more familiar thug narratives. The overt sensuality mixed with brutalism brings George Grosz to mind. In these works he ups the ante of the moral ambiguity at the heart of painting bad things.

And yet, standing amidst the Colossi, and then wandering through Mr. Golub’s erotica, an irreverent association sprang to mind. In one of the Austin Powers sequels, a wacky interlude dwells on the private life of one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen, who gets wounded. It is a spoof on the mortal expendability of extras in action movies: The evil henchman turns out to be just a regular guy doing his job. To make the point, we see the henchman in a burger joint with his wife and friends.

Mr. Golub’s colossi and prostitutes almost ask to be read similarly: as peripheral characters in the lives of his usual dramatis personae. The ur-thug colossi are icon-heroes of his mercenaries and torturers, while the “whoroscope” of his erotic drawings present their pin-ups.

***

For further colossal depictions of bodies at play, albeit of a comparatively innocent nature, check out Sandy Walker’s impressive ink drawings a couple of blocks away at Wooster Arts Space. Mr. Walker, 20 years Mr. Golub’s junior, looks to New York School action painting, Matisse, and oriental calligraphy in his sparse, fluent, energetic paeans to movement.

Mr. Walker’s figure studies bring together a heavily loaded brush, bravura confidence, an openness to chance, and perceptual acuity. His bold, easy humanism offers action painting without angst. He favors five-foot square pages, sometimes doubling them up to five-by-10 foot, and draws from dancers and Aikido practitioners.

Mr. Walker’s line veers from the voluptuous and balletic to the nervous and awkward. There is skilful play between brushmarks that are drying out and ones that artfully blotch up. Sometimes, especially where lines accumulate in dense overlays, his markmaking can be a bit too happy with itself, but generally he is a model of economy.

The most satisfying work in the show was the smallest and slightest, “‘EF’ #1” (2003), in which an enigmatic, dislocated mark, illegible but charged with a sense of observation, pulsates like a difficult pose heroically held.

***

Jacque Rochester (b.1952) has something of Mr. Golub’s scratchy touch and muted palette, but neither his angst nor his agenda. She is showing at N3 Project Space, the offbeat gallery run since 1998 by artist James Biederman in the front half of his Williamsburg studio. Ms. Rochester’s half-dozen paintings are more striking for their diversity than unity, but the energy level is consistent.

The main event in terms of space and effort is “The Other Side” (2003-04), a 15-foot wide abstraction made up of a dense patchwork of painterly scribble that recalls both Jasper Johns’s maps and Sisley’s snowscapes. But this highly worked piece lacks the verve of the diminutive, almost insolently perfunctory pictures, the real marvel of this show.

Next to the big canvas is “Missing” (also 2003-04) a quirky, inscrutable, nonchalant little panel, a smudge in blacks and grays packed with spatial ambiguity and a sense of enigma.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 22, 2004

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Bruce Pearson: Paintings & Drawings” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts until June 14 (31 Mercer Street, at Grand Street, 212-226-3232)

It takes a real pro to pull together a group exhibition that identifies a significant trend in contemporary art. That is what veteran curator Maurice Tuchman (formerly of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has done in an important show, High & Inside, which closes this weekend at Marlborough Chelsea.

The ostensible commonality binding these nine artists, according to catalogue essayist Judd Tully, is “mapping, scheming, surveilling and plotting.” Each artist in his or her way balances the yin of the microscopic and the yang of the telescopic – although how quaint these scopes now seem in an age where DNA and satellites define our horizons.

However much they respond to the notations of geography, geology, sociology, or cell biology, these artists, who mostly emerged in the 1990s, are anything but a throwback to the systems-obsessed 1960s and 1970s. (Unless, of course, they are intent on adding a layer of retro-reference to already dense stylistic configurations: the peel-on readymade abstractions of Brad Hampton, for instance, simultaneously satirize the artistic formalism and techno-gimmickry of the 1960s.)

The artists in this show are post-conceptual in their concern to reintegrate the cerebral and the optical. Even the two flow-diagrammists among them, Beth Campbell, who makes tree of life configurations out of terse statements of variable outcomes to simple life situations, and Mark Lombardi, with his persnickety conspiracy-theorist constellations analyzing international monetary investments, avoid the anesthetic anti-form drudgery of vintage conceptualism. Their handwriting, their touch, has formal significance that integrates with the (superficially) predominant “message” or narrative in their work.

Others in the show veer in an opposite visual direction, towards overload: It is not form giving shape to information so much as information rendered as form. Steven Charles, for instance, paints gaudy, pseudo-psychotic contour lines that glow in enamel paint. In a meltdown of layers and categories, manmade roads and geological strata splice into one another.

In “High & Inside,” artists make raw form out of cooked information. In semiotic terms, they turn signifieds back into signifiers. You could argue, of course, that is what collage has been doing since Picasso and Braque discovered it. But here it is not just objects but systems that are being abstracted. Lisa Corinne Davis and John J. O’Connor make pretty patterns out of ugly data: racial stereotyping in her case, disasters and social vices in his. It is left to Fred Tomaselli and Daniel Zeller to force an equation between method and madness, making a magical connection between density of data and the zaniness with which their work is crafted. With Mr. Tomaselli, this has to do with the trance-like effect of his psychadelic collages, where high and inside are psychological states as much as depictive prospects. With Mr. Zeller, the nutty banknote-engraver obsessiveness of his renderings of aquifer retention maps unites form and content, as both bring to mind desperation and dryness.

***

Bruce Pearson’s new show at Ronald Feldman makes something truly sumptuous out of semiotics. Like the High Insiders discussed above, he comes out of an aesthetic investigation of language and systems. In terms of reduction versus complication, he and his peers are to conceptual art what Baroque was to the Renaissance. Put a better way, they put back with a vengeance the opticality shunned by conceptual art.

Mr. Pearson came to public attention in an important group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art project room in 1998, in which Mr. Tomaselli was a co-exhibitor. He is also part of the Williamsburg scene where the trailblazing gallery, Pierogi, exhibits Messrs. Charles, O’Connor, and Zeller. In Mr. Pearson’s work, however, it isn’t mapping but language that is deconstructed to head-spinning and eye-dazzling effect.

He appropriates wacko statements from the mass media. These have gotten tamer recently but a suitably off the wall example from the current show is “Cybergasm machines and male hysteria.” The typography is subjected to computer-generated distortion (not enough, regrettably, in some recent pieces where legibility threatens the balance of power between texture and text.) From these patterns, letters are hot wired in Styrofoam. The eventual carved and contoured surfaces are painted in scorching fluorescents and other funky hues.

His modus operandi and how it influences our view of what he is doing may seem to have a whiff about it of the kind of art for which you need to know the process to understand its point. But the first and last impression of a Pearson is sensual, not cerebral. Mercifully, in other words, there is madness in his method. There’s a compelling, psychedelic otherness at play in what could read as lunar landscape or nuclear fission.

One has to go back to Jasper Johns to find a visual artist so intently locking horns with type as a visceral, physical presence. It is almost tempting to read Mr. Pearson’s project as a riff on Mr. Johns, sending up the grayness and monotony of the older artist. But unlike so much art of the last few years, this isn’t conceptual art with a smile. Rather, there is a sense of something much bigger: the reinvention of abstract painting.

The key to understanding Mr. Pearson’s achievement – and that of the best among the “High & Inside” artists – is to realise that language and system and mapping are at the service of form, not the other way around. In a way, the semiotic and the systemic are to their abstraction what gesture was to the first generation New York School: something at once arbitrary and personal, determined yet unconscious, circumscribing yet unpredictable, and equally about structure and chance.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 5, 2003

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