At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

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The painting and drawing practices of Alexander Ross, always in fundamental opposition, have increasingly been cross-pollinating. The paintings create photorealist illusions, and are thus, to a high degree, preordained. They are mappings of a kind, in which, in Caroll Dunham’s appreciative phrase, Ross “systematizes rendering as a conflation of sonar and paint-by-numbers.” The images they map are purpose-made glossy digital photo-collages of Plasticine sculptures, built in turn upon ideas in the drawings. As for the drawings themselves, they are pure inventions. They grow before our eyes. And if the synthetic atmosphere of the paintings can seem anaerobic (yet so viscously seductive that one willingly forswears oxygen), the drawings are earthy and florid, drawn as if by an ecstatic 19th-century Dr. Seuss looking through a microscope and reporting back from the microbial frontier. Simultaneous gallery shows in 2008 at David Nolan and Marianne Boesky showcased Ross’s drawings in relation to his then better-known paintings, emphatically revealing their opposition, but also their mediated interdependence as stages along a continuum. Think of Ross’s linkage of methods — drawing, painting, photography, digital manipulation, sculpture, and collage — as a fan belt designed to keep his mad-scientist ideas from overheating, to the point, as has often been noted, of post-human chilliness. But a thaw was evident as far back as those twin exhibitions of 2008. Hybrid drawing-photo works, graphically outlined paintings, and color-banded pencil illusions showed that Ross was in fact beginning to put drawing and painting procedures into direct contact, step by Gregor Mendel-like step.

The new work on view at David Nolan, a decade into these controlled experiments, exhibits full chromosomal exchange: the drawings are now essentially photorealistic, while the paintings invite graphic ideas into isolated Plasticene nodules and their increasingly open-ended backgrounds. Even more, the untitled paintings denoted (AR5072), (AR5073) and (AR5075) let drawing in from the beginning, where it lays down the law. Opting out of Ross’s previously inviolable figure/ground, sky/horizon convention, these unprecedented canvases offer soft frontal grids that can be carved into. This relief space is a revival of an established drawing motif, a vertical slice through cellular gray matter that exposes visceral pockets and interrupted ducts — rendered with Ross’s familiar low-bandwidth slime-o-realism. Yet, despite the sense of hidden rot or infestation thereby exposed, the tissue wall is soft and rounded, not a wound but a specimen cultured against laboratory glass, its graphic undulations blending smoothly, almost spongily, into photorealist punctures and cavities.

Normally at such border zones Ross lays it on thick, as in another hybrid canvas, (AR5232), which places a red trompe l’oeil fungal stalk abruptly against a backdrop version of the cell-wall motif, this one scrawled by oil stick into wet ground. In the context of Ross’s slow-boat methodology this loose sgrafitto is wildly Mattissean. But even so, it’s just another map-able asset, like the piled-up ridges of his fully photoreal passages. There, his meticulous sculpting of illusion owes equal amounts to the shifty self-consciousness of Gerhard Richter and the atelier positivism of Chuck Close. Or, going wide angle, we might take bearings on the viscid leafage of Thomas Cole and the encaustic hatchings on the maps and flags of Jasper Johns — the granddaddy and the grand Dada of American landscape. In that suspiciously empty wilderness, Ross may be our best contemporary guide.

The untitled paintings denoted (AR5233), (AR5234), and (AR5235) are far more typical of Ross’s exhaustive survey of a brave new world. They adhere to his longstanding if ceaselessly tweaked convention, mentioned above, of placing foreground figures against distant looming skies. Within this controlled environment he has been cataloguing “plastic life forms,” as he calls them, for some 20 years, as well as their degree of digital chunkiness, edge conditions, focal quality, and color spread. The startling twist in these new landscapes is that… well, actually, they aren’t landscapes at all, but faces. Or at any rate, Archimboldo-esque coagulations that insist on being read as faces. A couple of them sport genuinely fleshy tongues, though whether the tongues are human or amphibian or functionally attached is up for grabs. A half-dozen drawings on view also look back at the viewer, either as masks or dimly sentient beings, or maybe phantasms of a troubled mind. Some sport tongues that, as with those in the paintings, seem to have been ripped wriggling and wet from a higher life form. These new drawings closely follow Ross’s photorealistic painting procedures, though more atmospherically, by means of delicate, interfering layers of crayon color. At this moment the fan belt seems to be turning in reverse, as the paintings are driving the drawings.

As for the in-your-face faces: pareidoliac forms have always hovered a small step from cognition in the work, but here Ross takes a giant leap into the grotesque. No longer the objective bio-lab technician, the artist stands revealed as Victor Frankenstein. But will the stitched-together features in the new work come to life? Do they imply an embryonic — maybe even hostile ­­— intelligence?

From the evidence of the strangely goofy visages, there is little to worry about thus far. The Pugsley-and-Wednesday tongues notwithstanding, a preschool Jeff Koons might have Play-Dohed the blobbier ones among them. On the other hand, the most refined of the drawings, (AR5238), is creepily humanoid, its Plasticine skull sharpened to a Neolithic spear point. Protuberant horns and blades can be found in the face-conjuring paintings too, but here the heroic landscape scale evokes distant mountaintops as much as lethal body armor. (At 90 inches tall, one canvas is, I believe, Ross’s largest ever.) Still, the sense of scale is unsettled, and unsettling: the sharp peaks are preternaturally clear, and the over-exposed highlights glare forensically.

The more you look, the more pathogenic the paintings begin to feel, as if they might be dumb, deadly parasites whose incipient facial mimicry is evolving to penetrate the defenses of host organisms. If these repulsively seductive paintings feel unhealthy to view, that is no small accomplishment, and lesser artists would stop there. Ross, on the other hand, has just opened a Pandora’s Box of drawing ideas — new spaces, new structures — that the paintings now must pay attention to. Expect further mutations.

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Art has found its place in the sun.  This week sees the tenth edition of Art Basel Miami, previewing Wednesday,  with a host of other fairs and art events also taking over the Art Deco Miami Beach neighborhood, the Design District, Wynwood and Downtown Miami.  artcritical will be covering the fairs day by day with highlights and personal reports from our regular correspondents and guests.

Art Basel Miami is the US sister event of Art Basel, the Swiss fair that has taken place on the Rhine since 1970.  The Miami iteration, launched in 2002,  quickly eclipsed the preexisting Art Miami and usurped Chicago, the nation’s previous front running expo.  Some say it has even overtaken its Swiss parent in terms of size, if not earnings.

But Miami is not just for 1%’ers, as our title cheekily implies.  With 40,000 visitors expected through this coming weekend Miami can make credible boasts to be the art Olympics.  Besides Art Basel Miami and the persistent – actually reinvigorated – original Art Miami there are over a dozen satellite (or should that be parasite?) fairs, whether informal, pop up fairs in hotels along Collins Avenue or substantial rivals like NADA, the New Art Dealers Association event, striking out at the Deauville Beach Resort in North Beach, where Rachel Uffner’s stand includes the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, or Pulse, in the Ice Palace, where Morgan Lehman features Sharon Louden.  And there are specialist fairs devoted to Asian art, photography, and design.

For all the offshoots and tolerated rivals  (in fact they are encouraged, as Art Basel even lays on free buses) Art Basel does remain the main event.  Aisle upon aisle of blue chip historic shows  (L&M Arts, for instance, with Andy Warhol drawings of the 1950s and ‘60s or Robert Miller with Louise Bourgeois) are cheek by jowl with the latest novelties, or simply fine offerings by mid-career artists like Alexander Ross, on display at David Nolan New York or Nabil Nahas at Sperone Westwater.

For the second year a group of (mostly) New York galleries will present Seven, antidote to the booth after booth overload of the biggies, in which the eponymous seven integrate their artists in a unified display.  Douglas Florian, for instance, is represented at Seven by BravinLee programs.

And this year more than others there are signs of concerted efforts to integrate all this frenzied commercial activity with museum and non-profit cultural centers across the city, offering hopefully more focused and thoughtful displays.  The Bass Museum of Art, for instance, offers a solo exhibition of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm while the reviving Miami Art Museum is showcasing Faith Ringgold paintings of the 1960s.

And many local galleries enter the fray  with curated group exhibitions.  Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art at 158 NW 91st Street presents a ten-person international line up, curated  by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, and including New York artists Franklin Evans and artcritical contributing editor Greg Lindquist.  The show is titled “you are here forever…” But as artists, collectors, dealers and casual perusers of art fair craziness must all realize, we are actually here for a weekend.

CLICK THUMBNAILS TO ENLARGE

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The shape-shifting biomorph continues its 100-plus year march at David Nolan Gallery.  Tracking the various frequencies on the pliant bandwidth of Biomorphism, Morphological Mutiny brings together paintings, drawings and prints by Steve DiBenedetto, Alexander Ross, and James Siena.  Incorporating abstraction and figuration, these three artists deliver an absorbing mix of the transformative, illustrational and apocalyptic strains in current painting.

Siena spins out maximalist effects from discreet minimal units.  His deceptively understated work yields a wealth of form and content, ranging from geometric abstract progressions and softly liquefied, optical grid flows, to cosmic-comic characters and sexualized tricksters.  In the middle zone, drawings titled Liminal Spaceand Liminal Pathway probe the ambiguous and interconnected play between unfolding space and figurative embrace. In Liminal Space, Siena dissipates form and charts the expansion of space that accompanies increasing formlessness.  Conversely, Liminal Pathway manifests embodied form that inhabits space.   Remixing high and low with a scratchy line and a fuzzy scrawl, Siena rehatches Biomorphism.  And in Angry Forms, a study sheet of five agitated shapes, he aptly insinuates a connection to Thought Forms, a 1901 treatise by Annie Beasant and Charles Leadbeater about the correspondence of emotion to shape and color.

Siena’s Earthless , with its smooth, enamel-painted aluminum surface, requires only a few seconds of attention before it works its magic and takes your breath away.   The labyrinthine spaces suddenly coalesce and rise and fall, optically vibrating as if an animated topographical map were pooling and waving its peaks and hollows.  For those interested in the psychedelic effects of retinal painting rooted in archetype, Siena offers an amazingly effective delivery system.

Across the gallery hangs Ross’s Untitled 2008-9 painting of a glam, klieg lit, sci-fi biomorph ready for its close up.   Glistening and chiseled, the figure is a world away from Siena’s expansive tail-biting interiority.  Instead, we face a caffeinated realm of enhanced, bright but relatively normative space.

Utilizing a computer collage aesthetic, Ross manipulates photo images of his plasticine sculptures and paints the results with sumptuous color and graphic finesse.  His seductive and precisely organized gradations of volume announce an ultra-mediated process.  Inspired by the microbial, Ross restyles the surrealistic figure via YvesTanguy and Gumby, shelving any vestige of automatism.  What remains is an emphatically descriptive, photo-realized affair with mutations from the lens.

In Untitled 2008-9 Ross’s highly articulated figure is set against an abstract ground; the ensuing construction of pictorial space is simple and graphic.  The preening alien seems grafted onto the decorative backdrop, an effect oddly reminiscent of Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Vogue shots of a model in front of a Pollack painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery.  In Untitled 2009 however, the ground is a dynamic field that creates a compelling tension with the figure, as both share a structural DNA that intimates the possibility of infiltration through a porous border.  It will be interesting to see if Ross will allow the figure to burst its container and break on through to the other side.

Unstable and apocalyptic, Steve DiBenedetto’s mesmerizing drawings and energetic paintings are intriguingly complex.  In DiBenedetto’s Untitled and Quantascape drawings of 2009, colored pencil and graphite seem to scatter and coalesce in rhythmic pulsations across the sheet.  Using a protean array of line and color, in which figures slip into fields, architecture and constellations, DiBenedetto distinguishes himself as one of the best drawing practitioners around.  In Untitled 2009, shape-shifting grotesques meander across the oscillating fields, and freely associate like Rorschach blots in a psychedelic blur of color.  In Quantascape the punchy and economical use of white ground nearly upends the colorful swirl of effects.

There is a method to DiBenedetto’s sympathetic and synaptically connected free flow of imagery; the continuity between the paintings is undeniable. In Untitled 2008 DiBenedetto uses a relatively modest paint application against which he incises a web-like scaffolding by drawing paint away from the surface.  White and amber paint is then reapplied to openings within and around the structure creating a golden glow. He conveys an experiential ethos reminiscent of late Surrealist paintings of the 1930’s and 40’s by the likes of Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Jerome Kamrowski.

Dibenedetto along with his comrades Siena and Ross have defined an architectural endoskeleton within the body of the biomorph, a decidedly third millennium proposition.

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Dore Ashton, Joshua Mack and Stephen Maine joined David Cohen to review Julian Hatton at Elizabeth Harris, Byron Kim at Max Protetch, Alexander Ross at Marianne Boesky and at David Nolan and Tabaimo at James Cohan.

The post April 2008: Dore Ashton, Joshuah Mack, and Stephen Maine with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

ALEXANDER ROSS
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 W 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-680-9889

ALEXANDER ROSS: Recent Drawings
David Nolan Gallery
560 Broadway at Prince Street, 212-925-6190

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 27, 2008 under the heading “Alien Resurrection”

The art of Alexander Ross is contagious on many levels. Highly prolific, his labor-intensive paintings and drawings fill both the voluminous, museumlike Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea and the Soho premises of David Nolan. There is, too, a proliferation of mediums and processes, especially in his works on paper, which have now come to include collage. His imagery is concerned with strange growth patterns, with odd cellular structures metastasizing, imparting an ominous sense of alien substances spreading like the plague. Above all, though, it is his aesthetic impact that feels diseaselike. His giddy surfaces are icky, sickly, and yet addictive.

Mr. Ross, who was born in 1960, came to art world attention in the late 1990s with imagery and a modus operandi that arrived fully-fledged and has remained you might almost say relentlessly consistent, as the display at David Nolan, which includes a room of earlier work, demonstrates. His work is populated by structures that are poised disconcertingly between the organic and the synthetic. A typical painting depicts a cluster of gooey, globular shapes that could equally be thought to have been pulled together by some erratic gravity, or else to have grown out of each other, following their own perverse morphology.

Irritatingly, for viewer and reviewer alike, the works are all untitled, but, somehow, that is of a piece with Mr. Ross’s unlovely aesthetic: These are anonymous, alien forms that discourage familiarity or empathy at any level.

Mr. Ross has evolved a way of working that entails a back and forth between specificity and generalization. He constructs elaborate models from Plastecine, photographs the models, then paints from the photographs. The drawings would seem to entail a freer, more improvisatory method.

He uses paint in a way that captures the forms’ sweat and has them glow in an intense, sickly light. His palette, like the forms themselves, trades in ambiguity, with greens that suggest vegetal growth but avoid healthy, terrestrial associations: It is the unnatural nature of a science-fiction imagination. The compositions are completely scaleless: These forms could be microscopic or the size of planets. But while scale cannot be determined, the view is always cropped: Whether honing in or offering a long view, it is implied that the form or constellation of forms continues. The implication of bigger forms intruding into the space of his drawings is accentuated, in a series at Nolan from 2007, where the bottom left corner is diagonally “amputated” as artist Carroll Dunham describes it in the exhibition catalog.

Using the gallery’s accession numbers, “Boesky 1729” (2007) is an 8-foot-high canvas in portrait format, a close-up that fills the whole composition with meticulously rendered skin. “B2071” (2007), by comparison, is a tight cluster of irregularly shaped little green nuggets wedged together in an almost circular shape, with a set against a pale blue (sky-like) ground. You get the sense of each form’s having been pinched or perforated. Similarly, in “B1212” (2006) the grooves and faceting of each form has connotations of folds and creases that are more animal than vegetable. In this composition, six distinct personages cluster together in a closely cropped all-over view, and unusually include, along with the familiar green hues, a purple, an orange, and two blues. “B2273” (2008) looks like a corner of a much bigger constellation that might be moving into the picture space. While the surrounding space is the sky-like pale blue, achieved in scumbled, painterly brushstrokes, at the bottom left of the composition, a negative space between green blobs is brash scarlet, put down in a jolting matte finish that suggests a totally different space, in a different dimension.

At multiple levels, Mr. Ross is a collapser of dualities. Stylistically, he combines high and low artforms, relating equally to art historical precedents and popular science fiction illustration. His nebulous forms hover between abstraction and representation: At a literal level, they are representations of abstract forms, painted as they are from his photographs of actual, made objects; within the realm of imagery, however, they are abstractions of somehow credible forms with a life of their own.

Art historically, Mr. Ross’s touchstone is Surrealism, but, there again, in his embrace of a movement that contained competing attitudes towards method and mode, he offers synthesis in place of dialectics. Surrealist painters were split between those, like René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, who depicted surreal themes — dreams, desires, the uncanny — in tight style, whether illustrational or academic, and others, like Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, who, though dealing with similar imagery, embraced modernist approaches that embodied the Surrealist ideals of automatism and chance effects as ways of triggering unconscious forces.

Mr. Ross’s method combines elements of both tendencies, and looks to or like images of all the artists mentioned. There is a stand-off sense of cool, rational depiction at work in the realization of images that exist a priori. But there is also a sense that the act of making in turn triggers ways that forms can grow. In Mr. Ross, in other words, there is an organic unity between form and content.

A consistent feature of Mr. Ross’s paint handling is that in selective areas he builds up what register as contours on a weather map or gradational models. This impasto is highly deliberated and therefore conceptual rather than painterly. And yet, it has a visceral effect, making for engaging, present surfaces that trigger emotional responses.

If his skill and calculation as a painter makes for workmanlike, unloved surfaces, they also make sense of his project, his coolness, his weirdness. In graphic works, Mr. Ross comes back to a different sort of life. More freely inventive, they encourage him to collide languages. Ever medium-specific, he taps different sensibilities with each tool or substance, allowing for contrastive emotional distances and degrees of investment. But still, in his production-compulsion he is like an automaton. It is as if his own, weird creations are extraterrestrial taskmasters.

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