September 6 to October 20, 2018
521 West 26 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lorettahoward.com

Much of David Row’s earlier abstraction was predicated on dark, often curved bands that meandered over textured monochromatic fields. Curves have also appeared with frequency in his subsequent development, though with each iteration they are put to surprisingly different use. Like many abstract painters, Row works in series. And this latest, of relatively small paintings, continues with the irregularly shaped canvases he has contended with for several years now, but with a few notable changes typical of his restive approach

Unlike the chromatically rich selection shown at the Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, in 2017, Row limits his palette here to a mid-range cobalt blue combined with black and white. From this narrow medley he manages to coax compelling variations by applying two interdependent rubrics: the first is the commonplace method of controlling a color’s intensity by adjusting the amount of surface each occupies; the other involves cropping painted forms—reclining Os and Xs—with multiple diagonal edges. The Os in particular, when interrupted diagonally suggest a larger shape that amplifies each painting’s scale and pictorial depth. Illusions of deep space thwart emphasis on surface, but never entirely. Between barely contained expanse and concentrated interlocking geometry these images exude a complexity one would not expect from such small panels.

Most of the nine pieces in the main gallery are less than two feet in any direction. Their compression induces a viewer to seek answers that may explicate their elaborate construction. Axis 2 (2018), for instance, teeters between resolution and near chaos depending on which spatial illusion catches a momentary optical bias.

Searching for patterns within the series, one discovers that five of the nine paintings, including Axis 2, are made of components consisting of shapes formed of three, four and five sides respectively. It’s not a hard and fast rule but occurs often enough to hook the viewer into a heightened awareness of how the shapes fit together. Such casual consistency is typical of Row’s approach to composition, as he seems willing to follow a formula so long as it produces a desired visual effect. Though his canvas shapes seem to revisit issues tackled in the 1970s by Kenneth Noland, the analytical depth to which they are subjected, particularly in this series, indicates a willingness to investigate many aspects of abstraction simultaneously. He avoids ideological traps. Pitting one abstract element against another suggests a permanent restlessness. The search itself seems to be the point.

Selectively distressed surfaces are introduced into otherwise largely hard-edged compositions without looking arbitrary or directed toward novelty. Whites are slightly dulled with embedded gray newspaper text, too small to read and often reversed or upside-down, but visible enough as body text to suggest a faint gray tone. Though unreadable, they add a temporal aspect. The speed one brings to scanning the lines produces a braking effect on one’s sensitivity to the scraping, which is gestural and thus implies quick, assertive movement. A dynamic counterpoint develops. The crater-like gouges left by granules of sand embedded in the wet paint act against the text, while the text acts against the sweep of the painted curves.

Xs and Os are not just cropped but overlapped and occasionally split. Counterclockwise, (2018) the one large piece in the show and the source of the show’s enigmatic title, imposes a black ellipse on a blue background with a large keystone-like section severed and pulled slightly out of alignment. This partial amputation forces a change in scale that might be more discovered than planned. Either way, it remains impossible to decipher which section was pulled from the other—which was the fixed element, and which has been moved. There is no way to resolve it but to recognize that Row is not after gestalt. The dynamic born of his intuitive method becomes the primary element with which a viewer engages the work. One is drawn visually into his thought processes.

Considering much of current abstract painting’s focus on spontaneity and one-off effects, Row’s tendency to revisit abstract elements embraced by earlier painters—not just Noland but Ellsworth Kelly, Dorothea Rockburne and Al Held, with whom Row shared a close friendship—may seem retrograde. But Row evidently depends on viewers willing to look beyond the superficial recognition of a style’s elements. He’s interested in how the elements function in a single painting. His aesthetic hangs off slender threads tying abstract painting to both feeling and intellect.

David Row is accessible in the best sense of the word. The way each painting in this show begs for engagement, first with itself and then with the whole series, recalls the provocative hang quotes in a magazine article that begs a full reading.

The post Noughts and Crosses: David Row at Loretta Howard appeared first on artcritical.

February 18 to April 2, 2016
525 West 26th Street
New York City, (212) 695-0164

The work of New York painter David Row has been labeled “conceptual abstraction” but the unabashed physicality of his work—of which 15 choice examples are on view at Loretta Howard Gallery—suggests “calisthenic abstraction” as an equally apt designation. This exhibition’s checklist spans the promised 40 years, from 1976 to the present, and every painting is as much a material presence as it is a pictorial conundrum.

Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” is recognizably the source for the vertical, zigzagging motif in Koloph I (1986), implying that it might imaginatively extend beyond the top and bottom edges of the canvas. A pictorial field that seems too small to accommodate the figure—that is, in which the boundaries of the canvas or panel appear to crop the image—has long been crucial to Row’s compositional strategy. Variously reiterated, it yields all manner of spatial displacement and disjunctions. But this instability is carefully controlled, meticulously planned—another paradox that only deepens the pleasure this stunning show affords.

If the truncated figure/cropped ground is the exhibition’s through-line, the clearest evolution from Row’s early years to the 1990s is coloristic. Whereas Koloph I makes its point with just three hues—a brooding blue; a dense, cold gray; and black—the surface of Split Infinitive (1993) is scraped and repainted and scraped again, producing complex optical blending. Roughly approximating mustard yellow and blue-black from a distance (and in images), the surface is streaked and flecked with pale cadmium green, teal blue and a tamped-down alizarin crimson. The painting features concentric ellipses, a signature device that emerged in Row’s work of the early 1990s. The artist’s take on the ellipse—a foreshortened circle—is described by band of unvarying width, and thus both does and does not occupy illusionistic space.

At 7½ by 12 feet, Wind Cools Itself (1996) is still more chromatically complex, resonating in both major and minor keys. The wind in question is no balmy zephyr, but a gale that howls through the painting, rattling its shutters. Across a black ground smeared with white and green a great coiling band unspools through a scraped and squeegeed zone of underlying Popsicle orange, candy pink and lime green; qualifying its dominance is a vertical panel (more oranges and greens!) in which screened grids of tiny dots buzz. It is the most unhinged painting in the show, teetering on the edge of chaos. Row admires Indian painting; this work’s title might refer to a well-known Basohli gouache-on-paper work from 1730 in which a parti-colored cleft in the rocky Himalayas encloses a swarm of serpents, and trees with dot-filled green blobs for foliage. The deep space beyond—the heavens?

A grid of rather larger screen-printed dots is way up front in Here and There (2003), laid over an interlacing of flat brushstrokes that resembles a nightmare freeway interchange seen from high above. The grid reads as a pixelated scrim, with orange on the left half, green on the right. As in other works, bifurcation suggests two sides of the same coin; “Here” might be the picture plane, “There” the middle ground into which the brushy figure recedes.

The gallery’s walls feel crowded, but it is pointless to quibble over any specific inclusion; Row’s trajectory has been rich and varied, and the gallery is not enormous. Among the surprises is Omega (1991), in which concentric ellipses in charcoal and ink are distributed across the top sheets of three intact, contiguous watercolor blocks—an unconventional use of a traditional material. It echoes the three-canvas structure of the closely related Split Infinitive, which hangs nearby. Row’s work in fresco merits mention also, particularly Dean Street Special (1990), a somber study in brick red and olive green. The eccentrically rectilinear support’s chunky thickness almost—almost—eliminates the window-like illusionism of the picture’s face.

In recent years, the artist has worked on irregular polygons with (usually) six or seven sides, of which none is perpendicular or parallel to the edges of the framing wall. This family of shapes relates to the silhouettes of the artist’s smallish, cast-glass “Lighttraps” sculptures. But an understated horizontal/vertical axis, keyed to the painting’s center, anchors the work’s equilibrium—in Elektor (2013), it provides a spectral, yellow-orange ellipse another compositional structure to confront.

The familiar claustrophobic tension of ellipses expanding outward to press against a polygonal boundary is present also in Joule (2016), but its surface (it is oil on wood panel) feels significantly less worked-over; it is fresh, even lively. A smoldering red-orange peeks out from between the inner, blackish ellipse and its whitish surround; stirred up here and there, turning pink, are traces of this underpainting, which also resides in a diagonal incision slicing across the panel from top to bottom. The humming visual energy of Joule is quite unlike that of the strenuous Wind Cools Itself, or the workmanlike problem solving of Split Infinitive, or the radiance of Elektor. Each is unmistakably Row’s, and each reveals a different side of this artist’s restless intelligence.

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The March 7 edition of The Review Panel saw Nation art critic Barry Schwabsky join moderator David Cohen, Nora Griffin and newcomer to the series Drew Lowenstein, respectively editor, associate editor and a contributor at artcritical.  Taking their cue from the overdose of Armory Week these indefatigable art journalists chose  six topics for discussion in what is a departure from normal TRP format.

Gideon Bok: Welcome to the AfterFuture
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, 917 861 7312

Elana Herzog: Plumb Pulp
LMAKprojects, 139 Eldridge Street, 212 255 9707

Julia Rommel: The Little Match Stick
Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street,212 227 2783

David Row: There and Back
Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 West 26th Street, 212 695 0164

Leslie Wayne: Rags
Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street, 212 337 3372

John Zinsser: Paintings and File Studies
James Graham & Sons, 32 East 67th Street, 212 535 5767

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September 6 to October 13, 2012
520 West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 242 0599

For at least a generation now, characteristics of the computer’s distinct appearance have been invading most aspects of existence, including how we respond to paintings. As a metaphor for the picture plane, the computer screen has joined those old standbys, the mirror and the window. In seven paintings (all oil and alkyd on linen, dated 2012) the New York-based Stephen Ellis embraces digital space as he had, in the past, photographic and cinematic space, too. Formally poised but playful in spirit, the paintings are bracing, buoyant and convincing.  This is his tenth solo exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery.

It’s not that the hues Ellis uses evoke digital color, as seen for example in the L.A. painter Patrick Wilson’s exhibition at Ameringer McEnery Yohe earlier this year. Ellis’s palette, though lively certainly, generally conforms to the familiar oil pigment range. The color dazzles in large part because the paintings look like they are backlit like a lightbox, and in an optical sense they are: ambient light bounces off the white ground (or areas of high-keyed underpainting) and passes through subsequently-applied glazes. The result—a glowing film that seems at times to detach from the substrate—is a variant of a technological light also seen in David Reed’s paintings, though unlike Reed, Ellis employs a full range of values and intensities. (Ellis is also engaged with the transformational effect of a rugged surface attack typical of David Row.)

Like all the paintings here, Untitled (39 by 60 inches) is oriented horizontally. It is subdivided and compartmentalized in a way that suggests architectonics, though not solidity; notwithstanding its many reiterations of the geometry of the support, the painting is unexpectedly unstable. The lower section centers on a magenta rectangle in a cobalt blue surround, both luminous; the edge where they meet sizzles. The magenta appears to drift forward despite the pair of dark, emphatic horizontals that pass through it and extend to the painting’s edge. Boxy rectangles of brown and brick red range across the top of the painting, alternately masking and layered under a blue glaze that is partially scraped away with an undulating but generic gesture,a programmatic “autographic mark.”  Slightly but decisively above the painting’s centerline, a horizontal bar in a stark white fully leveraged as hue occupies an ambiguous position in space even as it precludes reconciliation of the top and bottom sections.

That mechanical gesture spoofs the familiar humanistic equation of painting as calligraphy, short-circuiting paint’s plasticity and repudiating its tactility. Untitled (39 by 60 inches) features two bands—across the top and along the bottom—in which continuous, ribbon-like trails of multicolored under painting are exposed, a scraper or stiff brush having been moved through a wet bluish or purplish paint film. Their repetitious peaks and troughs evoke computer-modeled waves, mountains, or beating hearts.  Between these bands, the middle third is a steamy region of luscious coral pinks and tropical fruit colors glowing hotly and, like the painting as a whole, suggesting infinite extension in both directions.  Untitled (33 by 72 inches) combines several such iconographic/symbolic systems, including horizontal, aqua-and-orange bands, nominally gestural glazes, and off-kilter, hard-edge grids. These elements are intricately entwined but not integrated, overlapping one another yet dead flat, and pushing forward visually to the picture plane like a liquid crystal display. The overall chromatic environment is red/orange, but bits where the aqua filters through reddish glaze are—disconcertingly— the color of grape jelly. There’s an earth green in there too, a result somehow of the complex optical information the accumulated membranes of color provide.

Ellis gets a lot of mileage out of body color, as well, both alone and in combination with glazes. The smaller of two paintings titled Marine (26 by 36 inches) is the most compact in the exhibition, its scheme the simplest. The upper half is a subtly modulated field of crimson laid with a soft brush over a blue-black ground; the region beneath the sharp centerline is crowded with saucer-sized, yellow-ochre swirls applied, one surmises, with a lot of wrist action. These are scraped down while wet and hence blurred, but still discernable as figure against the surrounding dark ground. A recurrent motif in Ellis’s work, such semi-illusionistic knots of paint have in the past been endowed with a distinctly rosette-like appearance; here they could be a collection of tiny, two-tone whirlpools the color of hot sand and the deep blue sea.

The large, Untitled (48 x 84 inches) also recalls Ellis’s earlier work. Its slanted, broken grid (rendered here as faux gaffing tape) supports a scrim-like, dark-bluish expanse broken by two parallelogram apertures. These frame smudgy, remotely anthropomorphic blurs that suggest photographic distortion—overexposed negatives, or radically enlarged details. As enjoyable as it is to revisit Ellis’s erstwhile vocabulary of painterly moves, the real excitement of this exhibition is in watching a veteran practitioner of “conceptual abstraction” break into new territory by substantially expanding his technique.

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