September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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Leslie Wayne is known for the vivid density and colorful materiality of her work, most recently a collection of what she called “paint rags” which hang from the wall, and are actually made of many layers of paint. Her latest work, on show at Jack Shainman Gallery through October 21, has undergone a marked change: there’s larger scale of image and an intensified playfulness with modes of representation and with process.

ELENA SISTO: I love the way humor is fore-fronted in this new work. You’ve scaled up your subject, slowed it down and gone directly for the comedic instead of sleight-of-hand.

LESLIE WAYNE: I’m told that I was the family clown as a child. I do love making people laugh and I am mad for puns. Having said that, I can’t claim that I decided in advance to make funny paintings. Perception has been at the crux of my thinking about this work, trying to dislodge the viewer from their expectations. Humor is just one tool among many, but it’s a seductive one and I love using it.

I enjoy playing with the relationship between language and the conceptual core of the painting. For example, in (W)resting Robert I’ve painted an image of a metal chair in my studio which takes up the entire space of the panel, making the panel in effect the chair itself. Then, draped over the back of the panel/chair are various sheets of paint that resemble fabric, the most prominent being a copy of an early Robert Ryman painting. I’ve wrested his painting from my pantheon of idols and laid it to rest on the back of my studio chair. I’ve moved on!

I like words that function as both adjective and verb. For instance, the word free in Free Experience functions that way. Or I’ll play with a word as it relates to an idea in a painting. It might sound like it could be the subject of the painting if you hadn’t read it. Would for example begs the question–would water really come out of a fence like that? But it also sounds like the word “wood.” That’s funny to me.

Is the humor a purely personal development? Or are you responding to politics? You have one painting of a window through which I see what looks like a melting atmosphere. Does it relate to climate change?

You’re talking about Snowmageddon. That painting started out as an homage to the Ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai. I happened to finish it right after the last major snowstorm of the winter, hence the title. I am keenly aware of our environmental crisis, but that is as political as my work gets. At one time I worked with an ocean conservation group and my paintings during that period dealt with issues of sustainability and climate change. It’s never far from my mind, however it’s not really the focus of this body of work. But who could possibly ignore the politics of this moment in time?! It’s insane!

What are some of the other tools you might use to dislodge the expectations of the viewer? And why is that important to you?

Using trompe l’œil and abstraction alongside dimensional verisimilitude is pretty interesting – mixing it all up, like in the piece entitled Wood. I wondered how many different ways I could describe a subject in one painting. I wanted to surprise myself as well as the viewer. That was important to me – to free up the experience for both of us.

It’s important to be surprised and delighted by something visual in the real world, as opposed to the virtual or the digital world. Painting has the power to do that – to make you see something you think you know in a completely new way.

You’ve been working and showing for quite a few years. Have you been involved with any long-term underlying themes?

The two consistent driving forces in my work have been nature and perception. The subject of nature has to do with my having grown up in California-its particular sense of color and light, and a specific relationship to the landscape and geology: earthquakes, giant Sequoias, the desert and the Pacific. There’s also a kinship with craft and materiality that is uniquely West Coast. Even the most conceptually driven work of many West Coast artists has been grounded in phenomenological experience rather than theory. Robert Irwin is a great example. Maybe that’s where part of my interest in perception comes from. One of my favorite books of all time is Lawrence Weschler’s “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I want my paintings to make you forget language, even while I’m punning!

Do I see intimations of Léger, Guston, Oldenburg? Are the paintings more Pop?

Guston, yes, but Pop is not a reference, unless you’re talking about Duchamp as the forefather of Pop. He was a driving force in my last body of work. Guston gives everyone permission to move from abstraction to figuration. I studied painting and drawing in a traditional manner. I’ve been trying to bring that deeply satisfying activity of observational image making back into my work, in a way that makes sense given my very peculiar process.

Your process is unique. The only person I can think of who has used paint similarly to you is Scott Richter, in his older work. How do you make a piece?

Richter was involved with a kind of spectacular accumulation of massive amounts of paint on a surface. Those tables were pretty dazzling. I use what some consider a massive amount of paint, but I’m not interested in the accumulation of it per se. It’s the ways in which the paint can be manipulated to resemble forms in nature that interests me–using paint to create dimension disarms and surprises the viewer, because of the way it mimics the object it represents in the real world. I’ve manhandled paint in many different ways over the years, mostly by building up thin layers of color and then doing things like scoring, peeling, scraping, folding, draping and collaging it. But I’m not interested in describing my process. It’s not that it’s a secret. It just detracts from what I think should be the driving experience of looking at art–being transported.

You mention a West Coast-type phenomenological approach. Could you explain why it’s important? 

Southern California was a magical place to grow up. Blue skies every day, temperature a steady 73°F year round, beach to the West, desert and mountains to the East. Even my most vivid memory of an earthquake is dreamy, as I recall the street I was standing on and the whole neighborhood becoming like the deck of a ship, gently rocking back and forth for several long minutes. My sensibilities were honed on my physical experience of the world, not on ideas. I’m not particularly intellectual, and that plays out in my approach to making art. Having said that, my work is decidedly not about process, it’s more about a desire to make the material connect with the subject in a visceral way.

Who are some of the artists you admire? I see references to different textile traditions–African for one.

I do love textiles and textile designs from around the world. They inform the more decorative aspects of my work. The term decoration has suffered from quite a lot of cultural bias. I don’t see myself as belonging to the Pattern and Decoration school, but I do find that pattern is a universal vehicle that everyone can take deep pleasure in.

Forms in nature have long been a source, but I’m moving away from that now. I’m drawn to a wide gamut of artists who are peculiar and unique in different ways. Right now an image of a beautiful Mamma Andersson painting is informing a new work; also a photograph of Rodney Graham in a tux sitting at a set of drums with a plate of steak and peas, which is hilarious. I often revisit Elizabeth Murray or Martin Puryear for inspiration or look through books of Matisse, Stuart Davis or Charles Burchfield, just to snatch up bits of imagery. There’s no denying a relationship between my work and that of my husband, Don Porcaro. We are in each other’s studios all the time. Mostly I like to see what my colleagues are doing, and what the next generation of artists are making and how they are thinking. On the one hand it’s an embarrassment of riches to have so much to look at. On the other it’s overwhelming to the point of distraction. Then I re-focus in the studio and remember what it is I do best. And that’s all one can do, right?

Do you have any rules for yourself in the studio?

Yes I do actually. Accomplish at least one thing.

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April 7 to May 14, 2017
221 Madison Street, between Rutgers and Jefferson street
New York City, reginarex.org

If the first impression of this exhibition is that these are standard monochrome painting that would be understandable. The ten works on display, most of which are two by three feet, are dark gray and harbor nothing we’d call images. But give them some time and they take on a very different aspect, as Haynes orchestrates light and dark pigment to form, as the press release stated, an “investigation into the painted illusion of light”. Most of her canvases are demarcated by a left/ right blended fade between various blacks and shades of gray creating a luminous effect. Brush marks inhere at the top and bottom of the canvas, tactile reminders of her painting process that also function as painterly highlights. With Haynes’s emphasis emphatic use of chiaroscuro the paintings evoke dawn and twilight and exude elegiac, romantic atmosphere.

Nancy Haynes emerged as a painter at the beginning of the 1970s. At that time much was made of the “death of painting” but in distinction to that discourse there was, for a number of artists, the conviction that painting—and its historical mode—deeply mattered. It’s hard to imagine that urgency today but abstraction at that time wasn’t so much a stylistic choice as a commitment with the gravitas of political belief or religion. Like older generation painters Robert Ryman and Marcia Hafif, Haynes keeps the faith even as she reworks the orthodoxies of that most severe form of painting—Minimalist monochrome—to her own ends. This show embodied a fascinating tension between Haynes’s half century commitment to the concrete specifics of material and process connoted by monochrome painting and her own interests in metaphor, poetry, philosophy and pictorial abstraction.

While it is possible to view these paintings as pictures of light, Haynes is also deeply interested in intrinsic material qualities of paint. The sides of the panels are often painted in tune with the picture front. Haynes adjusts the matt and gloss of her painting mediums such that the surface reflects more or less light depending on the angle of vision, generating a phenomenological analogue for Haynes’s rendered shading.

And even as one is persuaded that light is being rendered in Haynes’s paintings, the work never reaches the threshold of a convincing illusion of light. Nor is it possible to say if Haynes’s light is of the interior or landscape variety—indeed each painting is so adjusted, that, like the interchangeable image of the duck-rabbit, Haynes’s portrayal of light alternates between atmospheric gloaming and the deflection of light from architectural surfaces. Oddly, rather than making the light seem general or vague with prolonged observation the light in each painting becomes more particular. In final consideration, the light of Haynes paintings is specific only to her paintings.

Through a metaphysical sleight of hand Haynes’s paintings succeed through their ultimate failure to create illusion or to portray. With the collapse of these pictorial conventions it is the paintings themselves that are left to develop a related but independent vision of light. Haynes exploits the insight that paintings are, in essence objects that variously filter, absorb and reflect light. Haynes signifies light in her paintings even as actual light in the room is required to see them. The specific critical term for this recursion of form embedded with its facsimile is Mise-en-abyme. Indeed, one of the paintings in the show bears that title.

For Haynes light is both the dynamic and the matter of painting: abstraction and concreteness. This has been a long running idea for her, as can be seen with her use of glow-in-the-dark pigment in works begun in the early ‘70s. While those luminescent paintings were firmly grounded in the discourse of monochromatic painting of their period, subsequent works advance a very different form of abstraction, one that Haynes constructs through distilling her observations of light. With her latest show Haynes entwines very different conceptions of abstract painting. We can enjoy at one and the same moment her love of brush and oil paint, her personal poetics and a philosophic reverie on the mechanics of light in painting.

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December 9, 2015 to July 29, 2016
545 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 989-5566

A long time ago, in the last century, Robert Ryman, now 85, was in the vanguard of artists exploring what were then thought to be the basic components of painting. Though a rigorous formal approach to painting of this kind no longer occupies the esteemed position it once did, there remains a church of true believers who maintain a steadfast devotion to this esoteric practice.

Recently Dia:Chelsea has mounted a show of 22 Robert Ryman paintings ranging from 1958 to 1984/2002. This provided the opportunity for an experiment. Is there anything of relevance to be gained in looking at this work today? Can we find a creative way to encounter it? What is new that can be seen and thought about when looking at a Ryman?

Peter Schjeldahl in his New Yorker review of this exhibition points to a dilemma:

Ryman’s reductions of painting to basic protocols are engaging only to the extent that you regard painting as an art that is both inherently important and circumstantially in crisis. You must buy into an old story, which bears on Ryman’s extreme, peculiarly sacramental standing in the history of taste.

But is that actually true? Do you really have to buy into that old story in order to appreciate his work? When I came to New York as a young painter in the mid 70s, this deconstructive approach to painting was not only compelling, it was the only game in a town that still saw itself as the center of the artistic universe. But the austerity of this examination struck me, even then, as too hermetic, and today this approach may seem the equivalent of taking apart a watch, getting rid of those confusing gears, reordering its face and case, and achieving something more sophisticated than its former time-telling function. Because critics also referred to it as ABC art, I more optimistically thought the evolution of this idea would be to make paintings that were sentences, paragraphs, and complex stories—while still assimilating the rigorous decision-making that defined this process.

So many different approaches to painting have been explored since then, and yet this does not lead to a peremptory dismissal of Ryman’s work. In front of the actual paintings, we find a strong gravitational pull into close inspection of these mysterious objects. The works, though united in such primary concerns as the idea of whiteness, of paint application or the nature of supports, vary pointedly and peculiarly from one another. It’s a shame they are not hung chronologically, as the focus of the work has evolved and changed.

For all of Schjeldahl’s “reduction … to painting’s basic protocols,” it is striking how easily we are diverted from Ryman’s announced project of only presenting the materials he has employed at their face value. Seven of the earliest paintings here, dating from 1958 to 1962, are involved with using white paint to cover over, paint out, obliterate or subtly reveal a prior painted surface. This is a complex, metaphoric activity. To paint a layer that will then be hidden isn’t exactly dispassionate, but conveys paradox, secrecy, or censoriousness in its act of concealment and cancellation. The performance of painting throughout this show almost always entails movement that feels spontaneous, improvised and expressive, hardly conforming to the mood of quiet meditation that has come to be associated with Ryman’s work.

Paintings are not what they first seem. Untitled #1003, 1960-61, has a scarred, mostly thickly painted white surface. The paint application varies from individual small, thick brushstrokes to large troweled-on areas, to marks incised in wet paint. This all appears to be covering over under-painting of mostly celadon with various other hues also bleeding through. But close examination reveals that some of the colored pigment is not in fact “bleeding through” at all but rather is painted on top of the white even though it appears to be an artifact of an earlier layer. Such stark dissembling struck me as a rather curious development for a painter celebrated for his anti-illusionistic “honesty.” So much for “what you see is what you get.” The gaze that is induced makes one feel like a skeptical detective questioning an unreliable witness. Suddenly this modest little painting is more devious than one supposed, and makes one scrutinize all the work with suspicion.

Upsetting the usual vertical wall attachment, there is one curious piece in particular, Pair Navigation, 1984/2002, which first appears as a white square levitating a foot from the floor and jutting out from the wall. Abutting a wall with other works whose 3-dimensional presence is emphasized, it is supported by aluminum rods at either corner, making it seem like an expensive coffee table. Looking closer it appears that the central white painted square has a mirrored margin. Ryman may think he has overcome illusion, but the floating effect is partly achieved by other, invisible, rods, which secure the end into the wall. The painted fiberglass surface itself is invisibly suspended on a recessed piece of wood above what we learn is a polished aluminum rather than mirrored surface. Incidentally, the entire underside (visible only if you get down on the floor and peer under it) is also a reflecting polished aluminum.

Metaphor and representational content in Ryman have been raised before, though apparently ignored. In an article in Art in America in January 1994, for instance, which covered a Ryman retrospective at MoMA, Christopher S. Wood referenced Jacques Derrida’s notion that “the white European replaced the ancient truths of story-telling and poetic transformation with pale and bloodless abstract philosophy—-a ‘white mythology.’”

It often looks like Ryman is doing just this. But in fact no paintings are less metaphysical, less anemic. A little close looking pumps them full of blood. All their yearning is filtered through a human gesture, a web of cracks, a film of dust, a workman’s thumbprint, and above all through the tracks of the hairy brush. Meaning never untangles itself from the physical phenomenon. And in the gestural traces especially, an old mythology—an earthy and sanguinary mythology—rises again to the surface.

And speaking of sanguinary, even the seemingly straightforward Arista from 1968 is not the simple piece of lightly painted linen stapled directly to the wall. It is impossible to avoid the sense of whispered narration and history contained in this piece. Given the number of unfilled staple holes that somewhat arbitrarily ring the canvas, it appears that it has been fixed to a wall many times before, and it is hard not to imagine that installation drama continuously re-enacted. Apparently the exhibition installers do not create new holes but reuse some (but not all) of the same existing ones.

But the narrative does not stop there. Somewhere about a third of the way down the right edge of the linen, exists an anomalous tiny yet noticeable dark red mark in the shape of a candle flame. Could it be a single drop of dried blood? How did it get there? Was a finger injured when a staple was removed? If a mere installation accident, a conservator could have easily fixed it, so its presence seems deliberate. In a work of art whose parameters are so reduced and specific, it becomes such a glaring moment that Ryman could have painted it there. A purportedly abstract, conceptual work of art comes to double as forensic evidence, with all the melodrama that implies.

Schjeldahl, generationally positioned between Ryman and myself, may not be able to transcend the insularity of aesthetics he has absorbed in appreciation of Ryman. But the rise of a style of abstract painting valued primarily for the emptiness of its visual structural content, labeled by Walter Robinson as Zombie Formalism, makes it imperative that we embrace a more complex reading of Ryman. His paintings really do reward close scrutiny, not with mere empirical information but with complex and contradictory thinking and feeling.

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Michelle Kuo, Mark Stevens, and David Levi-Strauss joined David Cohen to review Mike Nelson at 303 Gallery, Joan Jonas at Yvon Lambert, Anya Kieler at Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Robert Ryman at PaceWildenstein.

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Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves
Knoedler & Company until January 29 (19 E. 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-794-0550).

Just as representation alters the way we view reality, abstraction has the same effect on representation itself: it has never looked the same again. Cézanne has us seeing shimmering facets fluttering in the landscape; Alex Katz has us acknowledge our social circle as so many crisp, cartoonish cutouts. Similarly, abstract painters make us read the efforts of older masters on their own nonrepresentational terms.

Abstraction is the great disengager of mark and color and gesture, subjecting them to a kind of pit-stop in their race to represent the world, giving us a moment, in concentrating on them, to savor them as things in themselves. A couple of shows up right now, recent paintings by Robert Ryman and late seascapes by Milton Avery, have the potential to upset the apple cart of art history and make us rethink the relations of abstraction to depiction — or, rather, they offer a timely reminder that abstract painting belongs to a “bigger picture” in which depiction remains the paradigm.

Both shows are stunning, and it’s worth crossing town to see them on the same day.

Nowadays, any painterly accretion of white looks Rymanlike, even if it is engaged in the work of depiction. Mr. Ryman is the artist who always comes to mind, for instance, when I look at Edward Hopper’s “Lighthouse at Two Lights” (1929) at the Metropolitan Museum , with the white of its tower thrust into the bright Maine sky. “It is important that painting always be new for me,” the usually reticent artist writes in an expansive preface to his show at PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea gallery. To aficionados, each new series of Rymans represents a significant departure, as the artist is ever setting himself fundamental issues to address. Even skeptics, though, will concede a new spirit animates his latest paintings: Expansive is again the word, as by his standards the paintings are atmospheric (almost impressionistic, even), prodigious in scale, compositionally busy, and colorful.

White, as we know, is not quite technically a color; in Mr. Ryman’s handling of it, though, it become more than one: It is motif, an aspiration even. Many of his trademark works consist entirely of white paint, whether pummeled or thinly applied, painterly or transparent. His last show of new paintings, in 2002, introduced quite startling colors in the grounds that peeked around his edges. Now the grounds are really starting to stand up for themselves, yet white continues to predominate.

Mr. Ryman draws a distinction between his previous use of white and his current one, however. “It may seem strange that I would now be making white paintings when I have seemingly been making ‘white’ paintings for some years. In the past I have used white a neutral paint, but in these new paintings I decided to actually paint white.” Everything Mr. Ryman does is at some level a philosophical tease: Is there, in fact, a difference between using a color and painting it?

The real tease here is that when he wasn’t actually concerned with white, he was literally “in” it, whereas now that he is thinking about it, he is removed from it. Proof of the pudding is the introduction of other colors (the rich, dark grounds). He turns upside-down Jackson Pollock’s romantic conviction that he wasn’t portraying or depicting nature, but that he *was* nature. This doesn’t stop these new Rymans from *looking* romantic. Some are almost Whistlerian or Monet-like in their foggy, shimmering effects. He may have forged his career on a set of conceptual and post-Minimal gambits, but these new paintings belie that history.

It is scale in particular that signals a shift. “Series #9 (White),” (2004) is a 53-inch square (a mural by Mr. Ryman’s standards.) The composition is book-ended by tapering dark blue lines, intimating a dark ground. Then there is an arrangement of what looks like a rectangular lozenge of white cloud against blue sky. Instead of Mr. Ryman’s heavily invested, intimate, precious, almost doodly impasto, there is an old-masterly scumbling, like one of Constable’s Weymouth skyscapes. The pulsating lozenge, with its fuzzy edges inevitably brings Rothko to mind.

Milton Avery was the most influential teacher and acknowledged mentor of Rothko, and the late seascapes at Knoedler are among the pioneer Modernist’s most abstract works. In some of them, like the wonderfully spare oil crayon on paper, “Breakers” (1958), where the turquoise sky and black, spume-punctuated sea, are autonomous rectangles floating on the sandy ground, he out-Rothkos Rothko. The son is father to the man.

Although the motif always remains perfectly legible within his pared-down, faux naïve idiom, the marine subject encourages generalized effect over detail or specificity. Like no other motif, sea and waves press gang brushed paint on canvas into service as their perfect metaphor.

If you think about a Ryman and an Avery, the differences in intention and generational attitude make it hard to relate the markmaking. One pushes self-consciousness to a deliberately contrived extreme; the other revels in expressive freedom. Yet the works in these two shows have us modifying our view of each artist.

Avery often plays conceptual games with the implications of brushstroke. There is a wonderful vertiginousness in his flattened-out compositions, for example, in the way surf or waves are carved out of a wall of sea, or the way the schematic beach defies a distinction between upfrontness and vanishing perspective.

An extraordinary expressionism is at play in these paintings, one as sophisticated as it is childlike. The artist’s touch, with its pronounced, knowing sense of rush, urgency, lack of deliberation, and agitation (yet perfect color always, and exquisite juxtaposition) is richly onomatopoeic. We can almost hear the the artist impishly going “wooosh” and “shooo” as he pounces the canvas with his dabs and smears.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 23, 2004

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“Band of Abstraction” until August 14 (819 Washington Street, between Little W. 12th and Gansevoort Streets, 212-243-8572).

A painterly equivalent to the truism that the child is father to the man is that an artist’s early drawings reveal the essence of his or her character. If this is indeed the case, anyone intrigued by the enigmatic art of Robert Ryman should repair to Peter Blum’s SoHo gallery. The selection of works on paper there, from the outset of his career, apparently constitutes the first survey of his drawings.

Harold Rosenberg labeled work that induces uncertainty about its aesthetic intentions or its very status as a work of art “the anxious object.” It is the genius of Mr. Ryman, throughout his distinguished career, to have made supremely anxious objects while always ensuring that not one is marked by the faintest degree of angst.

But that’s par for the course for so playful a reductionist. Mr. Ryman is primarily known for painted, white, square canvases, a drastically pared-down form he inherited from Malevich. What he jettisoned is the Russian Suprematist’s key ingredient: metaphysics.

His works can certainly seem, from the telling, severe enough: What, after all, can be more minimal, or conceptual, and yet remain a painting, than a white square? Yet the actual experience of a Ryman, once you get used to the closed-down range of his obsessive formal and material interests, is a sense of the perennial doodle, of someone simply mucking around with materials and having fun – quite possibly at the viewer’s expense. But the uninhibited may share the sheer pleasure-sensation of paint smeared on paper: Look at the isolated smudges of oil on mylar, or of casein on Bristol board in a couple of drawings from 1960, and you almost feel like you have put it there yourself.

A Ryman always teeters on the edge of pranksterism, not despite but because of its element of preciousness and pretentiousness There is humor as well as nonchalance in his touch in particular and his project in general. Mr. Ryman’s prank (if that’s what it is) compares with the honorable tradition of the hoax in turn-of-the-century French culture, which Roger Shattuck (in his book, “The Banquet Years”) brilliantly related to Cubism. Earnestness and absurdity ought to be opposites, but somehow, Mr. Ryman constantly has the one feed off the other.

Perhaps this odd aesthetic posture relates to Ryman’s start as a jazz musician. He turned to art on a whim and never submitted to formal training as a painter. And though he came to prominence with the generation of minimal and conceptual artists, and has attracted no end of weighty theorizing from critical supporters, he never lost a sense of improvisation: You could say he brought a light touch to their heavy agenda.

There is hardly a sense, in Mr. Ryman’s oeuvre, of early as opposed to late. He is either ever a beginner, in Rilke’s sense, or else – if you buy fully into his aesthetic – he arrived a fully-fledged master. The tentative, goofy curiosity of his early drawings show precisely the same quality, or lack of quality, that characterizes his “mature” work.

That said, these early efforts from the late 1950s and early 1960s pack some surprises, primarily in terms of color and expressivity. Mr. Ryman’s most recent show of paintings, at PaceWildenstein in the fall of 2002, was marked by the unusual extent to which colorful grounds were exposed, but even for the Ryman aficionado the displays of bold color in these first drawings is almost shocking. It is rather like seeing bright colors on modern tennis stars, where you expect the decorum of white.

More startling, though, is the tightness of pictorial organization that characterizes some of these works. The usual touchstone with Mr. Ryman, given his oxymoronically casual purposiveness, is Jasper Johns, the Dadaist debunker of Abstract Expressionism. But rather than looking like another enemy within of action painting, Mr. Ryman circa 1958 looks like an avid and uncritical admirer of Robert Motherwell, Clifford Still, and Mark Tobey. Even where he goes for alloverness or drastic informality, there is a studied sense of design, of a compelling gestalt.

Where a sense of the prankster-doodler undoubtedly comes across is in his unremitting play with his own signature. Arthur Danto has described Mr. Ryman’s “RRyman” as not so much a signature as a graffito that happens to be his name. The artist has made extraordinary motifs out of date and signaturewhich are all the more remarkable for being left to stand out in otherwise motif bereft compositions. In some of these early drawings, the artist’s name is repeated over and over, as if he were an adolescent trying to fix the style of his autograph. In what seem, anyway, solipsistic meditations on expression and its absence, the signature becomes a precarious signifier of ego.

If early Ryman puts you in the mood for oddball abstraction of a sophisticatedly childlike tenor, be sure to catch the closing week of “A Band of Abstraction,” the delightful and adventurous survey of less-known painters put together by painter and critic Joe Fyfe at Van Brunt Gallery.

Mr. Fyfe, himself no stranger to extremes of rough-edged painterly nonchalance, has gathered 17 artists. His stated guiding principle is that they should be relative strangers to New York exposure and that they should make small works. What looks at first, curatorially, like effortless scatter is in fact a marvel of dialogue and interchange between eloquent individualists.

An achievement of this show is to present New York debuts for several painters known quite well in France as latter-day followers of the Support-Surface movement. As the name implies, this movement was much-enamored of quirky games with ground and material. Jean-Francois Karst has a simple green grid on a white ground; both are incongruously animated by a tumorous buldge in the canvas. Nadine de Koenigswarter enlists hole punch chads as the ingredient of a monochromatic montage.

Several of the natives among Mr. Fyfe’s band pursue, as if punning the title of the show, bars and stripes as their motif – among them Jennifer Riley, Taro Suzuki and Adrienne Farb. One of several motif-orientated painters I was charmed to discover was Jason Duval. The subtly multilayered serpentine form of “Wrong Turn in Kharkom,” (2004) seemed-to paraphrase Paul Klee’s famous remark about line-to take the *grid* for a walk.

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

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