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

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September 9 to October 11, 2015
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
(also on view at 237 Eldridge Street)
New York City, 917-861-7312

This author hereby posits the existence of a Cult of Painting. Its adherents don’t call it that, or think of themselves as cultists, necessarily. But it operates akin to the manner of the ancient mystery religions. The insiders engage in arcane discussions. They both revere and debate the tradition, hoping to squeeze new insights out of it. There is pleasure and pain, if only of the visual kind. They practice metaphorical or actual drunkenness as a sacrament. I could name several high priestesses – Jackie Saccoccio, Carrie Moyer, and Elisabeth Condon are among those whose works I have contemplated   – but on the occasion of her current exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, I hail the highness of Kyle Staver.

When I recently wrote a TIP for artcritical.com for her show, saying that not since Lester Johnson had anyone gotten such mileage out of mythology, I had no idea that Johnson was Staver’s teacher at Yale. Johnson spent much of the 1960s incorporating classical imagery into his work, including several treatments of the Three Graces. I’m no oracle, but we aspirants (I’ll admit to membership in the cult) sometimes get impressions through mysterious channels. I think of Lennart Anderson painting beautifully despite the aging of his eyes. Staver is a longtime friend of Anderson’s and has sat for him regularly. She’ll inherit his mighty powers, as disciples are said to receive a guru’s by supernatural transmission.

Not that she paints like him. Her style harkens back to Bay Area Figuration, in particular the triumphs of David Park. One canvas from 2011 at Steven Harvey, Releasing the Catfish, shows a woman in a bathtub-like rowboat giving the day’s catch back to the lake as seagulls loom in the foreground. Park’s work went from intimiste to iconic over the course of his heartbreakingly short career. Staver has long felt compelled to retell her family’s stories, iconically in their way, but not so much as to defeat all the specifics. At the same time she brandishes what I regard as the mark of a true colorist: her luminous grays – such as the slate-colored water, the shadows on the gulls, the fish’s scales, and the boater’s bikini – appear as full-blown hues, not mere tints of black.

In her more recent paintings, mythology supplies enough storyline to give her figures, soaked in a vat of Cubism just long enough to become delightfully rubbery, something to do. Alexi Worth’s catalogue opens with a quote from the artist, “Oh no, none of that matters. I don’t care about mythology.” Worth protests, “…it’s clear that Staver does care about these ancient stories, cares passionately enough to re-imagine them again and again.” I counter in turn: take her at her word. Her Leda (2015), far from depicting a seduction or a rape, is a moonlit scene of post-coital bliss with a handsome waterfowl. They even put a checkered picnic blanket down. Staver, like Park in his late years, felt a need to escape domestic subject matter, and legends provided her a way forward. They otherwise retain the deliciously lazy atmosphere that characterizes her pictures from the 2000s of couples bathing and hanging around the house.

In the work of Johnson, mythology carries dire psychological urgency. Staver draws sweeter water from the same well. The cartoon-like elegance of her rendering  retains its carefree joy even when tackling the subject of Ganymede (2015), for which she produced a magnificent canvas of a gigantic eagle dangling a youth who elongates in a royal-blue sky full of cottonball clouds. It’s vertiginous, but the boy’s expression is coolly bemused and the eagle’s is, at worst, cranky.

A simultaneous and revelatory show of Bob Thompson (whose influence Staver acknowledges) and the madcap Louis Eilshemius at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery prompts me to wonder if there’s a mythological-modernist tradition that we ought to consider more thoroughly, with Staver as its current chief practitioner. While some curator works on that, the painters continue their contemplative rites. Days ago I witnessed a conversation between fellow painters on social media in which Shaun Ellison said that “all art making is like exorcism” to which Frankie Gardiner recalled words of Philip Guston:”The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.” Peter Shear then added wisdom from Picasso, “If we give spirits a form, we become independent.”

And all these are truths, as far as the Cult is concerned.

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July 4 to August 2, 2015
4 Fulling Lane
Kent, CT, 917 270 8044

Everyone loves an art movement, and many may feel the lack of any major recent one. But the next best thing is a group of disparate artists all working in the same place — ideally bucolic or exotic. And just in time to quench our thirst for such geographical groupings, and to welcome the upstate summer, comes the exhibition “Cornwall Bohemia,” at James Barron in Kent, Connecticut. This is the first group show at the gleaming new space belonging to Mr. Barron, an infamously modish figure who shuttles between here and Rome, his international profile matching the storied elegance of many of these local artists.

This is a crew, a scene, of truly heady social stuff, whether the ultra-cosmopolitan Philip Taaffe; the reigning royalty of TriBeCa, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham; not to mention leading glossy magazine photographer Todd Eberle; Downtown superstar James Nares; and Duncan Hannah, dandy draughtsman supreme. But quite aside from any such cosmopolitan grandeur these are all artists of true importance, of global caliber, who also happen to have houses and studios in Cornwall, a group of quaint unspoiled villages in Litchfield County, where they spend some of their creative time and energy. No, of course there is no thematic coherence or identifiable shared method,but yes they all make for a damn rich group show, artists of world renown here operating on a smaller, more communal scale. The perfectly proportioned main gallery is not only ideally light and airy, but also deliciously cool — blasting AC always being an accurate socio-demographic clue to a dealer’s status. And the whole space is simply ablaze with local color, from Greg Goldberg’s zingy modernist motifs to Eberle’s outrageously bold mirrored flowers from his Cosmos series, or Speed of Heat (2012) a smooth trademark bright swoosh from Nares. The show seems to move across from a joyously breezy abstraction, including the kick-ass, mica-rich Portrait (Regal) (2015) by Jackie Saccoccio. There’s a sort of refined outlined figuration in Dunham’s comic biomorphic blobs and Brendan O’Connell’s tasty, melting supermarket products, juxtaposed with ideogrammatic Canal Zone cityscapes of Judith Belzer. As if coming into focus, the image itself then solidifies into the recognizable contours of Simmons’s perfect, solitary and spotlit photograph Brothers/Aerial View (1979) and Hannah’s two highly stylized and desirable untitled paintings of cars and buildings brimming with Brutalist chic.

In all this, Taaffe provides a sort of central fulcrum to the movement from abstraction to realism, with his Strata Nephrodium (2014), a thicket of primal pattern, whose fern shapes and bold brightness could be read as an homage to Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/ Trail with daisies and barley/ Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

Kent is known for its widespread public sculpture – not least thanks to the notorious neighboring Morrison Gallery. But Barron has wisely included only one example, Nozedone (2013) — a sinister yet sensual work by Carl D’Alvia, a sort of Maltese Falcon built from cast resin licorice curlicues, looming in a back perch.

The Cornwall area has a long tradition of artist residents, including Alexander Calder, James Thurber, Marc Simont and Alexander Lieberman; and this exhibition is a welcome addition to such proud regional history and, ideally, perhaps an annual tradition. As Barron notes, “Cornwall has always enjoyed a rich intellectual and artistic heritage, which is especially remarkable given the town’s tiny population.” In fact, so creatively rich is this county that one could easily pitch a Litchfield Biennale, though this is no place to play the “why not so-and-so” game.

If there do seem some obvious omissions from this exhibition — such as watercolorist Adam Van Doren or sculptor Tim Prentice — clearly not everyone could be included without losing that generous, big, calm hanging that so distinguishes this show. The only two Cornwall artists one might have liked to seen together here are Seth Price and Emily Buchanan, a perfect pairing, ideal demonstration, of the town’s wide artistic diversity: a celebrated conceptualist and a renowned traditional landscape painter who recently created the White House Christmas card.

For any British critic, or indeed follower of European Modernism, there is the added irony that the original Cornwall, in England, was site of one of the St. Ives School, one of best known of the 20th century. This was a genuine movement. more than causal geographic coincidence, bringing together Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth as well as several subsequent generations of artists, such as Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, who all shared a distinct aesthetic approach to depicting their common landscape. Likewise, one does suspect that some of these artists in the “other” Cornwall up in Connecticut, should get together to work in a similar aesthetic vein, sharing studios, ideas and materials. Then at last we could have an actual new, live art movement. It only takes three to make one, as well as a welcome weekend country set. Perhaps they just need a name: the “Cornwall Oddballs” or the “Litchfield Color Field Crowd.” Something suitably snazzy can surely be found.

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