January 29 to March 9, 2009
1 Freeman Alley, off Rivington Street, Lower East Side
New York City, 212 529 7400

Francesca DiMattio’s solo exhibit of paintings on view at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans is a double bird strike for the young New York painter. Both uptown and downtown gallery spaces are exhibiting a selection of paintings from 2008 to 2009 that communicate the physical drama of momentous chaos and miraculous recovery.

This is DiMattio’s second solo show at Salon 94.  The paintings are a confluence of geometric spaces, loose and fast brushwork, and recognizable figurative elements (ladders, lace, showers, chairs) soldered together as teetering structures within stark black, white and grey tiled spaces. The mythical storytelling of German Expressionism and the playful heaviness of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism are visible forbearers for DiMattio’s paintings. There is also a direct connection to Francis Bacon in her depiction of human and inanimate forms in motion against a stage-like space. Bacon’s acute sense of ecstasy and tragedy are also a little on display as well, but to less extreme effect. Instead, it is a dreamy, personally-conceived Surrealism that is most at play here.  Unlike other young painters who combine abstraction and figuration in explosion-like arrangements, DiMattio forgoes obvious reference to our age of accelerating communication and technology. This is partly due to the painting craft being a visible component. Thickly rendered wedges and lines of paint take on sculptural qualities, literally becoming the glue and grout that holds the tile surface together and keeps the ladder from collapsing.

Blackout (2008) and Whiteout (2008) are complimentary paintings, on view respectively at Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94.  Amid a room of maximal energy and violent action, both paintings offer an oasis of relatively minimal calm. In Blackout an angular space is created with fields of black and grey, two buttressing tree trunks, and a lemon yellow umbrella-like form floating above. The central focus rests on a thin white lawn chair, a moment of light carved into the darkness of the “blackout.”  The black is thickened by a density of lines and patterns that hint at a rigorous history behind the arrived at composition. Whiteout has the same central motif of a furniture object floated in a thick space of all-over white.  Labor and time is a felt presence in the painting, a pulsing energy that radiates off DiMattio’s most successful compositions.

On view at Salon 94, Figure 2 (2008) describes an illusionist space with loosely drawn tiles as the sides, floor and back wall. The action in the middle is a pile-up that stretches from floor to ceiling.  The central characters are a Greek column, lacquered wood chair, table, and ladder. In the receding background is the silhouette of an old-fashioned sailing vessel and a water tower. Entangled in the middle of the rubble is a human figure, a burst of flesh tone amid the popping graphics and splashing debris. A black chair stationed at the lower right corner of the canvas appears as an invitation to have a seat on stage to watch the action. In this sealed vision we are allowed to breathe through the freshness of paint itself, an ingredient that is always visible as pure material.

In all of DiMattio’s paintings there is slippage between interior and exterior space, a preoccupation that can be traced through the history of modern painting.  In a way that is similar to Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916) where figures, furniture and statues are spatially transformed into fragments, there is a spell cast on the quotidian in DiMattio that endows every object with newfound meaning. However closely she references classical,  renaissance and modernist genres, her paintings never lapse into nostalgia, but instead give off an arch contemporary emotion. The use of pitch black, white and grid tiles has the effect of a printed graphic against a sharp color palette of reds and pinks.

The quiet showstoppers are to be found uptown where three large-scale canvases are complimented by four small paintings of classical Greek statue heads with colorful face paint “masks.” The metaphysical melancholy of de Chirico is channeled through DiMattio’s heads, yet her painterly touch is more pronounced. The mask-like visages of Bay area painter David Park come to mind, as does Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.  Head and Mask 3 (2009) packs the greatest visual impact of the group—candy-colored, irregular shapes, applied with palette knife perfection to an expressionless face from antiquity. There is nothing ironic in the gesture. Like the epic paintings, the heads are a self-contained vision unto themselves, simply conceived and endowed with the emotional weight of an artifact from a lost culture.

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1 Freeman Alley, off Rivington Street
Lower East Side
New York City, 212 529 7400

Lorna Simpson’s two-part exhibition at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freeman has a quiet tone. The content of her art is somber. She deals with such issues as gender, identity, war, and torture. All of these subjects are explored by Simpson with a formal sophistication that generates provocative yet ambiguous works.

In the uptown space, two bodies of work are exhibited, Photo Booth (2008) and Heads (2008). Simpson’s drawings of the backs and sides of women’s heads put a special emphasis on hairstyles. Simpson transforms hair into abstract forms. These are not simply representations of specific “heads”. They are multiplicities containing poetic signifiers that go beyond the visible world. They are reminiscent of Rorschach tests and yet they never become non-descript inkblots that are open to any interpretation. The drawings are based on photographic imagery and by interpreting these found images through the drawing process, Simpson discovers new forms and ideas that are not contained in the original material

The hand of the artist plays a very different role in Photo Booth (2008). These images are of black males from the 1940s. The intimate images are reminiscent of Carrie Mae Weems’ work, but instead of creating narratives, Simpson juxtaposes these images to form a cloud-like shape on the wall. This shape takes on a life of its own and an element of abstraction and ambiguity is introduced within a context that in and of itself only has historical value. The overall form created by the accumulation of individual photographs appears to be more important than the individual images and Simpson reiterates this notion by interweaving inkblots among the photographs. The inkblots become weird surrogates for the photographs, filling gaps to complete a “big” picture. The artist becomes a mediator of found images and the marks she makes. The viewer is responsible for interpreting this tapestry consisting of personal images of men who are self consciously posing for snapshots.

The tensions between intimate and public, between information and interpretation, found in the uptown space, take on a different meaning in what Simpson calls the “orchestrated theatrical disaster” of war. At the Freeman Alley venue, a piece called Long, Slow, War (2008) are juxtaposed with a set of drawings of interior spaces from the same year; these latter took their titles from the motif depicted in each drawing. The graphite drawings, on sheets of graphing paper, reminiscent of interior design sketches, are based on published images of war (either disseminated by the government or the soldiers themselves). The drawings emphasize the ubiquitous quality of war imagery in our culture, but when viewed all together, there is something uncanny about their barrenness. The mental spaces created by these drawings could be defined as a heterotopia; the viewer is not completely detached from the reality of the images from which these drawings are reproduced and yet the drawings do not make the reality of the events taking place pertinent.

The disorientation caused by the drawings urges the viewer to take them in in conjunction with the two video projections presented in the same gallery. The video projections are footage from Thomas Edison’s Railroad Smash-up (1904) and Fourth of July fireworks along with the aural element of slowed down sounds of train crashes and fireworks. Simpson’s criticism of the “spectacle of war” is more direct in the video works, whereas the drawings give the viewer more room for private deliberation and free-association.

The subversive beauty that has been present in Lorna Simpson’s work since Waterbearer (1986) has reached a new level of refinement in the private world of her new drawings and “collected” imagery. These new drawings address critical issues that are important to the artist while giving the viewer just enough mental space to experience precious moments of deliberation. It is the melding of formal sophistication with the artist’s honest yet poignant perspective on critical issues that makes Simpson’s work transcend boundaries and definitions and any and all expectations.

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February 8, 2008 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr joined David Cohen to review Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, Katy Grannan at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 Freemans, Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy, William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Chris Martin at Michell-Innes & Nash.

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Katy Grannan: Another woman who died in her sleep
Greenberg Van Doren until February 16
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-445-0444

Lina Bertucci: Women in the Tattoo Subculture
Perry Rubinstein until January 5
534 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-627-8000

There is a pervasive ambivalence in Katy Grannan’s portraits: the gaze that returns the viewer’s is a mix of coyness and exhibitionism. The images themselves oscillate between similar extremes, building a visceral sense of the present through precision while succumbing to a remoteness that results from theatricality.

She has two shows up in New York right now, which together with a show at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery constitute a body of work she calls “The Westerns.” This East Coast-born and -educated artist moved to the Bay Area in 2005: a unifying theme of “The Westerns” is the particularity of Californian light, which, in her hands, is intense and dispassionate.

Her Salon 94 presentation features a pair of middle-aged transsexuals, Gail and Dale, while Greenberg Van Doren presents a single protagonist — a younger, woman named Nicole, photographed in gutsy, flamboyant poses over an extended period of time.

Ms. Grannan finds her sitters through ads in local papers, and clearly seeks out people who are itching to share what they imagine others will view as a peculiarity — often sexual — that expresses something vital to their sense of self. Yet, at the same time, Ms. Grannan has an uncanny knack for capturing moments of doubt, cracks in a mask of defiance. Once you get used to the fact that these are big photos of odd people in forlorn places, the real subject that emerges is the negative space between individual and type, introspection and performance.

These photographs are big, typically printed at 40-by-50 inches, but their scale is complex. Through radical simplification of composition and meticulous capture of detail, they have a cinematic intimacy—that is to say, at once up close and enveloping.

In “Gail and Dale, Pacifica” (this series is all from 2007), the friends are caught between introspection and camera-awareness. Gail, a redhead, is looking down with her hand on Dale’s shoulder. Dale’s vacant gaze hovers at a middle distance. She has white hair; they both wear white dresses, and the sand, sea and sky behind them are bleached, all of which gives an abstract, ethereal glow to the image. But the camera manages to pick out highly literal specifics of texture and tone  such as dress fabric or creases of skin. .

In “Dale, Southampton Avenue,” Dale is nude, lying on an unmade bed and casting a long shadow against a cream-colored wall. The pose recalls Goya’s “Majas” in its langor, mixing voluptuousness and indifference. A worn, somewhat frumpy body tells the tale of a struggle to find inner femininity, her hands and face still burdened by masculinity. Transsexuals are perfect subjects for Ms. Grannan as they are caught between states.  Even “post op,” being oneself entails acts of defiance against nature and nurture.

Just when tolerance and technology allow a person born male to transform him/herself into a woman, women of different ages have found boyish ways to be feminine. Dale and Gail are at an age when women sometimes adopt the Senator Clinton approach of short hair and trouser suits, yet these two subjects are compelled by circumstance to cling to anachronistic trappings of the feminine with flowing dresses and PreRaphaelite locks that only serve to reinforce their biological origins.

A common problem among older transsexuals is economic marginalization — they lost the jobs they had as men and spent their savings on surgery — and thus they cannot afford to dress with feminine distinction. The photographs of Gail emphasize this tragi-comic twist in their frumpy vulnerability. This is the odd thing about Ms. Grannan: despite deliberation and composition, these photographs feel like an unsentimental version of the realities of their sitters’ lived experience. In comparison, Nan Goldin’s seemingly snapshot, diaristic, “real” photographs have the glamor of “La Cage aux folles” or “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

Coming to the uptown show from Gail and Dale you might have had to ask the receptionist — as this viewer did — whether Nicole, too, is a transsexual. While biologically feminine, she is no Nicole Kidman. Ms. Grannan’s merciless lense captures every bump and bruise, sunburn and freckle, stretch mark and body hair, on this slightly butch, working-class young woman.

In contrast to the Gail and Dale series, in which the camera sometimes seems to spy on the lives of the protagonists, the Nicole photographs project a more overt, performative collaboration between model and artist. Nicole lolls in a pin-up pose in “Crissy Field Parking Lot (II), (this series all 2006) and in a Madonna-like stretch in its pendant, “Crissy Field Parking Lot (I).” She strikes a body-builder’s pose in “Sunnydale Ave, (I),” looks like she is about to give birth in “Potrero Hill,” and, in “(Afternoon II), Lombard Street,” crouched at the top of a bed wearing heels, a skimpy dress and a white wig, seems to mimic a Cindy Sherman self-portrait photograph in the extremity of her grimace and pose.

In her camp scramble for odd types Ms. Grannan has drawn comparisons with Diane Arbus. One critic named her the “legitimate heir,” an honor she lives up to in “Gail and Dale (Best Friends), Point Lobos” where the pair face each other in matching twin outfits. But these shows, with their mix of theatricality and literalness, beg comparison less with other photographers than with two painters: Lucian Freud and Edward Hopper.

Hopper because of the lonely isolation of figures in washed-out, banal yet observed surroundings (sparse and tawdry) that — in a kind of cruel visual democracy — receive fastidiously equal attention. Mr. Freud comes to mind particularly in the Nicole pictures because of the way forced poses sit uncomfortably with a resigned sense of physicality. Working with a medium-format camera and slow exposures, Ms. Grannan brings out a kind of anxious boredom familiar in sitter’s expressions in a Freud painting from the long hours of posing and his exacting way of painting.

This stretching of time is of the essence in Ms. Grannan. The sitters try to express themselves when they dress up or down and strike their pose, but in fact, it is in the lag between the attainment of persona and sinking back into a literal, physical self that bathos seeps in.  The sitters do their utmost to project difference[end italics], but actually what comes across is a duller humanism, that we are all just people in time and space.

Ornament is crime, according to the Austrian architectural theorist Adolf Loos.  Two culturally prevalent forms of ornamentation that bear out this stricture, arguably, are graffiti and tattoos. But much as they violate the purity, respectively, of buildings and bodies, these ornamental systems have deep roots and cult followings as popular forms of artistic expression.

Lina Bertucci traveled to tattoo conventions around the world making portraits of women between the ages of 19 and 59 (mostly closer to the first figure) sporting wildly adventurous body decorations. Her photographs are likely to engender reactions of fascination and repugnance, sometimes in the same viewer. On show at Perry Rubinstein Gallery, they are also fabulous images: crisp, clean, and resonant. Tinged with voyeurism, and unabashedly “arty” in their adopted poses and settings, they nonetheless attain a documentary precision, a coolness that allows the individuality of their sitters to come through while capturing the ambivalent emotions surrounding the practice of making one’s skin the permanent support of an ornamental decoration.

The prevalent facial expression is somewhere between defiance and resignation.  There is little evidence of humor or delight on these women’s faces, although whether that was on the instruction of the photographer or reflects the general mood of heavily tattooed women is open to conjecture.

“Kerstin, 24, Drama Student / Works in Vintage Shop” (2007) brilliantly captures the central paradox of making permanent a transient taste. The young woman sports an array of tattoos — pinups, Japonism, nautical motifs — on her chest, arms, and right thigh. She wears a Victorian-style bathing suit which is itself decorated in anchors and bathing suits. The wall behind her has a dense black and white floral wallpaper and there is an animal pattern on the ground. The attire and furnishings represent rich, strong tastes that will be outgrown and replaced as they loose their luster, humor, novelty. The tattoos, however, which are all the more tacky and ephemeral, are there for “good.”

“Deborah, 45, Assembler in Machine Shop” (2007) has a finely drawn fan on her back and around her waist and buttock, intricate tattoos representing garters that, on her right leg, hold up an elaborate, gaudy “stocking”. Her flesh is beginning to sag, and with it her bold design. Were she a painting, it would be time to restretch the canvas.

Many of these tattoos are extraordinary in their artistry, wit and imagination, but more extraordinary is the decision to subject the body to a layer of decoration that can hardly be removed. However their moods or outlooks on life might change, the bearers can never strip down beyond the taste or whim of an extreme moment’s ornamental decision.

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