Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967-76 at Craig F. Starr Gallery
February 5 to March 26, 2016
5 East 73rd Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York, 212 570 1739

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end. […] We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.
-Brian Doyle

In so many words, this poetic excerpt gets at the heart of Catherine Murphy’s work, which is fortuitously on view at Sargent’s Daughters, and is featured in a new Peter Freeman, Inc. publication with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers and an essay by John Yau. The book offers the best possible surrogate to experiencing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in person, further providing a comprehensive, chronological exposition of her life’s work. Yau has clearly dedicated as much rigor and fidelity to Murphy as she herself has invested in her paintings and drawings. The reader is provided with an intimate, formal, conceptual, and even spiritual survey that touches on her personal life and artistic career. Living reclusively with her husband outside New York, Murphy submitted herself entirely to painting and drawing, frequently using the view from her apartment window as the vehicle for her expression. Yau writes, “Often, we find ourselves scrutinizing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in search of a clue to explain why she chose this particular moment and not some other one. The feeling of awe and bewilderment embodied in such concentrated looking is akin to what I experience when I again turn to her views from an apartment window, done nearly forty-five years ago.”

Murphy’s work hangs somewhere between an exacting and invented space. In the book she explains that while measured, it is necessary to avoid the pigeonhole of photorealism. Such a formulaic precision is too easy; rather, her observation must simultaneously bump up against and work with her own invention. As another rule, her invention never relies on overt markmaking and gesture. Despite the personal content, she never cares to assert her ego through those means, but rather aims toward a higher end: to deliver an experience of being in a particular moment.

We see her direct, emotionally reserved hand in the preparatory drawings on view at Sargent’s Daughters. Working Drawing (Getting Set Up) (ca. 1998), for example, depicts a note the artist wrote to herself about the anxiety of getting set up for a painting. Anxiety is literally expressed with words, and even felt in the painstaking accuracy of the picture. But true to the artist’s paradoxical insistence, one also experiences great pleasure in Murphy’s careful rendering of the moment this crumpled note rested on her desk or floor. She is incredibly serious, but always remains open to life in a lighthearted manner. In Working Drawing (Cathy) (ca. 1999), we see her name, apparently traced with a finger on the outer side of a foggy window. Cued by the painted version of this composition done a year later (featured in the book) we know that this was a very sensitive, factual study of a moment in time. But the drawing gives something the painting doesn’t: a cheeky red smudge in the top right corner. An element of chance is revealed in a number of colorful, incidental smudges found on the drawings. This body of work also demonstrates how experimental Murphy is in composing the scenes from her life. Working Drawing (Hand Mirror) (ca. 2006) is comprised of two pieces of paper unabashedly taped together in order to expand the originally conceived composition.

Murphy appears to be preoccupied with a number of relationships. Clarity and ambiguity meet in Working Drawing (Lampshade Reflected on a Painted Wall) (ca. 2000), where a fuzzy atmospheric thumbnail compares to a more linear study. In Working Drawing (n.d.) an economic contour drawing of a chair sits starkly in front of obsessively detailed wallpaper.

One cannot help but think of Murphy’s contemporary, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who also has a show up at Craig F. Starr Gallery. In the same vein, Mangold insists on acute observation while walking the fine line between naturalistic exactitude and invention, resulting in a variety of mysterious, peculiar pictures. Floor with Laundry No. 3 (1971) brings the viewer into the painting by plopping three white, yellow, and brown pieces of fabric onto wooden floorboards. Because we cannot affirm a particular perspective, it being something between hovering above and sitting on the floor, it is clear that Mangold, like Murphy, paints, with a deeply felt love of perspective and perception, for her experiences’ sake and not necessarily for the viewer’s benefit. Four Coats (1976) is simultaneously intense and simple. Two rulers rest on the right and left edges of the painting to create an immense pressure squeezed between them. But that space between is but a plain, white field — possibly the floor or a sheet of paper.

Murphy and Mangold share a miraculous ability to reveal the extraordinary nature of everyday happenings, the ordinary. Perhaps in this present time, in dealing with the immediacy technological advances impose, we can find their work especially vital. We can look towards these artists who have clearly shown us how to slow down and wake up to life.

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September 12 to October 11, 2015
179 East Broadway (between Rutgers and Jefferson streets)
New York City, 917 463 3901

The work of Roland Flexner is deep in conversation with traditional vanitas paintings that convey the impermanence of existence and the futility of earthly pursuits. Amidst the familiar symbolism of skulls, decaying fruit, smoke and other ephemera in 17th-century Dutch painting, for instance, is the motif of a young boy, gleeful and naive, blowing soap bubbles. But in his striking exhibition of bubble ink drawings, shown at Sargent’s Daughters alongside a selection of Japanese bronze vases (from the Edo period of the 18th and 19th Centuries), Flexner moves beyond the security of the intact bubble. The burst, remnant stains of the artist’s breath — reaffirmed by the adjacent hollow bronze vessels — provide a meditative glimpse into the composition of emptiness.

Born into the volatility of 1944 France, Flexner spent his first 30 years in the vibrant city of Nice where he was associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes and the Supports/Surfaces artists of the 1960s. In 1981 he moved to New York City on a scholarship, with a one-year workshop with PS1.

Monochrome prevails through much of his oeuvre and his theme has indeed predominately been one of vanitas — smoking skulls, agonizing visages, mourning clothes, decaying landscapes. These ideas underwent a certain condensation in 1996 when, while playing with his daughter, the bubble drawings emerged. Flexner began to study sumi-e (ink painting), and made multiple trips to Japan to learn sumi-nagashi (floating ink) painting — an ancient technique of paper marbling. In Flexner’s modified approach, the ink is mixed with soap and water, passed through a hollow brush, and burst against the paper. The result is a record not only of impermanence, but also of the artist’s breath.

The bubble drawings in this exhibition are all from 2001, on pages that uniformly measure 12¾ x 11½ inches. Though they are all untitled, each is unique. Some resemble onionskin marbles, pathogens or inkblots while many bring to mind alien planets — entire worlds, condensed. A couple of particularly vivid pieces have a ring of droplets dancing along the perimeter of the bubble — as these have been imbued with alcohol, Flexner likes to call them “drunken bubbles.” The forms of a few are disconcertingly ovoid, and others carry little dark tails — a sudden reminder of the artist’s haphazard process.

Considering Flexner’s other work, the understanding of these bubble drawings would cease to develop beyond his preoccupation with vanitas were it not for the thoughtful pairing of them with the five bronze futabana (two-flower) vases. Selected by the gallery’s curators — Allegra LaViola and Meredith Rosen — these late Edo vases were originally created for the Buddhist ritual of flower arrangement. The practice is extremely intuitive, and demands the artist’s patience and meditation. To see these vessels empty highlights the absence of those flowers and the artists that handled them. The mind immediately stretches towards the absence in Flexner’s own work — the product of a void, of dissipated breath.

Sunyata, the Buddhist meditative concept of emptiness, is often translated as the not-self and, indeed, the Sutras refer to foam, bubbles and drops of dew to illustrate that emptiness. Unified in this exhibition, these two records of absence bring the audience gently through the geographies of philosophy, West to East — from the weight of vanitas towards the zero gravity of nothingness. Flexner’s bubbles may be an impressive handling, and manipulation, of sumi-e. The vases may reveal Japan’s incredible early influence on Art Nouveau. However, this show is asking us to suspend our attention to such artistic achievements, to forget titles, dates or bitter lemon peels, to contemplate that old understanding of what we will all soon become. It asks us to consider nothing.

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Sargent’s Daughters

November 6 to December 7, 2013
179 East Broadway
New York, 917-463-3901

This broad-reaching exhibition with a deceptively simple title tackles the innate connection between painting and language. All of the work included Painting 101 at Sargent’s Daughters deals with language not as the repetitive system of facts, figures, and momentary emotions, but in its original form—a method of recording sounds and images that resonate meaning. Of the five artists in the show, two seem handpicked based on the theme: Jonathan Lasker’s lilliputian tablets are enigmatic, joyous and colorful lexicons, while Sandi Slone’s Red Letter Day (2013) is a direct reference to the ultimate interchangeability of letters and images as one and the same thing.  Daniel Rios Rodriguez and Francesca DiMattio flirt with the comfort of clichéd imagery and the response that is automatically inspired in the viewer when such images are collaged or taken out of context or otherwise transmogrified.  Dennis Hollingsworth approaches the dialogue from the complete opposite side, positing paint as object.

The curation of the show stays carefully academic: all the paintings exist within the confines of “abstraction,” but the works are not relegated to any generational or aesthetic categorization.  A series of Hollingsworth’s oil paint sculptures (all 2013) within glass vitrines are the esoteric outliers, and with titles like The Ultimate Manifestation #415 and So Many Chimeras #414, clearly these are not merely an exercise in the structural capabilities of oil paint, though in that regard they are quite fabulous.  As gooey, glossy and vaguely vegetal and sexual looking objects, they represent that small minority of art works which reconstitute a time honored medium in a new way—like a shaped poem by e.e. cummings.  The refashioning of a painting back into a three dimensional object is the real subtext here, though the artist’s clear enjoyment of messing with the paint distracts the viewer from what is really going on.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s thickly impastoed vanitas painting, Untitled (2013), similarly utilizes Hollingsworth’s over-the-top aesthetic as a gesture of painterly self-abnegation.  The image of a skull, so recognizable as a painter’s trope, as are his other two paintings in the show, a blue apple still life and Goodnight Moon (both 2013), as to verge on kitsch, is rendered with a new life when so self-consciously overdone.  Francesca DiMattio applies a reverse approach to familiar imagery with three large paintings, Banquet (Panels C, D, and E) (all 2010) by weaving familiar images such as seascapes, flower paintings, and other still lives into a modernist interior.  There is a confusion between what is painted and what is collaged to the surface of the canvas. Some of the images are collaged prints, others are rather meticulously reproduced by hand, mimicking the chiaroscuro and sfumato of the supposed old masters and impressionist paintings within the paintings. That the history of all painting can be digested and regurgitated to great effect, and without shyness, is perhaps one lesson of Modernism that DiMattio’s canvases point to.

There is a linguistic dialogue between Sandi Slone’s large-scale painting Red Letter Day and Jonathan Lasker’s delicate glyphs.  All four of Lasker’s works on paper present what seems to be a singular figure/word/symbol. At times these symbols visit each other from one page to the next, and we come out knowing the four of them quite intimately.  In S-156 Untitled (2012) a tangled Mobius strip, thickly painted in orange, purple, and green, sits in the foreground while numerous and orderly ink representations of this form flicker in a procession of boxes in the background.  A stolid, black grid-like figure is flatly realized next to the color strip. Are all these painted forms meant to be read as an idea, a sentence, or representations of something familiar? In S-130 The Plan for Morality (2009) mushroom-like objects inhabit a regimented field, painted over recessive Dubuffet-like calligraphic constructions.  Lasker’s paintings demand “reading” versus free movement across the picture plane.  Sandi Slone’s Red Letter Day is awash with symbols, and seems more like the cave walls of Lascaux or Le Chauvet. Her paintings are an accretion of visual ideas over time. From the upper right hand corner we read a bright red aleph-like shape, but this visual key presides over a cascade of less discernable but still interpretable signs.  Black circles, boxes and ladders fall away from the aleph into a rosy and grey miasma. Eros (2009) uses a similar figure ground typology, a single brushstroke with six dangling pods looms over a washy fade from light blue to yellow, like some forgotten gesture to call up a goddess.

Like all introductory courses, Painting 101 presents a wide sampling of practices and lays out the fundamentals of composition, subject matter and style.  But what this exhibition offers above all is a contemporary assessment of interstitial work—works by artists that don’t fall into any easily discernible category.  Like the text based paintings of Stuart Davis or the overtly symbolic paintings of Paul Klee or Richard Pousette-Dart, the five artists on view at Sargent’s Daughters  experiment with modes of representation that either immediately seem indecipherable, or employ a deceptive simplicity that betrays a much deeper meaning.  In effect, Painting 101 lays out the rules of the discipline with an enigmatic selection of exceptions.

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