It is not every art dealer who calls forth the kind of widespread, genuinely personal mourning that greeted the demise of Richard Timperio this weekend. Even less often is it artists leading the charge, as the latter usually look upon dealers as business associates more than friends. But Timperio was no ordinary art dealer. A better-than-average painter himself, he was also a community leader: The mammoth “Sideshow Nation” exhibition staged annually at the eponymous Sideshow gallery in Williamsburg, with literally hundreds of participants, was as much (if not more) a civic enterprise as it was a venture in high-risk capitalism.

Timperio suffered a massive stroke last week while visiting friends in upstate New York, and had to be rushed to the Albany Medical Center. He died on Sunday, September 9, at the age of just 71. He is survived by his daughter Cheyenne and his son Willy—the children of his former companion, Elspeth Leacock. Expressions of grief from an unusually wide range of people in the art world continue to pile up on Facebook.

A native of Ohio, Timperio arrived in New York in 1970 with dreams of becoming an artist, although his first foray was the design for a pinball machine. Relocating to New Mexico, he found he was able to make a living in commercial art. (It was in the south-west that he acquired his trademark black cowboy hat – as much a part of his latter-day persona as his wavy, shoulder-length iron gray hair, his genial smile and his booming laugh). Before long, he headed back to the Big Apple, where he graduated to political caricatures for The New York Times and began to paint in earnest – initially within the sphere of pop, evolving into abstraction in the early 1980s. His first abstract pictures were heavily laden with paint and employed organic forms, but this gave way to the thinner paint application and gently geometric shapes that define his mature style. His last show, in 2015, was at André Zarre in Chelsea.

Timperio’s “day job,” Sideshow, originated in 1995 when a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg invited him to hang some art on its walls. In those days, the neighborhood was still working-class, with rents that appealed to artists, and subsequently to galleries. Williamsburg is now gentrified almost beyond recognition, but it still appeals to a younger and more progressive demographic, to whom Sideshow’s annual extravaganzas appeal which makes sense since they were originally titled “Merrie Peace” and were anti-war shows.

It’s been so long since I first saw Timperio’s spectaculars that I’m not sure who introduced me to them. Most likely it was Sasha Silverstein, a subscriber to my blog, (An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor’s Doorstep (FMD), who exhibited her impressionist figure studies and landscapes in these shows, . Since I try to review work by my subscribers, I beat feet to this group show and and was pleasantly surprised to find work by many other artists whom I admire: Larry Poons and his wife, Paula De Luccia, Dan Christensen, Randy Bloom, Francine Tint, Jim and Ann Walsh, Lauren Olitski, and Peter Reginato, among others. Ever since, I have devoted much space to reviewing these shows in FMD.

Still, I don’t think I’m unique. Nobody who visited these sprawling “Sideshow Nation” shows could forget the hundreds of artworks mounted together, from the baseboards to the ceilings. Paintings, drawings, prints, collages, and photographs provided the two-dimensional experience, while assemblages, kinetic art and more conventional carved or modeled sculpture extended the panorama to the third dimension. Fans like myself of high quality abstraction found these shows wonderfully rewarding, but representational work – like that of Silverstein — was well-represented, too. And although Timperio favored “something to see” in his own artwork, the shows had at least a modest quotient of conceptual and other “edgy” but less purely visual art.

Above all, it was the spirit in which these “Sideshow Nation” exhibitions were mounted that made them so distinctive. They were somehow cooperative in spirit, with famous artists jostling modest ones who practically never exhibited. Husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings all exhibited together. Artists best known as artists cozily shared wall space with artists best known as critics or even artists best known as dealers. Indeed, these multi-faceted shows were more than merely art shows: they were the joint creation of a whole community, a Sideshow “nation” indeed.

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Richard Timperio lends new meaning to the terms “skying” and “grounding” with the humungous 470-artist group show, Sideshow Nation, at his Williamsburg gallery.  The precedent for such jam-packed art installation that comes to mind is the 19th-century style of exhibition of the great European academies and salons with their paintings hung floor to ceiling to which the public flocked en masse.  Sideshow Nation closes this coming weekend after a two-month run.

“I never liked the idea of a Christmas show,” the artist-turned-gallerist tells me.   “A lot of little trinkets.  Nobody buys them and nobody cares.” In the early days of Sideshow he staged just such an event, with the title “Merry Peace,” but what he has come to prefer is  “an overview – a chance to show what people are doing.”

An estimated crowd of 2,000 attended the opening January 5.  Of coure, if each artist attended with a couple of friends it would get up to that number pretty fast.  People lined up in the cold half way around the block, and Timperio had to stand out on the pavement, in order to let new people in only after previous guests had left.

The official hours were six to nine PM but the galleries were still crowded at eleven. Timperio’s annual salon has become a New York art world fixture: even its premier fun couple, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, were spotted in the line in one recent year.

The hanging is a work of art in itself, a complex checkerboard of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural objects. But then, Timperio is himself an artist, and one who has evolved through a variety of personae..  (His own show at Art 101 in Williamsburg was reviewed by artcritical in 2011.)

WhenTimperio arrived in New York in 1970,  in his early twenties, from his native Ohio, he designed a pinball machine. This was followed by a sojourn in New Mexico, where he was able to make a living in commercial art (and acquired his trademark cowboy hat). Returning to New York in the later ‘70s he did political caricatures for the New York Times and began to devote more time to his painting.

Starting out in a pop idiom, with special attention to rodeos, Timperio evolved into abstraction when, as he says, “I realized that I was more interested in what the paint was doing than in telling a story.”  This was in the early eighties, when he also started to paint on the floor. Dan Christensen, a good friend, was a big influence on his art.

Sideshow had its beginnings in 1995, when the legendary Williamsburg restaurant, Planet Thailand, invited Timperio to hang some art on its walls. In those days, Williamsburg was still a working-class neighborhood where artists found attractive rents. “We would have an opening and you could actually have a dialogue,” Timperio recalls, nostalgically.

But other galleries and young professionals followed the artists, and they, in turn, were followed by edgy boutiques, restaurants and condos: the usual story. Today, a Sotheby’s real estate office shares the block with the cheerfully graffiti-decorated building into which Sideshow moved in 2000, and, grouses Timperio, “Everything costs a fortune.”

Some of the artists showing in this year’s Sideshow Nation are “celebs” like Paul Resika, Bill Jensen, Forrest (“Frosty”) Myers and Dorothea Rockburne.  Others are at least as well known for their writing: Robert Morgan, Phong Bui, Mario Naves; or their dealing:  Janet Kurnatowski, Pauline Lethen. Some are unknowns and/or friends of artists included in the past, and some are tried and true friends of Timperio’s who have returned year after year.

It’s also a family affair, with brothers Don and Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield and son Noah Landfield, husband-and-wife team James Walsh and Ann Walsh,  twins Carol Diamond and Cathy Diamond, and  Timperio’s own artist-childrenWillie Timperio and Cheyenne Timperio.  The younger Timperios both showed abstraction in the past but this year both opted for figuration.

Most of the artists on display are alive, and of all ages, but occasionally room is made for a distinguished deceased.  For instance, a lively self-portrait drawing by the late impresario Willoughby Sharp is in the current show, as is a fine small painting by Dan Christensen.

Being a painter himself, Timperio is not overly enthusiastic about conceptual art.  “It has to have something you can see,“ he says.  He considers the visual “more important than meaning – I’m not big on the word. But I try to keep it as open as possible. I think every generation has something valuable to say.”

Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery through March 24, 319 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

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October 15 to November 13,  2011
319 Bedford Avenue, between South Second & Third Streets
Williamsburg,  (718) 486-8180

While Louise P. Sloane and Randy Bloom come from different painting backgrounds, both have sure, lively senses of color and color harmony, amply living up to the show’s title. “Hotter than ‘Ell” is the name of a 1934 jazz melody by Fletcher Henderson.

Sloane’s canvases have been compared to tablets, like those upon which the Ten Commandments were supposedly inscribed. This is not only because of to their rigidly rectilinear composition, but also because their many narrow and arrow–straight rows of squiggly lines (created by squeezing paint through the nozzle of a pastry tube) resemble cursive writing. Though too freely formed to be legible, they still convey a sense of linguistic message. The overall configuration of these paintings is so simple as to seem minimalist, except that few minima artists used the eye-popping color that Sloane employs.  Each painting (acrylic upon steel, aluminum or wood) is composed of four squares, one in each corner, with a fifth square in the center.

In most cases, the four squares on the periphery have horizontal rows of squiggled paint, while the square in the center has vertical rows. An undercoat of contrasting (or complimentary) color was laid down before the squiggles were applied, and a third layer of paint covers up most of the original (muted) color of the squiggles.  Some of the layers beneath peep through, however, and, because of the thickness of the paint, the effect is like a tapestry. Typical of the hot colors that Sloane loves is Red Red Orange Square (2010) with crimson and scarlet in the periphery, and a center of even hotter orange. But she can also do cool colors. The smaller Howl into Spring (2007), displayed in the window of the gallery, has two shades of grassy green in its periphery, with a center of electric blue.  Whether warm, cool, or a combination of both, the effect is hypnotic, almost magical.

Bloom creates paintings more like windows, offering the viewer a vista into wide open space. Indeed, the space suggested is so open that it can seem a bit unsettling, like a voyage upon uncharted seas. Upon solid fields of one color, the artist superimposes designs in contrasting colors. The design combines two, three or four long framing lines around the edges, with a small rectangle (usually blue) in the center, and the outlines of four even smaller squares floating in a semi-circle around it (or, alternatively, four raised jewel-like blobs of paint). No two compositions are identical, although the images all clearly belong to the same family, and are mostly made by acrylic brushed onto canvas with a highly traditional brush.

Bloom also works with warm, cool and combinations of both. On the warm side is Clown Around (2011). The red of its field is quieter than the reds that Sloane employs, but   more transparent, hinting at a darker undercoat beneath.  Three framing lines of bluish green nearly circumscribe this field, emphasizing the resemblance to a window while suggesting a floating feeling.  The small open squares of yellow, blue, pink and orange also seem to float. In the cool category is a smaller, witty painting, So What (2011). Here a field of ice blue clings to the canvas; at its edges, raw canvas shows through. Then the painting is framed all the way around, not once but twice, with navy-blue lines. The tilted square in the middle is framed with navy blue and filled in with slate blue inside. The four little floating ovals (blue, green, yellow, and pink) are each surrounded with their own individual frames of navy blue, while the small square could almost be a person surveying them. It’s like the diagram of a picture gallery, inside a picture.

These artists share a devotion to color, and also to jazz, as there is rhythm and cadence in each set of paintings. But the deeper reason Sloane and Bloom have been paired is that they offer two ways of showing that art doesn’t need to be shrill or sensational in order to command attention, that it can provide emotional release through beauty alone.

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Elizabeth D’Ambrosio: Although you are using traditional painting and sculptural techniques, I understand the body of work most recently exhibited at the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg to be generally conceptual. Could you explain the role of a concept in your work?

Robert C. Morgan: I often use a concept in my work but at the same time I try and keep the work as open as possible. I don’t write anything about the work before I do an exhibition. That comes after the fact. A lot of the work process is intuitive. I should also say that having worked as a critic and having written about art for many years I’ve decided there is often too much explanation and not enough experience in art. I try and keep the work as experientially open insofar as possible. I’m very committed to abstraction in painting and I have been since I began painting, which goes back more than four decades. What I’m doing is a kind of philosophy in which I am working through the ideas in visual terms.

What are the visual terms of the exhibition “Light Streak and Dark Enlightenment”?

I have tried to do two things in this exhibition. The first is to present a very recent group of work that is working through visual signs and symbols. The second was to compare and contrast that work with an earlier work that had never been shown in New York, an installation that I call, “Dark Enlightenment”. I developed a kind of tight system in the front gallery that is based on abstract signs, of which there are six, and integrate them throughout the larger (30 by 40 inches) paintings. Then I have an earlier piece, which on one level appears unrelated, but on another level has a system related to sequential images taken from a swim manual published in 1937 that influenced my thinking in the1970’s and 1980’s. I’ve always been a swimmer and swimming is a kind of culture for me. I picked up this manual that I found at a used bookstore and was fascinated by these images of people on dry land positions, often standing or laying on benches, trying to simulate swimming. Because of the time period they were all black and white and very high contrast. There was something bizarre and kind of ghoulish if not ominous about these figures and then I realized that 1937 was a very difficult year. There was the outset of the war in Europe and also it was the year of the famous degenerate art exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. I thought the images were very potent and should be used somehow in art. I especially like the seriality of the images, which was kind of like Muybridge although they were more amateurish, which was part of their ghoulish effect.

There are three elements in “Dark Enlightenment” from the 1970’s and ’80’s that includes a sculptural installation of a circle of sand with a cast aluminum figure, two medium-size abstract figurative paintings on  adjacent wall, and a quotation from the Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke, letter-pressed on the wall. The front gallery includes the conceptual paintings. How did the installation of the two rooms come to be?

The sculpture was cast in 1974 based on a photograph taken from the manual. I had to imagine what the photograph would look like in three dimensions, and cast the model in aluminum using a lost-wax method. In the 80’s I started doing the same thing in painting by taking parts of the pictures and combining them through painting them in a kind of expressionistic way. I had never shown them together before and I had never shown them in a gallery in New York or anywhere else for that matter. I thought that they represented a system but they represented something dark as opposed to the non-objective painting in the front gallery. Those are more about light in terms of the metallic colors that reflect light and the dark space that holds the light reflecting symbols. But, I thought that there was something fresh about those 2010 non-objective paintings that I consider neo-metaphysical.

Could you discuss the origins of neo-metaphysics and how they are reflected in this work?

The term “neo-metaphysics” I picked up by Derrida. There was a lecture at Columbia, maybe twenty years ago where he mentioned the word metaphysics. The audience started chuckling or maybe nervous laughter and Derrida remarked, “Why are you laughing. I take metaphysics very seriously”. Now, I think that back in those days people confused Derrida with Wittgenstein in the sense that Wittgenstein was very clearly dismissing metaphysics in terms of his language philosophy. But that was never really the case with Derrida. He understood that dimension within language as the basis for his deconstruction. Even so, he made to bracket metaphysics in order to understand the assumptions of ideology behind it. I think we can consider metaphysics certainly Heideggerian in terms of the 20th Century philosophy. Heidegger pursues a quest for being, or a desire to grasp what it means, “to be”. I think that the process of thought is generally the way Heidegger worked in relation to that quest for Being. He didn’t see the kind of distinctions between language and the quest for Being that a lot of other philosophers, such as Wittgenstein or perhaps Derrida did.  I’m not saying that I concur with every aspect of Heidegger’s position, but, in general, I do agree that language functions more or less as a system of representation in accordance with Being.  If that is the case, which I would accept that what I am doing in both these pieces in the front and back galleries is neo-metaphysical.  I’m not going back to an early, shall we say Hegelian system for example. I’m really thinking of metaphysics in terms of what does it mean to be in the world today and how can we come to terms with that in a visual system of thought.

There is a large quote on the wall of the back room from John Locke. What do you anticipate your audience to understand in using that quote?

I try to emphasize the fact of intuition in terms of how the work comes about in accordance with my own system; sometimes, however, I intuitively discover comparative analogies, which is how John Locke comes into the formula. First, I had been thinking a lot about the Enlightenment and I had been scanning through a book of Enlightenment philosophy and one day I found a phrase that I thought was very interesting about intuition. Then I kept finding these passages that I thought were trying to explain the various parts of thought that occur in the human mind in terms of what is taken in through perception and what is done internally after the fact of perception. The system that Locke was dealing with in the 17th Century was something that I understood as a painter. I felt that there was something parallel in Locke’s system in mine but there was nothing I was trying to prove or illustrate in relation to Locke. I chose the quote because it dealt with the word “light” and often John Locke would talk about illumination through thought. It is only a quote that has been extracted, and does not explain the work. I think that people that try to illustrate philosophy with art or vice versa totally misunderstand philosophy and art. In the Jose Ortega y Gasset essay, “On Point of View in Art,” he talks abut the parallel between the two. I think “parallel” is the most appropriate term because philosophy is happening or has happened and the art is also happening or has happened. You can always find a point where they touch, but to use one to explain the other is problematic.

You claim that your work is invested in a concept or a system. Can you explain that system in formal terms?

It depends on what you mean by formal. First of all, I have to say I am not a formalist in the sense that I understood early Frank Stella, for example, the Black paintings from 1959. I’m fairly sure that the form became the content in that work. I don’t see that in terms of my work. I am trying to advance the idea from the content. I don’t see much difference between the formal and the conceptual in my work. I think that they somehow intervene upon one another and therefore are connected, not separate. When I talk about formal I’m talking about how something is formed in language. I suppose this comes closer to the idea of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in the 1920’s with people like Malevich, Jacobson, and the poet Khlebnikov were very involved with. The idea is that through language form evolves. That understanding of form is one that I embrace, but not the aesthetic idea of formalism. In other words, if I were going to talk about formalism I would talk about how a concept evolves into a form, not how the aesthetic involves into a form.

The front gallery of Sideshow has a wall balanced by 6 small paintings, each which holds a different metallic sign. The larger paintings throughout the room contain variations on combinations of these signs. Understanding your interest in linguistics, what is the role of syntax in this work?

I understand it as the bridge between the sign and the symbol is the syntax. This is why I lay out individually the 6 symbols, none of which are appropriated. This does not mean that there are not other similar signs that exist somewhere in the world. Where you get the transference from sign to symbol is where you start putting them together in the larger 30 by 40 inch canvases. The signs take on symbolic value through their relationship and association to one another in a contained space, the pictorial space of the canvas.  The symbolic value is dependent on how the viewer reads the syntax in which they are put together.  This again relates to Locke:  Everyone has a memory and it is through the association of perception and memory that some kind of meaning comes into place.

What was the process you used in the making the current “Light Streak” paintings?

Once I had painted the six individual signs or “elements” I moved to the larger canvases where there was enough space to accommodate the scale of these images in relationship to one another. That was an important move. Also I decided that I would keep the metallic painted signs on the same ground on which they appear in the six elements, either on raw umber or ultramarine.  In either case, these colors are painted on black to give the light a quality of absorption. I was very interested in the numerology of all this because there are two grounds and three metallic paints. The two grounds were ultramarine and raw umber painted over a black ground. The three metallic colors are iridescent gold, permanent sand iridescent silver mixed together, and bronze. Altogether there are three metallic pigments, a primary and an earth color. The use of the ultramarine and umber came from a Korean artist named Yun Hyong Geun — the only contemporary Korean painter that Donald Judd collected. I first saw Yun’s paintings at a show in Gwangju in 2000 and really loved the work. I discovered that he was using ultramarine and umber together. From an Eastern point of view the idea of color being one, like earth and sky, and close to the idea of the yin-yang. Rather than combining the colors I wanted them to be separate. If you see them symbolically as earth and sky that’s OK but its not what I meant. I deliberately put them vertically on the field as opposed to horizontally to make it clear that this is not a representation of some kind. I’m constantly thinking of how to work the system in the process of making these paintings because I want to be consistent. In other words if the gold sign belongs on the blue then it has to stay on the blue, and if it belongs on the umber it has to stay on the umber. The consistency of the image to the ground is something that is maintained throughout the process. I prefer the brushwork not to interfere. In “Light Streak” I am working more with an architectonic space than a gestural one. The work is emotional but through is a certain kind of intensity within the syntax of the space.

Several of the paintings utilize optical illusions in terms of manipulations or divisions of space. What compelled you to incorporate optical illusion in the work?

Well, I have to say the illusory aspect of the work is nearly invisible, or so I would like is to appear. I have to say that on occasion I have used optics in relationship to painting and sometimes not. In these particular canvases, I was interested in things being a little off. This is not because I was composing, because I’m never really composing. What I’m doing is looking at the parameters that are within the system, and seeing how they can function within their own logic. For example when I was painting the three vertical sections on the two 30 by 40 inch canvases, I realized I could not so easily create three equal parts. So, I would have two equal parts and one that was a little longer. It is only maybe an inch longer, but that’s enough to throw everything off in terms of the optics. So I used the irregularities to my benefit. I started putting these metallic forms on top in a way that would create a kind of flotation. I have light being absorbed by the umber and the marine, which are in both cases painted over black, and then I have light being reflected by the metallic elements. But there is nothing really on the surface in terms of light, and I like that idea. If you look at an Impressionist painting by Monet, most viewers are not thinking of Chevreuil’s philosophy of optics (which, in fact, was the scientific basis of Impressionism).  Instead, they are involved with the emotional effect or feeling associated with the colors. I don’t have that kind of emotion in my color but I think there is something about the light either being absorbed or reflected that is interesting. The light is either going in or it’s going out but there is nothing really in between. I think that adds to the intensity of the work.

Do you think the type of conceptual painting that you do could be perceived as anachronistic in the contemporary art discourse?

I understand why you’re asking this question. The kinds of ideas with which I am concerned, including geometric or conceptual abstraction, couldn’t be further outside the discourse, at least in terms of the current international market. However, I do not see my work as anachronistic. I believe in the pursuit of what I do as committed to finding a visual language by which to articulate philosophy. I think that idea has to move forward.  It is an important idea just as human thought is important, just as Locke’s philosophy is important. Even though the medium is acrylic on canvas, I think the ideas are timely.  If I can say parenthetically … there is a certain pleasure I feel when I am engaged in painting these forms. It somehow connects with the quality of living– not in terms of materialism, but through a sense of Being. In recent decades, as virtual technology has accelerated, people have suffered from a lack of the quality in their lives even so far as understanding the concept of what this quality means. For example, one of the reasons I travel to Italy whenever possible is that I enjoy the kind of living experience that I miss in my own country. One aspect of my work tries to convey a certain elegance of thought. I believe this approach to art is one way to retain simplicity in the ways we choose to live.  I somehow believe that those simple ways are always at the core of the best art, even in the present and hopefully in our aspirations for the future.

Sideshow Gallery is at 319 Bedford Avenue, between South 2nd and 3rd streets, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180 and at www.sideshowgallery.com

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September 11 – October 10, 2010
319 Bedford Avenue, between south 2nd and 3rd streets
Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

Don Christensen’s new geometric paintings at Sideshow in Brooklyn are bright.  With almost all his colors deployed at full intensity, they are even hard to look at until becoming fully acclimatized.  Within a half hour to forty-five minutes his colors simmer down and rescind the initial reaction.  Complex movement within the compositions emerges when you have endured the blast and come through to the other side.

Christensen also has a certain masculinist approach. Each painting jumps out from the wall, vying for attention, with little modulation and no nuance.  What is remarkable and mysterious about his work though, is how unencumbered it is, without baggage and/or memory, offering, essentially, a real taste of freedom.

I came back for a second look to see if my first impression would hold up through careful observation.  Can paintings truly be free of memory, free of all associations, i.e. the process of looking that inevitably leads to other artists or movements long forgotten?   How could Christensen with his geometrically-oriented pieces rooted in the kind of visual language evidenced in the earliest fragments of pottery, achieve a relatively reference-free field when that field should, by all accounts, be laden?

Christensen is no outsider unaware of what has gone before him.  He has been around New York since the early days of the No Wave era when punk bands were comprised mostly of art school graduates, and his older brother Dan, was a key figure in color field painting.  Don Christensen went to the Kansas City Art Institute for a couple of years, as well, before heading to New York to become part of the 70’s underground scene.  The tabula rasa effect in his work is well within the bounds of intention.

Silver Button, (2009) a multicolored stairway that leads into a vast silver void is paradigmatic.  Here the surface has simply been painted, the way a house painter paints a wall; yet with none of the associations or legacy of the monochrome.  This reduces painting to its most fundamental aspect.  Stools and other three dimensional objects found and built are literally installed above and to the right or left of the paintings.  Like speech bubbles in a cartoon, it is as if they are what the paintings are saying.  Painted in patterns or single colors, sometimes with drips and gloss, they set the tone for an understanding of Christensen’s work as liberated from the past.

The sense of play in Christensen’s work is contagious.  In Charlie Ringo’s Crown, (2009) a round form overlaid with spikey green shapes engaged in wacky color combinations, gives rise to the notion that it is really perfectly okay to let yourself run wild and not worry about the outcome.  Christensen makes it seem like everyone, inherently, has the ability to do so.   An experienced eye knows the “Look Ma, no hands!” effect is, in fact, hard won.

In Santa Santa, (2010) a complex of triangles runs top to bottom, dividing up the canvas through a series of diagonals.  At the same time, there are horizontal bands of alternating colors, green and yellow in the foreground and in the middleground and most prominant black, white and red.  The colors drive home the Christmas theme while the form provides a web of conflicting spatial cues.  The background triangles reach forward to touch the foreground triangles confounding the middle ground, which nonetheless holds its own in the void.   The longer you look at it the more complex and unique the geometry becomes.  It is the stand-out piece in the back room, and shows that Christensen has come no where near to exhausting the possibilities these new works open up.

Christensen’s show is refreshing in how it makes painting look fun and easy. What I felt as I was leaving the gallery is all the fun he’s had along the way.

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on view at the artist’s exhibition of large cityscapes at Sideshow, 319 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, through November 15. Kapp’s breezily robust painterly observations capture the frenetic optimism of a city in motion. He also has a show of new paintings at Alpha Gallery, Boston, from November 7 to December 9, 2009.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2009.

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In his show “From Brooklyn With Love,” Jonas Mekas exhibits films and stills in which the world is recorded without innuendo or guile. As in all his work known to me, Mekas’ companions and surroundings reveal themselves as one assumes they were encountered – without indication of what might come next. There’s no narrative to his work, unless it be his life’s narrative, no hierarchy of events. There are no characters but those who chance before his camera. There is only sight – Mekas’ own and ours as long as we tally before Sideshow’s monitors.

Perhaps it is this uncanny ability to suspend judgement in favor of seeing that has allowed Mekas to support so many artists whose work differs from his own. He did so as editor of “Film Culture,” as a columnist at the Voice and as founder of Anthology Film. He continues this legacy at Sideshow by selecting two promising young film makers to exhibit with him: Martha Colburn and Auguste Varkalis. Both artists exhibit a-temporal work at sideshow alongside their films. Colburn shows two back-lit, computer-altered collages whose subject matter derives from her films. Varkalis shows boxed objects reminiscent of Cornell, as well as some of his illustrations from Mekas’ diary of dreams. As with Mekas, though, it is their films that impress most.

Colburn’s and Varkalis’ films both reveal the influence of Stan Brakhage, a pioneer of experimental film and yet another artist to benefit from Mekas’ support. This, however, is where their similarities end. Varkalis’ films evoke meditative calm while those of Colburn display an eye-opening corporeality.

The latter’s work is a rush of violent, sexual imagery – not repellant, but captivating. There is a necessity to her images; they seem cathartic with a frenzied quality derived from the artist’s drawing directly on the film as Brakhage did. In “Spiders in Love,” Colburn knits images of spiders with women’s faces and silhouetted phalluses. Bright colors clash with Colburn’s own discordant score. Still more savage and strange is “Skelkhelovision,” which begins with a cartoon skeleton making love to a woman, amidst hallucinogenic patterns. Similar images of coupling women and solitary nudes succeed one another. Over each Colburn scribbles her skeletons, their bones overlaying the women’s nude limbs. To my eyes, the whole equates death with sexuality in terms both ghastly and honest.

Varkalis’ films are less aggressive and more abstract than Colburn’s. They contain references to direct observation as in “The B Train” in which the periodicity of abstract flashes on a black screen mimics the lights flashing by the windows of a speeding subway car. Varkalis’ primary concern, however, seems to be the effects of various patterns and film speeds on the viewer’s nervous system. At times he seems just as willing to unnerve as to calm. He sets color against black and white, isolated form against undifferentiated fields. Unlike the intensely expressive Colburn, there is always a sense of balance in his films.

Both these artists provide definite counterpoints to Mekas’ own work in that they have visions, albeit divergent, that they seek to unfold in film. Visionary work seems to be just what Mekas avoids, pursuing instead the real, the seen-as-it-is. In Sideshows’s front room runs recently edited film footage of Williamsburg in the 50’s taken when Mekas first arrived there. The images are unprepossessing: children playing, men smoking, women chatting. It is impossible to resist the air of nostalgia they exude. Stills from the film flank the TV monitor. Next on the reel comes “Places I’ve Lived,” a set of images revisiting Mekas’ old homes one of which is a pile of rubble outside which the artist stands apparently forlorn.

In Sideshow’s rear room is one of Mekas long term projects: a film equal in length and quality to a day lived. On twelve monitors spaced round the room run Mekas’ intimate images of daily life, two hours to a monitor. Gradually, as one moves from monitor to monitor, one begins to feel at home. These anonymous faces and places were the stuff of Jonas Mekas’ most intimate life. Among them, unlike other documentary work of this nature, one does not feel oneself an intruder.

I would say that time is Mekas’ subject. Not time in the absolute sense of Warhol’s relentless films, but lived time as experienced by each of us each day. To record this, it seems, has been his lot and his goal.

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September 17 – October 24, 2005

Art belongs to everyone. So Chris Martin has it at his current show at Sideshow. Or should I say around Sideshow.  The first thing one notices on the approach is one of Martin’s signature abstractions looming large in black and red on the gallery’s adjacent brick wall. Closer still, one sees the façade of the building opposite peppered with Martin’s work. It seems perfectly at home framed by boarded windows and a wrought iron fire escape. After that, it comes as no surprise to enter Spoonbill bookshop down the street and run smack into another Martin installed between bookshelves for the occasion. He leaves his work out there, vulnerable as could be, as seemingly unconcerned about a drawing exposed to the elements as about careless passers-by and their fast fingers. Martin’s message is clear: art is meant for the streets and its inhabitants. It’s not a commercial object, but a most intimate effort at communication aimed at the broadest possible audience.

Intimacy on a grand scale – it sounds like a contradiction in terms. Mark Rothko was a master of it. He had an ability to infuse giant swaths of canvas with the most delicate feeling. It’s this that has drawn so many to his canvases over the years. In Sideshow’s front room, Martin shows himself in some measure possessed of this quality prominent in Rothko and present throughout the New York School. The one huge painting in the room is not intimidating but inviting. At 10 by 23 feet, its forms are generously hewn in black and white. They stretch with the painting’s length – lozenges punctuated by dots at three foot intervals and rectangles supporting and enclosing the lozenges. The seams of Martin’s signature drop cloth canvas contribute to the composition beneath the cake of paint. Across the room there’s a plush armchair and couch inviting the weary viewer to rest while they look. Judging by the fractious energy with which each inch of this mammoth painting is cut, Martin himself has rested little.

The painting is of a simplicity that often provokes those unfamiliar with art to balk though even the uninitiated must recognize that, by virtue of his sheer ambition, Martin is in earnest. Abstraction is a form often noted for its impenetrability. People wonder why artists would make things so hard to understand. From the painter’s perspective, it’s the other way around – their painting is clarity itself; a means by which the world is brought into focus. Martin’s forms have the feel of condensed experience, the mystical clairvoyance of things seen in great breadth and reduced to comprehensible order.

Martin appears to have installed a good portion of his studio in Sideshow’s rear room. Beside magazine clippings, old photographs, and student drawings hangs work by many of today’s finest painters. The artist is giving us his history. Three painters I imagine he’d have there if he could are Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock and Forest Bess. Though their scale is Martin’s obverse, these painters make similar use of focused form to transcribe experience. Their painting reveals how distortion of observed form is sometimes essential to fully communicate one’s feeling before nature. Martin is only a small step further toward abstraction, a step akin to that taken by the New York school more than half a century ago. His staunch determination that his paintings be seen as a part of the world that is their subject is a stance I imagine this latter group would admire.

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