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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September 5 to October 6, 2012
179 East Broadway (between Rutgers and Jefferson Streets)
New York City 917-463-3901

I first saw paintings by Sandi Slone in 1983, when she was living in Boston, and I’d been invited by some Boston artists to visit and critique their work. Slone had recently taken her MFA from the Boston Museum School, and was still teaching there.

Her paintings were huge and abstract, with large, soft fields of color; mellow reds and oranges either predominated or simply struck me with especial force. I thought them very beautiful (that being an adjective one could still use on such work in those days).

In 1984, Slone moved to New York. Twice, in the 1990s or maybe in the next decade, I saw more of her work in Manhattan galleries.  On the first occasion, her paintings were hung on three sides of a space, in the center of which, on the floor, sat a pile of sand and/or detritus. The second time, the paintings were only semi-abstract, with little, cartoon-like human figures floating on their edges.

I felt that these embellishments reflected insecurity, that the artist seemed worried that her work might not be “edgy” enough to attract attention by itself. Such embellishments aren’t unique to Slone. In the recent past, I’ve seen one well-reviewed show of abstractions to which lit-up neon tubes had been affixed.  Another artist had semi-abstracts mounted on hanging glass panels, because (according to the label accompanying them) she hoped that this would make them appear “relevant in the environment of today’s art world”.

I believe that today’s “relevant” may well be tomorrow’s redundant, and that any artist is better off trying to inaugurate trends than to follow them. That is why I was so pleased to find that in her latest show, Slone has largely (though not entirely) abandoned embellishments, and determined to tough it out with pure painting. The new paintings are more modest in scale than those I saw in the 1980s; but they’re also more aggressive, even offensive, with a savage voluptuousness that borders upon barbarity.

Colors are louder and shriller: reds, purples and oranges still dominate, though some pictures (especially less successful ones) are mostly blues or greens. Technique involves pouring and swabbing streaks of paint onto horizontal canvases, then manipulating the paint by lifting the canvases one way and then another, so that, besides vehement swirls and sinister puddles, there are long, straight drips, often running toward all four sides of the canvas.

Poured paintings, of course, are nothing new. Pollock worked on the floor, and has had his followers, but in the decades since, many more abstract painters have kept their canvases upright and applied paint entirely or at least partially with a brush – following the alternative example of de Kooning, that other Pole Star of abstract expressionism. It is therefore unusual to find an artist who perseveres on the road less traveled, and rarer still to find one who pursues it as passionately as Slone does in this show.

Some paintings here are overdone, with splashes and puddles dissolving into an inchoate sea of paint.  Other paintings, where coy little figurative elements still peep out around their edges, look underdone, unfinished.

A sizeable handful, though, are real winners.  One is Sex with Strangers (2012), whose pouring creates a wonderful swimming, soaring impression by contrasting thin with thick paint, and reds, whites, and pinks with purples and blues. Also dynamite is Vulcan Love (2012). It is mostly burning, boiling lava-like red, with complementary dark speckles and complementary smears of black at the bottom, blending with the red into brown.

A third, nearly perfect painting is Further Out (2011), which is organized into three horizontally-streaked, drifting areas of color – soft blues and purple at the bottom and a central dreamy cloud of white, above which a blazing red sunset waits.

The post Sex With Strangers: Sandi Slone at Allegra LaViola appeared first on artcritical.

Sandi Slone’s paintings are sumptuous, sensuous things, but not all luxe, calme et volupté. What has been most striking about her work, ever since she began exhibiting in the late 1970s, is the breadth and depth of her exploration of imagemaking. She has moved from abstraction to figuration and back. She has expanded the physical and conceptual reach of her painting with excursions into installation, performance, photography and video. She has incorporated sculpture and text. But in her work of the last several years, Slone has set aside the literal and literary means that have sometimes engaged her and returned to abstraction’s reliance on density of spatial references and primacy of touch for meaning. Although she hews to the legacy of Post-War American abstraction—and despite the sheer proficiency evident in the result—she does not lull the viewer, but keeps us on edge. Notwithstanding her emphasis on space, surface, and color, she still gives us a jolt.

Sometimes the world gets ugly. Slone invested four years working through her response to 9/11 (she lived six blocks from the site of the World Trade Center) in her “Permutation City” collage paintings, allegories of global destruction in which a vast futuristic metropolis seems to collapse in on itself or be swept away. She emerged from this project with a revitalized approach to abstraction, and with a new context for some of her questions: while formally focused painting responds to its own values and criteria, what is its responsibility to the wider world? How does it relate to our dismal state of affairs and maintain its integrity? Can abstraction situate itself within this dynamic?

The dreamy sense of a liquid landscape underlies this new work, manifesting not in the standard devices of vertical perspective or naturalistic color but in the strong feeling of expansive, elastic space. It is intriguingly difficult to find visual footing in a space where nothing is as it seems, where a familiar color or resolute stroke of the brush is qualified by what came before, and what came after. Even when the insistently panoramic treatment of the seven foot long painting Vostock (2007) suggests vast space over a glacial lake, the visual field is interrupted and complicated by the transparent acid yellow of the upper two-thirds of the surface, which threatens to wash over the rest.

This disembodied quality is all the more surprising because the material reality of these paintings is concrete. Slone’s experimentation in painterly touch is legendary. In her celebrated “broom paintings” of the 1970s, she manipulated pools of pigment using a long-handled janitor’s push broom in lieu of a brush. She has poured buckets of paint onto her canvases, and embedded objects into them. That awareness of the nature and scale of the mark relative to the surface and to other marks is evident in works like Roulette (2010) and Eclipse (2008), in which swathes of color laid on with house painting brushes vie for dominance with wiry, calligraphically fine linear elements. In other works, the range of tactility is even greater, with areas that are smoothed, stroked, glazed, blended, layered, and occasionally encrusted. Though their facture is upfront and intimate, the spaces these paintings describe are indeterminate, sweeping and devilishly distanced from the viewer’s will to get a handle on them.

Slone’s iconoclastic palette has mellowed, but not too much. It is luscious, maybe more than ever, and the artist still finds a place for metallic pigments, such as the silver-gray band in The Buxom Eye (2009), which has a mysterious black shape precariously balanced in a horizontal field of orange-gold and vibrant fuchsia. A daring and adept colorist, Slone achieves a beguiling luminosity through a contrast of dark and light layering until the paintings emit a strange, enticing glow.

Her studied disconnect of color and drawing disrupts the viewer’s expectations of pictorial organization. In paintings such as Checkpoint Charlie (2010), a series of dark abstract shapes moves across and interrupts the flow of a central mass of intense flesh-pink. The color shift both suggests and thwarts a figure/ground reading. It feels as if the laws of gravity have been temporarily loosened and our perceptual moorings compromised.

While drawn to some of the rudiments of Abstract Expressionism, particularly freedom and experimentation, Slone resists its bombast and melodrama. She shares some concerns with Color Field painters and practitioners of Process Art and Surface/Support. Equipped with a restless intelligence and a hard-earned knowledge of her craft, in this body of work this accomplished artist consolidates her explorations of avant-garde practice in terms of painting, and of painting’s history. Therein lies the broader significance of Slone’s mastery of technique.

The new works radiate desire. Slone pays hommage to her guiding lights: the warm hues and tenderly overlapping contours of Giotto (2007) retool the fundamentals of illusionistic space; rough and ready, Pontormo (2007) channels the great Mannerist’s flamboyant chroma and affection for bizarre bodily gesture; the pale rose, peach and blue of Botticelli (2008) recall a blushing, dewy Venus on a saline half-shell. And then there’s Where You Want Me (2008-09), a grayish mauve field streaked with gravity-pulled pours and upward-seeping drips in olive-green interrupted by bubbling, lumbering lines in reddish black. The title sounds like the will of a particularly compliant brush stroke, and any painter knows that their kind is scarce indeed.

Twenty years ago, Slone began working in the tondo format, to which she returns frequently. “I love getting rid of the corners,” she told me. “It puts a different kind of tension on the surface. It pushes the volume forward.” An example is the Pop-inflected Sky, Field, Lips (2009), in which a tumescent band of ruby red, occupying the middle third, looms out from among the undulating blues above and greens below. The circular support becomes a sculptural object, essentially different from a rectangle, which will always read as a pictorial window to a realm beyond the wall. The tondo sits on the wall, asserting another order of otherworldliness, disembodiment: sculpture as picture, form as shape. No solipsist, Slone is profoundly concerned with social and environmental issues, as any thinking person in our time must be. Personal and political, each tondo is a world unto itself, fraught with rifts, ruptures, and toxic turbulence. Or maybe a moon, reflecting the blazing shine of this artist’s vivid, quirky, restless visual imagination.

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