JENNIFER COATES
We are sitting here in your studio and I wanted to ask you about these paper constructed dioramas you have made over the years as sources for your paintings. I’m curious about how they have influenced your work and how they connect to the taped mixed media on paper pieces that are in your current show with Steven Harvey.

SANGRAM MAJUMDAR
Making the dioramas was a way to slightly detach myself from the physical environment, the kind of interiors we live in. If I paint something that’s in front of me or a space that I’m in, it’s hard for me to stop measuring my body in terms of what’s around it. Working from observation is about noticing the air around things and what happens when the body is in space. By removing that direct association, it helped me think of the painting as its own world, one step removed from where I am located.

So it’s a way to disorient yourself? Your relationship to an actual room had become too known and so shrink it down, to artifice it was a way to make it strange to yourself?

In a very simple way it was about being able to control it, do anything with it, flip it upside down. On one hand I wanted ground myself in light, air, gravity, but at the same time I wanted openness, and the ability to just change it all like it were a stage.

So you can be like a god!

Yes, I’m a god in training! The space in the paintings started to change, get more animated and dense.

After the 2016 election I felt like I needed to clean house – there was so much noise and anxiety in the world and I didn’t want that happening in the paintings. I wanted the painted space to be more of a refuge, calmer, a little bit simpler.

I was also thinking about the politicized language around walls and borders. I’d been painting rooms, but I hadn’t really considered the walls. What happens when you’re in a room? There is empty space that eventually hits a wall and what is that wall? The idea of literally getting closer to the wall was a way for the space in the paintings to get more compressed – layer on layer. My process now is about layering, removing, adding, and what happens if all the action is happening within a compressed space. Collage has become a way to approach that. When you layer collages over time, previous processes come through, and different layers of information are revealed. I remember one of the first times I saw frescoes in person and noticing how much was missing, how the decayed parts have become just as important as the information that was still legible.

What’s missing becomes part of our contemporary understanding of beauty. The ruin of the past in Classical sculptures that have lost their limbs, the darkening of formerly opulently colored paintings – the dirt, accumulation and dismemberment became part of western ideas of beauty. In some cases artists are trying to consciously re-make that.Yeah. I’m sensitive to that. I don’t want my paintings to become ruin porn. But I love how when there is information missing that our eyes can put it back together.

Ruins both unmake and remake themselves like a painting. When you have these moments where you see the picture breaking down and the materiality of it asserts itself. The picture remakes itself into an image and then it disappears into the materiality.             

I’d love to talk to you about color. Is color intuitive for you or do you have specific color worlds you are imagining before you start?

It is intuitive definitely. I’m interested in discordancy and setting up odd color relationships. The color can come from different worlds. One world could be a really rich color space like Monet’s last paintings and you can put that next to a color world like that of Ryder and it can all co-exist in one painting.

So you have all these micro relationship of color harmony moments in a larger composition. That’s a really exciting idea.

Let’s talk about “Alarm” [a large work, not exhibited, in the artist’s studio]. I love this painting. This crazy peach color you are using. In one area the peach is more opaque and in another it is painted more thinly over yellow, which comes through and creates an optical buzzy moment. They represent two temperatures. And then there’s this large, black, semi architectural, semi bodily construction that makes me think of something epic that an abstract expressionist would create. It feels monumental in that way and participates in a certain kind of art history. But then you’ve got these rays, dots and dashes that seem to come from a video game language or maybe a diagram. And at the edge it tapers out to gray. Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on?

Color is about making a decision and not screwing with it. I’m not trying to tweak things. That’s something I used to do, because when you are recording information, you have to really pay attention to the color relationships of the objects and spaces you are painting from. When you’re not observing but you have a thought in mind, then you have to just put it down. The only thing that you’re observing is really the painting and the world within it. Then painting becomes more about what are you willing to believe in, what surprises you. You can change it because you want to (or not) but it’s because of what’s in the painting rather than what’s in the world.

So in this painting “Alarm,” I put a figure in it to make this really monumental body. This was the key painting that led to the work in the show at Steven Harvey. The figure comes from an Indian miniature painting that depicts Thataka, a princess turned into a demon attacking Rama and Lakshman from the story of Ramayana. While in the story Rama is obviously the good guy, it’s Thataka who has such commanding presence in the painting. She was so much more interesting, almost heroic even. She is holding her ground. She’s in profile with one hand raised and her feet are moving in the same direction, but she’s a schematic figure. She’s holding potential energy within her body.

Does the color of the figure in your painting relate to the color of the demon in the Indian miniature?

No. In this painting I decided to pare down the color world into primaries plus black and white. I wanted the figure to be a luminous blue but dark. In Hindu mythology Krishna is often blue but that is not necessarily why this figure is blue.

I’m curious about your relationship to modernism and how is that connected to these Indian miniatures. How do these interests play out and intersect?

I have a somewhat detached relationship to where I grew up. I was really young when I left Calcutta. At RISD and at Indiana University where I went for my MFA, European art history penetrated my brain and body. I didn’t really know anything about Indian art growing up. When I started looking at the miniatures they reminded me of early medieval Italian art like Frangelico and that use of schematic color. I’m more drawn to the geometry, the color, the space, the framing elements. In this painting we’ve been talking about “Alarm,” the framing elements are like a video game I used to play.

I always bristle a little bit when discussing my work in terms of modernism because while it’s obviously there, I’m more interested in finding parallel connections from other histories and sources. A figure might come from an Indian miniature, but the color might come from a video game just as easily.

That’s what I love about this painting – your brain is telling you it’s a shallow space, but those modulations in the black – the matte to shiny, cool to warm – hint at a deeper more mysterious space. And then all the diagonals move into this vortex and with the scale of it, you are pulled into something overwhelming.

I like this painting too. I’m trying to trust what I’m drawn to, whether it’s in art or other elements that have been part of my life.

More just your lived experience embedded in the paint?

Yeah, the aspects of any given painting may relate to my cultural heritage or it may change and have a totally different set of associations.

A few years I gave my students postcards of paintings and had them paint them really from far away really quickly. The idea was to get them to focus on color and composition as broadly as possible.. One day in the studio I decided to try it myself with some postcards of Indian miniatures. I’m painting this postcard of a miniature done with a fine brush very carefully by someone who’s spent their lives learning these specific skills that I don’t have. I don’t paint like that at all – I’m painting with a bristle brush from far away, trying to translate it in 20 minutes. Failure is built in but so is that dislocation I’m interested in. My version will never be that. But at the same time, this is the only way for me to really discover it.

I just want to get back to the mixed media pieces for a minute. When I look at those pieces, there’s a sculptural quality that comes through and then it makes me think of your dioramas. But it also makes me think of this pixelated language that you’ve found in the direct painting gesture. What was the evolution of this stuttered language, how does that relate to three-dimensional space?

I ended up doing things I never thought I would do. if somebody had told me a few years ago I was going to use tape to do something, I’d be like, really?

The tape on a very simple level is an extension of a mark. You tear it, you put it down, you’re holding it at both ends, the hand presses it down. Maybe you try to rip it straight, but it never really rips right. I’m not cutting it with a knife or anything. So on one level it’s the closest mark to a painted gesture. But built within it is a distortion. I make a mistake, let me put some more tape on. It literally covers and erases and creates ground for a new decision. I like having that at my disposal because I feel like if I can make an image work with that blunt instrument, it’ll work when I’m going to paint it. My natural inclination is to be really sensitive to color and mark. So it’s disrupting my own sensibility.

The tradition of perceptual painting that I come out of is about observing slowly and carefully. But I want the image to hit you quickly and then then break down slowly via the layers that have accumulated.

Am I playing for both teams? I’m playing for the team that’s about erasing history: down with the past, newness is best, let’s move on to the future and just tear it down like an old building. But I’m also on the other team, which is about retaining connection to the past. That tension is akin to the world and how we exist as human beings. I want my paintings to be like that. I want them to be like people.

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, shfap.com

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Jason Stopa (quoted from the press release of the present exhibition) speaks of his paintings as “stages” in which “marks and images are actors acting in space”. If Stopa’s paintings are performative venues, this raises a question: has the performance concluded, or is it ongoing? Are Stopa’s stages the arenas of Action Painting, where the finished picture exists as a frozen testament to the act of its creation? Stopa’s works are not that simple. Activated by a colorful background in the gallery space, the paintings occupy one layer of a baroque abyss that is channeled inward—into pictures-within-pictures—and outward into our own reality.

Each of the seven paintings is hung against a red and yellow diamond pattern that covers the gallery’s walls, clearly painted by the same hand responsible for the canvases. Stopa’s brushwork is both affective and deliberate; like an actor who has rehearsed his lines a thousand times over, he looks to have put untold effort into making his performance appear effortless. The red lines and yellow fields unite the paintings while acting as a framing device. Much like an old master painting packed inside a gilded frame that’s weighed down with serifs and arabesques, Stopa’s paintings have indefinite boundaries between their depicted fiction and concrete reality. Two Views of Nature (2018) uses these same red lines to create the outline of a stage on the canvas, and Johari Window (2018) inverts the color scheme within its borders. Each painting is part of a larger entity and, in turn, contains other paintings within its interior space.

Two Views of Nature (2018) shows a pair of paintings placed en-abyme on a red and blue stage. The left-hand painting is linear and grass-like; the one on the right is calligraphic, black-on-yellow. This motif occurs again in Two Abstractions on a Stage, which features green pictures-within-pictures. Above each pair is a narrow window, the border of which has been extruded from a tube of paint. The paintings on the stages recall the placement of works in the gallery, but are a dimension removed from the actual canvases and exist only within another work’s diegetic space, like a play-within-a-play being performed on a fictional stage that is itself presented on an actual stage.

Another pair of paintings flips the viewpoint to show a possible audience or, at least, a space that could contain one. In the Pavilion (for Harold Budd) (2018) shows four rows of forms that resemble seat backs, and Syrian Damask Rose (Mushroom Cloud) (2018) has rows of staggered shapes that can also be seen as the work’s titular explosions. Facing the audience in some instances, and the stage in others, viewers occupy a paradoxical space between spectacle and spectator. We are outside the illusion depicted on the canvases yet within its walls at the same time. The paintings themselves balance on the knife’s edge between illusion and physicality, having their illusionistic spaces snapped back to flatness by areas of tubular impasto. Each of these paintings has a work placed en-abyme that echoes its dominant shape: an arch for Pavilion, and a mushroom cloud for Rose. These shapes are, like the windows in the stage paintings, applied straight from the tube and look heavy enough to peel away from the surface.

Another pair of paintings, The entrance to the gate (2018) and Johari Window, use the side-by-side, picture-in-picture format of the stage paintings while lacking their perspectival depth. The lines form diamond patterns—recalling the walls behind them—and vertical stripes that extend off the top of the canvas. The paintings en-abyme are mirrored between the two: Entrance has a green impasto “X” against a sunset-like gradient on the left, while Window has an extruded white diamond against a blue gradient on the right. Every work in the show has a doppelganger with the exception of The Big Picture (2018). Aptly titled, the large canvas contains eight representations of black-on-blue calligraphic paintings overlaid by one large pink and white one, outlined in yellow impasto. Perhaps this painting’s twin is the exhibition itself: They are, after all, both large self-contained works with many paintings within their boundaries. Spectators in the gallery viewing Stopa’s work occupy both sides of the conceptual divide between performers and audience. We are inside the work looking out, by virtue of being surrounded by it, while simultaneously being outside looking in at a fictional world. The performance thus continues; a fictional audience watches us from the painted theater as we gaze back at them.

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Bookstein
April 19 to May 26, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Harvey
April 18 to May 20, 2018
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Rivington streets
New York City, shfap.com

Might a bookish analysis provide the best way to understand the art of a marvelously intuitive painter? Perhaps! In his great treatise on figurative art, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) Ernst Gombrich offers a far-reaching thesis about the history of European painting. In a process of what he calls ‘making and matching,’ an artist starts with some simplified pattern, which Gombrich calls a schema, and then adapts it to match the particular visual features of what is represented. In cubism, which marks the beginning of the end of this tradition, so Art and Illusion claims, “the scrambling of clues” baffles perception. And then Jackson Pollock, going one step further, prevents “us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind . . .” Then visual deadlock is what results when there’s no way to consistently match the pictorial content to some depicted site in physical reality.

Often Paul Resika’s paintings from the 1980s show seascapes from Cape Cod, where he maintains a studio. These works, it might seem, are far from the modernist tradition of abstraction. But now, as if working in a highly personal way through a Gombrichian history of figuration, he juxtaposes backgrounds of clear skies, with yellow suns, with jagged pyramids in the foreground. And this show falls into two, distinctly different parts. Bookstein Projects shows a roomful of these enigmatic works, Resika’s more conventional paintings, variations on this theme. And at Steven Harvey’s gallery, in addition to the beach scenes, you also see several works, which are harder to place — A Quiet Romance (2017), showing a conch shell on a similar background, and, in the back room, the magnificent Self-Portrait with Rag (2017). Resika, you sense, keeps his options open. For this reason, my schematic history hardly does justice to the bold originality of all of these paintings. Look at Triangle- Sun (2017) are Harvey, or Rose Dawn, also 2017 at Bookstein. These prickly images set against the sky, which have no sources that I can identify, are a law onto themselves.

In some of these recent paintings, The White Sky (2017) for example, (on view at Bookstein) you see the edge of the sea on the horizon. The sea and sky backgrounds of these landscapes could be painted from nature, but what are we to make of these geometric structures – which, and here I contradict one statement by the artist in the gallery press releases, do not look remotely like any sand dunes that that I have seen at the beach, neither in Cape Cod nor elsewhere? Rather, I would argue, it is as if Resika self-consciously chooses to juxtapose a seemingly non-figurative form against these natural settings, in pictures that are half abstract, and half figurative. What a strange juxtaposition of figurative and abstract-looking elements – and what an original way, certainly never envisaged by Gombrich, to deal with the traditional issues of pictorial representation. As far as I know, this is a remarkable, seemingly unprecedented development in Resika’s long evolution. MoMA’s display “the long run,” which runs through November 4, chronicles the development of artists after their breakthrough moment. This exhibition includes an enigmatic recent work by Lee Bontecou, a late painting of Elizabeth Murray and one picture from the seemingly endless ongoing development of Frank Stella. These two shows of Resika’s very recent paintings nicely supplement that presentation, for at ninety his art, too, has undergone a dramatic transformation. In old age now, he prepares to leap into abstraction, as if returning to the concerns of the art world of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied in the mid-twentieth century. How surprising and how absolutely admirable is his determined ability to remain essentially unpredictable!

The post A Scrambling of Clues: Paul Resika, Geometry and the Sea appeared first on artcritical.

208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets.

A dozen years ago I wrote a letter of recommendation for Clintel Steed who was applying for a fancy residency somewhere  (I don’t recall if he got it or not.) I find, checking my files, that my verdict on his student work applies as forcefully to what he is doing now. Not that I’m suggesting stagnation in his development: on the contrary, he is a painter who never fails to astound me with his energy and ambition: “Clintel Steed’s work fuses a deep and original understanding of the formal complexities of picture organization with a fresh, intuitive, emotive sense of narrative. This marriage of the plastic and the personal gives his work its particular intensity and edge.” In contrast to the three other paintings that power Steven Harvey’s front parlor, which are busier, denser, slower-reading pictures that take their cues from old master painting and the news cycle, the enigmatic portrait featured in “When Dreams Happen” is a kind of Invisible Man for the Internet age, with a visage that looks like a cross between an African mask and a pair of whirling fan blades rotating in opposite directions, a face formation of hieratic menace and tender vulnerability.

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This essay is published in a book that accompanies the artist’s exhibition, “because I have no interest in those questions: photographs, paintings and painted photographs” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street New York City, 917-861-7312.  November 19 to December 21, 2014

What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret. – François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, 2012.

Stuart Shils is a painter.  His very being has come to be filtered through the act, substance, and legacies of paint.  The place of photography in his life is a case in point.  That he photographs with acumen and passion, relishing what are for him new expressive possibilities, is borne out by this publication and its related show, but his photography is, as Clausewitz might have put it, the continuation of painting by other means.

A latecomer to the feast, Shils is indifferent to the order of courses.  He has a hunger, but the kind of hunger induced by nibbling, not the kind that brought him to the table in the first place. In any event, he seems impatient with gadgetry, preferring the low-tech of the iPhone even to the user-friendly pocket Leica D-5 given to him in 2007 by his friend, the late Roy Davis, the gift that launched this adventure.

The classically trained painter could have gone in different directions, applying equivalent rigors to those that are now second nature in the painting studio, or “chilling out” with the instantaneity offered by his new toy.  In any event, there is an indifference towards post-shutter finesse—the developing, editing or printing aspects of photo craft.  But that is changing, inevitably, as he prints up his images for exhibition and is forced to address issues of size and scale and texture. It is changing also in a departure in which he actually paints on photographic supports (pace Richard Hamilton or Gerhard Richter) suggesting equally painting asserting its primacy over the newfound interest or an increasingly openness to medium fluidity.  But technological ease is still essential to Shils’ belated embrace of photography.

He is a bit like those resolutely abstract painters whose photography is less the scouting for source material than it is the registering of equivalents of their form-vocabulary in the observed environment. I’m thinking of artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully and Joe Fyfe.  Except Shils is not quite (perhaps indeed is hardly at all) an abstract painter.  His painting is always rooted in observation and experience of actual places, however generalized the sensation of looking may feel in his pared down evocations.

Another way in which the camera is subordinate to the easel in the ontology of image-formation is that his photographs are continuations of the act of painting rather than merely its resulting images. His discovery is of correlatives of painting in the layering that exists—or rather that is revealed to exist through slow looking—within the humanly built environment.  His photographic motifs often entail viewings through meshes and apertures and coming back at the viewer/photographer in mirrors or reflective panes—instances of observation that structurally mimic camera work.  In much the same way, the palimpsest of screens and frames that characterize his photographic motifs are equivalents of a painting process that is somehow at once alla prima and layered, marked equally by impressionistic responses and minutely deliberative editing, a kind of temporal push-pull that exploits dichotomies of composure and snap.

The iPhone suits the interventions of his eye upon the urban scene, as tool of communication and instantly handy jotter. A latter-day flaneur, Shils bikes around his native Philadelphia finding in its understated poetry a twin city to the Naples of Thomas Jones.  He is a wonderful guide to the underbelly of this city, as I have discovered on car rides with him, marveling at the architectural grandeur of its industrial age, offering almost archaeological insights into its social transformations.  I have dubbed him a connoisseur of slums, although his tours and evident astonishment at all he witnesses is the opposite of ruin porn.  His vision cuts through layers of renewal and decay, alerting him tosignifiers of alienation and aspiration. He is, in equal measure, aesthete and citizen.

It is odd that an artist who was a student in the 1970s managed without photography in his artistic life for so long.  Perhaps shunning the medium was a statement (to himself or the world), an affirmation of the totality of vision contained by painting and drawing.  And yet, as a teacher and voracious gallery goer, Shils is nothing if not ecumenical: give and take characterizes his attitude towards artists of all mediums.

Could it be that he had no need of the apparatus because he himself was the camera, in the Sally Bowles sense?  But that seems too cute, especially as Shils’ realism, even in his cooler, crisper earlywork, never aspired to mechanically impartial empiricism.  More likely photography seemed a distraction from the delicate ecology of looking and feeling constantly evolving in his painting practice – an unwelcome third wheel.  What has changed is not just his own security and balance but also perhaps the radically fluid, informal nature of photography itself in its post-celluloid and iPhone incarnation: with Shils and photography, medium and messenger are meeting half way.

Shils’ photography echoes the adventures of millions who use this technology almost unselfconsciously, and stands apart from the quasi-cinematic efforts of much fine art photography that exploits scale, precision and theatrical composition almost as means of distancing itself from popular use.  And yet, ironically, precisely by bringing painterly verve to iPhone quickies, Shils’ low-tech photographic imagery actually recalls the immaculately composed, attempting-to-be-painterly photography of the medium’s first half century.  His photographs, like his paintings, entail a strange chemistry of contrastive speeds.  Despite the layering and the relish in the discovery of layering, his images are a kind of suspended clarification, a sudden gestalt.  “Content is a glimpse” as de Kooning put it.

Just as his painting entails a back and forth between the painterly and the perceptual, between making and seeing, between plastic metaphor and actual moments of observation, so his photographic touch oscillates between clarity and blur, accident and set-up, purposiveness and nonchalance.  His iPhone is a weapon in the front line of seeing, in the fog of perception.

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November 20 to December 22, 2013
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
New York City, ?917-861-7312

(Projector: 237 Eldridge Street, between Houston and Stanton streets)

The title of Sangram Majumdar’s exhibition of recent paintings, on view at two locations on the Lower East Side, is “Peel.” The appellation seems to ask viewers to look beyond the surface to get at the paintings. But when they do so they are likely to find little “there” there.

The Calcutta–born artist received his MFA from Indiana University, a graduate program famous for its emphasis on figurative painting, and true to his schooling, previous exhibitions presented still lifes, landscapes, interiors and portraits rooted in direct observation. Using a perceptual process that incorporated exacting measurements and finely calibrated tonal ranges, Majumdar’s earlier artworks recalled realist canvases by Antonio López García and Euan Uglow. In his 2008 interview with online magazine Neoteric Art he declared that, “As a painter, my concerns really revolve around form, space and the specificity of the experience.”  Making straightforward paintings with rich colors and decorative patterns, Majumdar’s canvases packed a punch.

But in “Peel,” Majumdar’s third solo show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, paintings are left in an ambiguous state between representation and abstraction. Though works here contain discernable imagery, scenes are not fully described. Loosely sketched depictions of hard-to-recognize objects are out of scale and strangely lighted. Majumdar’s canvases are deliberately evasive.

“Torque,” 2013, for instance, the first painting greeting gallery visitors at Forsyth Street, is a canvas comprised of gray and brown stripes. The composition is based on Majumdar’s own studio storage rack, where cardboard encased artworks, seen from the side, lean against one another. Rendered with a subdued palette, a hint of the studio beyond is visible between the wrapped paintings.

“Interrupted,” 2013, is a painting of a painting partially covered in paper and scotch tape, a trompe-l’oeil with a painterly touch. Though real-world surface textures and light are naturalistically rendered, this strange object with no clear meaning expresses only the laborious execution of a concept-driven exercise.

“Paper Tree,” 2013, is a visual pun. Here lime green, blue and purple triangle papers were affixed to the wall in the shape of a tree and then painted. Majumdar’s composition, reminiscent of Ab Ex canvases by Jack Tworkov, is also an idea-driven work: a realist painting of an abstract symbol of the natural world, referencing both abstraction and representation.

Illustrating obscurity, a reclining female figure, lit from below, holds a mask over the right half of her face in “Look, See,” 2013. The figure’s left arm dissolves into brown background at the wrist while the striped patterning on a red dress, started but not finished, indicates a hesitancy to say too much.

At Projector, the second exhibition space around the block, two large oils reference interior spaces. “Unbuilt to Suit,” 2013, features a violet-colored staircase, the only identifiable form in the picture, leaned over in a glowing red room. “Step Right Up,” 2013, a seven-foot-wide canvas, looks like an attic space, with a chair that is stacked precariously. An essay in the exhibition catalog explains these scenes were inspired by a broken dollhouse Majumdar rescued from the trash heap, “rooms caught in the turbulence of disorganization, with all the sense of their original small scale removed.”

Majumdar has shown himself to be an ambitious painter with tremendous ability, but in this latest body of work he seems to be striving for obfuscation rather than clarity. In doing so he fails to realize, perhaps, that urgency in a work of art springs from unguarded, direct expression. In an effort to make smarter, more complicated pictures, Majumdar sacrifices the emotional impact of his earlier work.

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Katherine Bradford: New Work at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 19 to June 9, 2012
210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City,  212-691-6565

The First Great Depression bequeathed the common culture a pantheon of superheroes now making a spectacular “comeback” – although of course they never went away – in the Second. But as Hollywood slicks up the golems of yesteryear in new layers of spandex, visual artists have a different take on these valiant personages.  In 2012, in two remarkable shows, Superman and Batman stormed Gotham’s gallery scene.

Batman arrived at Frederick Petzel Gallery in January on the cape tails of Joyce Pensato. This artist’s trademark idiom, established over a long career, is the full-blown, angst and splatter rendering of cartoon characters, a style that not only simultaneously critiques and renews Abstract Expressionism but also recalls the shared roots of DC Comics and the New York School.

Superman stars in a show from an artist of the same age as Pensato but, thanks to a late start and contrasting outlook, a totally different generation: Katherine Bradford.  Where the dark knight gets bombast, the man of steel’s ascent is fuelled by fey sweetness.

Indeed, Bradford delivers an oxymoronically saftig übermensch.  But the deflated catsuit and soft limbs are in no way meant to imply an antihero: he is simply a cuddly hero.  Nor in his middle age spread should he be misread as a mere mortal in a rented Halloween costume, a figure – in other words – of bathos. His astral travels are for real as he ascends upon a schematic spiral or hovers in the night sky.  His depiction is of a piece with an overall paint handling that has the angst-free awkwardness of outsider art.  Like the best of naïve painting, only in her case knowingly hard won, Bradford’s images are shot through with effortless abstract harmony and disconcerting observational acumen. The hero’s buttocks and thighs in Superman Responds (2011), for instance, are conveyed by a few loose, carefree-seeming dabs of electric crimson and ultramarine against a generalized creamy ground that nonetheless get across with anatomical precision a convincing if gender-bent voluptuousness.

Everything Bradford paints is shot through with humor: sometimes whimsical, sometimes poignant, sometimes earthy and raucous, other times ethereal, but tellingly, never ironic. Superman as wimp could so easily be a satire of something: masculinity, militarism, even Painting with a capital P.  But Bradford invests the two motifs in her show – the other being ocean liners – with such warmth and evident personal significance as to defeat any such end.

These paintings are big and intimate.  Big in energy, implied scale, the busy way worked surfaces and agitated depths connote imagery found in decisions and revisions.  Intimate in the localness of color contrasts, the rapport with surface, the unfussy finesse of loved details—albeit ones modestly veiled with the appearance of chance discoveries and happy accidents.  This collision of gestures that are at once bold and poignant is what gives Bradford’s work its essential character, its tension.

She is one of those very contemporary artists intent on having her cake and eating it.  There is the peculiar poetic charm of provisional painting – a sense of blah, of nonchalance, of not quite caring about the slapdash, scruffy, Brooklyn-esque “work in progress” look. But, on the other hand, there is also the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting.  The happy marriage of naïveté and abstraction can feel at times as if a Chagall, Janice Biala or Aristodimos Kaldis has been pressed through a de Kooning sieve.  Actually, forget that messy analogy: just recall that Wassily Kandinsky made naïve woodcuts before he invented abstraction. Or else bring to mind the reverse, high-abstraction-to-low-realism trajectory of Philip Guston.

Guston is indeed the logical port of call for anyone making sense of Bradford’s journey to action heroes and cruise ships.  A very late starter, she had begun in abstraction when, in the course of her development, she felt a painterly, rather than existential, need for subject matter.  But ocean liners and Superman, at least as she treats them, are, on two counts, the opposite of Guston’s Klansmen, cigarette stubs, or old boots: her romantic, heartfelt subjects are neither quotidian nor dark.  Similarly, The Moon and Sixpence meets A Doll’s House scenario suggested by her delayed career launch is belied by her anything-but-outsider status as an artist.  Bradford is little short of a cultural heroine to a younger generation of Brooklyn painters making up the phenomenal attendance of her lecture at the New York Studio School earlier this season and the opening of the exhibition under review.

As I say, Bradford’s Superman and her ships are non-ironic and non-satirical, but clearly, the limp action hero and the capsized liner somehow battling on are powerful, fecund symbols of vulnerable strength and strength in vulnerability.  Found in the process of abstract painting, could they in fact be symbols of that very art historical legacy she treasures but also deconstructs: ciphers for painterly explorations that are personal and collective, provisional and heroic, their grandeur grander for being – literally, in her scumble and pentimenti – faded?

This would bridge the gap between the bulky ships at sea and the hero zipping through the sky. It would draw stray images in this compelling show into a gently suggestive lost-and-found narrative of danger and adventure: a Madame-X-like Lady Liberty (2011); a collage featuring the doomed aviatrix Amelia Earhart (2011-12); the silhouette of a ship against a pink sea and orange sky in S.O.S (2012).

Maybe it could even make sense of the cryptic (though neither Kryptonian nor marine) New Men (2011), a mirrored, quasi-palindrome arrangement of the words of its title.  In her lecture, in reference to this work, Bradford alluded to an appreciation of the strong sensitive men  she was starting to notice around her –  bearded Brooklyn Rail-reading metrosexuals flooded this audience member’s mind – perhaps, indeed, the very courtiers of the new order who throng her events.

All I can say is that Bradford is my personal discovery (so far) for 2012.  She makes me optimistic about the future of painting.  I left her show a new man.

The post A New Hero: Katherine Bradford at Edward Thorp appeared first on artcritical.

November 30-January 8, 2012
208 Forsyth Street at East Houston
New York, (917) 861-9380

How amazing is the diversity of the modernist American art world, and how limited are the traditional official histories! In 1958, Bob Thompson (1937-1966) drew Untitled (Man in Forest)— almost good enough to be by Georges Seurat, if we could imagine that the Frenchman had lived to look at and learn from German expressionism. In his time, the abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko dominated the New York galleries.  Thompson made his pastel Study for Expulsion and Nativity in 1963, conjoining the scenes of Eve’s Fall and Christ’s birth in a high art version of a comic strip that juxtaposed images riffing on Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Piero della Francesca’s Nativity.  By then, Andy Warhol’s pop art had emerged and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s Postmodernism had to be reckoned with by Americans. But while New Yorkers experienced this amazing transition, as if in a parallel universe, Thompson, who moved to Europe in 1961, was looking to Poussin and Italian Renaissance painters for inspiration.

Nowadays, Thompson is displayed at MoMA, but I have the sense that his manner of figurative art, which was influenced by Red Grooms, Gandy Brodie and Jan Müller, remains hard to fit into our narratives of American Modernism. This show of more than twenty works on paper, most not previously displayed, reveals an amazing variety of art. Charlie Haden (1960) and Portrait of Nina Simone, Provincetown (1965) are marvelous linear ink images resembling David Hockney’s drawings from the 1960s. Waiting Figure #4 (1958), a watercolor, darkly brooding, maybe owes something to Northern Symbolist painters. Untitled (Seated Nude) (1959), a pastel in pink and grey, is a mysterious female figure, whose sources, if any, elude me. And the big Last Painting (1966), oil with ink on canvas, inspired by Titian’s Venus and Adonis, transforms the colors and compositions of its Venetian source in a radical way that I admire but don’t understand.

Thompson is a deeply mysterious artist. After seeing Cézanne’s female bathers, he reportedly said: “I paint a woman that is real for me . . . and then I am going to put her right beside a tree and I relate her to the sensuality of the tree.” That’s clear enough, but I don’t comprehend how in Untitled (Nude in Forest) (1958) the sensuality of the trees, drawn in charcoal relate to the white figure of the female nude in the distance. Nor do I grasp its relationship to Untitled (Landscape) (1958), a watercolor revealing very different trees, and, so it seems to me, a very different artist. Furthermore, these drawings are done in a different style than the two ink-on-paper images after old masters, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (1961-63) and Entombment (1961). Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects seems to be presenting a small group show, including at least five draftsmen, each one excellent but all very different, a prismatic reflection of an excited painter exploring several different paths at once, an artist whose death precluded a fuller integration.

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