Harriet Korman: Permeable/Resistant
Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Fourth Floor, New York

Phyllida Barlow: tilt
Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, New York

Penelope Umbrico: Monument
BRIC, 647 Fulton Street, enter on Rockwell Place, Brooklyn

Glenn Goldberg: Beach and Quiet (a rest stop)
Studio 10, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn

Timings: Introductions and Barlow discussion followed by Umbrico at 30mins; audience responses to the first two shows at 47mins; Korman at 1h; and Goldberg at 1h23mins, followed by second round of audience responses.

Next panel: February 13, 2019

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October 12 – November 4, 2018
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, studio10bogart.com

Note: Artist in conversation with Jonathan Santlofer, Friday, November 2, 7PM

Emptiness, nothingness, nullity, void. That the human mind can conceive of a nothing as a something is an extraordinary feat of intellectual abstraction. But to anyone who’s suffered the loss of a loved one the concept is neither extraordinary nor abstract: the absence that fills their lives is an ever-looming, visceral, and unrelenting presence. Like a gaping hole in the world that bears the contours of the lost person, the void of the bereaved is so real it can acquire a life of its own. In some cases it can live longer than the person replaced.

In Ode to A Void, Ron Baron delivers a deeply felt experience of human absence in a new installation of exquisite subtlety. Inside a darkened room lit only by four carefully calibrated spotlights, a large spiral path of particulate matter stretches quietly across the gallery floor. Placed rhythmically atop the sand-like substance, its speckled white surface glinting in bright discs of light, dozens of pairs of ceramic shoes circle inward toward the spiral’s center. Most of them matte white like the dust they sit on (bisque-fired, they’ve been left unfinished by a final pass through the kiln), the shoes’ interiors are painted a light-devouring black. Slip-cast from shoes Baron collected from thrift stores, each pair bears the imprint of the anonymous life once lived in it. Except when it doesn’t, as in one particularly moving instance where a pristine pair of children’s ice skates looks as if it was never worn. Threadbare slippers, work boots, ballet shoes and high heels stand alongside weathered cowboy boots, sneakers, men’s loafers and baby shoes. Like so many empty vessels that have outlived their purpose, the shoes march in a silent procession toward the vanishing point in the center. Hauntingly beautiful and rich in associative resonance, the piece eviscerates abstraction and lodges right in the bones.

If physical traces of those absent manifest in the shoes’ wear, less literal evocations of lives lived also pervade the installation. Strewn about the spiral path are bits of flowers and broken glass, perhaps the remnants of birthdays and graduations, weddings and funerals. But even more affectively provocative are Baron’s use of placement and the range of treatments he gives to the shoes. Occasionally, the tiny shoes of a child will be nestled inside an adult’s, or an adult pair will erupt vertically from the interior of a toddler’s. Each is meticulously crafted to its own emotional note. Some pairs are marred by a barrage of rusty nails. Others are bound by metal wire or riddled with holes. Still others, departing from the stark white that predominates, have been ornately painted and glazed with various finishes, their bright colors perhaps suggestive of lives just extinguished. Between the moments of tenderness and the undertow of anguish, the swirling form pulsates with the full spectrum of human emotion. Circling its exterior – its outermost arm forming a closed ring, we’re barred from entering – we become empathic onlookers of the whole human drama.

Gazing down across the spiral, its form suggestive of our galactic home, we’re led to consider our predicament in the universe. Bound inside time, acutely aware of our own smallness and finitude and yet feeling ourselves and those we love to be as large as the world, we live in eternal incongruity with our indifferent cosmos. And what will remain when there’s no one left to remember that the species that mattered so much to itself even existed?

The economy of means with which Baron is able to evoke such ultimate questions is remarkable. Indeed, his use of a metonymically implied personal to conjure the universal charges the work with the kind of condensed expression we expect of great poetry. In this, the “ode” in the show’s title seems particularly apt. For while the human mind may be able to grasp negation in the abstract, the reasoning faculty founders when it comes to its own. Perhaps it’s only with the language of poetry that we can think the unthinkable – and, if not exactly accept the unacceptable, dare to feel the flame in all its intensity before it goes out. For all the absence in Baron’s work, the heat is palpable.

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October 14 to November 13, 2016
56 Bogart Street (at Grattan)
Brooklyn, NY 718 852 4396

The six large paintings, all done this year, in Suzanne Joelson’s show at Studio 10 evince the ecstasy of first love. The paintings are notably suffused with crazy feeling, ranging from the erotic cropping of an image of eggs in carton, the sensuous rhyming of paint strokes and chicken skin, or the fierce splintering of a wood paneled surface. Known as an incredibly smart artist, voracious reader of complex theory, and an enthusiastic educator willing to consider all possibilities of making art, it seems that in this latest body of work she has thrown caution to the wind and followed her heart.

The trigger for this lust resulted from coming across discarded vinyl supermarket banners while on a jog with her husband. The possibilities inherent in the over-sized, groomed advertising images of grocery staples — eggs, kale, chicken — hit her like a lightning bolt. Sliced up, the banners were immediately employed as collage elements in her paintings. The results are startling, certainly due to the punch of their visual effects as paintings, but also because of the way the pieces of banners have inspired her to paint with a newly discovered sophistication that leaps beyond intellectual propriety.

All the rational formal decisions Joelson used to make are still there, but have become subordinated to the emotional impact the banner images bring. These collaged images have brought a delirious scale to Joelson’s work and every painted moment now occupies a dual identity as pure abstract paint as well as a reference to the fragments of large-scale depictions of food.

Massaging Kale, has a passage of striated green, black, and white paint in the middle panel of three that reads as a motion-blurred image of the vinyl vegetables depicted on the side panels. Joelson might have previously used a similar paint facture before, but the transformation of the paint into a representational analog is new here, and an elevation in understanding of the possibilities of the dual nature of paint itself as both material and signifier.

Joelson loves the play of language both visual and verbal, and Crack, Rake, Crate has both. Metaphorical transformations abound from painted green stripes, green and white striped cloth, and the green tines of an old rake that hangs Rauschenberg-style off the surface of the painting. The “old rake” may be a pun because it challenges the power of what seem to be large naked brown thighs. But those inviting thighs are just the cropped image of two giant eggs astride a pudendal gray triangle of egg carton. The fracturing of the painting by the alternating horizontal/vertical arrangement of four rectangular wood panels to produce an empty white square in the middle echoes the tongue-twisting title.

The eggs in crate/thighs in panties recur in Egg Game, (another punning title as a post-modern rebuke to the idea of endgame abstraction). But even when she becomes more abstract, as in the paintings, As It Happened and Where it Went, which introduces the show, and Grasping the Center, near the end, Joelson still produces an emotional impact. In As It Happened Joelson uses the ideas inherent in the wood panels of its construction, playing with the scale of the dark grey enlarged wood grain found on the vinyl banners, or shattering the surface to show the wooden structure underneath. The violent splintering contrasts with the rational construction of echoing shapes and negative spaces. While Grasping is composed entirely of sky blue vinyl fragments and white paint, the way the central white image is patched together from the fragments is almost Frankenstein-like.

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined first-rate intelligence as the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still be able to function. But contemporary painting contains so many conflicting ideas that trying to reconcile all of them can produce arid results. Joelson masters the impossible complexity of modern thought, not through rationality but through feeling.

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February 5th to 28th, 2016
56 Bogart Street, between Harrison and Grattan streets,
Brooklyn, NY, (718) 852-4396

After sleepwalking through an afternoon of painting exhibitions stocked with retreads of Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch, I was awakened, ironically, by a show entitled Crypto–Somatic Incantation.  If painting is a form of dreaming in an active state, Charles Yuen has achieved it.

Yuen’s antennae are unusually sensitive. As long as thirty years ago, he was a progenitor of the expressionist painting aesthetic influenced by late-Guston that has since gained currency.  Today, one branch of this style often mixes self-deprecating, deskilled technique with cloyingly decorative color.  This faux-naive painting style is often described as quirky and charming.  Yuen choose a different path. Though he occasionally injects humor into his work, it is of the existential variety.  Yuen’s paintings provide evidence that there is unfinished business regarding the spiritual in art, and he negotiates the territory with the wisdom of a seeker’s experience.

There are many fine paintings on display.  In Umpf, a familiar Boschian Everyman, burdened by his own ungainly limbs, traverses a landscape. We feel pity and apprehension on his behalf as he drags the specter of death (a skull), along with the sustenance of life (fruit).  The figure moves, embodied in an energetic cloud, as Yuen weaves a transparent envelope out of scratched curved lines that intersect and frame the event.  At the edge of the image, Yuen has deftly slashed out a few gestural strokes, staging a deep space that appears suddenly to come into focus.

Almost every painting in the show is embedded with a version of repeating, freehand, curved lines that ripple across the field, (sometimes intersecting with another such group of lines). Somehow Yuen avoids the usual pitfalls of cheap op-effect or puerile affect.

Scarlet Prayer resonates even from across the room.  The gently waving vertical pattern imbues the field with increasing depth, though it sits emphatically on the surface.  Flickers of cobalt blue skip across the image, vibrating from the red field and adding another level of tactility.  Five small ovoids containing praying hands float, randomly scattered.  An outline of a proto-archaic figure stands facing the viewer in acknowledgement. A small pile of rubble appears on the lower right, perhaps symbolizing the eternal cycle of life, a recurring theme in Yuen’s work. It’s a difficult challenge to make a large red painting and have it meet expectation.  Matisse did it with Red Studio, and Yuen does it here. This painting beckons, stares the viewer down, then opens up and becomes a place of contemplation.

In Man With Tubers, Yuen continues the theme of connectedness and renewal.  The composition echoes the romantic landscape tradition.  Two stacked horizontal blocks dominate, each comprising approximately half of the field, with a intermediate band of soft blur wedged between.  Man With Tubers bears a striking similarity to Marine of 1907 by Ryder, currently on view at the National Academy Museum. Rothko, of course, used similar proportions in organizing his color forms. Both Ryder and Rothko set a high bar, but Yuen adds an extra and decisive element here: an evenly looping green line, slowly and loosely coiled,that  floats over the proceedings from bottom to top, creating a kind of circuit. On the blur of the horizon, the green line assumes the shape of a figure in corpse pose. The figure embodies and stretches the full length of the horizon in this strikingly wide format.  The supine figure mediates the symbolic transition between the upper realm of the composition, a steely blue-grey sky, and the lower realm, a dark, subterranean area, where tubers attach to the figure. Echoing the shape of the body, Yuen incorporates an elongated white cloud within one of the looping green coils in the upper half of the composition. The fresh, direct, and seemingly unmediated painting process displayed here leaves one marveling at just how tapped into the intuitive Yuen is. He is not just adopting style or referencing sources, as many do when Ryder or Guston come to mind, but instead seems, convincingly, to be sharing similar sources of inspiration and experience. Yuen’s paintings have wings not because he is symbolically mapping space, but because he can locate and imbed consciousness in the image and surface. Visages and persona show up, colors move, and the floor shifts: a rare feat indeed.

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February 6 to March 8, 2015
56 Bogart Streeet, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Buskwick, (718) 852-4396

The subversive invitation implicit in Fred Valentine’s paintings is to think about feeling. Which is such a cry in the wilderness, because most contemporary painting does not want to be caught dead eliciting feeling, let alone thinking about it, and these baker’s dozen of paintings do both.

The invitation is subversive, because when we first walk into the little Bogart Street gallery, several rectangles that appear to be pleasant little constructivist paintings ring the room. And the temptation is to think, “here is a sincere, old-school artist still fighting the good fight, and making hard won little tasteful abstract paintings that we are supposed to admire for their indomitable hopefulness.” Well, banish that thought.

These paintings are like sweet little children that will lie to your face and pick your pocket and steal your watch when you bend down to pat their heads. They sneer at the distinction between abstract and representational, and most are more like optical illusions of abstract paintings. Their beveled wood frames replete with brass plates, are just stripes of paint with an ochre oval that often just dissolve into the middle of the painting, where atmospheric colors suddenly become solid. Untitled Abstract Picture #14, 2011-2012, has one spiraling rectangular passage where the color subtly changes from a dark walnut, to ochre, to orange, to green, to grey while seeming to stay as discrete shapes that interlock and overlap with themselves, like parodies of Frank Stella’s Polish Village series from the ‘70s.

But we don’t begrudge these paintings their sleight of hand, because Valentine continually shows how pictorial allusions are embedded in the language of painting. These days, plenty of painters from Charlyne von Heyl to Gary Stephan, do that. Valentine’s achievement is revealing how emotion comes to occupy those allusions.

So by the time we get to Untitled, 2015 we understand how a flat grey hyperbolic shape overlapped by another black hyperbole and a black stripe can be seen as two mountains and a tree at dusk. The addition of the shaded brown stripes that surround the central image like a trompe l’oeil frame, only reinforce our desire to turn this geometric abstraction into a memory of night at a mountain retreat. The memory triggers feeling, and though you are constantly reminded of the reflexive nature of the painting, you understand how the feeling arises.

The exhibition is eponymously titled Toward Grandfather Mountain after the final five and a half foot high oil on canvas (the paintings in the show are mostly oil on wood panel) on a small wall facing away from the entrance that we discover at the end of the show. Like most of the others, it too, has the brown trompe l’oeil painted frame. But its image of a mountain seen through two giant boulders emerging out of a lake in moonlight has a slightly different character. The forms are not flat, the boulders have a massive solidity, the sky is cloudy, there is a round object that could only be a moon, and the water seems to glint in the moonlight.

What is different about this painting is that its light and mass is almost entirely achieved through moments of reflection on a surface, crusty and bumpy from built up paint, which varies subtly in its matte quality and darkness, almost as deep as a Reinhart painting. Towards Grandfather Mountain. Is this what all the paintings have been building to? Or is it just a metaphor for the inevitability of old age? The sarcasm that lurks behind Valentine’s work, both allows for the obvious, and ridicules it at the same time, aimed not only at us, but at himself as well.

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October 11 to November 10, 2013
56 Bogart Street, at Harrison Place
Bushwick, (718) 852-4396

A one-room gallery in Bushwick provides the unlikely setting for what is arguably one of the most elegant solo shows of the Fall season. Meg Hitchcock, formerly a painter of likable if unexciting lacy abstractions, came up with a fully-formed concept five years ago that sprang to mind, according to the artist, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  Simply put, she would disassemble sacred texts into their individual letters and then reassemble these same letters into passages from other sacred texts. She cuts up Psalm 23 from the Old Testament, for example, and pastes its letters into a passage from the Koran.  A self-confessed heavy reader of religious writings, and literature with a spiritual bent in general, Hitchcock makes literal the deconstruction necessary for the analysis of text.

The work’s visual impact is immediate.  Almost exclusively black and white works on paper, they present themselves as simple graphic designs.  A few of them appear as recognizable images – a tree branch, a flaming circle – but most allude to tantric symbols, mandalas, or Kabbalistic images. Their sensuality is undeniable, and one is enticed to closer inspection, and it is at this point that we seethat the images are comprised entirely of typeset letters. By the time one’s noseis mere inches away,,   the work’s austere terrain becomes monumental, the edge of each little square piece of paper – not much bigger than the letter printed on it – standing in relative high relief to the paper it’s glued on.  Hitchcock’s process, in spite of being immaculate in execution, registers as the opposite of mechanized.  Her touch is light and resonates with meditation not drudgery.

Once the viewer is aware that the image is comprised solely of text, they are lead, inexorably, to attempt reading the work.  Which, because they are based on often-familiar texts, proves surprisingly easy.  Not that the entire passage is immediately available to the eye, but the opening thread, “Amazing Grace” for instance, will stand out.  Grabbing that thread will, for the more ambitious, lead into reading more of the text, if only to confirm the derivation of the text. One looks to the wall label for help and is intrigued further: Amazing Grace, Letters cut from the Bhagavad Gita, 2013. On an intellectual pilgrimage, we move from label to label – The Prophets: Surah 21 from the Koran, Letters cut from the Bible (The Book of Psalms), 2013; Mundaka Upanishad, Letters cut from the Koran, 2012; or The Sun: Surah 91 from the Koran, Letters cut from the Bible. The palpable joy of following the artist down this rabbit hole can be transformative.  The single sculpture/installation in the show, Trimalchio’s Feast: The Declaration of Independence, Letters cut from “The Satyricon” by Petronius, 2013, expands on not only the artist’s materials, but on the possible definition of what might be considered a sacred text. There is a vision and a mind at work here.

As the late Arthur Danto often emphasized, the subject of most contemporary art is art itself, a circular dialogue within the art community.  Rarely does an artist find a way to step out of this circle and instead make their art an exploration about who they are as people – how they think, what is important to them on a daily basis – and wed it to a process that not only intimately mirrors this, but allows viewers to actively participate in their discoveries.  Mark Lombardi, whose obsession with conspiracies resulted in exquisitely drawn flow charts, comes to mind as another example of this.  With this kind of art, all the elements – subject, technique, process, materials, and image – are so intertwined, and in such harmony with each other, that they exude a sense of inevitability.  Conversely, and more to the point, aesthetic impact — the pure pleasure derived from engaging with each piece — is ensured by all of these elements being transparent and available to the viewer.  These spare, works manage to be at once, intellectually satisfying, emotionally powerful, and visually stunning.

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October 5 to 28, 2012
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn (718) 852-4396

Slaying dragons is messy work, usually reserved for saints and heros, but Mary Carlson takes on a few at her Studio 10 exhibition.  Her weapon of choice is a delightfully brittle sword, the medium of glazed ceramics.  Ceramicists have been baking the hallucinatory and the terrifying into grotesque ornament since antiquity. Carlson, though, is after more than decorum.  Using clay with searching sculptural ingenuity, she defies the tendency of ceramics to prettify, and thus succeeds in killing her beasts and having them too.  Viewers may smile at her delicately clunky monsters, but their unwieldy, segmented bodies, stricken eyes, and elaborate snarls and teeth can leave bite marks of genuine pathos on the soul.

Besides large-scale dragons, Carlson includes a gathering of tiny figurines of dragon-slaying saints inspired by Renaissance depictions, their features and attributes nervously indicated without being overworked, and a pair of toddler-sized fists in glazed porcelain whose exquisite breakaway wrists resemble hatched eggshells.  The mastery of craft in these smaller works contrasts with her cloddish dragons, which flaunt clay’s almost comedic inaptness for hazardous duty.  (Equally outlandish weapons for dragon slaying, a plastic cocktail sword and a tinfoil spear, are wielded by a couple of the saintly figurines.)  The humor in Carlson’s choice of materials cuts both ways, not only against the grandiose tenets of monumental sculpture, but against the cuteness of artisanship; and by the same token her dragons resist pervasive clichés, whether Wagnerian or Potteresque.

Big Blue, a misshapen, 13-foot-long serpent laid out on a feasting table, is all the more hideous a monster, and all the more compelling a sculpture, for abusing teacup materials.  As if digesting a kill in one place while pinching to nothing in another, the dragon’s body – assembled from separately-fired stoneware elements drizzled with blue crackle glaze – swells in a way that makes one think queasily of a blocked intestine, or of an enormous tapeworm crashing a dinner party.

Carlson’s no-nonsense tabletops, custom fitted to her dragons, can also suggest pathology slabs or fish market counters.  Four Part Snake (2010), though, is not quite ready for filleting: its googly, doglike eyes flicker with the last light of fateful recognition, perhaps of betrayal, while its gaping, floundering head tips the balance of its useless coil of a body like a spent cornucopia.  On the floor below we find a separately titled piece, Pool, which, given its placement, reads as the pitiable creature’s blood.  Yet this shiny pink, plate-sized lump looks more like fake vomit –– it’s as comical as it is tragic.  Is this wounded Goofy dying for our ridiculous, insatiable sins?

However you read Pool, there is blood everywhere in this show, and it creeps up on you. The most carefully modeled and most fearsome of Carlson’s dragons, the fully decapitated Head (2012), rests fang-first on a crimson stain of such direct address –– a spill of watercolor on paper ­­–– that the theme of blood begins, likewise, to soak in.  Meanwhile, Head’s upturned, severed neck reveals Carlson’s expertise in managing folds of interior and exterior, while displaying architectural scale and trim; no fragile table ornament, this bloodthirsty fragment might have fallen from the cornice of a sacrificial altar.  Here and there on the gallery walls, meanwhile, red-beaded embroidery takes the macabre form of enlarged bloodstain splatters and forensic drips.  Even those white porcelain child’s fists can be seen to be tinted red at the thumbnails –– nail polish, perhaps, as applied by Lady Macbeth.

Dragon’s blood in pre-Christian legend could be lethal or magical –– a drop of it scalded Siegfried, yet empowered him with the comprehension of bird talk, thus saving his life.  Carlson’s subversive mastery of different craft traditions (previous work has included a crocheted giant squid, cast brass chicken feet, and vivisected upholstery) always seems aimed at some down-to-earth enactment of ambivalence between death and transfiguration.  She succeeds best of all when indulging a gruesome sense of humor.  If her inner demons tend to resemble slavering, woeful-eyed dogs as much as Renaissance dragons, it only enhances our appreciation of their double nature.  Like the brilliant, curlicued monsters of Raphael and Pinturicchio, Carlson’s, in their own vivacious way, are not quite despicable enough.

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