April 20, to August 27, 2017
144 W 125th Street (at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard)
New York City, studiomuseum.org

Despite the fact that the famous African Americans in Rico Gatson’s “Icons,” , are pictured at the height of their power and creativity (in their iconic moment), each photograph of these heroes of music, art, and politics is scaled small in relation to the expanse of paper in which they are collaged. In the surrounding space, hand drawn lines edge ecstatically around the figure in individualized emanations. In colored pencil and marker at a width of about a third of an inch, lines of radiation, a system of repeating vectors, emanate from the subject’s head or chest, marking a relationship to mind or heart.

Gatson’s ongoing series is the subject of a focused display, curated by Hallie Ringle in the Studio Museum’s mezzanine gallery, a low-ceilinged, small room, offering an intimate setting for these 28 works on paper.

The images the artist excerpts are often familiar: a portrait of Chuck Berry kneeling in profile with his guitar; a smoking, contemplative James Baldwin; Angela Davis proclaiming full throttle at a civil rights rally; Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks pushing sound through his horn. The splashes of color that surround these dynamic images hit as an explosion of excitement or lust or cool, but the individual icon is the lifeblood of each piece.

Gatson’s idiom brings to mind Sol Lewitt drawings as well as album covers like Stevie Wonder’s Songs from the Key of Life, and the classic Blue Note covers from the 1950s and ‘60s by modernist designer Reid Miles.

With the exception of one or two drawings, like Cassius Clay hanging precariously on pointed peeks against a white abyss, Gatson’s icons are visually grounded. The artist chose renowned figures of American history and culture. This stands in contrast, however, to Andy Warhol’s project, which lays bare the emptiness of celebrity and the intoxicating effects of spectacle. Gatson’s portraiture is aspirational. His subjects shout to us in proud exclamatory mode: Miles Davis! Billie Holiday! Amiri Baraka! He illustrates the physical and psychic embodiment of black presence with a capital “B”, in an emotional style that conveys absolute reverence. See us, hear us. The fanning lines around these figures could equally be halos.

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November 12, 2015 to March 6, 2016
144 W 125th Street (at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard)
New York, 212 864 4500

“A Constellation,” which recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, presented a series of works selected to juxtapose established artists’ work with newer work, disparate in media but engaged in similar themes. Differences between elements of the show reveal that opposing signs — rather than repeated signs — may be more effective in signifying an idea.

From Al Loving’s Variations on a Six Sided Object (1967), the eye bounces back to Cameron Rowland’s Pass-Thru (2013). The latter title conveys an idea of access or transfer of an object. Yet the plastic sculpture, a replica of mechanisms used at bodegas or liquor stores, seems more interested in refusing access. A transparent rectangular box sits on a Lazy Susan within a larger rectangular box. The nails used to construct each box visibly protrude and lend a sense of danger. More obviously, there is only one open side to the larger box, meaning there is no through. An object placed in the pass-thru would only go round and end up exiting the same side. This refusal of use value is reflected in Loving’s painting which, with its solid and dotted lines, is reminiscent of an origami pattern or instructions for constructing a cube. However, the distortion and extension of “sides” beyond the pictorial frame frustrate any attempt to imagine its construction. While Rowland is described as more explicitly interested in social relations, both artists negotiate the viewer’s access to space.

Moving into more specific sites than spaces, Sondra Perry and Nona Faustine ask where a black body has been/is now situated. This is an intentionally objectifying statement; Faustine’s photograph From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013) explicitly places a body (the artist’s own) at an intersection in the financial district, standing naked on a wooden box with shackled wrists, on display. The viewer is conscious of their gaze. The choice of site does not immediately carry meaning, as the sign for a Tumi store and AT&T kiosk indicate that this is a relatively contemporary scene in New York’s Financial District. We learn from the text that this is the site of a former slave market, where countless bodies would have been examined, objectified, and evaluated as property that could be transplanted into the white space of a stranger’s home. The evident comparison of black bodies across time is eerie, and the fact that the viewer is still in a position of examination is troubling. This perhaps is why Faustine chose to reveal the significance of the site only in the text: the distinct experience of realizing its meaning is important. Perry reconstructs the white space Faustine problematizes (the space of a stranger or white master) as one of torment with Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I (2013). Photoshopped (objectified and deconstructed) dancers move desperately, emphatically within the confines of a corner in a blank room. Few architectural details reveal the nature of the space, yet it is clear that these bodies are supposed to disappear within it. Instead of arms, legs, and torsos, the viewer sees a grey blur occasionally interrupted by the misplaced line of floor meeting wall. (Architectural space is displaced onto the body just as the body experiences displacement in space.) Our only indication of the identity of the dancers is in the signification of their race — their hair — which in turn becomes the reason that they must disappear, the reason they must move so frantically through space. The trauma of their confinement in this space parallels Faustine’s refusal to belong in a slave market.

Specific to the site of the gallery itself is Torkwase Dyson’s 2015 wall painting, Strange Fruit (Dignity in Hand), which relates to the geometry of Loving and Rowland but seems more interested in conveying meaning. Representations of demographic statistics first come to mind when taking in Torkwase’s grid of painted dots. Again, the viewer only understands its meaning through the exhibition text. We learn that the painting on the wall commemorates “a fraction of the nearly 4,000 lynchings recorded in American history.” Structure communicates the presence of a narrative, but the narrative only unfolds through text.

Narrative is again constructed with ruby onyinyechi amanze’s that low hanging kind of sun… (2015), where the spacing of mixed media elements relates to the layers of that narrative. Here, not even the text reveals what the drawing must contain for the artist. The exquisitely rendered face of a woman kisses the masked face of another body melting into a mermaid’s tail. Three motorcycles drift into the web of a flock of birds nestling into the charcoal hair of another woman, drawn diagonally opposite from the first.

More explicit in creating a narrative, Talwst’s jewelry boxes encouraged the viewer to hold contemporary memories of racial violence close. The miniature scale of depiction should not be confused with scarcity of detail or meaning. In Por Qué? (2014), the killing of Eric Garner is recreated in front of a white American flag, reminiscent of flags by Jasper Johns. Within our culture of wealth and privilege, jewelry and commitments, what cases of cultural violence do we snap shut and hide away?

A literary mind could draw proximate parallels between titles: Jack Whitten’s Psychic Intersection becomes Billie Zangewa’s Divine Intervention (2015), or Andy Robert’s After Mass (2015) transmutes into the aftermath of Talwst’s Por Qué?, and from there into the math of Perry’s Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I. A visual mind may find representational rhymes: a wooden sculpture, Mother and Child (1993) by Elizabeth Catlett, stands in front of a silk tapestry of another mother and child by Billie Zangewa. The arrangement of elements in Troy Michie’s STRAND, CABLE, TWINE (2015) seems tied to the spatial arrangement of drawings in amanze’s work. Money transfers invoked by Pass-Thru relate to David Hammons’s piggy bank, Too Obvious (1996). Adrian Piper’s thought-bubble portrait painting hangs near Tony Lewis’ speech bubble Make His Mouth Bigger, Angrier (2015). Melvin Edwards’s Working Thought (1985) concretizes the slave shackles depicted in Faustine’s photograph.

This is not to say that these works are unproductive in and of themselves. A constellation is about the larger picture, but the curation of the show focused too narrowly on connecting dots based on narrative and representation.

The post Drawing a Line: “A Constellation” at the Studio Museum in Harlem appeared first on artcritical.

Karma: June 15 to August 30, 2015
39 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, 917-675- 7508

Harlem: July 16 to October 25, 2015
144 West 125th Street between Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard) and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard (7th Avenue
New York City, 646-242-2142

Two exhibitions, running concurrently, afford an exciting opportunity to think about Stanley Whitney. A selection of works from the 1990s are on view at Karma Books and Gallery while more recent works, from 2008 to 2015, can be seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The downtown exhibition, marking the publication of a sizable book on Whitney’s work by Karma Books (reviewed earlier this summer at artcritical) is comprised of five large paintings in the main gallery and 84 small paintings and works on paper salon hung in the entrance space. At the Studio Museum, 29 paintings, six color gouaches and five black gouaches afford ample indication of where Whitney is right now.

In their rows of rounded shapes and loosely brushed compartments Whitney’s earlier paintings resemble shelves or cavities, reading like sections of a catacomb or stacked fruit. Stacking is significant as the paintings are evidently constructed to accommodate color building with units or blocks of color; this has, indeed, become foundational to all his painting since the1990s. The artist spent five years living in Rome during the 1990s when he also visited Egypt and it seems clear that the nature of those built environments, including the Pyramids, were important constructive ideas for his subsequent development. The structure in the earliest of the large oil paintings at Karma, Radical Openness, (1991) evinces an already begun absorption in image making that combines drawing and painting through repetition and difference. By this I mean that, rather than change a basic structure from one painting to the next, the basic structure remains the same: graphic invention and shifts in color space become the painting’s subject. Though continued right through to the present day, there is no sign of this structure inhibiting or reducing the possibilities of emotional or intellectual expression, of inquiry through color and line. In fact, it becomes indexical of changes along the way. It is color that made this format necessary—emerging slowly, as can be seen in the 84 small works at Karma. Drawings indicate a range of possible directions, but it is color that definitively led to this particular structure.

The smaller paintings and drawings are like episodic, graphic narratives. Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, (1937) comes to mind, as might the way Bonnard uses drawing and mark making to define spatial elements in his paintings. In each new iteration, enough is carried from the last painting to the next to make the playoff between repetition and difference central to his effort. The sectional frontality and scale changes act like amplifications or diminutions of sound. The analogy with music is an obvious one, but no less relevant for that. The main difference, from the point of view of Whitney’s work, is that music occurs in a prescribed temporal sequence whereas in painting time only passes for the viewer: colors change as you look at them depending on where the eye is resting or moving.

Drawing is implicit in the way Whitney wields his brush: the degree to which he leaves traces of the latter visible indicates its role in the placement and organization of color. In the recent paintings this drawing element remains crucial although with the reduction of one color placed over another it is the individual color blocks that carry the energy. The color blocks are kinetic. It can be argued that nothing we see is static for our means of perception, but color complicates this, as it is already a fugitive phenomenon that operates between the phenomenological and the conceptual. There is nothing neutral when it comes to color, no known definitive form, and it is this that is so decisively at play in Whitney’s paintings. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Color does not relate to optics the way line relates to geometry.” In Lightnin, (2009), for instance, a 40 x 40 inch painting, one constellation of color supersedes another in even a few moments of looking. The vertical narrow rectangles of each side and the bottom edge pulsate, sending the eye on a rotating journey; adjacent colors pair up, blue and red on one side, green and yellow on the other. Similar animation happens everywhere across the painting: recombinations of color and pictorial space are endless. This transforms painting into something like a time-based medium in which time runs in every direction and at a constantly varying speed.

Whitney’s working method constitutes what could be described as lyrical pragmatism. The way the paintings look to have been made, from top left to bottom right, is analogous to reading script, or painting a wall methodically. He typically completes a picture over two sessions, with three to four drying days between. This speed of execution allows for surprises and time to absorb what is happening in the painting. Rather than the painting being the fulfillment of a set plan, therefore, it is a result of allowing any number of sources from life to inform and influence its outcome. The vitality of the paintings attests to the success of this strategy, leaving the viewer with a desire to see more, however much each completed painting refuses to be still and known. Repeated viewing appears to be a requirement, one that can sustain thought and pleasure in equal amounts.

The post Structured by Color: Stanley Whitney, Works from the 1990s and Now appeared first on artcritical.

November 13, 2014 through March 8, 2015
144 West 125th Street (between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X boulevards)
New York, 212 864 4500

“Of This Day in Time,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem through March 8, 2015, is the first major New York exhibition of the work of artist Kianja Strobert. In the tradition of Klein and Dubuffet, Strobert chooses to site her artistic practice within the confines of painting, while literally doing everything she can to reconfigure that discipline through a re-orientation of mediums and with an expressionistic yet pragmatic eye.

Like a passage from Aeschylus, Strobert’s Untitled (2010) is a raw and epic cartography of emotion and a historical narrative. The composition is simple enough: a cloudburst of silvers, whites and grays, which is decadent in its simplicity, like the old Bourbon flag of pure white. Applied to the bottom left quadrant, four gold-painted chicken bones embody the artist’s fascination with the “realness” of her media — the idea of expanding her stable of materials to the unexpected and atypical, including crumbled pumice stone, fruit skin, and in this piece, bones. In the face of the silver and white, the golden bones — one is green with gold highlights, seemingly in imitation of the gilded bronze of a classical cast — are suggestive of a reliquary. The whole assemblage speaks of ritual, art of immediate necessity rather than quiet pondering or decoration.

Strobert’s painting isn’t abstract painting but the abstraction of painting. She is on a search for its origins; painting as practical magic, the prosaic made ecstatic, and self-portrait in its most basic sense as a trace of its author. Many of the works bear the insignia of the artist herself, the above-mentioned Untitled (2010) departs from its opulent palette with two red fingerprints — a pair of red dots in a rectangle at the lower right hand corner that stand in as signature, blood contract or even eyes. A series of four paintings, all Untitled (each 2011), follows the format of enclosing yellow border; upper quadrant, or sky, of graphite dust; and a lower half of mostly brown, orange and ochre blots and smudges. Many of the active forms at bottom are marks made with the artist’s hands — finger streaks and thick, blobby prints. Beyond the literal application of paint, the strokes and gestures are at odds with the brush or pen. In this series of paintings the careful, regulating geometry of the precise and crisp straight-edge border, and the repeated texture and ordering of the colors is at odds with the spontaneity of the gesture, merging the genres of abstract landscape, diagram and portrait.

Archaism and Ecstasy (2014) and Taurus II (2014) employ alternative methods to subvert the artist’s tools: the gestures have a troweled-on quality, the strokes again have the singular nature of a finger motion, but almost as if the artist were a giant. The motions are smooth. But, bulked up with the pumice or some other filler material, the gestures are accretive and encrusted: artful while distancing themselves from the smooth artificiality of the brush, but not necessarily jettisoning its delicacy or poise as an instrument.

Often the use of a base — canvas, linen, or in this case, paper — seems so inevitable as to be arbitrary. It falls into a preordained hierarchy, i.e. paper for drawings and canvas for painting; here all paintings are on paper, and the choice is steadfastly self-conscious. Strobert chooses paper in order to torture the substrate, to watch it suffer as with each coating of acrylic, oil and matte-medium-infused pumice dust, the thick watercolor paper strains with the weight and buckles under the varying constraints of mediums that contract to differing degrees as they dry. This is paper that is not allowed to be an indifferent and neutral foundation and it begs the question of why we assume the substrate in a painting must be flat and indifferent to its various layers and coatings. The same holds true for the mediums themselves. The non-traditional materials Strobert employs — powdered graphite, pumice, papier-mâché and glitter among others — all have visual signatures as distinctive as the bulbous shine of oil paint or the transparent skeins of gouache. They very literally represent an earthier side of image making that enlists the grit and sparkle that exists in minerals, dirt and flesh, but that somehow crosses the line of acceptable representation. Strobert’s work inhabits a region outside of the neat requirements of traditional painting, and though her work is across the board contained in perfect box frames, ironically these only serve to reinforce the unpredictability of her use of medium.

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