“Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades” is a show that includes the retrospective aspect to which it title alludes in one room and a display of new works, in the other, made since the artist moved upstate following the disastrous flood that claimed his downtown Manhattan studio of as many decades and damaged his archives. Any transition between the restored or spared earlier canvases and his fresh new efforts is seamless to this viewer’s eye. As I wrote of his show  at Stephen Haller Gallery (before the merger of Stux and Haller) in 2011, submitting to an urge to pun on his surname, “here is a painter who reinvigorates the tradition of post-painterly New York School abstraction by making explicit what were –despite partisanship for non-objectivity, or at least non-representation, at its historical outset – irrepressible references and sly allusions to landscape. Landfield puts the field back into Color Field Painting.”

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Meat flowers are slow and difficult-to-digest food for the age of open-access porn.  The vagina used to be a rarefied thing; elaborate protocols were required to open those veiled gates.  Even prostitutes and porn were something you had to go and get – there was a protocol in going to the bordello, or to the burlesque show, or, in more recent times, to the magazine and video store.  The risk in the expedition, the confessional moment of purchase, the zinging pulse on getting the brown bag safely home: all that drama is gone.  Even ten years ago, dial-up connections were slow and video clips were short, teasers designed to get you to purchase the “real,” full-length version.  Now the Internet has flooded the market and people watch as much and as long as they want. We are truly awash in visible sex – a world-historical event if ever there was one.  When sex is an extension of the internet our sex is not the same.  This may be the Internet’s most far-reaching impact on our lives.

Which means we are finally in a position to appreciate what Death and the Maiden really means.  In Hans Baldung’s 1518 painting in Basel, the young woman is blooming, the draperies around her unfurling like the corolla of a flower. It is not that she is a flower who has attracted the ravenous creature; it is her ravishment that turns her into a flower.  Her flesh is white but for the blush in her face, corresponding to the flower’s pollen-powdered stigma.  Where else would Death sink his teeth in?  More than merely powerless against him, she seems almost to open herself to him, and that may be the true cause of the horror on her face – has there ever been a better depiction of it?  The draperies are in two pieces and cannot ever have served as a garment; they are curtains to be opened and they open just to the point of revealing her sex.  We know that when Death’s teeth pierce her flesh the curtain will be rent and the holy of holies will be revealed for all to see – and that cannot be a good thing.  Baldung leaves us at that exquisite point of anticipation, forever implicated, thinking about it.  And we’ve thought about it.  A lot.  And now we’ve hit play.

In 1843–1844 Nathaniel Hawthorne created another meat flower intimate with death, Dr. Rappaccini’s daughter Beatrice, raised among the most poisonous plants of his garden and drawing from them an intense bloom of life, health, and energy, “all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone.”  In this technological adaptation of the theme, Death is the Maiden.  Everything she touches dies on contact, but the young scholar Giovanni – allowed into her garden and exposed in small doses to her breath – becomes inured to her. Sparklingly toxic himself, he ends up able to kill flies by breathing on them.

Ideal conditions for an exclusive relationship, one might think, but instead a cure is attempted, and it can only be fatal poison to this “victim of man’s ingenuity and thwarted nature.” The story is an allegory about sex and science and it makes for good reading now, amidst genetic engineering, sex changes, plastic surgery, steroids, and performance enhancers, which are changing sex and, if Hawthorne’s prophecy is right, killing it.  “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! Is this the upshot of your experiment?” In 1851 Hawthorne’s second daughter was born and he called her Rose.

The diabolical Rappaccini had a real-life angelic Doppelgänger in Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist who had a mystical experience in October 1843 (perhaps the very month that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was composed) when he walked through his garden and, soaking in the beauty of the flowers, believed he could see the flowers’s souls glowing back at him.  From then on he became a passionate advocate of the idea that plant-life was animated. Famous and controversial in his lifetime, he was soon to be sidelined by the march of science.  Let’s call that the path not taken.

The vagina is not a flower anymore.  Or rather, “the vagina is a flower” is no longer a workable metaphor.  This is a death, and paradoxically it is a death that threatens to kill the age-old association of sex and death.  The vagina has lost its teeth. Hatry’s meat flowers short-circuit the metaphor and serve as its fitting epitaph. The birds and the bees know to keep away, but the flies will come.

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Stux Gallery
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
212.352.1600

February 24 to March 26, 2005           

On September 6, 1522, Victoria, Ferdinand Magellan’s tar-encrusted, worm-eaten but once-proud flagship sailed into the bay of San Lúcar, Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. Some believed her arrival signaled the end of the Age of Exploration, but contrary to their expectations, similarly epochal discoveries continue today. Soon, we will need to stretch our world view to accommodate robot soldiers, sub-cellular micro-machines and maybe even life on Mars.

To warm up for these mental gymnastics, you might consider viewing Heide Trepanier’s paintings at Stux Gallery on 25th Street. Her drippy, suggestive and excretory biomorphic forms hint at the existence of as-yet-unexplored places both infinitesimal and vast. The paintings look like Seussian snapshots of an unknown, but not unbelievable, world Trepanier has found. In the gallery foyer, the tone of the show is set by Party Hag, an installation piece whose title brings it to a personal, slightly raunchy level, but doesn’t strip it of otherworldliness.

In the main gallery there are numerous canvases filled with similar imagery in a range of sizes and hues. Each composition appears to have been derived through a somewhat freeform process in which the artist drips, dollops and drizzles acrylic paint of varying viscosities and colors onto a monochromatic ground. The resulting tangle of webby nets, knobby splotches and vaguely ejaculatory splashes is then embellished with black outlines that give the work a cartoonish feel. But beware, the silly or comic ideas the Disney-esque outlining may invoke belie the violence and carnality that are the real subjects here.

Indeed, titles like Fatalist, Vomitorium and Blowhard Skin Dealer indicate Trepanier’s seriousness. The forms in her paintings grapple ferociously, smashing and surging against one another in a ballet of lust and carnage. In her artist’s statement, she declares her pours and swirls to be “psychological prosthetics” that “act the way [she would] like to but wouldn’t dare.” They “have orgies, rip each other apart,” and generally appear to be exercising the animal instincts they were born with.

Clearly, Trepanier possesses instincts of her own which show in her ability to manipulate her materials. The works are attractively lyrical, both graphically and colortistically. Yet this show is more than a display of dexterity; through an editing process in which she emphasizes certain shapes, and relationships between shapes, over others, the artist implies specific narratives that impart to each painting a personality of its’ own. This is no small feat and especially remarkable given the repetition of both motif and technique the artist uses to achieve it. Trepanier has managed to extract a surprising amount of mileage from simple technical means.

But has she been ambitious enough in exploring the world she has worked so hard to uncover? She appears to be sailing in the same waters she familiarized us with in paintings of a few years ago—but has the wind left her sails? The figure-ground tack she is on here has not changed much since her last show at Stux. The characters in paintings such as The Pig, the Snake and the Cock, as interesting as they are, have not evolved significantly from their forebears in earlier shows. While it is nice for an artist when a formula works, it is problematic when the works become formulaic. Trepanier has reached such a crux. Perhaps she should consider trading her prosthetics for the actual—ripping apart her subject matter and having an orgy of paint could re-awaken her sense of discovery and open up some more new worlds.

After all, if Magellan, instead of tenaciously pursuing his quest to find a water route to the Spice Islands, had hung out with King Charles re-hashing earlier voyages, nothing would have been gained. Trepanier has begun an interesting painting journey and for further discoveries should keep adding spice of her own.

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