September 25 to October 18, 2015
581 Woodward Avenue, between Menahan and Grove streets
Ridgewood, 718 600 9417

The recent arrival of Valentine Gallery to Ridgewood adds to a growing gallery scene there that includes Famous Accountants, English Kills and Outpost. Fred Valentine, himself an accomplished painter, organizes a program of exhibitions with a bias toward painting, and this, the first exhibition in his new space, presents new abstract paintings by Bobbie Oliver. Though the space is modest in scale its high ceilings readily accommodate larger works. The largest painting here is Teal Daylight (2010) at 63 x 68 inches (it is also the earliest work here) while the smallest, a dark green painting on a sidewall of its own, is Untitled (2015).

Greens are often regarded as difficult colors in abstract painting, but not so for Oliver, nor for the dedicatee of one of the paintings, the much missed Hudson of Feature, Inc. It was in the window of Hudson’s gallery that I first saw a painting of Oliver’s in 2012, a large triptych that recalled the touch and directness of Chinese landscape painting, even from across Allen Street. So, Forever, for Hudson (#1) is a good place to begin contemplating Oliver’s work. It is characteristic of her oeuvre, technically and chromatically. Paint is applied, often wet into wet, and then manipulated using a variety of different methods, some discernable, some not. For example the darker green shape to the left of center appears to mirror its upper and lower halves vertically, though not exactly, as a result of folding of the canvas. Unusually, in this instance, it is a cut piece from a larger work mounted on a smaller canvas, exactly to size. Oliver always preps her canvases with a couple of coats of gesso as this enables a specific surface quality that she desires, and that makes the paintings distinct from color field stain painting that tended to exploit raw canvas. What she achieves is something akin to the immediacy of gouache or watercolor. Avoiding the potential grandiosity of gesture, Oliver imbues the painting with a practical sense of responsiveness, both to the materiality of paint and the fluctuating light of color.

In Teal Daylight, pouring, and blotting off, with newspaper draw attention to the surface of the painting in the way condensation does to a windowpane. Again, Oliver eschews grand sweeping gesture in favor of slow spilling movement, distributing paint compositionally in ways that determine a fluid, shifting pictorial space. The openness of method does not diminish the mystery of the final configurations. There is closely restricted color range, but it would be misleading to think of this as a monochrome painting as there is nothing anti-compositional about the piece. The shapes and tonal play recall shadows and reflections, or clouds and sheets of rain. But these shapes are not literal representations of things, eschewing the tradition of perspective and its assumptions.

Another recurring color choice for Oliver is the red/blue/violet of Under + Over (2012). Acknowledgment of the edge of the painting by cutting off shapes adds an almost geometric contrast to the flows of color across the rectangle. The looseness of painterly facture is impressive when considering how precise the relationships end up being. There is a rightness or dynamic balance that arrives like the sound of a chord in relation to its constituent notes.

We have another opportunity to view Oliver’s paintings at Hionas Gallery in a show that opened October 8 where she has been placed in an interesting pairing with the sculptor Alain Kirili. Both artists bring to my mind the legacy of Jackson Pollock: Oliver, by focusing on the fluid materiality of paint and its possibilities for pictorial space; Kirili by drawing in space in a way that is linear, punctuated and cursive like the drawing in late Pollock.

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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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