March 30 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, (212) 563-7821

In an early episode in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the novella’s quixotic antihero, Frenhofer, is adding masterful corrective touches to a painting by Porbus for the benefit of the narrator, the young Poussin. “Look my boy, it is only the last stroke of the brush that counts; no one will thank us for what is underneath.” The history of modern art, it could be argued, is a riposte to such certitude. Abstraction, while often making the contradictory assertion that what you see is what you get — that the surface, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, is to be penetrated at peril — actually trades quite aggressively in the values that have been circumscribed. Heroics of elimination and purification might be intimated physically in the form of pentimenti; or else, in works that achieve non plus ultra reductivism, they are conceptually implicit.

Beguiling, enticing even, as the paintings of Nathlie Provosty are, it took this viewer three visits to be convinced by the totality of the artist’s vision. On the first visit, a troika of large, dark canvases, each seven feet high, dominated this sumptuously austere gallery space: West, Gilles and Twice Six (all works cited, 2016). Their declarative restraint established pictorial subtleties with such calm authority that the scattered smaller canvases seemed like intrusive souvenirs or afterthoughts. On a second visit, however, taking on trust the monumental severity of the big three, the eye could adjust to the busier, tightly knotted smaller compositions. These seemed to apply the lessons of their larger counterparts — or, one could equally say, anticipated the breakthroughs, for why assume that less always follows more? Inevitably, the fuller lexicon of colors and textures in the smaller works eclipsed what might seem like neat contained solutions in the bigger ones. But the experience of both visits yielded such satisfactions as to demand a third, which in turn rewarded this devotee with a sense of synthesis. Degrees of reduction or addition seemed determined in each canvas by particularities of emotional ambition rather than mere strategies dictated by size.

The three larger paintings each present a U-shaped black form in glossy application against a matt ground of similar hue. As befits paintings that glide effortlessly over the retina yet draw the viewer back again, the shapes variously resemble a boomerang and a magnet. If the initial impression, from a distance, of black shape against black ground, might recall the reductive late paintings of Alberto Burri in Celotex, that was belied, on closer inspection, by Provosty’s subtleties of texture and composition. Process in these “black” paintings hovers between deletion and accretion. The eye quickly becomes attuned to the survival of obscured, subcutaneous shapes and zones, and indeed colors, without compromising the surface’s serenely achieved sheerness. In this respect, the enigmatic black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, with their cruciform substructures, inevitably come to mind, as do the contingent emerging complexity of Suzan Frecon’s irregular geometries. In Provosty’s case, in counterpoint to the play of glossy bent shape against allover matt ground, an off-kilter vertical axis serves to further destabilize monochrome finality, adding uneven slivers of exposed canvas to outer edges of the rectangle to give resulting shape to what would otherwise have been merely accepted as a given, a field. These are complicatedly simple pictures.

The smaller paintings could equally be viewed, therefore, as models or as elaborations; as studies or as clarifications. Their titles intimate states of contrast in relationship to each other: “Assonance,” “Dissonance,” “Consonance,” “Resonance.” The dislodging of the bisected rectangle (now on both axes) and the misregistration of its segments is more explicit — perhaps, indeed, axiomatic — than in the three big paintings. The coloring of different shapes, and more crucially the contrasts in tone of shapes of the same color caught in axial division, offer clues about what lies beneath that tarmac-like top coat in the “black” trio, or what could result from the evisceration of that surface. Tight busyness results, paradoxically, in greater legibility, although that can be questioned if what the viewer ends up reading was unintentional. In Consonance II, for instance, tapering shapes that could signify shading add the illusion of pictorial depth to an upside-down magnet shape; in Assonance, the fractionally dislocated curves assume a marching limb schematic (bringing to mind Don Voisine and the prints of Willard Boepple).

Ultimately, it is hard to say which body of work is richer. The smaller works are more traditional in their density and the larger ones more modernist in their singularity — they seem, respectively, to evoke avant-garde (pre-war) and institutional (post-war) phases in the history of abstraction. If so, it is the dynamic of the relationship of the two that makes this striking exhibition feel relevant in a moment where Provosty’s peers amongst younger abstract painters are too often driven towards the extremes of rhetorical neo-formalist statement and intentionally irresolvable open-endedness.

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Don Voisine’s masterful geometric puzzles have always packed a wallop, implying supergraphic mural scale despite their modest, easel painting dimensions. In the new work, taxicab yellows and blood reds, previously held in tight compression at the borders, invade the center where dark matter normally reigns. There Voisine’s stroked gloss and matte effects bounce in the eye as through a polarized lens, creating internal angles that hinge as you walk. In strong color, compared to the usual black, these subtle, monochromatic contrasts amplify weirdly, and time seems to stitch back to 1965, when Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley and other perfectly highbrow painters were included in The Responsive Eye, MoMA’s definitive Op exhibition. A half century on, that show’s controversial conflation of the eternal truths of hard-edge abstraction with faddish optical kicks seems perfectly viable, at least in Voisine’s smartly synthetic practice.

on view through June 14 at 55 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, 212 989 5467

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LaViolaBank: March 26 to April 25, 2009
179 East Broadway at Canal Street (Seward Park),
New York City,
917 463 3901

Janet Kurnatowski’s current exhibition is as close as a group show gets to being a string quartet.  It is not merely that Kurnatowski offers a four person show or even that each artist is represented by a single piece whose size, character and demeanor corresponds to an instrument in a traditional quartet. Rather, what makes the show quartet-like (I’m thinking Haydn by the way) is the deeply satisfying meld of four distinct but manifestly related painterly voices, and the intimacy – in the sense of scale to the viewer, and togetherness among the four – that the show engenders.  These are artists who can be described as hard-edged but tender hearted; their “playing” – jointly or severally – has the high minded warmth of chamber music.

Mind you, it might not be so easy to ascribe each painting to a part.  Allowing that Zahn must be the cello, as his painting is sitting on the floor, and Voisine as the most upwardly aspiring and clean cut of the paintings a violin, it remains a challenge to determine whether Waltemath or Francis is the viola.  Francis is the tempting candidate in terms of size, as she is larger than Voisine and Waltemath, and sort of the same size as Zahn (his piece is comprised of two overlapping canvases, so it depends if you count the visible or the implied square inches of his work).  But I’m tempted, in fact, to have Francis be the first violin, so strikingly expository is she of a theme.  Waltemath’s picture, by contrast, is diminutive, enigmatic, and quietly instrumental (sorry) in creating the texture that binds the disparate elements of this show.

These are artists who have their form-content ratio pitch perfect.  They all work with pared-down structures, with relatively simple math, but not out of some minimalist-redux attempt to see how basic art can get, nor out of a quasi mystical attachment to geometry per se.  In each picture, there is a sense that the overt structure is a kind of plan for the making of the work, while the work is the exposition of that plan.  But, at the same time, the work is more than its own plan.

In Francis’s Neutron Star (2008), there are four sets of white, thinly drawn circles (of four circles in three sets, five in the fourth) each occupying a quarter of red ground; the paint surface is brushy though even, all-over and not impastoed.  The arrangements vary in the visual impact of the circles’ interaction, in the degree to which they are purely schematic or they generate optical illusion.

Voisine’s Debutant Twist (2009), a tall, thin painting, has two outer bands of pale blue that sandwich vertically stacked dark rectangles, the top one to the left of the bottom.  Underneath these ziggurat rectangles is a lighter-toned rectangular shape of the same hue that runs off kilter with all the other shapes at a slight diagonal, syncopating the plumb-line, playing Broadway to the avenues.

Zahn is the most zany of the four, but also the most physically present.  His Modern Times (2009), places a square canvas in front of a rectangular one (landscape oriented) that is just an inch or so higher on its shorter side, with both supported on foam bricks.  They are painted a somewhat obnoxious synthetic browns, with one central, bisecting line in a darker shade, on the horizontal in the rectangle, the vertical in the square.  There are then small return strips accenting the corners, inviting a read of the images as the backsides of wrapped flat packages.  A thin strip of bright color at one edge of each canvas hints at labeling.

Waltemath adds a painterly, imagistic element that sets her apart from her quartetmates.  Blue Highway (2007-08) seems, at first impression, to represent the grid aflame: there are overlapping planes recalling Voisine and Zahn, but the dominant, dark rectangle to right is filled by an agitated area of orange and red that reads like fire.  There is a sense that it could be city buildings, or some activity in a room spied through an open door.  A figure seems caught in silhouette in the furnace. But then again, the painterly portion could literally be painterliness if the planes are viewed, à la Zahn, as stacked canvases, in which case the fiery rectangle might be an AbEx painting in storage.

These four artists are conceptual or painterly to varying degrees, but in and between each work structure bounces the eye towards texture, idea towards plastic value, and so on.  The conceptual and the painterly are truly symbiotic.  They make music.

If members of this group want to branch into piano quartets, Jennifer Riley is their woman: Her fulsome, vibrant, upbeat paintings are, like a piano, symphonic in possibility while true to a core sound. Hers are grand paintings in scale and scope alike.

As with the Kurnatowski Quartet, Riley is a geometric painter whose forms tease representational possibilities without compromising abstract values.  Her pictures impart the feeling that they are worked algorithmically rather than programmatically, that process trumps result, however much the forms are legible, spatial and enticing. Rather than driving the composition, image goes along for the ride.

Typically she builds her forms from discernable though irregular blocks: shapes are generally four sided though trapezoids and parallelograms, or else triangulated shapes, predominate, rather than rectangles as such.   Shapes are either filled in with solid color (synthetic pastel hues rather than primaries, always sharp and chirpy) or with bands of thin, hand-drawn stripes against a white ground.

The striped sections can read like sides of forms whose faces alone reflect solid color.  This abets illusions of depth, whether shallow relief or deep space, while the overall surface of her paintings retain literal flatness.  Bernini, Eiffel, Obelisk (2009) describes a vertical form that, despite its crazy-paving irregularity, conforms with the upwardly mobile connotations of its titular citations. It has some sides in a pale pink solid (various tones), others in stripe, to strengthen associations of faceting.  A sense of adherence to a goofy logic in Riley’s forms can bring to mind Jean Dubuffet’s late sculptures with their heavy black outlines filled in with white and the occasional primary.

The pink in Bernini, Eiffel, Obelisk is also subtly fleshly, which perhaps justifies the Bernini allusion (think St. Theresa).  It also recalls the knowingly “feminine” palette of Riley’s earlier, more heraldically modernist-referencing abstract paintings (Kenneth Noland, Agnes Martin) where the unlikely colors lent the works a subversive edge, a characteristic that carries across in milder form in the current series, with its pop palette.

But her sensibility is a far cry from the irony of, say, Sarah Morris or Liam Gillick. The many stylistic and art historical references and allusions in Riley’s works, whether Hokusai, Philip Guston, modernist architecture, classical history and myth, all come across as high minded, enriching rather than curtailing her pictorial ambition.  References, like the forms themselves, are algorithmic in their elaboration.  Her images are organic, and it is their palpable sense of growth that allows them to grow on the viewer, too.

The post Linda Francis, Don Voisine, Joan Waltemath, Michael Zahn at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, and Jennifer Riley: To Be A Thing In This World at LaViolaBank Gallery appeared first on artcritical.