Farrah Karapetian: Stagecraft at Von Lintel Gallery

2685 S La Cienega Blvd (between Alivar and Cullen streets)
January 17 to February 28, 2015
Los Angeles, 310 559 5700

When I was a child my father would delight me by playing Ken Nordine’s word jazz. We’d listen and laugh along with the absurdist poetry delivered in Nordine’s mellifluous baritone accompanied by bebop improvisations, breathy flute trills, the swish of a brush across a snare drum. I’d close my eyes and stare with my ears at the scenes Nordine sketched with words — short, jokey stories brimming with onomatopoeic ornamentation and witty little rhymes. His 1966 album, Colors, is a collection of 34 roughly one-and-a-half-minute vignettes, each characterizing a color with anthropomorphic anecdotes: ecru is a critic, for instance; burgundy is bulging and fat; lavender is an old, old, old, old, old lady.

I thought briefly of Ken Nordine after seeing Farrah Karapetian’s exhibition of new photograms and sculpture, “Stagecraft,” at Von Lintel Gallery. The comparison is perhaps a bit corny, I admit, but there is some correspondence to be found between Nordine’s evocation of colors through words and music, and Karapetian’s evocation of music through shape and color. There are shared elements of playfulness, improvisation and mood; with both, our mind fills in what the eyes do not see. While earlier works alluded to subjects with political weight (portraying riot police, protestors, guns and contraband), this series uses the accoutrements of music and performance as a vehicle to investigate the mutability of perception and the rhythmic possibilities of light, color, and space.

Karapetian began with bronzes and blues — the colors one feels listening to jazz, according to what Karapetian’s father revealed to her about his own sensations when listening to music. In Got to the Mystic (all works 2014), we see her father as a ghostly figure playing a skeleton of a drum kit, his face obscured by the hi-hat; the drum stands and rims and closures and cymbals register a stark white against the ruddy ground of the photogram.

Karapetian’s painstakingly crafted replica of her father’s drum kit — minus the skins and shells, leaving just the armature, the metal lugs, rods and stands — sits in an adjoining room. The cymbals are formed from glass, allowing light to pass through. A spotlight positioned on the floor of the gallery illuminates the sculpture from below, casting its shadow against the wall, and revealing the apparatus at play in Karapetian’s photograms. Many artists go to lengths to conceal their processes, but Karapetian, in the service of transparency, divulges her sources, shows us the “negative.”

The viewer, however, does not get the full experience, rather just a glimpse of how things work. In Three Muses one can clearly see the three bodies in space, but one can only imagine the haptic experience of three people trying to position themselves in a completely dark room, waiting for the flash of light that would inscribe their shadows on the paper. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Flash.

Karapetian spoke to me about the primacy of physical interaction in her work, from situating her subjects in the darkened space to the handling of the paper and processing. The viewer sees only the final result, limited to the perspective of the paper itself. We see only what the paper sees, as it mutely records the impression of shadow and light across its surface. It bears other marks, too, though. Around the edges, little fingerprints are indelibly smudged, and the pricks of the push pins that held the paper in place are visible. The prints hold a remarkable texture, impossible to capture in the jpegs you’d see online.

There are bronzes and blues — but also crimsons and yellows and indigos and deep, resonant greens. Yes, resonance: the colors here have it, just like sounds do. Light waves that linger. My memory of the electric greens and cyans of Kräftig — the color is so pure, so saturated and intense — challenges the colors I now see in the digital reproduction of the piece on my laptop and in the exhibition catalogue. Strange, how variable color is in real life and in reproduction. Stranger still, to think of these vibrant greens and blues produced by red and magenta lights. In the darkroom, the gap between perceived and resultant color becomes a playground of improvisation and experimentation, “a very present tense experience,” as Karapetian put it. Like a jazz musician mounting the stage, she may already know the riff, but where the song goes from there will always be a surprise.

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September 6 to October 13, 2012
520 West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 242 0599

For at least a generation now, characteristics of the computer’s distinct appearance have been invading most aspects of existence, including how we respond to paintings. As a metaphor for the picture plane, the computer screen has joined those old standbys, the mirror and the window. In seven paintings (all oil and alkyd on linen, dated 2012) the New York-based Stephen Ellis embraces digital space as he had, in the past, photographic and cinematic space, too. Formally poised but playful in spirit, the paintings are bracing, buoyant and convincing.  This is his tenth solo exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery.

It’s not that the hues Ellis uses evoke digital color, as seen for example in the L.A. painter Patrick Wilson’s exhibition at Ameringer McEnery Yohe earlier this year. Ellis’s palette, though lively certainly, generally conforms to the familiar oil pigment range. The color dazzles in large part because the paintings look like they are backlit like a lightbox, and in an optical sense they are: ambient light bounces off the white ground (or areas of high-keyed underpainting) and passes through subsequently-applied glazes. The result—a glowing film that seems at times to detach from the substrate—is a variant of a technological light also seen in David Reed’s paintings, though unlike Reed, Ellis employs a full range of values and intensities. (Ellis is also engaged with the transformational effect of a rugged surface attack typical of David Row.)

Like all the paintings here, Untitled (39 by 60 inches) is oriented horizontally. It is subdivided and compartmentalized in a way that suggests architectonics, though not solidity; notwithstanding its many reiterations of the geometry of the support, the painting is unexpectedly unstable. The lower section centers on a magenta rectangle in a cobalt blue surround, both luminous; the edge where they meet sizzles. The magenta appears to drift forward despite the pair of dark, emphatic horizontals that pass through it and extend to the painting’s edge. Boxy rectangles of brown and brick red range across the top of the painting, alternately masking and layered under a blue glaze that is partially scraped away with an undulating but generic gesture,a programmatic “autographic mark.”  Slightly but decisively above the painting’s centerline, a horizontal bar in a stark white fully leveraged as hue occupies an ambiguous position in space even as it precludes reconciliation of the top and bottom sections.

That mechanical gesture spoofs the familiar humanistic equation of painting as calligraphy, short-circuiting paint’s plasticity and repudiating its tactility. Untitled (39 by 60 inches) features two bands—across the top and along the bottom—in which continuous, ribbon-like trails of multicolored under painting are exposed, a scraper or stiff brush having been moved through a wet bluish or purplish paint film. Their repetitious peaks and troughs evoke computer-modeled waves, mountains, or beating hearts.  Between these bands, the middle third is a steamy region of luscious coral pinks and tropical fruit colors glowing hotly and, like the painting as a whole, suggesting infinite extension in both directions.  Untitled (33 by 72 inches) combines several such iconographic/symbolic systems, including horizontal, aqua-and-orange bands, nominally gestural glazes, and off-kilter, hard-edge grids. These elements are intricately entwined but not integrated, overlapping one another yet dead flat, and pushing forward visually to the picture plane like a liquid crystal display. The overall chromatic environment is red/orange, but bits where the aqua filters through reddish glaze are—disconcertingly— the color of grape jelly. There’s an earth green in there too, a result somehow of the complex optical information the accumulated membranes of color provide.

Ellis gets a lot of mileage out of body color, as well, both alone and in combination with glazes. The smaller of two paintings titled Marine (26 by 36 inches) is the most compact in the exhibition, its scheme the simplest. The upper half is a subtly modulated field of crimson laid with a soft brush over a blue-black ground; the region beneath the sharp centerline is crowded with saucer-sized, yellow-ochre swirls applied, one surmises, with a lot of wrist action. These are scraped down while wet and hence blurred, but still discernable as figure against the surrounding dark ground. A recurrent motif in Ellis’s work, such semi-illusionistic knots of paint have in the past been endowed with a distinctly rosette-like appearance; here they could be a collection of tiny, two-tone whirlpools the color of hot sand and the deep blue sea.

The large, Untitled (48 x 84 inches) also recalls Ellis’s earlier work. Its slanted, broken grid (rendered here as faux gaffing tape) supports a scrim-like, dark-bluish expanse broken by two parallelogram apertures. These frame smudgy, remotely anthropomorphic blurs that suggest photographic distortion—overexposed negatives, or radically enlarged details. As enjoyable as it is to revisit Ellis’s erstwhile vocabulary of painterly moves, the real excitement of this exhibition is in watching a veteran practitioner of “conceptual abstraction” break into new territory by substantially expanding his technique.

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The painterly accomplishments of Catherine Howe’s voluptuously feisty new works bursting the seams of the Von Lintel Gallery should not diminish their rare taxonomical achievement: to make action painting out of still life.  These works defy categories of abstraction and representation, stasis and movement, literalism and metaphor.  Their motifs are passive, indeed pacific, a cornucopia of flowers, fruit, glasses of delicious and inviting brew, and yet the artist brandishes her brush like a weapon.  In fact it is more likely roller than brush that delivers willfully misbalanced concoctions of pigment and medium: she is a painter who revels in the wizardry of intaglio printmaking, exploiting with alchemical mischief the repulsions of differing viscosities. Liquid seems to curdle on the surface, generating fissures that make you think someone in heavy boots has just stomped through the canvas.  And yet form and color sing with miraculous sweetness in works of disarming elegance, gutsy delicacy, explosive charm.

Until May 5, 2012.  520 West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues. New York City, 212 242 0599

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This sampling of contemporary incarnations of abstract painting by eight artists, all of whom are women, evokes a wide range of painterly associations. Strikingly, however, almost all of the works forego the traditional (for abstraction) flat treatment of the picture plane in favor of the kinds of depth inherent to illusionistic space – implying, whether tacitly or overtly, an engagement with depiction.

In the warp-and-woof play of Canan Tolan’s work, for example, a plaid pattern is destabilized by contrasting surface yellows and recessive darks. Carrie Yamaoka’s resin-slick surface of even deeper blues and blacks is alternately inky, cosmic and oceanic in effect. Amy Ellingson and Lisa Corinne Davis employ diagrammatic sensitivity in their constructions of geometric forms. Dannielle Tegeder’s fresh take on Suprematist forms has them ascending towards the extended field of a secondary canvas while Rebecca Smith’s metal wall sculptures suggest forms slipping off the grid in an almost liquid gesture of melting and submersion.

The chaotic underpinnings of abstract process are visible in the wrestling-with-formlessness evident in both Andrea Belag’s big-stroke chromatic transitions and Catherine Howe’s deliciously sloppy tableau of ill-contained areas of color and bursts of materiality.

The exhibition remains on view through Friday, July 29.  There is a closing reception for the show as part of Chelsea Art Walk 2011 on Thursday, July 28, 5-8 PM

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What it Is – the title of Medrie MacPhee’s recent show at Von Lintel – was fitting for an artist with a career-long preoccupation with the slippery identities of painted forms. Over the past years MacPhee has exhibited abstract paintings that are nonetheless evocative of some specific, if indeterminate, time and place.  Forms feel rendered rather than invented in her work, and distinct spaces are suggested by horizon-like lines.

The dense, challenging paintings that comprise the new show mark a dramatic departure. In these mostly larger-scale canvasses the separate shapes, or “futuristic species”, as the artist has playfully described them, of earlier pictures have been brought together en masse to collide, overlap and interact in scenes of barely controlled abundance. The approach builds forcefully from the abstract/figurative tensions established in the previous works, and the multiple forms are more engaging than the solitary ones to an almost proportionate degree.

The works in this show differ in character, effect and intention, while united in their elusiveness. In Big Bang (2010) jagged shapes press uncomfortably past the picture plane, right-angled items stack and teeter to a compositional point of near-breakdown. Float (2009) similarly depicts a collection of forms either emerging or being submerged amidst piles of wreckage. Further comparison to anything architectural falls short, however: the configurations of parts depicted in these paintings are in no way earthbound or materially stable. Not only has gravity given way to a point where questions of support and suspension are non-applicable, but the very planes of the matter depicted often give way to contrasting underpainting of atmospheric blues and grays, to disorienting effect. Strong dramatic light unexpectedly strikes some forms and softly passes through others.

But rather than allowing us to get lost in the rich ambiguities these elaborate set ups offer, MacPhee seems insistent questioning just what is being looked at in these pictures? The response is rich in adjectives and short on nouns. The seemingly discrete parts that make up these works have clear and specific characteristics–hard, transparent, soft, columnar, etc. – and yet remain unidentifiable as any known object outside their painted world. As viewers we have the distinct sense of looking at real, raw materials in a pre-named state. Surveying these paintings recalls the tasks of early philosophy, laboriously weighing questions of attribute against those of essence. MacPhee’s unusual, even jarring, palette becomes significant in this context – purples, acidic greens and reds are laid on, label-like, to objects that still stubbornly resist definition. The world presented by the artist is one keenly, even threateningly, felt – if not necessarily comprehended.

It was instructive to learn from the artist that this recent series was sparked in part by time spent in Berlin, where the marks of a complex history are materially palpable. Without being too literal about it, the influence of the city supports the impression that the laboratory-like experimentation of the earlier works has given way to a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum and collapse.  Also cited was a growing concern with the “hard-core unreality” of the current news media, in which the facts surrounding oil spills and economic recoveries are altered wildly on a daily basis, and where the exact point of crisis is always uncertain. In MacPhee’s new paintings there is a distinct sensation of being up against a reality that we cannot name. These remarkable works stand out as a brave response to locating subject matter in a world where the simplest “is” can be difficult to grasp

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Jurgen Teller: Daddy You’re So Cute
Lehmann Maupin
540 West 26th Street
New York NY 10001
212-255-2923
September 13 to October 18, 2003

my people were fair and had cum in their hair
(but now they’re content to spray stars from your boughs)
curated by Bob Nickas
TEAM
527 West 26 Street
New York NY 10001
212 279 9219
18 October through 15 November 2003

In two exhibitions encountered at random during recent visits to Chelsea galleries, sex is used as a vehicle for investigating issues of national and racial identity: Jurgen Teller’s beer, pork and penis studies of German-ness as reflected in a series of self-portraits is one, and Reagen Louie’s brothel and sex show encounters with Asian-ness the other. Additionally, a group show at Team Gallery offers a survey of utopian and mystical extensions of the sexual, dating back thirty-five years or so, with male artists looking at male subjects (and a few women) giving and receiving pleasure with a nostalgic abandon. Here, multiple Christ-like figures engage in anal sex, an attractive young man offers himself through an open car window, and another young man pleasures himself with a pumpkin, all in an effort to convey”sexual energy as key to kingdom and entering into a more fluid state between the mind and the body,” as Bob Nickas, the curator of the exhibition, is quoted in the press statement.

In short, what these three shows had in common was a male evocation of a social erotic, a situating of the masculine in relation to a collective identity or transcendent figure (Christ or Shiva, Eastern or Western sexual experience). Images of identity construction on the outer margins were few-no blood or whips or extreme piercings; nothing particularly squeamish or ‘kinky’. Theory was absent as well. No sightings of the fearful objet petit a), but lots of young flesh posed in the landscape of conventional male fantasy: bordellos, parking lots, hotel rooms, restaurants, and beaches. Irony was rampant, but so were various forms of earnestness. Sometimes the two were difficult to distinguish.

This blurring of the earnest and the ironic was particularly evident in the work of Reagan Louie. The implication of his images of sex workers is that-surprise!– they are individuals just like you and me. They horse around together, chat over cigarettes or soda, and work. Although they are often photographed nude, the fact that they have sex for money is kept out of view, and the voyeuristic pleasure of exposed flesh is deflected by the lush composition of the images. The seemingly hygienic attractiveness of the women, the tonal warmth and elegant structure of the compositions, and not least the absence of sex make women seem all the more wholesome. Yet isn’t that the core of fantasy in scenarios involving commodified sex? The woman for hire is lovely and sweet, just like the girl next door, and conversely the girl next door is, with the right man or in the right circumstance, sexually voracious or ‘slutty.’ What is fascinating about these photographs is that, even whilefantasy operates within them, the images also appear to be motivated by a desire for kinship or sympathetic bond with the subject, a bond that would turn wanderings in the sex industry into an artistic or spiritual quest, a visual bildungsroman with pasties. A fifth generation Chinese-American, Louie previously explored questions of identity, journeying to China to take the documentary images collected in “Toward a Truer Life” (1991). For this project he undertook a six year odyssey through Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. So, whereas one might expect images that raise difficult issues of sexual exploitation, racial exoticism, and decadence in the global marketplace, one finds unresolved attempts to find human contact in the most unlikely places.

At Lehman Maupin Gallery Jurgen Teller turns his lens from the celebrities and fashion models of his recent work onto himself. The confessional rigor of this work suggests the paradox that photography with sex as a focus is likely to achieve greater depth with the absence of the other. In place of objectified women, Teller conjures his dead father and a macho culture of German soccer and beer, each a bitterly unresolved attraction and repulsion. “Father and Son” depicts the artist nude on his father’s grave at midnight; a soccer ball serves as an allusion to his father’s dislike of the sport. Elsewhere, Teller lounges in a sauna, his face hidden behind a soccer magazine. With his rear presented to the camera, he exposes himself as ‘arsehole’ (his term) and as an object of desire. Beneath the self-loathing of these images, it is not hard to find a longing for a masculine ideal made problematic by a confluence of German and personal recrimination.

Almost six decades after the end of the Second World War, Germany and ‘the orient’ (a term Louie employs in the title of his show) still conjure sexual mythologies too troubling and complicated to confront directly or dismiss completely. Still, Teller’s pasty, drink-addled figure is the “real” element missing in Louie’s photographs; conversely, the giving and attractive women in Louie’s work are the fantasy missing in Teller’s images.

After seeing the Louie and Teller shows, one can be thrown by the poetic dreaminess of the organizing theme at Team: “My people were fair and had cum in their hair (but now they’re content to spray stars from your boughs).” Perhaps a new sexual revolution might run like an x-rated production of Midsummer Night’s Dream or a recitation of early Yeats by the cast of a gay porn film, but probably not. The reactions, or lack thereof, of visitors to the gallery indicated that the premise of the show (“Lately, a lot of work by younger artists has brought back ideas revolving around hedonism, liberation and revolution”) provokes the same sort of wary if bemused interest as a pair of outlandish sneakers at Jeffrey. This is because hedonism is already a given of contemporary consumer culture. Self-control is the new lost paradise-lose weight, organize, manage time, manage money, eliminate the menstrual cycle. This is not to suggest that all of the works at Team are glimpses of simple pleasure. Jules de Balincourt’s satirical image of corporate sexual processing (people burn their clothes upon leaving the plant) gave a refreshingly whimsical take on capitalism and sex, and Tim Lokiec’s cartoon grotesque of oral sex was intriguingly fierce and unresolved. Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Do Not Disturb”-an image of a man opening a door just enough to present his genitals- was amusing and disturbing all at once. It would be interesting to see what else lies behind the door-a geisha, a harem, a rucksack for a back to nature stroll, a pile of crumpled beer cans…We’ll see.

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I would venture to guess that your average person regards photography as the instant capture of reality simply because real places and things are often photographed, and because the resulting image is documentary in nature. But the document is not necessarily real. Once the picture is taken, time moves on, thereby making what was real the past and the now-the real real-something else entirely. Thus, photography can be described not as the capture of reality, but rather, as an abstraction of time and place. What may have been real now only exists on paper in the swirl of chemicals and fixatives that hold it in place.

What then of the photographic image that is in itself abstract? What if the abstract real (as I have just defined it) is really abstract? Does our focus (no pun intended) shift from the recognizable, indexical form, to composition, tone, line and the intent of the artist? More than likely. But what if the photographer gives us both? What if the artist presents a real, recognizable form in an abstract presentation? The results are much more complex than in abstract painting because the eye is conditioned to read photographs by their surface, to take it for what it is, and therefore not question more than what the eye can see.

These are the questions and assumptions I had in mind as I wandered through “Abstraction in Photography” at the Von Lintel Gallery. Using the works of sixteen artists, the show was subtly divided into three sections deemed as “general paths to abstraction.” The front gallery was dedicated to photographs that captured recognizable subject matter in an unusual way. A good example is Andres Serrano’s Bloodscape V (1989). The slick, plastic red surface is actually a Cibachrome image of a pool of blood, taken close up so that it is abstracted into not only a rich study of line, but also a heavy viscous wave of damned if I know what.

The middle gallery is given over to non-objective abstract photographs that derive their imagery from a non-recognizable subject. Roland Fischer’s Lucas Ave. L. A. (2002) from far away looks like small gray and black squares generously spaced in series across a large white surface. Grays fade into strips of black at the bottom of each rectangle, the rectangles dot the surface in a grid. Up close, the pattern starts to make more sense, and it is obvious that this is a wall somewhere. The high-key white of the wall surface contrasts sharply with the shadows of the rectangular holes, giving the image a sunny feel. The serial pattern of the squares conjures up notions of the digital, blinking cursors on a computer screen. This brings it into the present, but combined with the twelve-part Sean Scully piece Art Horizon III (2002) on the adjacent wall, Fischer’s work calls to mind the seriality and cleanliness of minimalist abstraction.

In the final gallery, we are offered works that eliminate the use of the camera altogether. Winfred Evers dominates here with Master Altar and Moving Still, both from 1998. These gelatin silver prints have gelatinous, biomorphic shapes created by merely manipulating the surface of the paper. Like jello that has been wiggled, the images move by their own sinuousness, their black and white shadows creating contrasts that evoke the architecture of roller coasters. Very classy, and very fun.

Vik Muniz’s After Yves Klein (From Pictures of Color) by far outpaces all the other images in its double capacity to capture both the abstract real and real abstraction. For that reason, I will dwell on this remarkable image in some depth.

By way of Klein, Muniz calls authenticity to task and in different ways projects a very mindful artificiality with a slight twinge of dishonesty. This Cibachrome image of little blue Pantone squares is in reference to Klein’s own ultramarine blue-I.K. B. or International Klein Blue. Klein used the blue to connote the boundlessness of space and the spirituality space evoked. The blue’s powdery texture (created with the use of a special binder) expanded its optical qualities. Klein painted his monochromatic blue canvases with a roller-just as one would apply your run-of-the-mill house paint-a nod to the commodity culture burgeoning the 1950s and its repetitive nature, which in turn, became a reference to both authorial presence (the hand of the artist) and the commercial nature of that which could be readily reproduced.

By using the medium of photography, Muniz draws attention to its optical qualities, namely, the idea that what is represented in a photograph is also an optical illusion-what you see is not real, although it appears so. Is it really monochromatic? The squares all look to be of the same hue, but if one reads the actual names of the colors, it is obvious that they are not identical. Reflex Blue U is not the same as Blue 072 U. Again we’re dealing with an optical illusion: the abstraction (or refraction) of light as it bounces off the surface of the squares, their perceived color actually a mixture of the colors Muniz lays out for us at the bottom of the image: Process Cyan U, Process Magenta U, Process Yellow U, etc.

Muniz’s photograph can also be interpreted as a play on Klein’s Yves Peintures an illustrated booklet from 1954 wherein the plates were not photographs of paintings, but sheets of commercially inked paper. In his homage to Klein, Muniz gives us a photographic reproduction of commercially inked sheets (again their repetition emphasizing their function as a commodity). Muniz’s presentation twice removes the viewer from the real thing. It is the abstract real (blue photographed) in an real abstraction (a photograph of a reproduction of blue).

Muniz’s image illustrates concisely what the exhibition as a whole was designed to prove: it documents the fact that distance between reality and abstraction is in fact, very minute.

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