June 26 to August 7, 2015
619 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues
New York City, (212) 594-9478

A combination of absolute clarity and poetic weirdness has had me intrigued by Deborah Remington’s strange and beautiful paintings ever since I first saw them in the late 1960s. When I ask artists whose paintings seem related to hers if they know the work, usually they reply “no”, and I wondered when the paintings would be exhibited again.

A rare opportunity presented itself at Wallspace this summer, in an exhibition curated by Jay Gorney. This terrific show gathered three large paintings and twelve drawings from 1963 to 1983, serving as an introduction to this artist’s classic style. Remington (1930-2010) was an inventor of imaginal domains whose purely visual elements feel both tangible and psychologically compelling. She paints hieratic forms that suggest machined devices, architectural diagrams, interiors of the body, shields, and emblems. In their ambiguity, the possibilities inherent in the imagery keep opening up multiple readings of exposed cross-sections, places of refuge, routes of escape, and at times, majestic flowerings.

The paintings begin with March (1964) a surreal mash-up of folded forms emblazoned with abstract insignia and floating in indeterminate space, somehow reminiscent of de Chirico. Memphis (1969) is like the heart of an engine or the cavities of a skull. An interior vertical shaft glows red against a cool gray gradation, all surrounded by a segmented structure, itself encased in dark space. Strongly symmetrical, the complex, isolated form incorporates wavering contour lines and gives off a kind of mutant, robotic heat.

Dorset (1973) is a painting structured around emptiness, an oval that is an orifice, mirror, or space, simultaneously. Its carapace is animated by a radiance emanating from the sheer surfaces of cadmium red and cobalt blue that grade into black. The forms are echoed by lines in the same colors that pulse like hot, forged steel. Two small, errant forms float across the surface, beginning to occlude the hard perfection of this locked-in world.

In all of Remington’s work we are confronted by the mystery of a psychic urgency charged with myriad impulses: the mechanistic, the sexual, the claustrophobic, along with the display of beauty and power. She conjures a dream life of forms, an alternate reality that is weightless, yet one that we can almost taste. In her work we can see links to the art and design of the Machine Age, to Duchamp and his merging of the erotic and the mechanical, and to our own virtual lives amidst illuminated electronic screens. And we can see connections to the art of Japan, an early inspiration for Remington who studied calligraphy there for two years in the 1950s.

These and other influences can be divined in Remington’s deft, strong, and delicate drawings. The drawings in this exhibition came from three bodies of work, affording wonderful insights into her visual thinking. The drawings from the Soot Series from the 1960s are done in carbon black, with accents of red oxide, on cream-colored muslin. The centralized image appears to be suspended in a tight aura of light, in a field of granular darkness. The forms resemble grills of cars from the 1950’s, air vents, or ritual devices from traditional cultures.

The Adelphi Series of drawings from the 1960s were done in pencil and crayon on paper in soft tonalities of black, with accents of orange or ox-blood. They are complex and inventive works, which evince the same sense of hard-edged, graphic precision found in the paintings. In the drawings there is an organic feeling, with jostling forms resembling rocks or organs, tunneled through by passageways that arrive at interior repositories or galleries. In the two drawing from the 1980s, the third group tapped by this show, the elegant bunkers that Remington describes begin to lose parts of themselves that float free in space.

Deborah Remington started out as an art student and young artist in the Bay Area, and moved to New York in 1965. Her work was integral to the development of abstract painting during the 1960s and 1970s, and beyond, was exhibited extensively, and entered major American collections. Remington’s paintings have been widely recognized for their originality and invention. This exhibition rightly refocused the spotlight on the cryptically expressive side of her work.

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Wallspace
619 West 27 Street
New York City, 212 594 9478

Like the typographic code of a stenographer, Patricia Treib’s first solo show at Wallspace tempts and enchants with embedded information and a deceptively forthright vernacular. A series of nine oil paintings, two collages, and one pastel drawing exhibit a frugal array of repeating motifs, marks, and shapes. The paintings draw a clear synthesis between the color-as-shape sensibility of late Matisse and the action painting of Pollock, but also plunge right into the ring of contemporary abstraction as exemplified by Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, and Laura Owens.

In her paintings Treib focuses on banal details excised from unnamed historical paintings and unrecognizable close-ups of mechanical devices. The titles allude to time and vestment, reminding us of the performative, ritualistic aspect of painting. In the large canvas Accoutrements (2013), five motifs gambol and fill the space around a central ochre form that reappears in the two smaller collages in the show, The Mobile Sleeve (gray) (2013) and The Mobile Sleeve (green) (2013). This central shape recalls a torn open and flattened paper cup, and looks simultaneously like an opening, the profile of a face, and a fold. Another repeating composition is the enigmatic “glass clock.” In the small pastel Glass Clock (2012), quick lines and dashes flirt with reflective symmetry across a central lavender column. In the large painting Glass Clock (2012), this column is indicated only by a hint of transparency inside a paradoxically dominating beige rectangle that echoes the edges of the canvas, and acts as both foreground and background. As the works shift between transparent and opaque in media, composition, and effect, we feel the difference in their making and scale as we would feel watching a play develop from rehearsal, to opening night, to the last curtain call.

Treib’s marks read as simultaneously improvised and practiced. She works on the floor or a tabletop, and the paint, responsive between the surface of the canvas and the pressure of the brush, bleeds and blots slightly at the edges, recording with expressive exactitude the process of its making. The paint is thinned to the consistency of buttermilk, and her bright and pure colors become either faint or enlivened through their transparency to the off-white ground. Many of the works hover near the scale of a human body, which redoubles the sense that Treib is choreographing us alongside her. Using brushes that are unabashedly as large as a palm is wide, each of her gestures is made visible; gliding, then halting, the brushstrokes recount a hand eliding (and an arm sweeping) over the surface. Within the shapes and striped swaths, a lightning-bright line registers brief pauses and shifts, giving subtle dimensionality to what could be a flat shape. In some compositions such as Camera (II) (2013), Device (2013), and Cuff (2012), we confront a dark or black glyph, enhancing the flow of a measure, like musical notation, and redirecting the speed of our eye, like punctuation.

Treib’s compositions seldom exceed the edges of the canvas, so while the paintings are intrinsically painterly, they also resonate with the cropping and indexical characteristics of photography, and the close-up details of her source material. As our gaze follows the path of a brushstroke, we feel that we are seeing the afterimage of a long looking, like light streaks visible in an extended exposure. While the entire compositions and their parts are easy to grasp at a glance, each shape contains a detailed record of the timing and movement of its making.

It’s clear that Treib is composing with the hard-won ease of rigorous practice. Whether the weight of meaning lies in the act of looking or execution is a circular conversation. The painted forms, so discrete and specific as to be characters, shift in and out of legibility, and up and down on the register of “complete.” The repetition in compositional structure between works only increases our awareness of a language and grammar underlying the spontaneity, a visual vernacular in use and embodied, which, we too, could grasp—with long enough study—but never replicate, or translate, with such grace.

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Martha Friedman’s exhibition “The Organization of Batter”, represents a celebration of, but also an intense meditation on mass produced objects, in this case waffle irons/waffles, rubber bands, and slabs of butter, through the lens of minimalist and modernist sculptural forms. The gridded waffle form, the focus of all but one sculpture in this exhibition, is an  anonymous artefact, hardly thought about for any great length of time outside of its practical value as a factory made consumable, that becomes in this exhibition a humorous counterpoint to the universal geometries of minimalist sculpture and the psychological archetypes of modernism. Friedman’s art brings together different concepts of matter, soft and hard, organic and fabricated, and all of the physical sensations and memories we associate with them, and generates contradictions with straightforward gestalts.

The organization of batter, the act of forming a waffle using an amorphous liquid batter and the metal or plastic template stored in the heart of the waffle iron represents a creative act or a controlled act of composition, albeit one done within the confines of domestic life. The waffle grid forms in this exhibition are ambiguous because it is never clear if we are seeing traces of the waffle iron, the machine, or the consumable it produces. Friedman’s focus on a relatively old fashioned food preparation process has a romantic element to it.

Throughout her oeuvre Friedman transforms single units of something into an overall form like a pyramid, a wavy line, or totemic horizontals. Her inclusion of the simulacra or replicas of organic matter we ingest such as cantaloupes, yucca, cucumbers, and eggs, along with human made edibles like bangers (sausages), macaroni, and waffles, and other common objects such as chairs, nails, rubber bands, and rope, add a humanist element to her formalist sculptures. She references objects we are familiar with in our daily life, that we have had tactile experiences with, and that appear within our living spaces.

The odd juxtaposition of these common objects with an abstract formal language gives the work social dimensions and sensual qualities. At the very least they introduce a tactile element to the work that lures the viewer into the experience of the work. The inclusion of these forms also adds a layer of vulnerability in that real food stuffs and organic matter decompose fairly quickly and are not considered as permanent as objects made from industrial materials. But of course her faux food stuffs and organic matter are made from industrial materials.

With this exhibition Friedman is less interested in recreating the surfaces of organic matter as we saw in her previous sculptures that included carefully rendered models of yuccas and cantaloupes and cucumbers. The waffle forms that appear in the marble, paper pulp, and rubber sculptures in this exhibition are either carefully trimmed so that only the outline of the waffle or outline of the interior of the waffle iron is included, as in the Petrified Waffle series, the waffle form is surrounded by a rubbery flat substrate that is trimmed in an asymmetrical way and hung from the wall directly or using a metal rod, as in the Flap series, or the waffle form is reproduced with paper pulp in actual-size and sits in the middle of a rectangular flat slab of paper pulp that is colored the same color as the waffle form in the middle of it, as in the Waffle Paper series. In the Waffle Paper series the isolation of the waffle form transforms it into an emblem or herald, and also suggests a drain. This series forces us to ask the question, “Why do certain shapes and textures become part of our everyday domestic life and others do not?” Like everything Friedman does it provides a valuable lesson in the malleability of reality.

In the series of marble sculptures in this exhibition entitled Petrified Waffle, Friedman uses different colored pieces of marble, which vary in coloration and vein patterning, and places them on formica covered plinths. The formica obviously suggests a kitchen counter, or the environment we commonly associate the waffle making process with, but the art historical associations we have with marble, transforms the whole through odd juxtaposition. If the artist had placed an actual waffle iron on the plinth, offer it up as some strange religious artifact or perhaps luxury item on display in a department store, the series would stand as a sort of ironic testament to consumerism. Instead Friedman creates a carved marble rendition of a mold of a waffle iron interior rendered with the help of a software program. This can be seen as a tribute to the basic skill set required for the manual labor involved in daily domestic life, but we can also see this as the artist’s search for a new vernacular, a new way to make abstract art that uses as a launching pad, traces of the real.

In Column Waffle, 2009 Friedman enlarges and fragments the waffle form, uses the reference point as a launching pad for a material transformation. It is fascinating to see how much an artist can manipulate a referent before it becomes something else. The large white rubber mold of an enlarged waffle grid goes perfectly with the white column it is hung on. So Friedman recontextualizes the manual process of making waffles. A machine made to do one thing only can be used for completely other purposes, and common objects can take on meanings that go beyond their practical value. In Friedman’s world, no values are universal and the naming of things, the rigid associations that exist between mental constructs and real world shapes or patterns or objects, can take on new layers of meaning.

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