There remains a circle of modernists working in New York who trace their roots back to postwar abstraction on Tenth Street and consider themselves to be working with its fundamental concerns. Modernism, it turns out, may be inherently revivalist, and thus a form of permaculture. The problem from the beginning was to look back in order to find a way forward. As Walter Darby Bannard noted, “Any art that is truly radical must also be in some way conservative.” [1]

The newly arrived Berry Campbell Gallery has taken an interest in such work, and is currently showing James Walsh and Susan Vecsey. It’s too soon to call Walsh a senior member of the circle with lions like Bannard and Larry Poons still making beautiful paintings, but he’s been involved and productive within it since the 1980s. Vecsey is younger, but no less invested in Color Field abstraction, though she comes to it by way of the Tonalist landscape.

Walsh’s paintings are smallish by the standards of modernism, but the containment showcases a range of application from thin stains to eight-inch-thick crests of acrylics. Over the years his palette has moved from smoky and dour to cheerful, even tart, and his painterly command, judgment and taste have become exceptionally refined. Somehow the paint sloshes over the canvases without looking incidental. They are as orderly and yet unpredictable as the sea.

Case in point is his 2002 Turn of Color, just 18 inches high but seven thick. The berm of paint on it is built from slathered layers of pure yellow, royal purple, and a splat of iridescent copper. But Walsh folds a cream color around so that it dominates the pile, and tops it with a gray dollop, forming an organic symmetry that pulls the canvas together. It is as if a Georgia O’Keefe flower study was given the dimensionality and assertiveness of a John Chamberlain sculpture.

Among the recent works, Greenscape (2014) is especially forceful, with a mighty left-to-right sweep of paint that builds to a wave, leaving behind it a weightless slick of aqua, lime and ocher. A resinous green crackle has formed over the lower half, and with blue and white smears above, it alludes to landscape, but volume and gesture tow it back into the objective physicality of paint.

Susan Vecsey provides a restrained counterpoint. I had wondered why no one had yet picked up on Helen Lundeberg’s sunlit minimalism and run with it — perhaps it had to wait for another landscape painter like Vecsey to become interested in geometric abstraction. In any case we need wait no longer. This new series has her making satisfying pictures out of three or four colors, modulated with the surety of someone who has painted her share of skies. In Untitled (Gray/Blue Vertical) (2014) a sumptuous azure block sits atop a field divided by an S-curve into a lighter and a darker gray. Nothing else is needed.

It may sound strange to say so, and reproductions won’t back me up, but this is virtuoso painting. With the right viscosity of turpentine, oils bleed into one another in a way that leaves little branch-like shapes at the edges, such as those in Untitled (Gray Waves) (2014). The burlap-colored warmth of the sized linen is allowed to show through from behind the application of cool grays, producing a rich atmosphere. This all takes enormous control. If anything, Vecsey’s new paintings feel a little too premeditated, but she’s in an early stage of her abstract oeuvre and more chromatically pumped-up pieces like Untitled (Blue/Red) (2014) indicate that some unruliness is on its way in. Thus the constant revival continues.

1. “Touch and Scale: Cubism, Pollock, Newman and Still” (1971), Artforum, Vol. 10, (June 1971): pp. 58 – 66.

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April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

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