May 12 to July 29, 2016
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 941-0012

Five medium-sized paintings in the rear of the gallery break with Stephen Westfall’s familiar practice. Unlike more characteristic paintings such as Cortona (2015), with their coolly satisfying symmetry, the structure of these newer works display a strongly asymmetrical and relational pictorial composition. This exciting departure is a result of the artist’s experience of mural scale wall painting completed over the past several years where he has begun to break with pattern, to an extent, and has increased the role of white as a color. The site-specific murals completed at at Art OMI, Ghent, New York, in 2014 are examples of these.

There is also a faux comical undermining of seriousness, both in the titling of the show and in the deadpan paint surfaces. For a Modernist like Westfall, the strategy of linking high and low cultural narratives—constructivism and graphic signs—proves expedient in deflating grandiosity and productively opening influence to the vitality of quotidian environment. But originality is not dependent on novelty of technology and media. Westfall has achieved a singular style of painting that stands out for all the right reasons—it is compelling, arresting work—whilst not straying from already existing modes.

The diamond shapes, though recalling a harlequin design, represent an ostensible pattern that is broken through changes of hue and value. There is one color per shape, often now with the addition of white diamonds that when adjacent to each other create a context of figure/ground with the chromatically varied diamonds with which they cohabit. These consistent shapes, edited actively at the edge of the paintings’ rectangular limits, are converted into triangles of various sizes in proportion to the over all size of a particular painting. In The Future Advances and Recedes (2015), a central diamond shape is made up of four smaller diamonds, two aligned vertically, the top one deep purple, the lower one black. The horizontally aligned diamonds are a cadmium red and cobalt blue and can be read as eyes in a Paul Klee-like geometric head balancing on a diagonal of orange and yellow. The orange is a triangle formed by the lower edge of the painting bisecting what would have been another diamond. The orange and yellow flip to read also as a three-dimensional roof-like shape. The remaining triangle, taupe in color and to the left of the geometrical head as I describe it, skews what would have been otherwise a general symmetry of composition.

Color is liberated to function in a kinetic way through the simple devise of geometric shape. Thus articulated, color moves and reorganizes, as we perceive it, like a mobile turning through space. Like Stanley Whitney, an artist who structures color through geometry in a similar way, nothing is static in these works. Pages could be written simply to address what color does as one looks at it, the sensations it causes and the thoughts it elicits. An added quality is the perspectival lean that happens in a steeply vertical painting like Delta (2015): the narrow format and large scale of the contained shapes fragment the composition in such a way that there is no complete diamond visible, creating an almost sculptural column. That so much is possible still in the field of an expanded, inclusive modernism and its visuality is evident in considering this exhibition. Westfall’s change in direction only serves to intensify and enlarge his subtlety and range.

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March 12 through April 18, 2015
443 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 967 4972

Oh the grid! The enduring inheritance of Africa, absorbed by the West through Modernism, the grid continues to be a beguiling structure for abstract painters today, the uses ranging from sophisticated play with the grid as trope to culturally driven references to textiles, patterns, architecture, urbanism.

The grid paintings of Russell Roberts belong to a line with roots to Hans Hofmann and branches to such contemporaries as Joan Waltemath, Stanley Whitney and Stephen Westfall, albeit that each of these artists have very different aesthetic intentions in their work with the grid.

Roberts’ previous decades of work had no repeated structure or system, no set scale, frame or image, palette or approach. The paintings yielded multiple gestalts and were provocative explorations that combined painting history with personal imagery in terms that were unique to each painting. These new grid paintings, therefore, represent a dramatic departure for him. Roberts has reprised familiar elements of an older image of his own, one that sees complex blue grounds, violet shapes, and both rough hewn and delicate lines in orange and brown. In canvases nearly identical in scale, white or blue rectangles are deployed as modular components in a system of template-derived lines and areas that are intricately connected by fluid curvilinear lines.

These grid-based compositions are uniform from canvas to canvas but within the multiplicity of parts there is immense variation, and differences emerge. Roberts’ grid brings to mind rows of windows on a building in which each aperture describes the variable and the constant — rather than, say, evoking a checkerboard or gingham print. With an urban feel to them, they are about how people live, about chance encounters and social serendipity. Here, variously sized blue vertical or horizontal rectangles are stacked atop each other creating large zones or areas, producing dynamic pictorial relationships as well as a strong surface design.

Heskin Contemporary is a ground-level, north-of-Chelsea gallery space with an old-school downtown feel to it: its long narrow asymmetrical rooms are the antithesis of the white cube. Rather than overwhelming this cozy gallery, Roberts’ eight large, uniformly sized, off-square canvases and one medium sized outlier lent unexpected expansiveness to the space. The paintings are window-like in scale, structure and color alike, and the blue rectangles, painted and full of air, offer glimpses of deep space. A datum linking all eight paintings is formed by horizontal white or bare surfaces that define the top edges of the consistent lower third portion of each painting. The repetition of these strong “lines” link the paintings and reiterate the shape of the architecture of the gallery, visually unifying the latter’s disparate sections.

Roberts engages the unending argument between material and pictorial form using a broad spectrum of painterly techniques. This allows him to meet the challenge of making a new image by repeating the same structure with aplomb. Each painting is unique in mood and information despite Roberts’ self imposed repetition of shape, form, structure and color — yet success is really due to his deft brushwork and relentless attention to the drawing within the work. The paint application differs within each painting from carefully applied opaque layers to ones that evoke a brusque and provisional quality. This clash of high to low skill used in the same painting appears without any sense of cleverness, irony or nonchalance. Some canvases show evidence of a lot of rethinking, removing and re-painting contrasted with areas that the artist decided were perfect after the initial address, which expands the range of emotion and increases, at least to my mind, the notion of time in the work.

In these complex paintings, rich in complex spatial propositions, the main white and blue areas evoke Matissian plays of figure and ground, while within the smaller white or blue areas Roberts complicates foreground and background with shapes and lines that easily swap roles. Various marks and lines cut through and exit the box-like shapes. The light white areas contain orange and purple shapes, sinuous lines that can feel both comic and anthropomorphic. Occasional brownish-green shapes or strokes connote‘stuff’ tucked into interstitial spaces like closets, corridors or in-between walls. Each element is interconnected and dependent on other parts. Lines often toy or flirt with shapes, bisecting or breaking off, linking disparate areas, yet a strong sense of liberation and harmony is achieved. Perhaps Roberts has engaged these forms in this way to serve as an apt metaphor to describe the complexities of world we live in today.

The poetic title of the exhibition, “Paper Bed Concrete Head,” reverberates as sounds in the ear much in the way the forms and gestures in Roberts’ work themselves reappear and repeat in varied orientations and patterns. The enormous variety of lines, gestural marks, and organic and abstract forms spark associations with many modern art approaches and contemporary strategies: Roberts’ cobalt blues and vivid oranges bring de Kooning to mind, for instance.

An accomplished, mature artist long proven in the medium of oil paint, Roberts has undertaken something risky in this ambitious project. The results upend expectations of serial abstract painting.

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THE EDITORS, 2011
David Cohen, 2011
David Cohen, 2008
John Goodrich, 2006
Aaron Yassin, 2006
David Cohen, 2003

More information on the artist can be found at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

Full index entry for “Westfall” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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discussing exhibitions of  David Adamo and James Castle at Peter Freeman, Inc; David Adamo at Untitled Gallery; Anna Betbeze at Kate Werble;  Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth; and Nan Swid at Margaret Thatcher Projects.

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The Ghost in the Machine, Curated by Stephen Westfall: John McLaughlin, Nicholas Krushenick, Don Christensen, Harriet Korman, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Jennifer Riley, Rachel Beach, Jackie Meier, Thomas Raggio is at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., June 23 to August 19, 2011.

REVERIE, Curated by Stephen Westfall: Andrea Belag, Shirley Jaffe, Alix Le Méléder, Sylvan Lionni, Julia Rommel, Patricia Treib, Stephen Westfall, Stanley Whitney, at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, New York. NY 10012

The last thing you expect of cognitive dissonance is a harmonious feeling, and yet that is what you get when you consider Stephen Westfall’s mode of painting and his way of conducting himself in the world.  Rigorous, cool, hard-edged formal abstraction is his painting mode whereas his activities as an educator, critic, essayist and (this season) an especially busy curator of group exhibitions are marked by ecumenism: warmly inclusive and boundary-breaking in the people he selects to write about or to exhibit with/together, he often makes unexpected connections across mediums and styles, generations and allegiances.  His approach is non-dogmatic, suggesting that pragmatism rather than idealism lies at the heart of his aesthetics.

This season he has been the subject and instigator of three New York shows.  His sixth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, his Chelsea dealer, titled Seraphim for one of the paintings in the show, opened at the end of April and followed on from an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, where he had been a fellow, in Summer 2010.  During his residency in the eternal city, Westfall became mesmerized by mosaic flooring in early medieval churches.  The result – an extended series of diamond-shaped bands of color, formats that recall Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella but in ways that, to paraphrase Klee, take the grid for a walk – captured praise from the influential husband and wife critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz.  For Smith, in the New York Times, Westfall’s “syncopated progression of hues, which is more intuitive than systematic, creates a wonderful, jangling destabilization, warping space and confirming scale (not size) as the living energy source that it is.”  For Saltz, in New York Magazine, “it feels vibrantly alive, quirky, open, ever-mutating, and popping with color… Westfall’s work has never felt so free, confident, and his own.”

His New York solo show was followed in the same space by a group show he selected, Ghost in the Machine, that included a large work of his own, a show that juxtaposed artists all working within geometric abstraction but to sharply contrastive ends.  Coincidental with the Chelsea group show was Reverie at Zürcher Studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, which again included a painting of his own amidst a diverse and intercontinental group. Zürcher is his longstanding representative in Paris.

Ghost in the Machine can be read as a kind of manifesto of “impurist” geometric abstraction in which popular culture and humor are celebrated as extensions of abstraction rather than its enemy.  “Some people think that artists deploy geometry as an austerity.  It ain’t necessarily so.” Westfall wrote in a statement accompanying the show.  “All the work here stands for more than one thing: swoony craft, optical dazzle, compression and expansion.” John McLaughlin, the Boston-born Californian whose proto-minimalist paintings have been the subject of recent rediscovery, might seem closest to a purest aesthetic with its allegiance to Mondrian, Malevich and Zen.  Even he allows his color and spatial decisions to be inflected by a Californian aesthetic of gloss and ease.  Jennifer Riley, one of the younger artists in the group, and a former student of Westfalls (he has taught for years at Bard College and at Rutgers, both important centers for abstract painting on the East Coast) makes the connection between her crystalline forms and a Pop aesthetic explicit, if extremely coded, in the title, Starburst for NK, (2009); NK is Nicholas Krushenick (1929-1999), also represented in the exhibition and held by many to be the father of pop abstraction.

If Ghost is a manifesto, Reverie is a visual poem; in place of the rigorous organizing principle of geometry – whether subversive or subverted – this show allows for greater diversity of touch and process, ranging in its modes of abstraction from monochrome (Julia Rommel ) to gestural (Andrea Belag) to minimal (Sylvan Lionni ) to organic (Patricia Treib).  Its presiding eminence grise was the Paris-based veteran Shirley Jaffe, represented by a monumental, tapestry-like collage of glyphs and decals, while another “lifer” – to quote Westfall’s witty euphemism from his supporting statement – was Stanley Whitney, whose gutsy grids are composed of wobbling lozenges of sharply contrastive colors and gently differentiating textures. Whitney’s found grid stood in instructive contract to the meticulously preplanned rigor of Westfall, but rather than suggesting an opposition, it seemed that Westfall enlisted Whitney to say that he, too, arrives at his patterns through feeling and whim as much as any formal logic.

Westfall has been known for years for his penchant for cheery, upbeat geometric abstraction that simultaneously registers order and disruption.  At first his compositions strike the viewer as well-behaved structures of pattern with decorative correlates in the applied arts, such as plaid, herringbone, chevrons.  Good humored populist titles like “My beautiful Laundrette” or “Candyman” and raucous color schemes hint at subversion of prim minimal grids or Color Field-redolent arrangements of parallel stripe.  But his visual wit goes beyond mere reference to recent abstract art history.  A key element in his vocabulary is the disruptive kink he will admit into his patterning that sets it off kilter; never quite subverting the flatness of the picture plane, he nonetheless allows a breeze or ripple to run across the composition.

The references to other art and the broader culture, coupled with his funky palette, might sound like Westfall belongs simply within the pop or deconstructive camp of Neo-Geo and its derivatives, making him a bedfellow, say, or Jonathan Lasker or Peter Halley.  And there are generational connections, as there are with other abstractionist wits like Mary Heilmann.  But somehow, in Westfall, the attachment to the positive, energetic, affirmative aspect of pattern and decoration always seems in earnest; the subversion is within pattern, rather than of pattern.  He recalls Ruskin’s dictum that “All beautiful lines are drawn under mathematical laws organically transgressed.” He leaves viewers feeling that his intention is to invigorate abstraction rather than to debunk it.  And this makes sense of the community he establishes around himself of fellow abstractionists, and workers within other styles, for whom wit is important but irony is to be avoided.

This article first appeared at the newly-launched website of Abstract Critical, a British not-for-profit organization dedicated to abstract art.  Despite a similarity in name, Abstract Critical is not connected with artcritical magazine, although artcritical editor David Cohen has agreed to submit quarterly reports to Abstract Critical with cross postings here at artcritical.

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On view at the artist’s solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, 514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York 212 941 0012 through Saturday (December 20)

Restraint with a smile has always been Stephen Westfall’s hallmark. As surely as his method of tight, almost heraldic geometric abstraction remains focused, so are his stylistic references correspondingly diverse. His paintings acknowledge both minimalism and pop in their serial logic and jazzy, synthetic color. A somewhat designer-ish, language-game take on abstraction places the artist in the dubious company of postmodern contemporaries but Westfall seems incapable of irony: indeed, his work is pervaded by ingenuousness, placing him in genuine and respectful dialogue with the luminaries of the purist tradition in modern painting.

This was an artcritical PIC in December 2008.

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June 1 – July 15, 2006

The Material Sign is the carefully chosen title given by painter and critic Stephen Westfall to this show of four artists: Craig Fisher, Phillis Ideal, Marthe Keller, and Gwenn Thomas. Their work, as Westfall writes in the press release, “reflects an overt participation in the material processes of painting in abstract work that nonetheless admits references to what one might call the “image” of the material itself.” This statement along with the title of the show act to frame the primary questions of the exhibition: What is a “material sign,” and what is “the ‘image’ of the material.”

First, before an examination of the paintings, it is helpful to define the terms signand image. According to the Swiss linguist Saussure (1857-1913) a sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified and this relationship is referred to as signification. The paintings then are signifiers (a sound, image, written shape, object, practice, or gesture invested with meaning).Image, on the other hand, is the thing perceived and represented in the mind.

Craig Fisher is represented by a single 6-1/2 by 5-1/2 feet work that is typical of his unique form of abstract non-objective and non-relational painting. It includes many of his seemingly casual but masterful moves of drips, pours, splatters, scrubbings, etc. Fisher paints on raw unprimed cotton canvas and begins with many yards of it rolled on the floor. He then goes about his haphazard process until there is enough of something that it suggests a painting of a certain size and a certain orientation. At this point the section of canvas is cut out, stretched, and possibly worked more typically on both the front and backsides. Then almost as if nothing specific happened there is a finished painting.

Fisher’s work is often discussed in relationship to the French Support/Surface movement of the 1970’s, which attempted to strip down painting to its basic phenomenology of support and surface in order to build the process again while maintaining the integrity of these fundamental elements. Fisher in his own way does something similar, yet his work is more solidly rooted in a lineage from Pollock and de Kooning to Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

In Fisher’s paintings the meaning exists in the trace of their existence as signifiers and it is in this way that they become “material images.” It is only through their materiality that the residue of the essential decisions and non-decisions that occur in their process of creation can be seen.

Creating a similar quality of the material-as-image are the two square pieces of Phillis Ideal. Her paintings are built from varyingly thick skeins of paint that have been previously poured and collected for later use; the final works become a collage of their material elements. Ideal refers to it as a kind of ecological process where her poured paint skeins become interdependent signifiers. As a result different parts of the paintings suggest cartoon outlines, raster dots, computer graphics, graffiti, and a wide range of abstraction.

This process produces a unique conceptual doubling where the paint exists as both a specific tangible material and simultaneously as a referent of the visual language of different styles of image making. It links to Dada and Surrealist experiments through its use of collage and chance elements to create meaning. It also acts as a parallel with the experience of current technologies like cellular communications and high speed Internet where time becomes a warp-speed pastiche of information and signifiers. The work also references forms of abstraction from the Concrete movement led by Max Bill to the Neo-Concrete and Grupo Madi movements in Brazil in the 1940’s all while showing hints of Lichtenstein and Warhol. The scope of Ideal’s project is broad and even though these two paintings feel a bit unresolved they suggest the innovative and invigorating potential of her process.

The two works by Marthe Keller expand the material form of painting into 3-dimensions with a stunningly painted curved ceramic piece and a work in two parts, half of which drapes off the wall and conceals what appears to be a chair. Unifying all of Keller work is a compositional device that she emphatically refers to as vertical strokes, rather than stripes. These strokes become, in essence, theimage of her work. They also act as a comprehensive signifier for the issues at stake, which include a complex, ironic, and playful questioning of the nature of painting as subject versus object, and illusionistic versus concrete.

Keller uses her material with a sensitive touch achieving sensuous, rich surfaces, and vibrant fields of color. Central to her work is an understanding of the fundamental role of drawing at the origin of the creative process—she allows it to exist unfettered. Thus she has great freedom and flexibility as she applies her ‘strokes’ from stretched canvas and linen, to tarpaulins and walls. Keller’s work shows the influence of the New York School in their goal of sublime painting while at the same time embraces the paradoxical impulses of artists from Lucio Fontana to Cy Twombly in their use of a single seemingly authorless gesture.

Gwenn Thomas whimsically and cleverly broadens the idea of the material image with her use of photography and inkjet printing. The end result of which is, ironically, an image of material. First, she creates delicate collages of different swatches of fabric and other woven textiles often arranged in a grid of some sort. Then she photographs these collages, prints the photograph on canvas and stretches the canvas in the same manner as one would stretch a painting and presents them as such.

On one hand Thomas’ work exists entirely as signifier as a result of its mimetic function. The objects perform all of the functions expected from a painting: they present an image on canvas and stretched on a frame, they create space that’s in dialogue with specific Modernist works, and they feel painterly. On the other hand they become a new material form that is entirely their own and mediates between painting and photography. The result, while a fairly accurately printed and “true” photograph, creates a distancing effect between the viewer and the thing seen that forces the acknowledgement of the absence of the real. It is a perceptual conundrum that deeply questions the possibility of phenomenological truth.

In all four of these artists work there is something disturbing, mischievous and ironic. They continue to shake-up painting by questioning it and then giving it new life. They consider each aspect of their process and the specific material that’s involved and they impregnate it with meaning. The work is not slick, craftsy or pretty. None of it feels like the current mass proliferation of laboriously decorative post-minimal abstract painting that is often covered with a shinning layer of epoxy. A good look at this show and at these artists who have all been working for decades makes it clear that in the search for this years new “ism” we should just consider ourselves “ismed out” and instead focus on what’s really good and continually extending its potential.

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February – March 11, 2006

According to light theory, white is the sum of all colors. As a spiritual symbol, white occupies one end of another kind of spectrum; it’s the note of purity beyond life’s assortment of grays. For artists, though, white has a more down-to-earth characteristic.  As a painted or sculpted surface, it’s especially revealing of subtle marks, textures, and volumes. And, as these paintings and sculptures by thirteen very different artists demonstrate, whiteness is an almost endlessly mutable quality.

The exhibition marks the tenth anniversary of Howard Scott’s original all-white show, which included four of the artist’s here. Among the four is Rebecca Salter, whose tall, slender diptych “Untitled JJ1” (2006) seems the embodiment of meditative constraint. Its surface (actually grayish-tan from the linen support showing through) quietly vibrates from hundreds of delicate parallel lines; these minutely irregular marks seem to accrue with a singular, organic regularity. A pale, translucent wash covers the entire surface, imparting an extra depth, and enhancing the effect of humming self-containment.

Vincent Hamel, too, had work in the original exhibition, and if Salter’s work has an otherworldly aspect, his untitled panel from 2005 is all physical grit. Undifferentiated except by texture, his paint has the grainy viscosity of cement, its surface evocatively recording the broad, buttering attack of a palette knife or trowel.

By contrast, soft, overlapping circular forms have been applied to the surface of Robin Rose’s panel, giving it a delicate organic depth. So many of these lily pad-like forms fill the surface that no portion of “Pause” (2006) is flat. Circular stains also dot its surface, but they correspond to none of the “lily pads,” adding to the sense of constant, gentle undulation. (A peek at the panel’s edge reveals its aluminum honeycomb core—a startlingly unyielding support for its melting forms.)

Down the wall, Lance Letscher’s collage subtly bristles, both in its surface and its literary allusions. “White Side” (2006) consists of countless strands of paper, sliced from record album covers (judging from their bits of fractured text), and bound into a regular pattern of arcs. These bundles are mounted on what appears to be an old ledger sheet filled with hand-written entries. Standing out among the fragmented phrases is the single word “Records”—punning, perhaps, on the original purpose of the ledger, the source of the strips, and the way an old ordering has given way to a new, idiosyncratic one.

David Goerk’s three small, wall-mounted sculptures feature strict geometric forms—variations of a cube or box, with segments cut out—but their slightly irregular surfaces lend them a surprising organicness. Their whiteness highlights internal shadows, increasing their three-dimensionality—while at the same time suggesting that they’re actually outgrowths of the gallery wall’s white mass. The inner facets of “#8 (Doorman)” (2006) have rougher, lumpy surfaces, heightening the contradictions between interior and exterior spaces.

A square resin relief sculpture from 2004 by Florence Pierce seems a pale greenish-gray, but on closer inspection it’s impossible to assign it any one color. The untitled relief’s flat surface is translucent, with a faintly iridescent quality. Light seem to infiltrate slowly from the sides, imparting a dimensionless depth utterly different from Goerk’s modeled blocks.

Stephen Westfall is one of the few artists here to animate his work not through physical manipulations of space but solely through the vigor of his design. The light green-blue geometric shapes of his canvas “The Alleluia (For Leonard Cohen)” (2006) seem at first as coolly controlled as his oil-and-alkyd surface, but in a moment, the image warms with subtle pictorial tensions. His large, square composition has been divided into nine smaller squares so that the outer ones increase slightly in size, on either one or two dimensions. Each smaller square in turn has been bisected, just off-center, by horizontal and vertical lines. In turns out that this playful composition consists entirely of shifting tensions, endlessly testing our expectations.

Color is at a minimum throughout the exhibition—of course that’s the point—but this serves only to highlight the varieties of surface, plasticity, and scale. At Howard Scott, the artists’ different personalities are apparent in a startling diversity of means.

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