November 3 to December 21, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
138 Tenth Avenue, between 19th and 20th streets
New York City, lissongallery.com

People sometimes bemoan the state of formal abstraction.The critique is as follows: It’s repetitive, stale, too often attached to the grid. Yet, this is not a new critique. The grid remains, so long as the convention of a rectangular support remains. Even the most sophisticated High Renaissance painting responds to the grid – breaks with it, negates it or conforms to it. Rosalind E. Krauss bankrolled her early career attacking it. Without offering an apology for the modernist preoccupation with the grid, however, I would argue that sometimes exploring formal conventions can expand the language of once well-worn trajectories. Such is the case with Stanley Whitney’s solo exhibition, “In the Color,”at Lisson Gallery.

Whitney came of age, as an artist, with peers such as David Reed, the late Jack Whitten and the slightly older Ed Clarke. The late 1970s were a time when some didn’t believe that any kind of painting was possible; others still rejected color as too tied to a cultural moment, deemed it superficial or lacking in seriousness. The art world periodically likes to relive this hangover, usually after binging on candy-coated color that’s all too easy to like. Color is most interesting when it is incredibly specific—otherwise it can become generic.

In the show’s title work, In the Color, (2018) Whitney uses a perfect square measuring 8 x 8 feet, and employs a loose lattice, vibrant grid structure, with three horizontal bands unevenly spaced to create spatial dimension. Cadmium yellow on the left side of the canvas, cadmium red on the right, a few cobalts, teals and viridians closer to the middle, and a few pastel pinks and yellows dead center create a patchwork motif. It’s in the placement of rectangles and their sameness or relative proximity to other hues where color begins to take shape, to create space. Color becomes subject and object.

Whitney’s grids aren’t dogmatic. He allows a few drips on the right side of the canvas; a deep, cadmium red bleeds into a peach-pink, a blue-grey rectangle bleeds down the bottom left corner of the painting allowing for transparency. It’s in moments like these where Whitney seems to harken back to his earlier paintings of the 1980s and ‘90s. Using a loose geometry and a range of natural color, Whitney has found a way around the static grid that neither negates it or simply repeats it. It is a playful response, a cartooning of the grid.

And cartooning is most evident in the drawings. In Untitled (2013), Whitney scribbles, scrawls, draws sharp verticals or horizontals and even swirling curlie-cues all in crayon.They all conform to the grid like structure, the bands, and vignettes, but the language of his line is buoyant and playful and nearly collapses a sense of structure at all. The drawings elicit a whimsical quality not often seen in abstract painting.

I first encountered Whitney’s early work in Raphael Rubinstein’s survey, “Reinventing Abstraction” at Cheim and Read in 2013. In the early ‘80s, David Reed and Jack Whitten famously found new technologies and employed theoretical or synthetic color to definitive aims, resulting in new discoveries. Meanwhile, Whitney was forming out of color field painting and gestural abstraction. With loosely scrawled or drawn gestures painted wet into wet and in partial grid-like formations, the frenetic energy of these early works burst with individual intensity, as if pulsating from within. A change of focus subsequently saw color begin to dominate the language and gesture to take a more secondary role. The show at Lisson Gallery has bothtendencies on display. Nearly a survey, it spans some 22 years of paintings and drawings. A good example of his mid-career work is Untitled, (1996) in which Whitney employs the same basic compositional structures that would come to form his mature work but including distinctly colored grounds to form the underpainting for each rectangle. Flatly painted opaque layers of light blues, white, pale yellows, bright reds and deep blacks all act as placeholders for painterly activity. Inside these self-contained vignettes, Whitney’s hand is incredibly evident, deft, and robust. His brushwork is gestural, at other times drips or stains in a variety of bright oranges, creamy yellows, and grass greens to punctuate the intensity of the darker grounds. Alternatively, crimson reds, Pthalo greens and cobalt blues contrast the lighter grounds. It is one of themost lively paintings in this show.

Whitney’s paintings indicate a deep lineage back to Philip Guston and other giants of the New York School, while also pivoting in a new direction, towards territory uniquely his own, one that collapses subject and object, color and form and mesh into inseparable space.

The post Where Color Takes Shape: Stanley Whitney at Lisson Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

Lee Ann Norman: I think I ask everyone this question firstly (laughter): When did you decide you would be an artist?

Jennifer Packer: I was born in Philly on a naval base that is now closed. I lived with my grandparents for most of my life in South Jersey. I went to Tyler [School of Art] and stayed in Philly a few years before going to graduate school. It’s a weird question for me, “When did I choose to be an artist?” I was coy about it. People would ask me what I do, and I would try to deflect and say, “I’m a painter,” rather than an artist. (laughter) I didn’t know what an artist was for me, yet. I just thought I had some things I needed to sort out and that I could maybe do it with painting.

How did you decide that art would be the way that you could sort those things out?

I realized that I can make a painting of anything—a fantasy, a question, a sadness—and based on the choices I’d make and my attention to what is cared for in the image, I could learn about how I feel and where my genuine concerns lay.

My first painting class was sophomore year with Stanley Whitney. There are many professors who have no shame about tying your achievements to their approval. But with Stan, it was like his disapproval became the most significant part of the class (laughter). A friend of mine, Susannah Habecker, would come in, and he would love her paintings, and the rest of ours would be disappointments. In that atmosphere, it was hard for me to distinguish between what was mine and what was his in terms of the concerns [in the work] then. Toward the end, I started making a couple of things that were my own. He also pushed me to go to Rome, which changed my life.

Are there things you can look back on from that time that define you now as a painter?

It was important for me to feel like I was butting heads with someone who had as strong of a personality as I did. But I try to keep my students from having that kind of relationship with me now. I tell them, “You gotta figure out your own thing, and we can talk about it, but I’m not here to give you a personal stamp of approval.”

Yes, I think that can be a more productive challenge than simply making someone say they like your work. You mentioned that Rome really changed you. When did you go?

In 2006. Stanley told me I needed to go to Rome and learn what it’s like to be a black person abroad. Rome was so complicated . . . . I experienced some really unique kinds of racism and isolation that threw me off my game entirely. I tried to get ready—I even took Italian before I left. (laughter) When I got there, I felt completely alone. I had physical exchanges that were really unpleasant. I was kicked by a woman multiple times in the cafe at the end of Via Flaminia in Rome. I thought I understood what racism looked like, but I was surprised that I couldn’t combat it with my intelligence, my dress—

—Or when you spoke English.

That’s the thing that makes it more complicated! I refused to speak English when I travelled. I think people made assumptions about who I was and what I was doing, or they didn’t care. After I got kicked, the other students in the program were in disbelief that it actually happened to me. Those kind of experiences can cause you to draw inward. One day, I walked into San Luigi dei Francesi, and I saw Caravaggio’s St. Matthew paintings. I got chills. Typically, Italian painting is [presented as] this vibrant, bloodless affair, but Caravaggio’s [paintings] are like: No. This is dirty, it’s nasty, it’s lonely, it’s hard. When I saw the paintings I felt like I was in the presence of family. I connected with the images immediately and felt changed. If these paintings—I felt like they were left for me—if these paintings could make me feel that life is worth living, then perhaps I might make something that could affect someone else in the same way. It’s rare [for me] to feel like there’s a haven in painting where I am fully recognized as an artist, a queer woman of color . . . I don’t usually look at paintings and feel like they acknowledge me, but as a painter, I can connect with other concerns. We grab on to what we can. Caravaggio seemed dejected and I thought: I know what that’s like. (laughter)

How did you try to work through that problem you’d given yourself of creating images that might resonate with someone else?

I had a copy of “Letters to a Young Poet” that I took to Rome with me. [In the letters] Rilke is very clear about the necessity of solitude for individual growth, regardless of difficulty and loss. It was good for me to read, but painful to experience (laughter). I’d already started to make things that were intimate and introspective. I had made a really dark painting that was about my parents and how their choices affected my life. I want to make paintings that needed to be there, paintings that I can’t make again.

How does your relationship to literature, storytelling, and writing relate to painting?

I enjoy the fact that painting, like writing, is a language, and one can become more fluent over time. Writing can inhabit places where painting can’t and vice versa. I’ve been thinking a lot about the translatability of works of art and emotional experience. I’ve been keeping journals for years, and it has become really important for holding myself accountable to my vision and my personal growth.

A lot of the new work has a discernible image, but I can see where things aren’t totally filled in—they are more like a sketch of an idea, or they add and subtract information.

I’ve been interested for a long time in how I present or protect humans in the work. It’s not figures, not bodies, but humans I am painting. I want to know how to present a personal relationship without damaging the individual or putting them in harm’s way.

I read commentary about your work that described this process as you trying to present relationships in the paintings. You might know the people who sit for you, for example, but you want to reveal something more about them than their figure.

I thought if I filled the painting with distracting information, that people would turn away from the person and toward a kind of fantasy. But I saw Nicole Eisenman’s shows at the New Museum and Anton Kern and felt like I was in the presence of someone who was engaging unapologetically with their own pleasure. I wanted that for myself. I think for a while, my process simply became too rigid and overly severe. Now, I want to be able to ask many different questions and find various and unexpected answers, which requires more flexibility.

What kind of questions are you interested in asking?

I’m working on two paintings where I’m trying to figure out how to make logical decisions that are also deeply emotional. I’m looking for opportunities to describe how I think and feel, without breaking away from realism to do it.

I’ve been painting flowers on and off for about five years. When I first started painting them, I didn’t know why I was interested. There’s no singular stylistic intention. It’s not the image that moves me so much as the touch, color, light, and the movement of the image. I was painting them at first from observation as a way of grounding myself in the studio. Now they usually address a specific loss, which to me, requires time and deviation. I wanted to make a bouquet dedicated to Sandra Bland, but I didn’t feel I had the right to use her name or say it was for her, However, I know how traumatic experiencing her death through the media was for me. If you google a lot of the young black and brown people who have been killed by police, you can see images of their funeral, but not Sandra’s. You can see a stuffed animal, the burial, or a rose on her casket, but you don’t get to see images of the service. I started the painting this year thinking I would make a glorious funerary bouquet, but because I was so upset [about her death], still, it became this other charged thing. I wanted real justice for her . . . but there are some things painting can’t do. I didn’t know when I started the painting that I could use the process to move through my grief. But after I finished the painting, I felt differently, more in control, and less burdened. I feel comfortable now having difficult questions, and earning the answers.

Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, September 9 to November 5, 2017. 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60637. renaissancesociety.org

The post “Not Figures, Not Bodies, But Humans”: Jennifer Packer in conversation with Lee Ann Norman appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Diamond in the Smooth: Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

The post “This is how it’s done”: David Salle Curates Recent Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Karma: June 15 to August 30, 2015
39 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, 917-675- 7508

Harlem: July 16 to October 25, 2015
144 West 125th Street between Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard) and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard (7th Avenue
New York City, 646-242-2142

Two exhibitions, running concurrently, afford an exciting opportunity to think about Stanley Whitney. A selection of works from the 1990s are on view at Karma Books and Gallery while more recent works, from 2008 to 2015, can be seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The downtown exhibition, marking the publication of a sizable book on Whitney’s work by Karma Books (reviewed earlier this summer at artcritical) is comprised of five large paintings in the main gallery and 84 small paintings and works on paper salon hung in the entrance space. At the Studio Museum, 29 paintings, six color gouaches and five black gouaches afford ample indication of where Whitney is right now.

In their rows of rounded shapes and loosely brushed compartments Whitney’s earlier paintings resemble shelves or cavities, reading like sections of a catacomb or stacked fruit. Stacking is significant as the paintings are evidently constructed to accommodate color building with units or blocks of color; this has, indeed, become foundational to all his painting since the1990s. The artist spent five years living in Rome during the 1990s when he also visited Egypt and it seems clear that the nature of those built environments, including the Pyramids, were important constructive ideas for his subsequent development. The structure in the earliest of the large oil paintings at Karma, Radical Openness, (1991) evinces an already begun absorption in image making that combines drawing and painting through repetition and difference. By this I mean that, rather than change a basic structure from one painting to the next, the basic structure remains the same: graphic invention and shifts in color space become the painting’s subject. Though continued right through to the present day, there is no sign of this structure inhibiting or reducing the possibilities of emotional or intellectual expression, of inquiry through color and line. In fact, it becomes indexical of changes along the way. It is color that made this format necessary—emerging slowly, as can be seen in the 84 small works at Karma. Drawings indicate a range of possible directions, but it is color that definitively led to this particular structure.

The smaller paintings and drawings are like episodic, graphic narratives. Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, (1937) comes to mind, as might the way Bonnard uses drawing and mark making to define spatial elements in his paintings. In each new iteration, enough is carried from the last painting to the next to make the playoff between repetition and difference central to his effort. The sectional frontality and scale changes act like amplifications or diminutions of sound. The analogy with music is an obvious one, but no less relevant for that. The main difference, from the point of view of Whitney’s work, is that music occurs in a prescribed temporal sequence whereas in painting time only passes for the viewer: colors change as you look at them depending on where the eye is resting or moving.

Drawing is implicit in the way Whitney wields his brush: the degree to which he leaves traces of the latter visible indicates its role in the placement and organization of color. In the recent paintings this drawing element remains crucial although with the reduction of one color placed over another it is the individual color blocks that carry the energy. The color blocks are kinetic. It can be argued that nothing we see is static for our means of perception, but color complicates this, as it is already a fugitive phenomenon that operates between the phenomenological and the conceptual. There is nothing neutral when it comes to color, no known definitive form, and it is this that is so decisively at play in Whitney’s paintings. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Color does not relate to optics the way line relates to geometry.” In Lightnin, (2009), for instance, a 40 x 40 inch painting, one constellation of color supersedes another in even a few moments of looking. The vertical narrow rectangles of each side and the bottom edge pulsate, sending the eye on a rotating journey; adjacent colors pair up, blue and red on one side, green and yellow on the other. Similar animation happens everywhere across the painting: recombinations of color and pictorial space are endless. This transforms painting into something like a time-based medium in which time runs in every direction and at a constantly varying speed.

Whitney’s working method constitutes what could be described as lyrical pragmatism. The way the paintings look to have been made, from top left to bottom right, is analogous to reading script, or painting a wall methodically. He typically completes a picture over two sessions, with three to four drying days between. This speed of execution allows for surprises and time to absorb what is happening in the painting. Rather than the painting being the fulfillment of a set plan, therefore, it is a result of allowing any number of sources from life to inform and influence its outcome. The vitality of the paintings attests to the success of this strategy, leaving the viewer with a desire to see more, however much each completed painting refuses to be still and known. Repeated viewing appears to be a requirement, one that can sustain thought and pleasure in equal amounts.

The post Structured by Color: Stanley Whitney, Works from the 1990s and Now appeared first on artcritical.

Karma Books on Great Jones Street has a summer exhibition of works from the 1990s by Stanley Whitney to coincide with their publication of a 500 page doorstopper of a survey of the abstract painter’s career. The take home revelation of this show is that Whitney is a consummate draftsman. Drawings in water soluble crayon, graphite and other mediums and small oil sketches are presented salon style on an entire soaring wall of the front section of Karma’s Great Jones Street premises. It feels like a rare privilege even to be viewing pieces that evidence being torn from a notebook and were perhaps never intended for public eyes. Most of the drawings are in color, but even where they restrict themselves to graphite, color is an implied presence. “The drawings [are] very important to me,” Whitney has said in an interview. ”They [are] key to figuring out the space. Even now with the paintings, no matter how structured they are, the lucid stuff really belongs to drawing.” That “lucid stuff” maintains a quality that touches life in a concrete way, but for the viewer the experience is like zooming past a scene of people, lights and advertisements on a train. The eye moves quickly across stacks of containing lines that almost rattle by violently. Even if you can’t hold on to particular objects you sense, in the rush, that they are there.  Colors almost possess agency, as if they were not chosen but presented themselves.

Exhibition continues through August 30, 2015 at 39 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, 917-675-7508

The post Stanley Whitney at Karma appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Windows on a Complex World: Russell Roberts at Heskin Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

At the Jewish Museum, on the night of October 23, a large crowd turned out to hear “What’s at Stake for Abstract Painting Today — and Where Do We Go from Here?” The panel featured a discussion among painters Joanne Greenbaum, Philip Taaffe, and Stanley Whitney, responding to prompts from the writer, critic, and curator Bob Nickas, who was the moderator. It was followed by questions from the audience. I showed up just moments before the program’s commencement, and after an onerous check-in process I was happy to see several friends in attendance. Nickas focused the conversation especially on young abstractionists, who he identified in his opening remarks as men born between 1980 and ’89. Other critics have likewise been eager to harp on a highly visible cadre of such boys: Parker Ito, Jacob Kassay, Lucien Smith, Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, Fredrik Vaerslev, and others. Their work has been given many monikers, including “Zombie Formalism” by Martin Mugar (subsequently popularized by the artist and critic Walter Robinson), or Jerry Saltz’s minimally clearer and more incisive term, “MFA-clever” painting.[1]

No artist of that cohort sat on the panel, which Nickas explained by saying, “I considered inviting some of them, but it felt like setting them up and not a good thing to do in public. They can have a panel of their own and talk about how we’re wrong or don’t understand.” Neither were any of them mentioned by name during the discussion, though images of the artists and their work (as well as the work of the panelists) were shown in a slide presentation that was paged through by Nickas mostly without commentary during the conversation. In his introductory remarks, Nickas emphasized his dislike of those artists as voguish and robotic by describing their careers as suffering a Menudo Problem: every artist as a boy band (a brand), “in a rush to be famous and therefore in a rush to be forgotten.”

The conversants were affable and their sharp quips were balanced with genuine acquisitiveness — an interest in what one another saw as the predominating problems and issues of contemporary painting, and seeing what insights they had gleaned from or about younger artists. Each was sure to reiterate, unequivocally, that there are younger artists they appreciate and admire. Nickas and Greenbaum were both quick to proclaim explicitly that they’re not generational.

Criticisms of the aforementioned youths were varied and most were well deserved, albeit delivered with what to my ear sounded tinged with a kind of “what’s wrong with the kids these days?” ageism, though perhaps I’m mistaken. Whitney and Taaffe noted that there have been bad artists in every era. Whitney offered that, “Painting changes, but not very much.” Nickas remarked that in The Afternoon Interviews, a series of conversations between Calvin Tomkins and Marcel Duchamp published in 1964, that many of Duchamp’s complaints are identical to those being made about today’s arts, and that “the [arts’ economic structure] has remained continuous.” Indeed, commoditization, cynicism, and repetition were perhaps as common in that era as they are today. However, Nickas went on to say that there is little similarity between today’s art market and the one Duchamp experienced a century ago: during the Armory Show, for a short time, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) was one of the most famous and shocking new paintings in the world, after which it wasn’t displayed publicly for a very long time and Duchamp didn’t exhibit for several years. Nickas speculated that today — 50 years after Tomkins’s conversations with Duchamp, and 100 years after the first Armory Show — if a painting achieved the same level of fame it would likely be immediately repeated by the artist a dozen times over and shown as much as possible.

The panelists’ lamentations were primarily aimed at the mindless production-line work of those certain young artists: paintings that are churned out in large quantities, using the repetition of a few simple gimmicks. Such work is often described as conceptual, but with an abusive use of the term; this “conceptualism” conflates process and content, prioritizing the former at the latter’s expense. It typically employs expressive-like gestures, their formalism pre-slotted into a post-war art-historical genealogy. Greenbaum especially hypothesized that the young men are underformed and that their work is rushed from brainstorm to execution to market.[2]

The sum of all these features is decoration: canvases that are speckled or monochromatic or heavily worked into atmospheric mush or inscribed with a solitary line of colorful spray paint, pigment shot from fire extinguishers, athletic line markers, or whatever. Images that are nominally painterly, but essentially just expensive color swatches, follow not only formally but also ideologically from Abstract Expressionism, which the art historian TJ Clark lamented for its undying endurance and described as “vulgar,” the more successful for its greater vulgarity:

Seen in normal surroundings, past the unobtrusive sofas and calla lilies, as part of the unique blend of opulence and spareness that is the taste of the picture-buying [bourgeoisie] of America, a good Hoffmann seems always to be blurting out a dirty secret which the rest of the décor is conspiring to keep. It makes a false compact with its destination. It takes up the language of its users and exemplifies it … For what it shows is the world its users inhabit in their heart of hearts. It is a picture of their ‘interiors,’ of the visceral-cum-spiritual upholstery of the rich. And above all it can have no illusions about its own status as part of that upholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take them or leave them, these ciphers of plenitude — they are all painting at present has to offer.[3]

It should come as no surprise that Lucien Smith’s “rain paintings” resemble Pollock or that Jacob Kassay’s reflective monochromes allude to Barnett Newman or Frank Stella. Their work fulfills a nearly identical role.

In a recent essay for New York Magazine‘s Vulture blog, Jerry Saltz averred that the Internet, speculators, and schools are in some way coacting to make contemporary abstraction more dull and painters more conservatively similar. (He did not hypothesize a specific mechanism or motive.) By way of example, Saltz selected more than a dozen works by the cohort in question, compiling a Buzzfeed– or Huffington Post-like slideshow. Others in the slideshow included Mark Flood and Charline von Heyl, both of whom are about a generation older than the artists in question, as well as Helene Appel, whose work is spare and minimal, but trompe-l’œil, except if viewed as a 200-by-300-pixel jpeg. So the definitional boundaries of abstract painting’s contemporary problem children may be up for debate, depending on the peculiar tastes of a critic, curator, or artist. Or it may simply be dependent on the particular formal affinities that make for a contemptuously banal clickbait slideshow.[4]

Looking through back issues of arts magazines it’s easy to find faddish similarities between artists, curatorial experiments, and even exhibition advertisements from every time prior to the web’s arrival and the market’s recent rapid growth. In the 1960s and ’70s every zombified manner of grid, dash, monochrome, and unconventional canvas could be found on gallery walls and in print. Today’s scholars, critics, and curators are apparently eager to rediscover middling parishioners from the church of the grid and rectangle who have since fallen by the historical wayside. They should, and we shouldn’t be surprised if many new painters are consigned to such fates in the near and distant future. What is different about the contemporary, readily digitized era is our ability to easily index and examine a vast array of artists and their work, both past and present. Greenbaum asserted that she believes many of the young artists she speaks with are mostly looking at work that was made in the past 18 months, on their computers and at art fairs.

Perhaps even more so, as far as I can tell, a bigger problem is the profusion of superfluous rhetoric that substitutes for… uh… discourse. Published in Triple Canopy last year, Alix Rule and David Levine’s “International Art English” identified the way that fuzzy, otiose language has become the argot of arts conversations from press releases to the academy and everywhere between. The willing abrogation of critical talk to artists, consultants, and markets virtually guarantees that phony explanations will be offered in lieu of considered content, that buzzwords stand as simulacra of thought rather than leading to any idea, that every kind of nonsense is spoonfed to people willing to buy into it, and that ambiguity is prized over staking a claim.[5] That has nothing to do with the bogeymen that are more often worried over: fairs, auctions, speculators, dealers, and on and on.[6] As Nickas asserted at one point, this relatively contemporary ethos of de-skilling, and the seemingly accepted truism that anyone can be an artist, “teaches naïve people that they’re also talented.”[7] My feeling is, tangentially, that the actual sin is to try to persuade people, by way of inane jargon, that naïveté and redundancy are actually relevant.

Toward the end of the event, a young woman asked if the panelists still believe that a group of boys sits at the apex of contemporary painting. Nickas answered Yes, and then smirkingly added that he takes this from a good source: Philips auction catalogues.[8] I don’t know whether this is earnest or not, but the people who probably benefit most from the confusion of cultural capital with an investment strategy are investors. It would be far better, as I see it, to note that those young men are a symptom of lazy allowances for people seeking highbrow excuses to decorate their homes with banalities, and who might make a profit on later resale. Nickas quoted John Miller’s aphorism that painting is a “service industry,” which I think gets at this very problem — not a new one, nor an invention of young men painting today, and one that is propped up by rhetorical structure that acts like a Fuck You to any thinking viewer. One would hope, though, that the wizened representatives of earlier generations, some of whom have actively supported a few of these young men and their peers, can take responsibility in their laxity, and that we can as well,[9] and that perhaps we could all demand more from what we look at, calling out bullshit where it is found.

[1] Fashionable painting has begotten a fashionable dispute.

[2] This judgment is probably true, but is likewise applicable to earlier generations, such as Frank Stella, Richard Serra, Chuck Close and others who emerged from grad school and more or less walked straight into the gallery system. And anyway, this problem isn’t one owned by any particular party, and both the artists and galleries share in the responsibility of prematurity.

[3] Clark, TJ “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism.” In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 397. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

[4] The unspoken flipside of Saltz’s critique is the equally vapid and arbitrary cheerleading promotional apparatus, including much of recent criticism. Saltz even tempers his critique with an apologia, noting that while he thinks such work is a problem, he likes the way it looks.

[5] My preferred example of this kind of thing is the press release for Jacob Kassay’s 2013 exhibition at 303 Gallery, which is so riddled with typos and non sequiturs that it’s absolutely depressing that such a document can hope to explain or even entice the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on such work.

[6] In fact, despite their problems, galleries have historically done a great deal to protect the artists that they represent (again, taking into consideration the disparities in who they choose to represent and other very serious crimes). And the expansion of the art market since the 1980s, while concentrating wealth among a small class of artists, collectors, and dealers, has also sparked an enormous widening of opportunities that allows for more artists, more writers, more artist-run spaces, more non-profits, marginally greater diversity, greater museum attendance, and so on.

[7] About all of these phenomena and propositions I’m basically agnostic.

[8] In September, Nickas, with artist Ryan Foerster, released a zine made from collaged Philips catalogues, inscribed with marginalia poking fun at many of the young male artists featured therein and also discussed on the panel.

[9] This includes me, by the way.

The post The Zombies: Contemporary Abstraction and Its Critics appeared first on artcritical.

April 11 – May 12, 2013
83 Grand Street
New York City, 212 279 9219

Stanley Whitney has over five decades painting behind him.  The seven large luscious paintings currently on view at Team Gallery constitute his 28th solo exhibition, so it is maybe little wonder that, at this point, his technique appears effortless.   Indeed, the work displays a beguiling simplicity. There are sixteen or twenty rectangles in each square painting and they are, more or less, evenly apportioned four down and four, or five, across – not by ruled measurement but an equally exact though ineffable idea of rightness. These are formal paintings, grids of quadrilaterals, but casual and unpretentious, like a conversation one might have about the checkered tablecloths at your favorite trattoria.  The same sense of ease holds true for the paint application, and for a few moments one might get an impression that the brushwork is almost careless.  This is, however, a manifestly false reading and it quickly transmutes into an awareness of acute fastidiousness.

Take the largest work, for instance, the eight-foot square Bodyheat, (2012).  Hanging solo in the rear gallery, where it can enjoy the most controlled lighting, it dominates the small room with a quiet authority and grace.  The rectangles, arrayed in this particular piece five across and four down, are topped and separated on the horizontal by thick stripes that simultaneously delineate and activate the grid.  For the most part the colors directly abut, shoulder to shoulder, but in a few cases an additional fat stroke puts in extra duty.  In the top row a slash of salmon keeps the orange square from combining with the orange line just below, while in the second row from the top, a scumble of slightly darker blue achieves the same end between the blue rectangle and all but identically-colored line below.

Conversely, the unusual blended stroke dividing the yellow from the green serves to modulate and mellow what would otherwise be a potentially harsh juxtaposition. And in the same vein, a wash of blue at the top of the pale yellow/green square in the bottom row eases the dialogue between it and the dark blue stripe above it.  Meanwhile, in the bottom right corner the paint in the lower half of the black square dissolves in drips, a permanent history of its interaction with the wet medium.

The cumulative effect of these additional strokes and wet drips is to highlight their outlier nature: there is not a single unintentional mark in any of these paintings.  Echoing this low key but firm control are the colors themselves: blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown, black and white.  Such a simple list brings to mind the basic box of 8 Crayola Crayons.  As elsewhere, sustained looking quickly alters this perception, each mottled or extenuated color being an overlay of another, the palette expanding to six variations of green, five of red, and so forth.  We are made aware that individual colors mean naught, while the syntax and syncopation of the colors are everything.

Whitney nonchalantly weaves together nearly invisible yet precise technique, lightly imposed yet persistent structure, and a simple yet sophisticated use of color. The resulting works are as playful as they are powerful as they flutter and wave against the cool white walls whose flatness they eviscerate with hardly a sigh.

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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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