February 4 to April 14, 2012
522 West 22nd Street and 502 West 22nd Street
between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-243-0200

For Terry Winters to be the great painter implied by euphoric reviewers of his recent work, including his current exhibition at Matthew Marks, worthy indeed of comparison with Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Johns (immortals invoked by no means merely as influences), then he would have to have a profound way with materials, specifically with color.  He certainly brings a strong graphic intelligence to bear, making the most of near monochrome palettes, notably earth browns and blacks with acid orange overtones at the beginning of his career.  A characteristically dynamic engagement with printmaking seems to have taught Winters how to work layers of contrasting oil colors additively.  The resulting informational overload can be arresting, intensified by the besmirched hues that ripple where wet corrupts wet.  Restricting the palette has been good for Winters.

In his current body of work, Winters uses only the pigments traditionally known as lakes –– fixed dyes, which are luminous, oily, and transparent.  This particular palette constraint began with the Knotted Graphs (2008), part of a methodology that also involves the direct tracing, evidently, of superimposed topology diagrams.  Winters has said that the choice of transparent colors is intended to reveal the layers of his process –– though process has always been Winters’s primary declaration of strength; and in any case, liberal admixtures of opaque white in these works tend, just as much, to cover things up.  What is revealed by the lakes, given that Winters has access to a full turn of the color wheel is –– all too plainly –– lackluster chromatic sensibility.

One might well be reminded of Matisse by Winters’s topological still life, Tessellation Figures (4) (2011) in which toothed disks, presumably of higher-math pedigree but resembling flowers, hover in puffy, sensuous bursts of blue-tinted white over crisscrossing patterns of watery blues and greens. In the 1910s, Matisse would set greenery against blue-white tablecloths with similar intent.  But that palette served merely as theme, allowing Matisse to weave a set of variations in which, for example, virile blacks, luscious roses, and wounding slashes of red and green might elaborate a creamy illogic of light that burns as it caresses.  When Winters, by contrast, tries to expand the blue-to-yellow color space of this work with washes of red, he creates gormless dead spots.  Where he sticks with his home colors, he runs out of ideas: whole quadrants of the canvas feel abruptly colored-in –– and not with the panache of Alex Katz, nor the deliberately less than ingratiating haste of Martin Kippenberger.

Cricket Music (2010) is even more stagnant.  The painting clings to blue, gray, and white after forays into a wider palette –– so the translucent process reveals –– attaining the sickly, over lit pallor that recalls black-and-white video played on a maladjusted color TV.  If only Winters had gone all the way!  Instead, the light is generically dappled.  The title apparently refers to a sound composition by Walter De Maria, but seems to gesture also at the synesthetic moonlight chorusings of Charles Burchfield.  Either way, the painting’s interfering knots and pentagram fragments, which should vibrate and dance with Winters’s big ideas about nature, information, and the cosmic manifold, are stuck in one-dimensional color space, all dressed up with no place to go.

When Winters brings chromatic contrast into play the effect is no more musical.  A smattering of blue tiles detaches and pops from the torquing chain-link of orange and white diamonds that prevails in Tessellation Figures (11) (2011), while, reciprocally, orange diamonds intrude on the blue and green carapace of Tessellation Figures (6) (2011).  These lunges of blue/orange opposition issue muddy skid marks, but no secondary tonalities to sustain the drama, to give it heft and suspense.  Nor does Winters seem to grasp how an acute, further dissonance can thrust a simple antagonism into visionary, perhaps psychedelic keys –– the sort of lateral move that is second nature to color voyagers like Phillip Taaffe or Dana Schutz.  A richer palette does build up in Tessellation Figures (9) (2011), which shows Winters plunging into the interstices of his overlaid patterns of whited purples and yellows, oranges and blues, but there is little sense of color architecture beyond layers of binary opposition, and the result is a kind of Monet lite.

If, in his prints and drawings, and indeed in his more urgently graphic paintings, that strategy of color-as-information can often hit, it consistently misses when Winters has to lean on deep color thoughts to create breathing room, which is what he has had to do since domesticating his diligently tangled brushwork within traced topological patterns.  For all their spatial signifying and handwringing, these Lissajous curves, knot states, and sunflower spirals arrive flat on the canvas and tend to stay that way.  We can view, down the block in an ancillary Marks space, Winters at work surfing, grabbing, and printing similar images as transparencies suitable for overhead projection –– except that here they are laminated into witty collages and presented as a suite called Notebook (2003-11).

The gee-whiz science porn that has long caught Winters’ eye collides in Notebook with other found imagery and text, in ways that often bristle with dada absurdity, caustic observation, and sheer silliness.  Could this be the rebirth of a buoyant self-critique distinctly lacking in Winters’s work since the cannily constipated husks and pods of the 1980s?  In one of the Notebook pages, an oil color chart is overlaid with text purporting to graph “skill level” against “challenge level.”  Where challenge is moderate and skill low, we get “worry”; adjust the skill variable to high and we get, with flawless logic, “control.”  The full diagram comprises four pin-wheeling oppositions of attribute, as if to decode the gridded march of purple and gold paint chips beneath –– though one can’t help speculating as to the artist’s broader interest in a skill/challenge paradigm.

We don’t normally associate the prodigious Winters with “apathy,” “boredom,” and “relaxation” –– qualities resulting, according to the graph’s diagnostic wisdom, from a low challenge level as plotted against ascending degrees of skill.  But neither do his current paintings come close to the high-challenge states of “anxiety,” “arousal,” and “flow,” those usually reliable attributes of the Winters expressionist juggernaut, varying according to the flux of his proficiency.

The post Winters Lakes: Terry Winters at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

Terry Winters’s show includes eleven large oil on linen paintings and five smaller black graphite drawings on paper. Stand up close and his knots look flat and roughly painted. But move back, and then they appear to be spheres, with markings like those on a soccer ball, arranged on grids. He loves blues and yellows, those great Matissean colors, and also intense red, which he often uses both on his knots and in the backgrounds. Winters, an abstract pointillist, asks you to step back to see his paintings come into being. But although he, like Georges Seurat, has apparently been inspired by mathematical theorizing, still these pictures should be judged intuitively. In his drawings, the black spheres do not appear three-dimensional and the background is the simple neutral white of the paper. Like Seurat, Winters has mastered a difficult craft, translating a distinctively personal style of visual thinking into convincing drawings which work without color on a relatively small scale. In the paintings, occasionally his spheres run across almost the entire picture plane, but often he lets us see his grid and large areas of the intensely colored background. Some may remind you of Sam Francis’s Blue Balls, although Winters packs his pictures more densely. And his lavishly worked colors occasionally have some unruly relationship to 1970s pattern painting, the faux-Islamic decorations of Philip Taaffe and, even, the gridded portion of Henri Matisse’s The Moroccans. But whatever his visual sources, Winters makes entirely original, entirely resolved works of art.

Compare Sean Scully’s Walls of Light, abstract solid walls of rectangular panels of glowing colors, to Winters’s painted knots, which float in front of a shallow space, lit from within, whose exact depth is indeterminate. As different as, say, the paintings of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, they reveal that today, as in the Abstract Expressionists’ era, very diverse forms of abstraction are viable. Often abstraction has felt beleaguered. Justly so, for the fate of color field painting reveals the greatest danger faced by this art form: It all too readily becomes merely elegant decoration. Winter demonstrates that painting abstractly remains a viable option. The “modern artist,” Meyer Schapiro once said, “is attracted to those possibilities of form which include a considerable randomness, variability and disorder . . . . His goal is . . . an order which retains a decided quality of randomness.” I can imagine no better description of Winters’s new pictures. Now, as half a century ago, handmade personal objects can help maintain Schapiro’s “critical spirit,” without which the high art world would become merely an upscale branch of the entertainment industry.

The post Terry Winters: Knotted Graphs at Matthew Marks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

November 6 to December 24, 2004

Strangely there are currently a number of shows around town of 80’s art. One of the best is Matthew Marks show of Terry Winters paintings and drawings from 1981 to 1986. These are some of the earliest paintings that Winters showed in New York. The palette is dark and the feeling of the primordial ooze, from which life springs, is all over the place. Winters was, at the time, very involved in botanical and other scientific illustrations as source material.

In the age-old controversy over the supremacy of drawing or color in painting Winters would definitely be in the drawing camp. Even the areas of so-called background a draftsman’s hand is evident. Using the scientific illustration as a springboard Winters improvises, combines, extrapolates and revises forms often to arrive at a hybrid or even new species. Pine cone, limb, stem and cell structures sometimes become insect or even human forms. This is not really the stuff of anthropomorphic grace but rather some weird science drawn and redrawn out of the forming miasma. The levels of layering and redrawing become a kind of bildungsroman of the creation myths.

All of the drawings and paintings in this show were done years before the work Winters showed in a big exhibition at the Whitney museum in 1991. By that time color had become of greater importance in the work and form had become clearer. “Point” in the present show, for instance, is a harbinger of things that followed. The Whitney show received less than enthusiastic critical response in some quarters. Daunted but not undone, Winters work began to give form to binary information systems. The soundtrack started to include European jazz systems. In short the less lyrical work of the past ten years was born.

The point of this background information is to demonstrate that painting is not merely a process in itself but that the artist is also involved, garnering and responding to information and to life. The current show at Marks provides a rare glimpse of some of the beginnings of a beautiful process.

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