September 5 to 30, 2006

This show – which was curated by David Cohen, editor and publisher of artcritical.com — covers a time range from 2001 to 2006 and as would be expected reflects some diversity. Durner appears to have moved from a rougher esthetic to a place in her work that is more refined.

The earlier of these pieces were done on paper with edges that are sometimes angled and uneven. Due to the effects of water-based paint the paper contains large ripples which, in conjunction with gallery lighting, creates an additional dimension of light and shadow not available on stretched canvas.  These pieces are approximately the same size as the canvases that follow later and should be regarded equally as paintings in their own right rather then as ‘works on paper’.  They have a pleasantly unfinished, often chalky, raw quality that provides them with an authenticity not as available in later work. Durner references the legacy of the New York School artists from the more expressive side in these pieces.  Compare “Day is Breaking” with “Stripes Drip”:  the former weaves together the structure of the forms, primarily through the paint handling.  “Stripes Drip,” on the other hand, gathers the forms together in a way that recalls Morris Louis and similarly confronts the conceit of orderly placement by letting gravity turn the paint loose.  The difference is that Durner’s paint is more opaque than Louis’s. These two approaches are nothing new but the execution is well done and the diversity between them is refreshingly experimental.  This is especially so given the unique textural capabilities of paper and the dry quality of the paint.

Her more recent work on canvas reduces the rough and tumble approach.  Further, the latest work divides into the two categories of painted or poured.  The poured pieces are the most refined work in the show as well as the smallest of the canvases.  Because of this they drift too closely toward functioning as objects and do not fully engaging as paintings. The refinement is too controlled (surprising for poured paint), the color too evenly distributed and the overarching effect too synthetic. The result is that these pieces come off as inaccessible and remote when compared to the other work.

Contrast this with Rousseau (2006) where a generous depth of space is coupled with an abstract, though natural sensibility.  The colors compose a warm earthiness that contributes to an overall realism regarding the emotional temperature of the piece. Another painting, Lush(2005) achieves the same thing but with a completely different color theme. In this piece the intensity is turned up with bright yellow and chartreuse dominating. Yet the governing colors are not straightforward as each is comprised of a complex mixture of tones.  Here and there bits of light blue, lavender and sienna are tossed in which is just enough to challenge the majority hues.  Rousseau and Lush are the strongest paintings in this show for offering simplistic forms complexly arranged.

Compared to the paintings on paper Rousseau and Lush break away from Durner’s use of woven forms or the confrontations she sets up between order and anarchy.  Unlike the poured paintings, they achieve a refined authenticity and quality of ‘painterly realism’ not provided by the latter work. In the end Leah Durner deserves a great deal of credit for pushing the boundaries of the territory she has staked out for her art. Clearly she is an able painter with an excellent color sense who is not content to simply ‘paint what she knows’.  Rather it is her artistic curiosity and willingness to experiment, for good or ill, that makes the best of her work even better.

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“Sandy Walker: Large Ink Drawings” at Wooster Arts Space until February 14 (147 Wooster Street, between Houston and Prince Streets, 212-777-6338). Prices: $2,000-$5,000.

“Jacque Rochester: Paintings” at N3 Project Space until TK (85 North 3rd Street, 2nd Floor, Williamsburg, between Whythe and Berry Streets, 718-599-9680). Prices: $500-$18,000.

A trademark Leon Golub depicts agents of repression at their brutal business: torture, pillage, execution. But Mr. Golub’s familiar imagery is an absent presence at the octagenarian’s current exhibition. Instead, Ronald Feldman has brought together two groups of works that thematically and chronologically sandwich this subject.

Mr. Golub’s Graeco-Roman Colossi from the early 1960s predate his political thug narratives, which (appropriate image) kicked in during the Vietnam era. His “Erotica, etc.” series, from the last few years, shows another side of this “existential/activist” painter, as one critical champion, Donald Kuspit, described him.

If your politics are Mr. Golub’s politics, then everything is political. But you don’t need to share his avowedly leftist stance to see that politics is the prime mover in his painting. His political views energize or enervate his art in almost direct proportion to the viewer’s own.

This is not to say that Mr. Golub is a propagandizer. He wears his allegiances on his sleeve, but his art is charged with an indignant humanism. It invests every surface and every mark with pathos and grandeur. His violence is mythopoeic, mixing specific historical references with a sense of the perennial. Mr. Golub makes art, not agitprop.

Ironically, his early work is shot through with the character of “late style” Old Master painting: a telling fusion of bravura awkwardness in drawing and lovingly invested impasto that puts you in mind of, say, late Titian or Rembrandt. (More specifically, the Colossi series recalls French painters of the postwar period – Dubuffet, Fautrier and Eugene Leroy.)

The impasto would soon be jettisoned by Mr. Golub, sometime after the Colossi series, when he started to take a meat cleaver to his canvases to scrape away and distress his surfaces. Even in these earlier works, though, with their flickering, glowing accretions of paint, there is a sense that to make the work dark and heavy was a categorical imperative as weighty for the artist as a party dictum.

There is nothing elegaic in Mr. Golub’s appeal to the classics: His colossi are appropriately chthonic. The half-dozen suitably gargantuan canvases know how to pack a punch, generating power in both the what and how of depiction.

In the touchingly enigmatic and disturbingly raunchy erotic works in the second gallery, the personal becomes political. The sexual encounters depicted and the poses struck are as much about power play as any other kind. These small drawings actually renew the moral charge that had begun to become rather stylized in Mr. Golub’s more familiar thug narratives. The overt sensuality mixed with brutalism brings George Grosz to mind. In these works he ups the ante of the moral ambiguity at the heart of painting bad things.

And yet, standing amidst the Colossi, and then wandering through Mr. Golub’s erotica, an irreverent association sprang to mind. In one of the Austin Powers sequels, a wacky interlude dwells on the private life of one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen, who gets wounded. It is a spoof on the mortal expendability of extras in action movies: The evil henchman turns out to be just a regular guy doing his job. To make the point, we see the henchman in a burger joint with his wife and friends.

Mr. Golub’s colossi and prostitutes almost ask to be read similarly: as peripheral characters in the lives of his usual dramatis personae. The ur-thug colossi are icon-heroes of his mercenaries and torturers, while the “whoroscope” of his erotic drawings present their pin-ups.

***

For further colossal depictions of bodies at play, albeit of a comparatively innocent nature, check out Sandy Walker’s impressive ink drawings a couple of blocks away at Wooster Arts Space. Mr. Walker, 20 years Mr. Golub’s junior, looks to New York School action painting, Matisse, and oriental calligraphy in his sparse, fluent, energetic paeans to movement.

Mr. Walker’s figure studies bring together a heavily loaded brush, bravura confidence, an openness to chance, and perceptual acuity. His bold, easy humanism offers action painting without angst. He favors five-foot square pages, sometimes doubling them up to five-by-10 foot, and draws from dancers and Aikido practitioners.

Mr. Walker’s line veers from the voluptuous and balletic to the nervous and awkward. There is skilful play between brushmarks that are drying out and ones that artfully blotch up. Sometimes, especially where lines accumulate in dense overlays, his markmaking can be a bit too happy with itself, but generally he is a model of economy.

The most satisfying work in the show was the smallest and slightest, “‘EF’ #1” (2003), in which an enigmatic, dislocated mark, illegible but charged with a sense of observation, pulsates like a difficult pose heroically held.

***

Jacque Rochester (b.1952) has something of Mr. Golub’s scratchy touch and muted palette, but neither his angst nor his agenda. She is showing at N3 Project Space, the offbeat gallery run since 1998 by artist James Biederman in the front half of his Williamsburg studio. Ms. Rochester’s half-dozen paintings are more striking for their diversity than unity, but the energy level is consistent.

The main event in terms of space and effort is “The Other Side” (2003-04), a 15-foot wide abstraction made up of a dense patchwork of painterly scribble that recalls both Jasper Johns’s maps and Sisley’s snowscapes. But this highly worked piece lacks the verve of the diminutive, almost insolently perfunctory pictures, the real marvel of this show.

Next to the big canvas is “Missing” (also 2003-04) a quirky, inscrutable, nonchalant little panel, a smudge in blacks and grays packed with spatial ambiguity and a sense of enigma.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 22, 2004

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August 31-October 1, 2005

The six emerging artists in this exhibition–painters Eric Ayotte, Jon Elliot, and Gwenessa Lam, and photographers Jaishri Abichandani, Lisa di Donato, and Tod Seelie—each portray ways we have transformed, for better or worse, the natural world. The computer plays an important part in their process, and the impact technology has had on the human psyche looms large. You could say these artworks are primarily pictorial signs rather than linguistic signs, in the sense that they are iconic and descriptive. They describe internal psychological states and the ways we experience the lived-in physical world.

In Lisa di Donato’s four photographs, each 20 x 13 inches, from 2005 calledNeither Here Nor There we see different views of a barren landscape flattened out in Photoshop with a uniform grayness . These are pictures of what Christopher Knight has called “a ‘no place’ that defines and is defined by the nature of passage.” These photos invite us to examine the pockets of nothingness our way of life has created, anonymous terrains or peripheral events we usually don’t notice because we are blanking out waiting to get to where we are going. Light Sources, 2005, a largish C-Print that has been heavily manipulated by the artist, is an essay in voyeurism and isolation. The camera angle places the viewer in the position of a lonely person standing in a darkened room gazing out at an assorted array of illuminated apartments. Unknown light sources in these apartments and the outlines of mysterious forms and spaces visible through the obscured windows focus our attention. Bright patches of reflected light and the image of a television screen hover weirdly in front of the windows, and reveal in a fragmented way the personal space of the voyeur, who looks out on the illuminated checkerboard of absent life. Modern Ruins is a panoramic view of the skeletal remains of a structure located near 63rd St and surrounded by the Hudson River. On the right side of the photograph, high above a shoreline littered with broken chunks of cement, life goes on, traffic streams by, and Lord Trump completes another trophy project. The ruins are far more beautiful than the sad excuse for life transpiring on the edge of the composition.

Light acts a dramatic force of transformation and disruption in Todd Seelie’s work. It is mysterious and transformative but not mystical in nature. It is all about capturing the perfect moment of atmospheric effect. Seelie’s paintings are also about the entwinement of nature and the human made world. Seelie’s photographs stress the point that we are thoroughly embedded in our world, no matter how many different shells or artificial skins we make to protect ourselves. He captures epiphanies of natural and artificial light, perfect moments of illumination that come and go in an instant in real life. In Whistler Van, a C-Print from 2004, we see the front of a snow covered house, front yard and driveway, and a parked old white van, with a piercing ray of dawn’s light shooting out of a second floor window. We can’t imagine the van moving ever again. Light is the embodiment of the life force in this photograph, but it is also dauntingly bright and mercilessly slices through the human made world.

There is an element of intimate mysticism in the photographs of Jaishri Abichandani. In one image there is a lush tree and grass filled terrain with a beautiful reclining female nestled in the grass. The entire image is bathed in warm green light suggesting a comfortable bond between humans and nature. The expression on her face is dreamy, as if she was communicating with the trees and grass in silence. In another photograph a ball of light that suggests extraterrestrials or some sublime other hovers above a broodingly dark strip of highway and in another photograph the artist’s foot is collaged into a photograph of lush trees, calling to mind the films of Stan Brakhage. Abichandani transforms her intimate thoughts and acts of self discovery into romantic and symbolic reveries which stranger’s can gain pleasure and insight from.

Gwenessa Lam’s oil paintings perfectly capture the claustrophobia of being trapped within interior spaces all day. Her paintings of windows are frames within frames, a patch of blank wall and rectangular windows with the sky and clouds visible through them. The dense clouds outside do not provide a reprieve from this sense of entrapment. No realist, Lam does not try to make us believe we are looking through a sheet of glass. Instead, these paintings focus on the framing of nature or exterior space as part of  the slow, usually unconscious feelings of entrapment we experience while indoors. There are barely any details specifying the type of interior space these windows are located in so the paintings have a nightmarish quality. There is a tense static quality to these paintings because we are frozen in a moment of gazing out with a limited field of vision.

Jon Elliot begins all of his paintings by covering a wood surface with a dark brown, high gloss polymer, and then he etches thin white lines into them and adds painted grids, patches of stippling, non-descript cityscapes, and cartoonish renderings of TV sets, computer hard-drives, and barrels of oil or toxic waste. He also likes to paint noxious rust-colored clouds or plumes of deadly gas. The grounds on all of his paintings resemble dark amber or quartz, and the finely detailed imaginary architecture and patterning he paints on them bring to mind the detail in Siennese paintings. But his paintings are not just about technology transforming society, or the transformation of the entire world into a toxic wasteland. The spectral forms that appear in his work look like alien life forms, weird energy creatures, signifying a post-human environment.

The sporting industry, a financial behemoth that seeps into our daily lives, regardless of our economic backgrounds, produces many potent images for artist’s to work with, but this is seldom done. Eric Ayotte paints with icing-like enamels that congeal around each other but maintain their autonomy. The vacillation between representation and abstraction–you recognize the subject matter, it dissolves into an overall abstract pattern, and then it comes into focus again– is the main form of visual movement in his paintings. Areas of different color interlock rather than blend. We are reminded that the subject matter of these paintings is photographic imagery that has been transformed in Photoshop, because the disembodied race cars and motor bikes exist in a weird state of digitalized entropy. Our latent desire to see someone die or to see someone cheat death is what makes engine powered sporting events so popular. Ayotte’s paintings have a static funerary quality. Patches of light and dark are compartmentalized and the intimacy of the brushstroke is replaced by an industrial sheen that emphasizes the iconic quality of the imagery. Their iconic quality, however, is constantly undermined by the abstractness of the imagery and the tension between the two. This is what makes Ayotte’s paintings very different from LeRoy Neiman’s output.

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