November 19 to December 24, 2015
516 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 229-1088

The title of Zieher Smith & Horton’s two-man exhibition of David Byrd and Peter Gallo, “The Patients and the Doctors,” is taken from a fiery 1947 work by the poet-mental patient Antonin Artaud. The artists paired together for this exhibition both worked a number of years in mental health centers. Gathering from their experiences within modern medicine conceived as a kind of Ship of Fools run aground, their art documents the disfiguring pressures of contemporary psychological space on the body and the mind—thin skinned and gray mattered.

Raised in foster homes in Illinois, the late David Byrd (1926-2013) escaped to Brooklyn, NY at the age of 16. After serving in World War II, the G.I. Bill brought him to art school. Byrd balanced his art practice alongside a career at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Hospital in Montrose, NY where, as an orderly, he cared for psychiatric patients. It is as if his paintings reiterate that care in terms of palette and rendering—the touch is light, even delicate, and the tone softly cajoling. The emaciated bodies of his subjects wander halls, slump in corridors and fall into lines. Their heads, shrunken by disease, rarely present their features, hanging heavy between shoulders or hands. Byrd’s paintings seem rich with reference to madness and art—from the deranged eyes of Goya’s Saturn peeking from the shadows of Alcove, to his own antipodal “Venus rising” in the frail, pitiful body of the nude man in Arising.

Byrd’s paintings consistently employ a mix of the social and magical realism popular in the early to mid-20th Century. New York artists like George Tooker also dealt with the complexities of psychological space, though from within the urban space. However, the horror of Byrd’s figures’ physical agony is in continual contrast to the sugar glass palette that models his institutional spaces. The figures of Waiting and Aging, arranged across the canvas in various states of pain and boredom, are flooded with a fleshy peach light. Like the faded underpainting of a Morandi or De Chirico still life, the careful placement of these patients—paralyzed yet wilting—distills them in their communal isolation. The interiors of this psychiatric ward are startling calm in their malt pastel, fleecy geometry and impressionistic light. Indeed, in Byrd’s compositions there is a great abundance of windowless light; just as there is a great abundance of mindless bodies—the window, seemingly, is closed. What remains is the body—emptied and organized by vacuum, by number.

Peter Gallo, born 1959, lives and works in Hyde Park, Vermont. In a similar way to Byrd, he has synthesized his art practice (and an art history PhD) with many years of experience as a case manager at a mental health center. However, where Byrd explored the interior of the institution and the exterior of the body, Gallo presents just the opposite through a practice he defines as “bio-aesthetics.” In his doctoral thesis, “Bio-Aesthetics and The Artist as Case History,” Gallo offers a bio-political lens through which to understand the various divides and –isms of modern art history. He locates the drive of Modernism and material specificity—movements “toward embodiment, toward the referent … toward the real”—in 18th–century clinical revelations of the body and later ideas on artistic subjectivity and pathology.

To look at Gallo’s work, seemingly of an outsider aesthetic, against his doctoral history brings one to wonder if he is playing patient instead of doctor. Channeling Artaud, his work often gathers what material is immediately available to him; pencil and wine make desperate letters, illegible yet sobering in their urgency. However, to take the paintings as embodiments, as subjects themselves, is vital; they are skin and bone, skeletons etched with psychic charts. His supports—bedsheets, denim and burlaps—are stretched with an aching, poignant negligence across their makeshift frames. Works such as Glanz, der nicht trösten will, Glanz. Die Toten —sie betteln noch, Franz. (Celan) employ his body’s own shape as templates stitched in blue—truly, these are blueprints to the mind of the poet-patient, struggling to remain against the pressures of the panopticon, the pill and the practitioner. Comprised of two loosely-joined canvases, Guyotat is both the most unassuming and utterly corporeal piece of the exhibition, and named for the writer Pierre Guyotat’s inter-sanitarium “anti-memoir”, Coma. The sedate body of stretched and stained burlap skin, lightly scarred by thread, is crowned with the muslin canvas of red and rising COMA, reversed and restricted—the hot head, the fevered mind. Balancing allegory, politics and a love of text, Gallo tugs his Ship of Fools, seen in Blood Drive and Blood Galaxy, through such historical and philosophical explorations (and implications) of the artistic body and experience or, more closely, of the body as experience.

After decades of working in isolation, Byrd’s work was only discovered at 87 years of age. Just days before his first exhibition, Byrd was diagnosed with lung cancer; he passed away just shortly after the show closed. Perhaps the late artist related, throughout most of his life, to those patients’ distilled bodies, to that well-lit yet windowless space. It is also clear that Gallo traces not only history’s mad poets and the oil slicks of Foucault, but his own mind’s stretched and pinned divination, his psyche’s sextant. The pairing of Gallo and Byrd thoughtfully explores their shared understanding of the body and mind: how they find that the embodiment of one is the emptying of the other, and how their experiences color between the sanguine light, the blood-drawn lines.

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January 24, 2014 at the National Academy Museum,  moderator David Cohen’s guests were Hrag Vartanian, co-founder and editor of the blogzine, Hyperallergic; Christina Kee, a regular contributor at artcritical; and Village Voice critic Christian Viveros-Faune.

The shows discussed were Allison Schulnik Eager at Zieher Smith, Thomas Bangsted at Marc Straus,  Wade Guyton at Petzel and Lori Ellison at McKenzie Fine Art.

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Liz Markus Double Nancy 2009.  Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 60 x 48 inches.  cover MAY 2009: Nancy 5 2008.  Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 60 x 48 inches.  Courtesy Zieher Smith Gallery

I had not planned on seeing the Liz Markus exhibition at Zieher Smith Gallery.  In fact I was doing the usual Saturday tear through Chelsea trying to see the shows on my list when I just happened to look up into the gallery’s first floor window.  There, staring back at me from the far wall of the gallery, hung Nancy 5, (2008).   It is not often that an artwork twenty feet behind a plate glass window can grab my attention as this painting did, so I put away my list and went into the gallery.

Markus’s paintings are a strange brew.  The technique, thin washes of acrylic on unprimed canvas, conjures up memories of some of the more flaccid poured abstractions of the 1970s, think Paul Jenkins, while the imagery harkens to the late, self-indulgent Warhol portraits of rich socialites from the same period.  An un-enticing sounding combo, to be sure, and yet the results confounds expectations.  In Markus hands, apparently, two wrongs can make a right.

The question, of course, is how.  The answer is that the artist creates a critical fission by playing the technique and imagery against each other.  There is a palpable tension evoked in watching the crystalline visage of Nancy Reagan struggle for clarity against the loosey-goosey stained canvas.   The same can be said for the images of George Plimpton and Johnny Rotten, two other icons from the 70s rapidly fading from our consciousness.  She gives art from that time the same treatment, riffing on the Target Paintings of Kenneth Noland in her own Failed Target series.  The result is a potent, shifting emotional palette that is paradoxically nostalgic for a past time while questioning its hierarchies.

This is a delicate balance.  An earlier body of work from two years ago with images of anonymous hippy types, while perhaps just as technically adept, lacks the essential edge, the urgency present in the current works.   The choice of the current imagery, in some cases working directly from past issues of Vanity Fair, reveals something else not immediately obvious in the earlier works: Markus technique only presents the illusion of chance.  No doubt she welcomes the happy accident, but overall these paintings are as tightly controlled as the frozen smiles on her subjects.

This brings me to a final thought on Markus, and her unique blend of content and paint.  To describe these works, with their drips, stains, blotches, dry brush and bleeds, it might be easy to mistakenly tag them as well as slacker and ironic.  Yet this is clearly not part of the viewing experience.  Instead we see the opposite; an artist as fully engaged and committed to her exploration of ideas as she is of her paint.  The result is a group of paintings that is ambitious conceptually as it is visually striking.  In the end, I returned a second time to a show I never intended on seeing, and days later I am still thinking about it.   What more can one ask?

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