represent

Matt Klos and Nora Sturges

Matt Klos, Sycamore Avenue, oil on panel, 8″ x 10″, 2023

Matt Klos and Nora Sturges are showing new work at Anne Arundel Community College in the The Cade Center for Fine Arts Gallery. Matt is from my hometown, and he showed his work for a number of years here at Oxford Gallery and now teaches at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland. Years ago, he was also a student of my friend Bill Stephens. It’s always a great pleasure to see his new work. He’s constantly finding pictorial opportunities usually in overlooked places most people would rarely pause to admire. Yet his achievement isn’t simply to show you what’s physically visible, but to convey a time of day, a quality of light and a season. You see what he saw in the short period of time it took to paint these small pieces, but his images root themselves in a stillness that reaches out far beyond a particular moment. His statement, below, on the new work is eloquent. What follows is from his email invitation to the show.

Street View: Paintings by Matt Klos & Nora Sturges

EXHIBITION ON VIEW
The exhibit is open February 2 – March 1
RECEPTION: Feb. 8.  5-7pm

In “Street View,” painters Matt Klos and Nora Sturges investigate the visual contours and terrain of cityscapes both near and far from home.  Klos’ series A Community Portrait investigates his historically working-class community of Sparrows Point by tracing the alleyways and painting on site. Generally, each painting spans a few hours of working time to capture a particular light, time of day, and season. In the series The View from the Road, Sturges paints from screenshots she takes in Google Street View following the route Charles Darwin took on his voyage with the Beagle (1832-36). These meticulously crafted paintings reveal idiosyncratic contemporary moments. Both artists value discovery by looking closely. Their ideas are couched in the time required to paint in an empirical and investigative manner.

MATT KLOS: “This project is a series of small format paintings of my community made during my sabbatical in spring 2023. Subjects include the outbuildings as seen from the back alleys near my home and front views of houses along a historically black and landlocked street in Sparrows Point, MD. Over the last twenty years I’ve spent time observing these often-overlooked areas, which I have seen on walks at various times of day. I’m often surprised by the endless variations and beauty found here. As we increasingly choreograph our identities via social media, slavishly attending to every detail of how we may be perceived, it’s refreshing to see a dimension of our public facing selves that is not as self-conscious and as premeditated. Our homes reveal volumes. I see each painting in this project as a type of portrait and, as such, communicates both specific and general truths about our communities and ourselves.”

NORA STURGES: “Since 2008, I have worked intermittently on a series of tiny paintings collectively called The View from the Road. My original inspiration was the early color photographs of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, who set out in 1905 to document the Russian empire, and my paintings offered me an opportunity to document the interesting things I saw on my own travels, out in the world near home and farther afield. During the pandemic, deprived of actual travel, I found myself devoting considerable time to exploring foreign places in Google Street View, and wanting to paint the wonderful things I was discovering. Instead of using chance or previous knowledge to choose places to explore, I decided to follow the route Charles Darwin took on his voyage with the Beagle (1832-36). Like Darwin, I am convinced of the value of observation, especially the intense observation painting entails, even when the subject is, on the surface, boring. Darwin’s observations led, years later, to the theories of natural selection and evolution he set forth in On the Origin of Species; already my voyage and observations are leading me to ideas about the human species.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Chris Mona, Interim Director, Cade Art Gallery, at [email protected]

There be dragons

George’s Dream in progress

I realized today that I haven’t posted here for nearly a season. I’ve been absorbed by the largest painting I’ve ever undertaken, a departure from almost everything I’ve done so far. I’m moving off the edge of the map of what I know how to do, and it’s both unsettling and exhilarating. It’s a one-off effort is how I look at it; I’m not seeing a series of paintings like this in my future. Oxford Gallery has a group show on the theme of dreams in April, and I’m hoping to finish this in time to have it in the show. It’s not the smartest thing to be doing right now, given the fact that my taffy paintings have been selling, but the opportunity emerged to put myself on a deadline and get this thing finished after thinking about it for the past couple years. I’d be smarter to do half a dozen more taffy paintings on the chance that Arcadia Contemporary will sell most of the work it shows at the LA Art Show next month. But if that work sells, I should be able to begin producing more work for Arcadia in March.

All of this has been going through my head: can I finish this big canvas in time for Oxford and will I be able to return to some taffy paintings without missing more than a beat or two when this one is finished? I think so, but wasn’t feeling it until this week when the still life portion began to look closer to completion. I’ve been so focused on the considerable demands of this painting that I’ve neglected the blog and Instagram and opportunities to have more fun than I deserve. I also have a solo show, a review of work from the past ten years, at SUNY Finger Lakes Community College coming up in a month. (As Spoon sings, everything hits at once.) I have more than enough work to provide for the show, candy jars from a decade ago, a sampling of still lifes over the years since then, and several taffy paintings that aren’t on their way to Los Angeles. That said, most of my time every day has been devoted to inching my way up from the bottom of this canvas to the top.

This work is a departure for me in that it’s intentionally meant to evoke a narrative. I’ve done tabletop paintings, gazing down from overhead on a square table covered with a white cloth, objects arranged randomly with more consideration for shape and color than anything else. They have suggested narratives to some of my friends, but that was never the intention. Like Chardin I tend to reuse familiar and favorite things in my still life paintings simply for their formal qualities, shape and color and so on: a cream pitcher, jelly beans, flowers from my garden or the supermarket, art books, CDs or mobile devices, patterned napkins. In this one the objects are chosen to serve as props for a painting about good and evil. They are under consideration by the painter who hasn’t been painted yet: his outline with the drawing of a woman standing behind him, appears behind the table on the right. Beside and slightly behind them, in the right/center, stands an easel with a painting of a human skull on the drawer than supports it. In the upper right corner, there’s a sketch of an angel I’ve quoted from Chagall’s huge painting where he depicts himself grinning, perched on his wife’s shoulders holding a wine glass to the sky. George’s Dream is about the painter who has yet to appear except as a line drawing. It’s a visualization of this painter’s dream, his assembly of objects to represent a modernization of that St. George and the Dragon legend. It’s up to the viewer to speculate on how the objects on the table figure into this project. The etching just below the painter’s hand is by Rembrandt, Adam and Eve in the garden, with the exchange of an apple in the offing, and in the upper corner of that print, there’s a dragon attaching himself to the tree trunk, looking as if he’s ready to pounce, more like Hobbes in the cartoon series than a dinosaur with bat’s wings.

I look forward to making a little, incremental progress on this image every day. Even the finished looking objects would benefit from more work. The Salinger book isn’t white enough where the light hits it. The etching is too white overall. There’s a blank space for a cow skull on the table. I’ve been indicating areas of flat color and then working on individual areas and object until they are finished. The tablecloth is just two areas of flat color at this point.

I have a backlog of little posts I’ve wanted to do about various other artists whose work I’ve seen since last October, and I’m hoping to get some quick observations off for a while now. I’m still finishing my fourth reading of Proust and my thoughts on that book could fill a book, but he is one of the greatest novelists for a painter to read, since he was influenced by a number of painters in his writing and much of what he says uses paintings as reference points and metaphors. His work is inexhaustibly intelligent, insightful and ultimately unique: what he was doing was spiritually radical in a way no one has really fully explored except for how Samuel Beckett touches on it in his long essay. More to come.

A new path at Arcadia Contemporary

Steve Diamant, owner of Arcadia Contemporary, takes a look at the work I left with him.

On Tuesday, week before last, I turned a significant corner in my life as a painter.

Two days earlier, I’d filled a minivan with more than a dozen large paintings. I picked up my friend Tim Farrell and drove my work down to Manhattan to deliver them to Arcadia Contemporary. I was hoping Steve Diamant would keep a few of the taffy paintings to see if they would sell as readily as three smaller ones he sold at the Five and Under show in August. I also brought four of my older candy jar paintings.

This was something I’d decided to do only a couple days earlier. When I emailed Steve and said I was coming to town and would check in to see the new group show, he said “Bring those candy jar paintings we discussed.” This was a pleasant, but puzzling surprise. My plans had been to visit New York for two days of entertainment. Tim and I had tickets to a Rick Beato talk at Gramercy Theater, (Tim had played briefly in a band with Beato in high school) as well as tickets to the Rangers in their season opener at Madison Square Garden. During the day, I was going to get a look, as well, at the superb exhibition of paired work from Degas and Manet at the Metropolitan. This trip had originated as Tim’s first venture out since his wife passed away of ALS this year, one step toward getting back in stride, and he agreed to help with this additional venture.

My puzzlement at first was in determining which candy jar paintings we had MORE

 Alexander Chistov

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

Russia, b. 1986, Impressionists, oil on aluminum, 9″ x 12″

Alberto Ortega

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

Spain, b. 1976, High Noon, oil on panel, 15″ x 20″

Matthew Cornell

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

United States, b. 1964, “Grace”, oil on panel, 8″ x 8″

Narelle Zeller

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

Australia, b. 1978, “At First Glance”, detail (4″ x 4″), oil on panel, full painting: 4″ x 16″

Windows on the world

Summer Afternoon, oil on linen, 36″ x 36″

I’m sure when some people see my taffy paintings, including the most recent one above, they think of them as Pop and categorize any candy paintings with Jeff Koons or Thiebaud or one of the hyper-realists who do candy now. Yet Pop has really never been much of an interest for me except for some of Jim Dine’s work and Thiebaud’s landscapes. Anyone who sees the influence of Emily Eveleth’s donuts would be closest to the mark, since I’ve loved the simplicity and the lighting of her enlarged still lifes of pastry, her painterly approach to her medium and athe straight-forward depiction of what she sees without stylization, enlarged to the point where the subject assumes a new character. Many years ago, when I first saw one of her early glazed donuts in a New Yorker squib, I was moved by the way it was lit, set against a dark background out of the Dutch Golden Age. The fact that it was a loving, masterful painting of a donut amused me; but the irony of depicting such a humble guilty pleasure, with all the appreciative skill of Vermeer trying to capture light glancing from the curve of  a milk pitcher, made her paintings seem not cynical but friendly, full of subtle feeling. She was adopting the repetitive simplicities of mid-20th century abstraction and applying similar strictures to representational painting. Who knew that if you lit a donut this way it would stir something in you other than than appetite? The donuts reminded me as well of Chardin’s use of humble, everyday objects from his own home in painting after painting–a painter whose rank among the masters decades ago inspired me to narrow most of my efforts to variations of still life painting. William Blake could see the infinite in a grain of sand. Still life painters see the world in a cup of coffee or a jelly bean.

The taffy paintings are still lifes restricted to the simplest possible terms. In the back of my mind I’ve always thought of minimalist color field painting as an inspiration for these variations in color, line, form, light and volume within an identical hashtag grid of nine vectors. Two pieces of salt water taffy sitting on the reflection of the lower piece arranges itself into nine segments, the three colored candies and the six ears of waxed paper on left and right, all of them rising in three ranks from the bottom edge. Within these limitations I experiment with unlimited shapes and colors, depending on the design of the taffy and the way the twists in the waxed paper create lines and forms that converge and run throughout the composition. Rothko was a remote inspiration with the way he reduced landscape painting to a kind of Taoist void: empty sky, horizon line, empty earth. Within this primordial view he experimented mostly with luminous color harmonies to evoke dramatically different responses with each painting. Over and over, he explored all the ways such a simple composition could express an endless range of feeling and perception, from joy to despair. The ways in which colors assume volume and shape in the taffy itself have always reminded me of Rothko, or Frederick Hammersley’s small abstracts with organic forms or Stella’s experiments with protractors or Barnett Newman’s zips. With the taffy I’ve found a way to pay subliminal homage to a lost age of painting, color field memories contained and congealed into these dollops of sugar wrapped in a haze of waxed paper.

When I arrange the taffy, usually on the granite countertop beside our kitchen sink, where the natural light is best for most of the ones I’ve done, I spend hours trying in some cases to rewrap them repeatedly until the bow-tie shape of the paper seems to unify into an actual shape rather than a veil of chaotic wrinkles. It’s like trying to build a tiny sculpture with nothing but your thumbs and forefingers. Then, once the lines and curves of the paper come together somehow, I balance one on top of the other and then photograph the candy at different angles to catch the light properly. Sometimes this can come together in ten minutes, other times it takes hours. But all I have in mind at this point is the formal unity of the image–to create something that looks as if it’s exactly as it should be as a result of the way form, light, line and color come together.

The taffy paintings hew closely to the way I think visual art most fundamentally works. The subject itself has no significance, narrative or otherwise, and the ways in which I get to the final image don’t arise from any desire to visualize a preconceived meaning or significance. Most of my work is meant to be a visual image devoid of consciously-invented signifiers. Yet through the purely formal struggle of arriving at the objects to paint and in the process of adopting colors and choosing paint in response to an image I’ve essentially built, I see resonances with times, places, feelings, certain experiences and even spiritual states. I don’t intentionally invest any of this into the work as I’m creating it. I want the painting to have no significance whatsoever, strictly speaking. It doesn’t stand for anything but itself, yet in looking at the finished work, I see through it, the way you see a world through a window, these periods in a person’s life: struggles, joys, states of mind, and so on. While my methods are as repetitive, dutiful, utterly subservient to the uniform process of making one painting after another, with little room for improvisation throughout the process, what’s happening behind all this essentially lowly labor is an act of discovery: how to get an object as meaningless as a chunk of taffy to become a window through which to see a world.

Joe Whyte

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

United States, b. 1987, Leaving, oil on linen, 10″ x 16″

Mary Jane Ansell

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

United Kingdom, b. 1983, “Cours Vaillants I”, Oil on aluminum, 12″ x 12″

Caren Wynne-Burke

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

United States, b. 1968, Daybreak Fillmore, oil on panel 12″ x 12″.

Kesja Tabaczuk

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

Andrew Leventis

At Arcadia Contemporary through Sept. 20:

United States, b 1980, Traveler with a Coach Bag, Oil on Linen, 24″ x 58″.

Five and Under extended

My three taffy paintings at Arcadia Contemporary through September.

Because response has been so strong since the show opened on Aug. 19, Arcadia Contemporary is extending it’s Five and Under Invitational show until Sept. 20. For the next couple weeks, I’m going to be posting images of what were, for me, the most striking work from painters around the world.

Five and Under

Three of my taffy paintings will be on view at Arcadia Contemporary in SoHo until Sept. 6 as part of its annual Five and Under Invitational. The gallery sold all three paintings before the opening on Saturday, which was packed, even though most of the Chelsea gallery space a little further north was empty or dark during this August vacation lull. Some of the other work in the show was marvelous, with emerging artists invited from around the world.

Sea Change

Virtue & Vice, 2023, Oil on linen, 60 x 48

The last time Elise Ansel moved across my radar was when she was at the lamentably shuttered Danese Corey. Before that, I spotted a couple examples of her work in a booth a number of years ago at the LA Art Show. I’m pleased Miles McEnery is now representing her. They’re developing one of the most interesting rosters of artists in the city. Sea Change will be up through the end of August.

Five and Under

Andrew Leventis, Traveler Series 1, Oil on Linen, 11 x 26″, 2018

I’m going to have three paintings included in the Five and Under exhibition this month at Arcadia Contemporary in SoHo. This will be the first time I’ve exhibited work in Manhattan since almost a decade ago when I had a solo show at Viridian. Fifty artists will be participating. My three will be small oils from the salt water taffy series.  May Moonlight has been exhibited at Manifest, and Carnival won first place at the 21st Annual Central Adirondack Art Show last year. I’m honored to be included in anything Steven Diamant puts together at Arcadia, having admired and written about the work he exhibits over the past decade. He moved the gallery from downtown Manhattan to Los Angeles and then back again following the economics of NYC real estate as it shifted favorably during the pandemic. He’s an endangered species, an old school gallerist who represents artists for many years as long as he can find a reasonable market for their work, cultivating and promoting the talent of the people he picks. In person, he’s an acerbic observer of the current art scene, a refreshing intelligence, a good soul.

The painting above, by Andrew Leventis, shown at Arcadia’s landing page for the Five and Under show, struck me as a perfectly realized photo-realistic work–immediately recognizable, I thought, as a painting of a still image from a film. It’s mid-sized, smaller than one might think it would be when discovering it online. I was taken with the painting partly because it represents something I’ve been intending to do myself: using screen grabs or photographs of paused movies (commercial films and my own family videos) as a source for a series of paintings–though not photo-realistic ones. I’m thinking of looser work, closer to the way Porter evoked figures in a room or outside. (I showed an early foray into this possible series in London many years ago.) Seeing this one is humbling. Leventis not only conveys a moment in a larger narrative, the arrival of a traveling woman, not moving in but visiting, it seems, evoking many mysteries of what comes before and after this moment. Yet the work is also a marvelous abstract composition where he has concentrated the rich caramels, reds and greens, the touch of blue, into that one cluster of objects in the upper right quadrant of this wide-format painting. The light that greets your eye from the distant horizon at the far end of the street seems to be the same light reflected off the smooth surface of the luggage, giving the viewer a sense of hope, clear skies, maybe a bright future, or at least the chance for one. Wonderful work. Only one of many paintings available at the show, and it would be a bargain given the price range that defines the show.

Five and Under will run from Aug. 19 through Sept. 6. An opening reception will be Aug. 19, 4-6 p.m. I plan to be there.

Bill Stephens, new drawings

A tour of Chelsea

Raven V, Natalie Frank, detail, gouache and pastel on paper

After attending the reception for the 106^th Annual Open Exhibition at the Greenwich Art Society last week, I spent Friday again touring Chelsea galleries, as I did a month ago, this time with fewer moments of joy, but without regrets for the time spent. There was powerful and original work, but early on in my tour it was less rewarding. Mostly, it was a good occasion to step away, as I did when I attended the Armory Show last fall, and wonder how many people actually pay attention to visual art now and whether anyone in the high art world cares about reaching people outside what seems even more of a cult than ever in the past. The audience must get smaller, as a portion of the population, every year. Someone should commission a poll of what used to be called Middle America–let’s say working- and middle-class families with children, the demo of people who labor to make life productive and endurable for most people–and simply ask them if they are familiar with any visual art produced in the past decade. Ask them to name a contemporary working artist. Ask when they last set foot in a gallery or art museum. Most of the galleries I visited were empty except for the young woman or man offering to answer questions at the front desk.

There’s nothing terribly new in this. Since the advent of modernism (and photography), visual art has become increasingly intellectualized in order to maintain its critical standing as a field of activity deserving as much respect as science (which itself has become less and less comprehensible to the average human being). Much of this effort has gone into distinguishing itself from humble representation, a job all but handed off to someone with a lens since the mid-19th century—though representational art still thrives as a vital and often the most interesting branch of visual art. All of the new art movements that marked the first half of the 20th century found their apotheosis in AbEx and Pop, when it became inescapable that Western art history had terminated itself in total freedom: anything could be art, all the frontiers were now open for cultivation, the whole idea of progress was nullified. There has been an attempt to replace that old sense of theoretical progress with progressive politics: art now can legitimize itself as something new by finding a unique way to deconstruct the patriarchy, white supremacy, racism, gender bigotry, religion, American exceptionalism, and so on. It’s an opportune way to retain the sense of moving forward. It feels as if the art seen in the larger cities often (certainly not always) illustrates or embodies these academically orthodox political ideas much the way painting illustrated Biblical narratives during the Renaissance.

Visiting more than a dozen galleries last week, it was hard not to feel that the work on view was meant to disconcert viewers, not puzzle them in an intriguing way, as they went from door to door hoping for some tiny morsel of recognizable human warmth and delight. Probably the most laconic expression of this disdain for ordinary perceptions and accepted historical perspectives was Figuer Sucia at Green Naftali. It was a deconstruction of the heroic myth of the American West—something one could understand only by reading the press release—and the best one can say of it is that it was so subtle and understated as to be almost entirely incommunicative. You entered the space through swinging pink saloon doors. One object occupied the center of the space, looking like a gray, plastic excretion, probably a 3D print from the digitized image of a horse deformed with software and then materialized into a cube of intestinal complexity. The press release indicated it was an enlarged image of a toy horse, squeezed and twisted into what looked like several human or animal figures trash-compacted into this gray object sitting on a warehouse pallet in the center of the gallery. (So much for Dodge City’s equine transportation.) On the walls around it were sets of three-to-four dye sublimation prints on tall, rectangular sheets of aluminum. They look weirdly monolithic at first, like the dream of someone who dozed off while watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I examined them, I could see little artifacts of photography: dots of lint on the camera’s sensor enlarged and furry against the nearly monotone surface. Also visible were the vastly enlarged squiggles left by image compression. All of these flaws made it clear these probably were enlarged details of video images. The show’s title could be translated as “Dirty Figure”, but Dirty Ground would have been more appropriate since in none of these images could a figure be spotted, so to speak, except for what could have been a fuzzy assembly of clouds or a hazy suggestion of a reclining woman floating in space. The hand-out at the desk explained: “The scenes originated as hand-painted backdrops for episodes of Looney Tunes.” Somehow this didn’t help.

It was hard not to wonder whether the whole exhibit was a wry send-up of contemporary art itself. Aria Dean showed how little physical effort it takes to deconstruct the notion of manifest destiny and human dominion over a landscape that offers up mostly a literal and figurative emptiness, an infinite sky and endless, unpopulated spaces impossible to master. The horses can’t move. This frontier is mostly empty of people. Look on your works, ye mighty, and despair. . . But the aftertaste here of facile technological engagement with ideas, a sardonically knowing minimalism–it’s all (probably intentionally) off-putting and more than a little funny, if you take it as a wry commentary on how art gets thought-up and made now. If the joke was on us, the show was actually good satire, but as with so much art, this all depends on an amused, rational interpretation rather than a felt response to the immediacy of something visually conveyed and visually understood.

At Hollis Taggart I stopped in for a few minutes, glanced around and again wondered if the exhibit was a stunt. In the hand-out, the gallery said, “John Knuth Pays Homage to the Horseshoe Crab.” The show, on view until June 24, is indeed a faint tribute to this creature’s shell, which the artist has painted metallic gold and affixed to painted canvases, over and over and over. Turn a full circle in the gallery and in every direction you would see the same thing, a pastiche of poured color-field canvases, like tame salutes to Paul Jenkins, festooned with the gilded shells. The show’s title, High Noon, echoed the political deconstruction going on back at the Greene Naftali show, but in this case it’s an environmental crisis that commands attention: how declining populations of the crabs imperil our supply of their blood: “their blue blood … has been essential to the development of safe vaccines and call for the development of an artificial alternative.” Art here, again, puts itself in the service of social needs, with an implicit critique of capitalist depredation, here of the environment, even though the entire show looked as if it required about a month to produce and about sixty seconds to assess. It also required written commentary to begin to understand the point of the work.

Hauser & Wirth has organized a monumental solo exhibition of Mark Bradford’s work. As with much of the other work I saw in Chelsea, the critical theory embedded in what’s being shown requires commentary. It would be a bit optimistic to imagine the average viewer glancing at his dense, layered surfaces and seeing a denunciation of manifest destiny, colonial exploitation, racism and socio-economic injustice. Some of his work is closer to Anselm Kiefer’s mysterious built-up surfaces than anything with a recognizably political agenda. It’s hard not to admire these multi-media constructions simply for the immense effort of creating such topographically complex objects, where color is applied in layers—dense and deep layers of paper attached to the surface and “oxidized,” after which he creates variation in this hidden field of color by sanding or otherwise abrading this layer cake to the hue he wants in a particular area. These constructions offer a completely different visual experience when you stand up close, jazzy and wildly colorful compared to what you see from a distance, muted encrusted colors, like cooling lava, almost muddy and richly earth-toned with hints of rust and blood. It’s fascinating to get a foot away from his surfaces and look at them from different angles and ponder how long he labored to create the hills and valleys that achieve the wildly intense close-ups he makes coalesce into a muted blur. Chuck Close does something similar in ways that achieve just the opposite: a seemingly reckless expressionistic use of color in unrecognizable grids up close that resolve into an individual portrait from a distance. Here, stylized figures become visible, upon study: a jaguar, a bird, but they are subsumed into the mosaic, where the distinction between figure and ground disappears.

Beyond that, you have to take the gallery at its word when it says you’re looking at his show as a deconstruction of Western culture’s exploitation of indigenous and minority communities in a body of work that represents a “deeply personal exploration of the multifaceted nature of displacement and the predatory forces that feed on populations driven into motion by crisis.” You read those words afterward and think, Guess I need to go back and look again. Maybe that’s the irony in the exhibition’s title: “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice.” No, but it helps if you ask me to look twice. Two canvases in particular, Where Lee Goodwin Was Jailed and Lynched and Go Down Moses are powerful and arresting abstractions. They are original in their use of materials and extremely restrained color, the first looking almost like a wall of papier mache draped across the surface in colors as supple as fur and the second a complex visual image that evokes a number of different impressions: Asian scroll painting, oddly enough, and what’s left after multiple bills have been ripped from a wall. This description isn’t meant to sound droll, though it might. Again, with written instructions one understands that these interesting and rewarding experiments with materials and surfaces have everything to do with social injustice—but it requires a catalog to even see a glimmer of the political cargo here. Once again, you need a user’s manual to understand why the work has been given the deluxe and reverent presentation.

At Art Basel last week, Garth Greenan offered a selection of interesting, sometimes amusing works from the early 1960s by Pop Artist Rosalyn Drexler. In its blurb for the selection, the gallery writes: “They expose not only the underside of the American Dream but also a vision of America as the violent and self-violated world of white men.” That pretty much sums up quite a lot of our politics now. And it describes much of the work I’ve been assessing here, and I imagine it could easily be the marching song for entire classes of painters flowing out of art schools. It’s definitely in keeping with the neo-Marxist critique of patriarchal-capitalist culture going on throughout many of these exhibitions and in our culture in general. In Chelsea, on 20^th St, for another month, Garth Greenan will be offering a selection of work that isn’t so stridently accusatory, but is consistent with that vision of America, from Esteban Cabeza de Baca, the child of parents involved in the radical left during the 1970s. From the press release: “Cabeza de Baca’s parents met in the 1970s while working as union organizers with César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. Chávez and Huerta, co-founders of what became the United Farm Workers, were dedicated to improving the lives of farm workers using non-violent practices such as boycotts and strikes.” The paintings are part fantasy, part biography, gently distorted memories from the painter’s childhood. The political is integrated into the personal by making it all surreal or magically real, as the AFL-CIO shares space with the Mexican cloth dolls and Kachina dolls given to the artist by his mother. As the gallery observes: “By working with the repeated imagery of these dolls, Cabeza de Baca reimagines these figures in the landscape of his father’s ancestral home in New Mexico. These dolls, and the resulting paintings, reflect memories from the artist’s childhood— stories of growth, migration, resistance, liberation, and solidarity.” Again, a show adhering to the current political orthodoxy, yet it was a refreshing exhibition for two reasons. The politics were delivered through visions from half a century ago, when economic struggle and unions acted as the point of the spear for the Left. But it’s a relief to walk through it because the artist’s style is child-like, colorful and affirmative. I didn’t love it, but I liked the parameters, a critical vision earned in the process of growing up and shown from within a world of remembered innocence. To fully understand what you’re seeing still required footnotes, but it’s a non-confrontational, almost nostalgic vision of people working together for family and community in good faith.

In Chelsea, there was also plenty not just to examine and study, but to love as well. As usual, Miles McEnery didn’t disappoint. (I am doing penance with a long post here for the sin of still not having written, after my last visit a month ago, about Inka Essenhigh’s marvelous, magical sold-out show at this gallery. I will get to that soon.) I discovered this gallery in 2011, when it was Ameringer McEnery Yohe, with a little show it assembled of Frederick Hammersley’s unique and winning minimalist abstraction, and I’ve been passionate about his work ever since. Under the transformed management, the gallery has expanded into new spaces and, in one of them on W. 21^st St., is offering a powerful exhibition through July of Natalie Frank’s Jungian visions of inner loss and struggle. In the best of these paintings, she reaches for an almost visionary, Blakean extravagance and occasionally achieves it. The assembled work explored two themes: a woman’s struggle with her inner jungle cat, facing it, trying to tame it, a psychological exploration of the amoral, uncontrollable, dangerous, but psychologically innate drives in a person’s character and subconscious experience. Presumably Frank is drawing from her own inner life as Lion Queen. One of the most powerful of these paintings—much of the show is erotically charged, but this one achieves a sort of balance, a détente between lion and its tamer. She is touching foreheads with the lion, a gesture of affection less celebrated than the kiss but in some ways more selflessly loving, and our sultry tamer looks fully in control. The handling of the mixed media, what looks like oil as well as pastel and gouache used in much of the work, is bold and masterful, rich with a full spectrum of color. In fact, much of the show brings to mind almost a female Chagall from an alternate world, full of dark emotions, shorn of his Kabbala and the fascination with Christ. In the other series, Edgar Allen Poe’s Lenore is fused with his Raven, figures of death, fate, passion and loss. Raven V, the work with the least saturated or varied color, is the most transcendent, an image of a blissfully sleeping or dreaming figure clutching the legs of his lost love surrounded by wings filled with eyes, like an albino cecropia moth or a vision from Ezekiel. Without any commentary and completely out of the context of the show, it serves as a convincing vision of bliss. (Something hard to come by in Chelsea last week.) Frank’s work is imbued with passion, vision, daring, and immense reserves of felt experience full of unresolved ambiguity and verging on chaotic confusion. In other words, the show is brimming with life.

A Minotaur makes a small cameo appearance in one of Frank’s paintings, recalling Picasso’s Vollard Suite and the sexual abandon it represented so mysteriously in masterful line drawings. Another show picked up this theme, at Gladstone on W. 24^th, and made it urgently contemporary in a show by Carroll Dunham that ended a few days ago entitled merely Drawing. (Gladstone represents Matthew Barney as he does his unique thing out on Long Island.) This little show was a vehemently, explicitly sexual exhibition that would have been considered pornographic a hundred years ago, but now looks as distanced and almost clinical as an engineer’s sketchbook. Its sexual content is startling and at first disconcerting, but then—as what’s being shown falls into place—the show reveals itself as a much needed view of our sexually saturated culture, especially in its lonely, obsessed, voyeuristic modes. That said, the gallery’s press release is comically euphemistic, as if we don’t live in a world where you couldn’t actually say what’s being shown here. Quasi-prurient content gets announced with a slightly Puritanical reticence. Maybe anything goes on Tinder but Chelsea galleries can’t say a penis will be shown in a line drawing. (The Sixties and Seventies are definitely over.) Walking into Gladstone, you would have no idea whatsoever of what you’re about to view by reading up on it ahead of time. The press release talks of the green project and purple people, explorations of identity, science fiction, Celtic mythology and fundamental formal concerns, yadda yadda. No, this is a show about sexual obsession. “Male and female forms vibrate with intense purple hues, amongst other tones of red, yellows and blues,” the press release mutters. Vibrate is the least of what they do. This show is an eruption of taut, feverishly executed and masterful line drawings that bring to mind Picasso and perfectly do the artist’s bidding, which is to show you people trapped in a world reduced to nothing but sexual gratification. It’s claustrophobic. Whether this was what Dunham set out to do when he began this series, it works. It’s a concentrated and terse, and largely restrained (compared with Picasso’s erotic ouvre) creative response to a world where sexual stimulation is as easy and available as tapwater, vicarious and otherwise. On one wall, six drawings work variations of a female figure, half sunk into the floor, anchored in a tiny room, staring at an image of a vagina projected onto the wall in front of her. She and many of the figures in other drawings occupy this minimally indicated room, delineated with only a few lines that define a rectangular box, a cage, around the figures. In a companion drawing across the gallery, you look through the bars of the cage behind a bearded man gazing at the far wall again, and over his shoulder you see that he’s staring at a pair of breasts as large as the wall where they appear. The colors are indeed purposeful, distancing the viewer from what’s being shown, but also faintly hinting at the green skin of the Hulk, as he emerges in the series of drawings that greet the visitor on entering the studio. While there’s nothing political going on in this exhibition, Dunham’s vision of what’s consciously and subconsciously driving our social interactions and our economic life struck me as more powerful than anything I saw in the overtly political deconstructions going on elsewhere.

Finally, a retrospective group show at Berry Campbell on W. 26^th St. introduced me to the Women of West Coast Abstract Expressionism. As the show was designed to point out, the work of these women was different in character from the more assertive and less emotionally calibrated painting of their East Coast male counterparts. Their work is far less indebted to Clement Greenberg’s axioms about paint needing to simply be on a flat surface. Much of this painting are examples of abstracted representation. It’s closer to contemporary perceptual painting, structured as a scene with the suggestion of three-dimensional depth, but mostly a simplified composition of different values and tones. Bernice Bing employs a sense of shape and line and volume reminiscent of Arshille Gorky for a modified pastiche of Las Meninas. Adelie Landis Bischoff, wife of the esteemed Elmer Bischoff, titles her oil on canvas Still Life No. 2, but it suggests an interior as well, three disconnected human figures positioned around a table rather than on it.  The most powerful and perfectly composed oil in the show, Emiko Nakano’s Night Landscape would be most at home in a show with the East Coast abstract expressionists, akin to Franz Kline, but again the eye can’t help but discern an inscrutable scene, an unfinished expressway, a table, some thick construction topped by white globes like newel post caps, all of it projecting out from a green backdrop. It refuses to flatten out, the surfaces consistently reflecting a light source but the whole assembly working as rugged abstraction with the brush marks creating the illusion of relief. Irene Pattinson’s Spring Rain is a simplified landscape, as sparing with detail as Rothko, a wet surface, pavement or water indicated with a long streak of dull blue under a green expanse above, with one small rectangle in the lower left where the blue has been coated with a thin layer of white, suggesting moonlight reflected on the fallen rain from an orb outside the frame of the scene.

The most impressive painting in the show is Dorr Bothwell’s City Dusk, an oil on canvas that revels in the physical properties of oil paint and yet simultaneously evokes both abstraction and a distinct sense of an immediately recognizable scene. It appears to be an impasto image of a city sunset reflected in the surface of a river, all of the color streaking from side to side. It brings to mind Richter’s squeegee abstractions, but the handling here is more delicate and, amazingly, accurate, and thus representational. Some of the paint is clearly applied and dragged from side to side with a brush, but in the middle, where she seems to be conveying a sunset shining over the reflected structures hovering over the middle of the scene, the paint has a different quality. It’s as if she applied cling wrap or something flexible, laid it on top of the paint and then pulled it sideways just slightly, then carefully peeled it away, leaving the little puckered webs that form when two glued surfaces are pulled apart before the glue sets. The effect is efficient and effective: the whole work suggests ripples and streaks in a reflective body of water. It’s also an elegantly uniform field of oil paint, each area with the same sense of effortlessly perfect application.

Renato Muccillo

Silent Horizon Study, Renato Muccillo, 6″ x 6″, oil on panel

Distillations, a solo exhibition of Renato Muccillo’s most recent work, opens Saturday at Arcadia Contemporary in SoHo. I received a catalog of the work in advance of the show and this very small painting stood out, not as the most stunning or even the one I would most want to own, but because at that scale it’s almost bafflingly masterful. Steve Diamant represents quite a few artists who are able to work so small they could almost be classified as miniaturists. Muccillo is able to paint within these dimensions about as well as anyone working now. In this show, Muccillo extends his exploration of the golden hour when night and day give way to each other, and also explores landscapes at other times of day and from new angles. A number of paintings are stunningly simplified images working from a drone’s-eye view, gazing down at the Alouette River in British Columbia. The effect is more abstract, with the water serving almost as raw negative space. The composition of Corridor brings to mind the ragged, vertically ascending streaks of paint in a Clyfford Still. Using drone shots of watery landscape is something Christopher Burke has explored for years; he pushes his images to an even more simplified, abstract level, in a wonderful way. Muccillo retains his more traditional rendering even with these aerial views, yet he uses the freedom this perspective gives him to design an image energized by its kinship with abstraction. In all of his work, he’s able to capture the most subtle transitions of light on the surface of the land, on plants, hills, clouds. In Silent Horizon Study, above, his typically deft handling of long grass–bringing to mind both Durer and John Henry Twachtman–he seems to capture not simply the complex thicket of individual strands but, in the tips that bend and fold toward the viewer, the grass seems to reflect the exact color of the unseen sky above the viewer’s head, bluish white, distinct from its warm tone in the distance, over the horizon. He puts you into the scene itself, so that you almost feel the temperature of the air, the scent of the season, the gradual shift of clouds, the silence. I’m heading back to New York City today and will be stopping in to see these paintings while I’m there.