{"id":9069,"date":"2020-01-30T18:30:07","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T18:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9069"},"modified":"2020-01-28T14:23:53","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T14:23:53","slug":"todd-gordon-the-mundane-superfluity-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9069","title":{"rendered":"Todd Gordon: the plenitude of life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

View of Norra Djurgardsstaden reurbanization project around Gasklockan 1 and 2, oil on linen, 33″ x 77″<\/p><\/div>\n

On my brief visit to New York City, to spend a few hours at the New York Public Library\u2019s J.D. Salinger exhibit a few days before its final weekend, I caught the new installation of work from three artists at George Billis Gallery<\/span><\/a>. It was the only exhibit of new painting I was able to see, because I timed my visit on the worst possible day\u2014between exhibitions at almost all the galleries in Chelsea. Billis had a leg up on all the others and was already prepared for the following night\u2019s opening.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I was the only visitor at the time, with Billis himself clicking away on the computer in back, and Todd Gordon<\/span><\/a>\u2014the painter whose work had been hung in the main gallery space\u2014standing at the window on a call with his wife who was arriving at the airport, having flown in from Sweden with the kids. I didn\u2019t realize he was the exhibiting artist until I\u2019d toured the entire gallery and wandered back to ask him, in my own charming way, where to find a rest room. I\u2019m relieved to report that I never got to my question, because he introduced himself, and we launched into a discussion of the state of the art world at the moment\u2014a delightful series of agreements about almost everything. He was intense, making his points without belaboring them, as I was more likely to do, but amiable and generous in his eagerness to endorse some other contemporary painters whose work would be on view at galleries he directed me to visit.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s tall, fit, with the bearing and aura of a guitarist who would prefer to be considered alternative, a good sense of humor, quick to pick up on the slightest irony and add his terse two cents. He had the quality of attention, the alert bearing, of someone who is out in the field, engaged in the hunt, a fellow soldier, not just someone making observations about the battle from a safe distance. I had the sense that, he was doing what we\u2019re all doing: trying to puzzle out, not just from year to year, but from minute to minute, whether or not genuine art can rise up and float over the slippery, unreliable ocean of wealth that grants painters an income and makes a few rich, for better or worse. It\u2019s an experiment with as many possible outcomes\u2014and few, if any, are repeatable\u2014as there are painters.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

His painterly landscapes and cityscapes, many similar to urban scenes that he has been doing for quite a while, were compellingly intricate and fresh. In addition, he\u2019d included some more traditionally rustic wooded settings, all of them just as unsentimental and exacting as the city scenes. He works from direct observation, and though he describes himself as a Brooklyn artist on his website, he resides in Sweden and paints both there and in Italy. Aside from his considerable skills at capturing tone and value and conveying the volume of what he\u2019s depicting, what I liked most was the panoramic aspect ratio, as it were, of the work\u2014extremely wide and shallow, like a sideways scroll. It gave me the sense of the proliferation of the world, the seemingly superfluous expanse of natural life and fabricated objects. It\u2019s a meditation on the plenitude of every big and little thing out there\u2014mundane, wonderfully ordinary, and suited to whatever it happens to be doing, or not doing, wherever it stands in the scene.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is great work,\u201d I said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got more. I\u2019ve got enough to fill the other two rooms,\u201d he said, smiling ruefully, motioning toward the other smaller solo shows with a slight air of frustration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a nice space, on an upper floor with plenty of natural light, and though I liked the way Billis was able to organize three solo shows simultaneously, I could sympathize with Gordon\u2019s eagerness to get as much exposure as possible, if he had so much other new work not on view. We were actually occupying temporary quarters, next door to George Billis\u2019s permanent gallery, which was undergoing a reconstruction. This space was on loan to him for the current shows.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked Gordon what it was like to live in Sweden.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cExpensive,\u201d he said.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEven in Sweden.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, socialism or not, we can still just barely afford our apartment,\u201d he said, which measures around 500 square feet for the whole family. The price per square foot sounded comparable to the rates in any of a dozen large metros in the U.S. I ranted briefly on the rampant inflation in real estate there\u2014the migration of people escaping it to live in secondary U.S. locations, like Boise or Birmingham, driving up real estate prices there. The illusory elan of financial speculation keeps bleeding out from Wall Street into real estate and any other market that could sustain higher and higher prices. Like, say, tulips. But if all this is as much of a bubble as it seems, no one believes it\u2019s going to burst any time soon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere has to be a correction coming,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s a little insane, and the people in the middle of it aren\u2019t quite aware of how unreal it is.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHave you seen Hudson Yards?\u201d he asked, incredulously. \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d just walked south past the periphery of those new sky-blue stalagmites of glass on my way to the gallery, the futuristic Fortress of Solitude pointing toward the clouds just north of Chelsea, erasing the old haunts of Hell\u2019s Kitchen. A nice little 500 sq. ft. studio apartment there will run you around $3,000 per month. As I passed that block, I\u2019d wondered what sort of mood stabilizer Maeve Brennan<\/span><\/a> would have needed to be able to document, for the current New Yorker<\/i>, the razing of individualized old architecture to make way for these charmless, Neo-Robocop glass palaces\u2014as she had done for The<\/i> New Yorker <\/i>in her day, commenting on the impersonality of the architecture going up half a century ago.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like what\u2019s going on in the art world,\u201d I said.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cExactly. It\u2019s all about the price now. Do many of these people who buy art even spend much time looking at it?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much speculation. Buy whatever seems guaranteed to go up in value and then auction it off in six months. It\u2019s just an alternative to buying stock. Or houses to flip.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

He asked about my own work, and we talked a bit about painting in general, and about his career. He mentioned his roots in Ohio, and I spoke highly of Ohio as a state that devoted more attention to visual art than most\u2014how I\u2019d lived for nearly a year south of Cleveland and how I exhibit regularly in Ohio. He spoke of his history as a teacher, and how most artists have to teach in order to be able to afford to make art: often without an institutional affiliation, organizing independent workshops. He himself has always made it work, even in Brooklyn, apparently, where the median price of housing is nearly four times what it is throughout the rest of the country. We pledged to find one another on Instagram, and I headed out, only to find that many galleries were closed to install new work, or the work on view didn\u2019t move me to want to spend much time with it. I had to get to my car in time to make it home to Rochester late in the evening, and I regretted not being able to spend more time with Gordon.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On my brief visit to New York City, to spend a few hours at the New York Public Library\u2019s J.D. Salinger exhibit a few days before its final weekend, I caught the new installation of work from three artists at George Billis Gallery. It was the only exhibit of new painting I was able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nTodd Gordon: the plenitude of life - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9069\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Todd Gordon: the plenitude of life - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On my brief visit to New York City, to spend a few hours at the New York Public Library\u2019s J.D. 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