Eva Hesse / No title / c. 1962 / Oil on canvas / 49.5 x 49.5 inches / Andrea Rosen Gallery

Willem de Kooning
Lucio Fontana
Eva Hesse

In cooperation with
The Willem de Kooning Foundation and
The Estate of Eva Hesse

October 25 – December 6, 2008
Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 w 24th St.

All of the works in this exhibition display a sense of violence, uncertainty and aggression, and yet, are bound together by their abundantly joyful palette. Evoking a tension between abstraction and figuration, the figure in all of these works is present as much as it is not.

Hesse’s work in this exhibition were made following a much more figurative body of paintings and just precede her transition to a sculptural practice and like so much painting being made in the early 1960s, have an indebtedness to de Kooning and his ethereal line between abstraction and figuration. As Helen Molesworth astutely notes, Hesse’s early production is marked by “jumbles of energetic abstraction held in a kind of violent contrapusto with figuration.” {Read More…}

Duston Spear / MONSTERS NIGHT / Collaged oil paintings, work clothes, spray paint, wax on canvas / 67 X 76 inches / 2008 / Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery

 RORSCHACH TALES
Duston Spear’s most recent series of paintings, ‘Rorschach Tales’ will make up her third solo exhibition with STRNY (September – October 2009). In these works Spear has combined the applied graffiti of ‘Read’,(2005), with the iconic imagery of ‘Delivered’, (2007) and added the narrative intent of Japanese scroll paintings to assemble a codex of fictional battles. Miniature warriors fill the flattened scene charging on yellow grounds, the thin blue horizon line marks the ageless conflict below. The center of each canvas is dominated by a Rorschach-like form filled with her old paint clothes stenciled with words that are unreadable in this palimpsest incarnation. Tiny figures are curved out of cut up paintings and collaged onto the surface- horses rear, bulls race across the stage, archers toss their painted arrows, battalions of warriors shoot spray paint from their rifles at the unknown Rorschachian thing that stales the armies. The scene is frozen in it’s activity, the site is abstract in its figuration. {Read More…}

Cecily Brown / Untitled (#38) / 2007 / Oil on linen / 12-1/2 x 17 inches (31.8 x 43.2 cm) / www.gagosian.com

A number of people have been asking lately why I haven’t posted anything recently. The answer is that I have been meaning to, but I’ve just been super busy and the blog has gotten the short end. Anyway….

I’ve been down to Gagosian a few times over the last couple of weeks to see the Cecily Brown show. The first time I went I was impressed with the work but something bothered me and I couldn’t figure out what it was. After going back and spending a good amount of time looking at the work and being in the space I realized the problem, the lighting in the gallery kills the drama of the paintings. It is just too bright in the gallery to really enter into the paintings. The drama of her paintings is in the swelling volumes and the internal character of the light she creates. The bright lighting of the gallery illuminates the dark areas, renders visible all the brush strokes, and the reflected light off the white walls of the gallery overwhelms the light areas of the canvas. The overall effect is to flatten the canvas into a collage of energetic brushstrokes with color.

This actually struck me when I was looking at some of the smaller canvases in the show. Looking at these works I could really see the connection to Rubens, Tintoretto, El Greco, both in the compositional structure and the swelling weightless forms hovering and suspended in space. I also began thinking about how those paintings were painted for candlelit cathedrals and castles. How the dim lighting of the space really elevated the drama of the darks and lights, allowing the swelling figures to really explode out of the canvas. When I turned around to look at the larger works in the show, especially the Sam Mere series, I really felt like I was missing something.

I’ve often read Cecily Brown’s work compared to De Kooning’s, and while they both engage in figurative abstraction, I think it will be interesting to examine their approaches over the next few days to see how differently they put paintings together. In the meantime, definitely check out the show.

Cecily Brown @ Gagosian, September 20 – October 25, 2008, 555 West 24th Street

stan gregory / solitary dime / 2007 / oil on tinted gesso on canvas / 64 x 64 inches / sundharam tagore gallery

I hadn’t been to see any exhibits in about a week or two…Today I went down to Sundharam Tagore Gallery to see the show of Stan Gregory’s work, whose work I’ve been waiting to see for a while now. His paintings are deceptively simple. I found myself drawn into the fluctuating shapes and the interpenetrating spaces. The arabesque lines of the paintings and the dynamic positive and negative shapes call to mind Islamic calligraphy and images of whirling dervishes. The paintings are joyful and both the lines and the colors have a lot of movement and energy. However, and maybe this is just because I am a painter, I found myself drawn past the lines, the shapes and the colors, right up and into the surface. The thick heavy layers of paint smoothed down with a knife and sandpaper to create a soft luminous ground. The contrast with the thin impasto lines. Semi-transparent colors, subtle brush marks next to smooth matte flat areas. Paint mixing around the lines, layers upon layers of paint, giving the feel of smooth heavy fresco. I could go on, but what the surface revealed to me was a painting that took time. It grew and evolved and changed…and will continue to do so as the painting ages and the layers become more transparent.

From the catalogue:

These are the paintings of a sensualist.

Admittedly when looking at Stan Gregory’s work from across the room that might not be the first adjective that springs to mind, though at any distance the standard terminology of styles and “isms” is mostly misleading. The spareness of these paintings will sooner or later suggest the labels “minimal” or “reductive” as well, but only to those whose tolerance for overall abstraction is contingent on bravura effects or atmospheric auras. Gregory doesn’t invite such associations, and they don’t take the attentive viewer much of anywhere except back to the same starting point…

That is what paintings like Gregory’s are all about. Looking once and getting you bearings, looking longer and losing them, looking away and then back and finding a new optical purchase or path, looking at one part and then jumping to the furthest point from it and trying to account for all the transitions and liaisons that map their connection. The best thing about doing this is that there is no “X marks the spot” to these mazes, no predetermined course through them, no one way traffic, no privileged entrance or exit, no inside or outside and no price to pay for perceptual or conceptual pleasure except that of paying attention. These are the works of a rigorous sensibility but also of a generous one, and they are delivered to the viewer in move-in condition without further explanation needed and with no theoretical strings attached. To spurn an offer made with such painterly know-how and conviction would be foolish; to accept it is to yield to that intelligence and that commitment and so make a self-rewarding commitment of one’s own.

Robert Storr – 2008

Stan Gregory @ Sundharam Tagore Gallery, 47 West 27th Street through July 19th

www.stangregory.net 

Sheetal Ghattani /Untitled / Watercolour on paper / 36 x 36 inches / Bodhi Art

What sets Gattani’s works apart are her philosophy and attitude towards painting. Her manipulation of the medium, watercolour on paper is to mediate through colours without them suggesting any referential reality. Encountering her abstractions leaves one puzzled since they are large areas of colour, which defy definition in terms of specificity, for instance, red or mauve. In the delicacy of soft textures lie the subtexts in her canvases, which gradually settle upon one’s sensibility and one begins reading into them, forms that bring forth the character of her otherwise placid works. Her abstractions do not beckon but gently whisper, and once that whisper becomes audible it translates into a communion, wherein one is compelled to respond. In evoking these gentle persuasive responses from the viewer lies the success of her abstract compositions. Sheetal’s process of creation largely conditions the nature and character of her works. She predominantly employs black paper on which she brushes layers of paint washes, completely in communion with her materials and tools. With her contemplative wide stroked gestures, Sheetal builds up layers of paint that in the end leave an impression of her self. And this form of abstraction is clarified by Sheetal, who says, “Abstraction is in its deepest sense, based on realism, as in reality — reality of the present moment, free from any thoughts, memory conditioning. Only that pure present moment exists. So painting is a `time-manifested’ process and I become only a means.”

A silent journey through her most recent show titled Silent Soliquyoy, Bodhi Art, Singapore (2007) may freeze the viewer to one description namely ‘similar.’ Yet her similarity is built into the very idea of difference and this difference is the basis of her ‘magical moments’ and ‘inspirational relationships’. This is where Sheetal strikes at the heart of the matter, reconceptualizing her ‘moments’ according to the quality of light and poetic play with materials through an active imagination that enables her to create similarly different works that offers varying significations

The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

www.bodhiart.in

paul christopher flynn / work 1 / oil on canvas / www.pcflynn.com

paul christopher flynn / work 2 / oil on canvas / www.pcflynn.com

Two paintings from a fall 2007 exhibit at the Beijing 798 Space entitled The Homeward Collection by Irish artist Paul Christopher Flynn.

Paul said “It is obvious to anyone who sees my work that I have a great love of certain styles of Chinese painting. During my long absence from painting, the art which spoke most to me was usually Asian, mostly Chinese – it was only natural therefore that when I began painting again, those influences resonated most in my work. The opportunity to create a body of work expressly for show in China was a great joy to me. As I painted I felt a sense of coming home, not so much for me as for my paintings. It is my wish that these emotions – peace, hope, joy – are evident in the work.”

Christopher Wool / Untitled / 2007 / Enamel on linen / 126 x 96 inches / (320.04 x 243.84 cm) / Luhring Augustine

I guess there is a famous quote by Christopher Wool that goes something like “The harder you look, the harder you look.” I find that the longer I look at his work, or the more that I look at his work, the more I want there to be and it just isn’t. I want there to be more paint, more layers, more color, more erasures. I want it to be something more than a spray painted Brice Marden de Kooning Basquiat derivation. To be something more than a derivative work or a simulacra. I find myself asking, are they alienated pictures, cool intellectual, ironic, sad, frustrated? I don’t know. Standing in front of them I feel an absence, a loss, a longing for something, or a searching for something that I’m just not getting. There is something elusive about these paintings, something always out of reach, yet right there in front of me hanging on the wall.
However, this seems to me to be their goal or function–to frustrate or disturb the tranquility–to crack apart the security of my own assumptions about painting. In fact my first thought- and a dangerous thought for an abstract painter- was to assume that the work was somehow derivative, that Marden, de Kooning, and Basquiat are original, authentic, and superior, while Christopher Wool’s work is secondary, derivative, or even “parasitic.” Though I know very little about Christopher Wool, I would like to imagine that to overcome this idea- that artists in the past were original, authentic, or superior and artists working in the present are derivative- and move beyond this pattern of thinking, is a fundamental theme of Christopher Wool’s work. If not, it’s at least something I am thinking about in response to the paintings at Luhring Augustine and the more I look at them and reflect, the more I see them.

Wool is an American painter known for creating pictorial forms, often void of color due to his loyalty to black and white. First gaining notoriety from his ‘word pictures’ of the late 1980s, Wool now works frequently with enamel paint on canvas, creating layered pieces, marked with paint spatter and sporadic drips.

Other characteristic tendencies include erasing almost-entire pictures then writing over them with black spray paint. He approaches art as a process that needs revision and often makes visible corrections within his works. (artobserved.com)

Chirstopher Wool at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street through June 21.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe / Thought in a Garden / 2008 / Oil on linen / 86 x 38 x 1-1/4 inches / alexander gray associates

Got to this small exhibit a couple of weeks ago. Lush colors, probably need to spend a lot more time than I did looking at each piece to get more of a sense of the spacial shifts and the color effects. The colors are certainly visually enticing.

From the gallery:

In the four abstract paintings in this exhibition, Gilbert-Rolfe revisits the grid and the vertically oriented canvas. The grid, which possessed a more architectural look when it first appeared in his paintings in the late 1970s and early 80s, becomes a mesmerizing force in new paintings such as Pynchon. Covering the entire canvas with a meticulously rendered rectangular grid, Gilbert-Rolfe uses the grid in Pynchon to suggest the depth of a screen and the temporal duration associated with music. An empathetic relationship with the viewer’s body is encouraged by all of the paintings’ verticality, which also shifts their compositional foci to the center, where a crevice runs down the center of each painting.

Gilbert-Rolfe has said that he “want[s] to reverse the relationship between color and drawing in painting.” In this new body of paintings, he has continued this pursuit by almost completely abandoning painterly gesture and instead using the grid to feature color in its most exuberant forms. Using a technique that involves building layers of glazes, Gilbert-Rolfe flaunts color, punching up the brightness of his pinks and yellows by juxtaposing them with dark browns and blues.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe @ Alexander Gray Associates, 526 West 26 Street #1019, through June 14.

Natura Morte/Zen III / 2008 / Oil, alkyd on canvas / 58 x 59 inches / stephen haller gallery

Saw this exhibit the other week. From the press release:

Johnston creates pictures within pictures and strives for dimensionality through layers and composition. Multiple overlays of symbols in his work surface through multiple layers of translucent color. There is a mysterious luminosity in Johnston’s work; his paintings are noted for their lush gorgeous surfaces.

The double rings in the paintings are representational of binding relationships – a variant design of an ancient Asian symbol for fidelity or infinity. Johnston explores the impulse expressed in the notations and symbols of many cultures in an attempt to visually articulate the aching human desire to communicate an intensity of thought and feeling.

The new paintings also reveal the influence of the rarified yet organic construct that is a Zen garden – carefully organized symbols embodying a rigorous aesthetic.

Johnston says of his work: “Every painting is a relationship within a relationship within a relationship, and structured much more like a novel or a piece of music, than the incredible open-endedness of a painting on a picture plane.”

ron ehrlich / pale rain / 2007 / oil on panel / 48 x 48 inches / stephen haller gallery

Went to Stephen Haller Gallery the other day to see Gregory Johnston’s paintings, but was actually much more taken by Ron Ehrlich’s work hanging in the back of the gallery. His paintings had a physical presence lacking in the alkyd sheen finish of Gregory Johnston’s paintings.

Ron Ehrlich’s paintings combine the very American dynamic of action painting with the Japanese aesthetic of wood-fired Bizen ceramics. His application methods include throwing, pouring, brushing, scumbling and glazing. To achieve his remarkable surfaces, some glistening and others matte, he mixes recipes of oil, wax, lacquer, shellac, porcelain dust, and marble dust; and then turns a blowtorch on some areas to fuse the materials into a lustrous glazed finish. The resulting canvases, with their dense layers of oil paint and other media, are simultaneously energetic and tranquil.

Ehrlich’s palette leans toward water hues and earth tones: ultramarine, turquoise, peacock and sky blue; greens ranging from muted moss to sparkling emerald; sunny yellows, ochre, ivory, terracotta, and chalky white; the deep tones of rich soil. Broad horizontal bands of color in the under layers of his paintings are also suggestive of landscapes. The general impression, though, is of heavily textured, densely layered action painting. Often he creates an all-over grid-like texture with many thin vertical drips of color running down the canvas over thickly painted horizontal blocks in the under layers.