Yuko Ueda / Memento / 36 x 44 inches / mixed media on canvas / 2008 / yuukoueda.com

What I focus on is expressive colors and harmony of materials. I use plenty of water with acrylic paint, making many thin paint layers to achieve depth of color and luminousity. Inspiration always comes from nature, life and the human spirit. With acrylic paint, I often use pastel, sand, metals, fabrics, paper and pencil. I try to reach a beauty of natural harmony by combining these materials with various colors. {Read More…}

Beatriz Milhaze / Mariposa / 2004 / Acrylic on canvas / 98 X 98 inches / James Cohan Gallery

Unfortunately I missed her recent exhibit a James Cohan Gallery, but Joanne Mattera has a great post about the show on her blog, from which I stole the title for this post.

Also from Carol Kino’s review in the NY Times comes this great quote:

“In the beginning,” she said, “I felt a connection between Spanish Latin American and Brazilian, which is more Portuguese: the Baroque churches, the costumes, the ruffles, things that have volume or a sculptural shape.”

But ultimately, she said, although she wanted to incorporate all those things into her work, “I wanted to put them together based on a geometric composition. Because at the end of the day, I was only interested in structure and order.” {Read More…}

I love to eat oranges and sardines, though I’ve never had them together, but I keep coming across stuff about this show at the Hammer Museum. Sharon Butler wants to go and notes we don’t get any good images on the Hammer website.

From Ed Schad:

We don’t discuss inspiration openly anymore. Inspiration is much like the word “beauty.” We use it among ourselves, in the studio, and most have an inherent sense of what it means, but we don’t discuss it – you won’t find an Artforum piece on inspiration, you won’t see a symposium on inspiration. I admit thinking about inspiration is at times difficult for me. For instance, I remember studying Brice Marden in depth, with all the commentary about modernism, surface, and the painting support only to go to Marden’s artist lecture to hear “The Olives!! How wonderful they were, as I looked on them that day in Greece.”  {Read More…}

From Christopher Kuhn:

Conversation got a little heated around this last point, specifically between Von Heyl, who believed the sublime has something to do with contemporary abstract painting (what, I am not sure) and Amy Sillmann who more or less told her she was full of shit (but in a more polite way). I completely agree with Amy here, that the sublime is a crisis that occurs upon discovering a phenomenon that cannot be explained rationally. Now I have never been to a museum of gallery and found something on the wall that I was unable to explain how it possibly could exist. Typically, the answer is something along the lines of: it’s paint, or that’s a photograph. Sometimes art is tricky, sometimes things appear to be other than they are, but never in my experience have I found a work of art to be crisis inducing. Now, the word “sublime” is also used vernacularly to mean “awesome” or “great.” It’s fine to use the word in this way, but don’t then pretend that it has some deeper philosophical meaning, cause it doesn’t. {Read More…}

Merrill Wagner / Large Flower Small Owl / 2006 / Paint on steel / 87.75 x 82.25″ / sundharamtagore.com

I checked out this show this past week. I wasn’t familiar with Merrill Wagner’s work, but I loved how she painted with the steel. It’s interesting, Richard Serra’s work makes you really feel the presence and the weight of the steel, whereas with Merrill’s work I found myself enchanted with the surface, the rust, the marks left by the heat of forging, etc. There was a delicacy and lightness about the steel.

Wagner’s oeuvre explores the possibility of steel and slate as a painterly surface. Wagner begins with found materials, either die-cut scraps of steel, or pieces of slate, and transforms them into abstract landscapes or flowers. She imbues the surface with an unexpected softness yet still maintains an architectural form. Painted directly from nature, her forms allude less overtly to geometry than to a structural topography. Her assemblages are suspended by magnets giving them a floating quality. Her innovative utilization of the dichotomy between the softness of the pigments and her subject and the rigidity of her surface has earned her the acclaim of the art world.

Merrill Wagner @ Sundharam Tagore, 547 West 27th Street, through 10/15

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

Jasmina Danowski / Brazen Truths / 2007 / Oil and alkyd on panel / 19 x 19 inches / Spanierman Modern

Created with thin washes overlaying thick paint surfaces, the colors and forms in Danowski’s panels are compressed and charged, drawing energy from the confinement of the small, square supports. The strength of these intense works is seen in the way they hold their own against the much larger works on paper, with the two groups “forming a field of connections and interactions.”

The artist states that in the panels, it is “as if the paintings are searching to break out continuously from their own rules.” Many capture a suspended moment between control and release, with forms strained to the breaking point and pressurized as if to thwart an explosive chain reaction that has already begun. An inevitable hilarity appears about to burst forth at any moment but is barely restrained. This sense of play, using broad humor and subtly curbed energy, evokes the brilliant comedic physicality of Buster Keaton, whom Danowski cites as a hero.

Danowski’s process entails allowing her marks and colors to develop their own implicit potential, “the story they carry within them,” and the tales they unfold are to be generated as much by the observer as by the artist.

Gao Xing Jiang / Penumbra / 2007 / Chinese ink on paper / 105.5 x 79 cm / 41.1 x 30.8 ins / alisan fine arts

Thomas Nozkowski / Untitled (8-100) / 2008 / oil on linen on panel / 22 28 inches / © Thomas Nozkowski. Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Wildenstein Gallery

If you haven’t figured out yet, I am qute enthusiastic about the Thomas Nozkowski show at Pace. I’ve been twice so far and will probably have to head back again before it closes. My first impression was the colors. The glowing lights emitting from these small paintings were fascinating and drew me in, like the sideways pyramid of light beaming out of a television in a dark room (except of course Pace is well light, come to think of it, it would be interesting to see these paintings under different light). They reminded me of the Fra Angelico show at the Met a couple of years ago. Small paintings, radiant colors, small, intimate. They also triggered some memories of Monty Python-like animations, or Yellow Submarine, or the Great Space Coaster that I used to watch back in the 70s and 80s. Each piece struck me as a glimpse into a world, a moment in time, a thought, a memory, a scene, or drama – tightly cropped so I couldn’t see everything in total. A small window.

The shapes and forms, whether pure invention or distillations of something observed, feel alive and moving with an energy across the surface. I wonder if I turn away or blink will it still be the same. Their purpose however, seems to be as vehicles for the color – an excuse for color. The specificity of the shapes feel to me to be of secondary importance to the color. It could just be that I find the color so exciting. On the other it may be that it appears as if the shapes and forms have been drawn in and decisions on their size and position were not questioned, changed, reworked, etc. The colors, however, have been changed. over and over and over. Painted in, wiped down, rearranged, reworked, glazed over, warmed up, cooled off, toned up and toned down. Like a game or a play I just imagine little shapes running around geared up and enjoying all the fun. It’s as if hanging on the gallery wall the shapes are resting. Taking a break. on intermission. or maybe nozkowski’s just hit the pause and is waiting for us to hit play again when we walk in through the door.

As a side note – John Yau, who writes reviews for the Brooklyn Rail, has written an excellent essay for the exhibition catalog in which he speaks to both Nozkowski’s concerns as a painter and his position in relation to contemporary painting and the historical tradition. It’s definitely worth picking up a copy.

Thomas Nozkowski: Recent Work is on view through May 3, 2008 at Pace Wildenstein 534 w 25th Street