Ingrid Calame / From #258 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River) / 2007 / enamel paint on aluminum / 72 X 120 inches / James Cohan Gallery

I came across Ingrid’s work yesterday. I am not familiar with her and have never seen her work before. I spent some time looking at her work online trying to engage with the paintings themselves, which of course is impossible online. If nothing but intrigued, I read a bunch of reviews, mostly mixed with critics bemoaning the conceptualism of her work. This made me laugh because I had just read a piece by the poet and writer David Lehman this morning referring to the joke that if you crossed a mafioso and a deconstructionist, what you got was someone who makes you “an offer that you can’t understand.” So I began to think that maybe that’s why I couldn’t really make heads or tails of this work, because the deconstructionist mafioso got crossed with a painter, which is certain to be messy.

Anyway, John Yau, whose writtings I really enjoy, opened a review of Ingrid Calame’s work for the Brooklyn Rail with the following quote from James Hillman, “We sail against the imagination whenever we ask an image for its meaning—requiring that images be translated into concepts.” I thought this was a great thought/observation. He goes on to conclude with the follow:

When you stand close to one of Calame’s visually packed paintings, you are likely to forget that you are looking at a brightly colored copy of stains. It is in the small areas that the juxtapositions of color and layering become visually engaging, and you might get lost in the looking. Standing near to the surface, and narrowing your focus, you don’t see what looks like a big tire track and immediately think speedway. This enables you to overlook, if only briefly, that the painting is made up of literal signs that are meant to remind you of all the little details of everyday life that you failed to notice. After all, there is something contrived and didactic about this equation. With their faint traces of brushstrokes, Calame’s densely crammed surfaces really are something to look at. And spatially, the unpredictable shifts between small and large, near and far, defy any simple reading. The forms begin to float free from their literalness, while the staccato colors and asyndetic transitions bounce you all over the place. Calame ought to aim for more than being mentioned in the same sentence as Pollock, who has seldom been given credit for all the different ways in which he worked.  {Read More…}