“Slick With Calculation”: The Art of Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley, Mizrah (2011), oil on canvas, 36″ x 48″; courtesy The Jewish Museum

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A version of this article originally appeared in the July 28, 2008 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum (until July 29, 2012).

In the catalog accompanying The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar, an exhibition of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the artist holds forth on various aspects of his work—among them, his African heritage, the role of mimicry in art, being a twin, and themes of gender and postcolonialism. He lists as his peers Allen Ginsberg, Britney Spears, Fragonard, Versace and Kara Walker. He’s not crazy about Spike Lee or Titian, and is suspicious of Barack Obama—“his rabbit holes,” Wiley says, “are capable of losing structural integrity by virtue of their own weight.”

Which is to say: Let’s be be thankful that Mr. Wiley has found employment as a famous artist rather than as an addle-brained cultural theorist.

His models are exclusively young men, typically in hip-hop garb, striking poses based on figures in paintings by Tiepolo, say, or David. They’re set against elaborate and vibrantly colored patterning derived from different cultures and eras—you’ll find Islam in Mr. Wiley’s art, and the Rococo. Skillfully rendered and smartly conceived, the paintings mix and match historical periods for reasons both Pop (Peter Paul Rubens meets the Wu-Tang Clan) and political (Peter Paul Rubens, make room for the African diaspora).

To his credit, Mr. Wiley himself isn’t altogether sold on art as “a site of normalizing and redemption,” as the catalog puts it. His skepticism evinces a painter resistant to the clichés of art as “transgression,” as well as an African-American wary of pigeonholing, equivocal about the notion of “black art.”

All the same, Mr. Wiley is savvy to the arresting power of confrontational imagery. He’s kin to showmen like John Currin and Matthew Barney, though Mr. Wiley’s sociological foundation is graver than porn and Vaseline.

Kehinde Wiley, Leviathan Zodiac (2011), oil and gold enamel on canvas, 95.75″ x 71.75″; courtesy The Jewish Museum

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Mr. Wiley’s recent paintings are part of his “World Stage” series. Establishing studios in China, the first site where he set up shop, and then in Nigeria and Senegal, Mr. Wiley adopts aspects of regional culture. In China, he looked at Communist propaganda and adapted it to his own needs.

Something similar informs the African paintings: A number of them are based on public monuments that recall Soviet socialist realism. Taking into account the reproductions in the catalog, they are like most nationalist sculpture, stiff with symbolism.

Notwithstanding what must have been jarring contrasts in environment and custom, Mr. Wiley seems pretty much untouched by his travels. His pictorial formula remains intact. Whether he’s in Africa, in China, or navigating 125th Street, Mr. Wiley is always himself. Motifs gleaned from the immediate surroundings—primarily, pattern and palette—are subsumed by his trademark style. Mr. Wiley doesn’t open himself up to disparate cultures—he merely Kehinde-izes them.

The stately men seen in The Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos (2008) and Rubin Singleton (2008)— a spectacularly elaborate play of floral arabesques and a wonderfully garish camouflage jacket—hail from either Dakar or Lagos. (Mr. Wiley and his film crew look for “models” as they stroll down city streets.)

There’s an impressive and chilly finesse to Mr. Wiley’s realism. He doesn’t take pleasure in putting brush to canvas—it slides efficiently, but with no sense of urgency—but likeness is carefully delineated. Elsewhere he’s coy: Benin Mother and Child (2008) pictures a young man holding a fan and basket; you think the painting is mislabeled until you find out that it’s based on a matriarchal sculpture.

But it figures—Mr. Wiley isn’t interested in his models for who they are as individuals, but what they can be as archetypes. Warholian anonymity, slick with calculation, is the point. It’s disconcerting how blithely Mr. Wiley denatures his subjects.

Only Ibrahima Sacko (2008) escapes the artist’s conceptualist straitjacket, and you can’t help but cheer on his puckishness. If anything, the artist’s work succeeds best as pure form—his expert riffs on figure and ground would’ve made Clement Greenberg smile. But these disjointed amalgamations of specificity and artifice don’t quite know what they are, except that they’re by Kehinde Wiley. I wish he’d get out of the way and let the paintings fulfill their promise.

© 2008 Mario Naves

Exuberant Ill Will: The Paintings of Peter Saul

Peter Saul, Raccoons Paint a Picture (2011), acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 96″; courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

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The following review originally appeared in the May 1, 2009 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Peter Saul at Mary Boone Gallery (until April 28).

Bernie Madoff and his testicles make a fleeting appearance in Peter Saul’s exhibition of paintings and works-on-paper at David Nolan Gallery, and New Yorkers are poorer for it. Actually, it’s Mr. Madoff’s castration Mr. Saul depicts. Notwithstanding the artist’s typically over-the-top finger-pointing, the “Maddoff” drawings aren’t anywhere near as disgusting, funny or caustic as they should be.

The Ponzi King deserves, not commentary done on a deadline, but vitriol made gross and lurid through paint. Mr. Saul’s finicky style, with its innumerable pats of oversaturated color, is inherently anti-immediate; we’ll have to wait for his definitive take on capitalist excess and arrogance. But then, topicality isn’t Mr. Saul’s forte. Bile is.

For the last 50 years or so, he’s thrived on the stuff, and created a body of work that stands as a monument to garish, adolescent overkill. From his early, not un-fond forays into AbEx pastiche to the pseudo-pointillist cartoons for which he’s gained a significant following, Mr. Saul has trained his scatological eye on humankind’s failings and follies. Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, O. J. Simpson, Donald Duck, Jeffrey Dahmer and Newt Gingrich—in mortal combat with Little Orphan Annie, no less—have met with his ire.

Peter Saul, Peter Saul vs. Pop Art (2012), acrylic on canvas, 75″ x 72″; courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

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Mr. Saul has worked on themes both grand (totalitarianism, the ubiquity of racism and genocide) and trivial (zit-popping, nose-picking and Marcel Duchamp). Either way, he invests a given motif with gleeful and raucous overstatement. “I like the way [a] picture presents problems you have to deal with,” the artist, in an understated mood, told BOMB magazine. If there’s no particular breadth to Mr. Saul’s maliciousness, its unflagging nature is impressive in its purity.

Which is a not-so-roundabout way of saying that the exhibit is more of the same. The fleshy and contorted figures; the electric palette; the Silly Putty–like elisions of space; and an endearing weakness for the easy mark—Joe the Plumber no less than Bernie Madoff—the recent work demonstrates that Mr. Saul is as reliable a stylist as he is a misanthrope. Stalin and Mao make an appearance, as does the artist himself, brandishing a large pickle and running through a bowl of what appear to be SpaghettiO’s.

A keen, if dyspeptic, student of art history—Mr. Saul is, for example, a fan of 19th-century academic painting—he knowingly parodies Willem de Kooning’s slash-and-burn methodology in a canvas titled (what else?) Better Than De Kooning. A homage to Max Beckmann’s The Nightsimultaneously simplifies and amplifies that masterpiece’s grotesqueries without necessarily tapping into the German painter’s philosophical gravity. But that’s kind of the point: Mr. Saul prides himself on his amorality. He trades in across-the-board vituperation. He’s refreshingly un-p.c. that way. That’s why charges of, say, misogyny don’t phase him.

Not that he doesn’t ask for them. The unabashedly puerile Viva La Difference(2008) is a case in point. A kneeling man in purplish-pink pajamas—he resembles Derek Jeter, though the folks at Nolan emphatically state that it’s not—crouches by a bed, putting his arm around a multiethnic lump of flesh with six breasts, six vaginas, blond hair and no face. In the catalog interview, Mr. Saul’s posits the canvas as a bedroom emollient for the collector ready to snap it up. There’s no accounting for one’s tastes in aphrodisiacs. But neither is there any doubting the integrity of an artist who is, in the end, less cantankerous or scabrous than just plain lovable—at least for those of us with a weakness for exuberant ill will.

© 2009 Mario Naves

Lumpish, Monumental and Endearing: The Art of Douglas Florian

Douglas Florian, Dawn Thief , oil on wood, 18 x 18″; courtesy Bravin Lee Programs

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The following article originally appeared in the May 5, 2010 edition of City Arts. It is posted here on the occasion of Douglas Florian; Dawn Thieves at Bravin Lee Programs (until May 5).

You don’t need to know about Douglas Florian’s accomplishments as a poet and children’s book author to intuit the playful lyricism informing his works-on-paper, subject of an exhibition at BravinLee Programs in Chelsea.

In fact, a buoyant-bordering-on-goofy élan positively radiates from each page or, rather, from each paper bag. Recycling isn’t necessarily the reason Florian prefers working on this mundane material; rather, it’s the humbleness it confers upon, and elicits from, his painterly process. You can’t for a moment imagine Florian doing his thing on a virginal sheet of Arches paper. A classy support is contradictory to his loose-limbed and unassuming improvisations.

A self-proclaimed “abstract regressionist”–the work is, the artist tells us, “bottle-fed and battle-torn”–Florian creates heraldic images that simultaneously bring to mind the natural world, the Hebrew alphabet, Indian miniatures, graffiti and astronomical diagrams. Made with gouache and spare oddments of collage, the works are swiftly realized, but not always fast in final effect. For every and bye and bye, with its sweeping rush of gritty gray pigment, there are hypnotic pieces like QQ, wherein Florian channels both the cosmic and the microcellular with breathtaking economy.

Douglas Florian, Bewail and Weep (2010-2011), oil on wood, 24″ x 20″; courtesy Bravin Lee Programs

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Elsewhere, the alphabet is cut-and-cobbled, calligraphic forms are transformed into lumbering giants and errant lines spin spidery traceries of incident. Florian’s single-mindedness of purpose and wide-eyed sophistication is reminiscent of Paul Klee.

The palette tends toward earthy, but is given to flashes of exotic reds, pinks and purples, crystalline blues and encompassing yellows. The forms are lumpish in definition, monumental in scale and endearing in character. Would that the installation emphasized, rather than streamlined, each picture’s idiosyncrasies. But Florian’s wit and whimsy thrive all the same. This is a lovely and lilting exhibition.

© 2010 Mario Naves

“Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait as a Young Man (c. 1628-29), oil on panel, 22.6 x 18.7 cm.; courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Apples and Oranges—that’s a colleague’s alternate title for  Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has a point: What commonality is shared between history’s most humane artist and its most perfect? (Really, did anything Degas touch not turn to gold?)

Box office receipts may have prompted The Met, along with co-organizers The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, to mount this jewel-box exhibition. Place the name of either artist on a banner and a steady stream of visitors is guaranteed. Still, cynicism shouldn’t prevail—at least, not initially. Part of a curator’s job is to explore the possible and render it revelatory.

Turns out  Rembrandt and Degas  isn’t revelatory in the least. Sure, Degas made a copy of Rembrandt’s  Young Man in a Velvet Cap  (1637) and paid keen attention to the Dutch master’s distinctive way with line, light and “the depth he is able to achieve.” The Frenchman was a voracious student of tradition; it’s fair to say every artist Degas came into contact with was funneled through his steely, elegant intellect. Rembrandt was one amongst many, that’s all.

Edgar Degas, Self-Portrait (Ca. 1855-57), red chalk on laid paper, 31 x 23.3 cm.; courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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As a study in contrasts, the Met exhibition has its uses. Degas’ exercises in self-portraiture are heady and pitiless, their rigor is risky, pointed and sure. Psychological insight wasn’t alien to Degas’s vision, but neither was it a driving force. Rembrandt, on the other hand, couldn’t make a mark without embodying a distinctive and inquisitive generosity of spirit.

Even as a cocky young buck, Rembrandt was a mensch—take a look at the showy  Self-Portrait as a Young Man (1629). In it, the 23-year-old artist daubs oil paint with a brilliance that borders on the vulgar. Then check the gaze, hidden in shadow: Rembrandt is both startled and haunted—as if he had become aware of, and daunted by, his own boundless empathy. It’s a disquietingly naked moment.

Forget historical illumination: As a tidy array of exquisite little pictures, Rembrandt and Degas is a welcome anti-blockbuster of a show.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the March 6, 2012 edition of City Arts.

“American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, De Kooning and Their Cirlce, 1927-1942” at the Neuberger Museum of Art

John Graham, The White Pipe (1930), oil on canvas mounted on board, 31.1 x 43.2 cm.; courtesy the Grey Art Gallery, New York University

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What is there left to say about the New York School? Its advent, fruition, notoriety, and success are staples of twentieth-century art. So, too, is the pop-fueled backlash that followed on its heels and the daunting shadow Jackson Pollock and company continue to cast on world culture. Innumerable exhibitions, scholarly tracts, gossipy tell-alls, documentary films, and Hollywood biopics have delved into the whys, wherefores, and who’s who of this distinctly American phenomenon. In the past few years alone, the Museum of Modern Art, a significant arbiter of establishment taste, mounted a sprawling exhibition devoted to “Abstract Expressionist New York,” as well as a retrospective of one of its most revered figures, Willem de Kooning. The shows garnered huge crowds—in part, I think, because the museum tapped into a historical moment when art had not yet become a plaything for billionaires and a platform for theoreticians—when art was, in fact, a serious and ambitious pursuit.

Nostalgia isn’t the sole factor accounting for the pull Abstract Expressionism has on the popular imagination. Not a few masterworks populate the canon. Still, it’s prudent to be wary of misty or, in this case, hairy-chested notions of artistic integrity and the clichés they can engender. Truth be told, the New York School—or, at least, the typical accounting of its accomplishments—has been coasting on received wisdom for some time. Even the vogues of feminism, multiculturalism, or any extra-aestheticism you’d care to name haven’t truly shaken up the AbEx orthodoxy. Not a few admirers of the style found their enthusiasm reiterated—merely reiterated, one wants to add—by MOMA’s de Kooning show. It’s a good thing to celebrate important accomplishments; it’s a better thing to endow them with the force of revelation. Toeing the cultural line makes for handsome but humdrum bedfellows.

Gallery-goers expecting more of the same with “American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927–1942”1 will be pleasantly taken aback. The exhibition features the usual suspects, sure, but not the usual emphasis. To get an idea of how the curatorial team of William C. Agee, Irving Sandler, and Karen Wilkin pull off this feat, you’ll want to sit down with the catalog. In the essay “All for One: A Dedication to Modernism,” Wilkin—scholar, critic and a regular contributor to these pages—makes an intriguing aside regarding de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Noting that both men continued working on representational imagery even as they pursued abstraction, Wilkin admits being tempted to “speculate about what the evolution of modernist painting in New York might have been, had these two virtuosos of the enigmatic portrait not abandoned figuration.”

There are quarters of the art world where such a “what if?” might qualify as heresy. Wilkin isn’t alone in her speculations. In their respective essays, Agee, the Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College, and Sandler, author of the seminal work The Triumph of American Painting, touch on similar tangents. Agee spends a good amount of time pondering the egg—yes, the kind that comes by the dozen at your local supermarket. Tracing the motif from Piero’s Brera Madonna, in which an ostrich egg suspended over the heads of the Virgin and Child provides “the psychological center of the painting,” Agee brings it forward to an early still-life by de Kooning, and beyond. “The egg’s interchangeable role in both abstract and figurative works suggests . . . just how much de Kooning, [John] Graham and Gorky valued their figure compositions.” Stuart Davis, too, never lost sight of “the classic function of art—bold assimilation of the environment.”

The pivotal and, at times, causal relationship between observed phenomenon and abstraction in the work of the New York School has long been remarked upon. De Kooning never abandoned the human form, Pollock sought (and failed) to reappropriate it after his signature drip paintings, and Gorky’s abstractions, those lyrical elisions of biomorphic shape and washy veils of pigment, are nothing if not figure painting by other means. But what Agee, Sandler, and Wilkin have accomplished isn’t a wholesale revision of a standard historical narrative. It’s a deepening of the narrative’s locus. In doing so, they complicate and, given the exhibition’s basis in camaraderie, humanize its trajectory. The tone is set as one enters the exhibition. The first thing we encounter is a suite of portraits—some playful, others moody—by and of various participants in the art world of the time, including Adolph Gottlieb, Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Gorky. This note of intimacy is sustained throughout “American Vanguards.”

By concentrating on the cross-fertilization of (sometimes contradictory) artistic currents and temperaments, the organizers offer a “rightly deserve[d] celebration” of American art in an era typically dismissed as “backward-looking.” Politics are touched upon. How could they not be? The exhibition takes place during the Great Depression. “Socially aware” art, whether in the form of Regionalism or Social Realism, was deemed, by some anyway, the only parlance appropriate to the time. The philosophical struggles artists underwent in the attempt to square artistic choices in hard economic times were significant, much discussed, and distracting. But the American vanguard didn’t lose its focus. Davis, a one-time Marxist and dedicated political animal, put his studio priorities in order, arguing against the hoary bromides of Regionalism and insisting that aesthetics trump social issues. “Formal relations,” he wrote, “have another content which continues to have special meaning for us and this content can only be Art.” Gorky, in a deathless turn of phrase, dubbed Social Realism “a poor art for poor people.”

“American Vanguards” is centered on friendships predicated on artistic radicalism and—there’s no other way to put it, really—the American spirit. The curators infer that the two are, in the case of the four painters named in the exhibition’s subtitle, inextricable. Three of them were immigrants who, to one extent or another, reinvented themselves. Vosdanig Adoian came to the United States in 1920 and adopted the name “Arshile Gorky,” claiming to be Russian-born and a relative of the writer Maxim Gorky. De Kooning, born and trained in the Netherlands, arrived on these shores in 1926 as a stowaway on the S.S. Shelley. Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowski was born in Kiev, Ukraine to Polish nobility, studied law in Russia, and was later imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. Upon coming to America, he assumed the name “John Graham,” enrolled in the Art Students League, and became a go-to in progressive art circles. Davis, the only native-born member of “The Four Musketeers,” was as American as Mom, apple pie, and Louis Armstrong. It’s there to glean in his bluntly stated writings and, especially, the paintings—brash abstractions that, notwithstanding their strong ties to European precedent, can only be considered out-and-out American.

The Dumas references can be traced to a comment made by de Kooning and were indicative of the ties between Graham, Davis, and Gorky, “the three smartest guys on the scene.” (De Kooning was particularly close to Gorky, dubbing the Armenian’s Union Square studio the place “[I] came from.”) They were, as Wilkin notes, an “unlikely trio” in terms of appearance and sensibility. At this date, it can be hard to imagine how Davis and the enigmatic Graham could be fast friends—their visions seem diametrically opposed. The older American held no brief for Surrealism’s woozier tangents. Graham, in contrast, was intrigued by and later fully embraced them. Yet at the onset of their careers, the Four Musketeers were united by an unshakable sense of purpose. “American Vanguards” is installed with an eye toward underscoring that bond. Discrete themes—the still-life, the city, abstraction (both pure and not), and what can only be termed Ingres-worship—are grouped together with a keen sense of rhythm and commonality. Continuity is the leitmotif, and it’s elaborated upon with understated and, at moments, thrilling nuance.

The curators have a hard time not singling out Graham for special emphasis. Or, perhaps it is better said, Graham emerges as the most individual of the musketeers. Certainly, the pictures—invariably sophisticated, wildly uneven, and hugely peculiar—make their presence felt. Taking into account his role as Modernist proselytizer and his direct contact with the Parisian avant-garde, Graham proved a magnetic and inescapable figure. He had pull, too: In 1942, Graham organized “French and American Paintings,” an exhibition at McMillen, Inc. that mixed and matched Modernist giants like Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, and de Chirico with Davis, Pollock, de Kooning, “Lenore Krasner,” and others. Graham’s theorizing can be found in System and Dialectics of Art, a 1937 tract that embodies his passions to bracing, if at times, obtuse effect. (“What is American Art?” It is “art made in America by American artists.”) Though he would eventually repudiate Picasso, the touchstone for all the artists featured in “American Vanguards,” Graham’s contrarian and, at times, frustrating example does answer Agee’s call for “a new classicism, an alternate modernism.”

“American Vanguards” features a wonderful and wonderfully unexpected array of objects. It comes as something of a relief, in fact, that many of the paintings, drawings, and sculptures are off the well-beaten path of American masterworks (though there are, admittedly, a handful on view, particularly in the case of Davis). Graham’s The Yellow Bird (c. 1930) is a lumpishly elegant Cubist still-life that foreshadows the nubbly obsessions of Richard Pousette-Dart. An untitled de Kooning canvas (c. 1934) is almost hallucinatory in its brutish concentration of form and figuration. Elsewhere, the exhibition’s purview is broadened with works by Gottlieb, Pollock, Dorothy Dehner, Jan Matulka, Lee Krasner, and David Smith, who sneaks in the back door as the fifth and possibly most energetic musketeer. The final gallery is largely dedicated to Smith’s welded steel sculptures and it’s fairly engaging. As someone who has always considered Smith a painter-in-sculptor’s-drag, I found this particular arrangement of pieces the most convincing argument for his shambling brand of scrapyard Constructivism. This is but one of many understated pleasures in an exhibition that does much to illuminate a pivotal and much misunderstood juncture in American art.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the March 2012 edition of The New Criterion.

“Storytelling in Japanese Art” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Shibata Zeshin, The Ibakari Demon (c. 1839-40), ink and color on paper, 51-1/2″ x 62-1/2″; courtesy the Klaus F. Naumann Collection

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The advent and subsequent triumph of modernism did much to diminish the role of narrative in the visual arts, insisting, as it did, that the exigencies of craft should take precedence over anything smacking of literature. But modernism is an historical blip—a significant blip, mind you, but a blip all the same. Narratives have dominated world art. To ignore (or downplay) as much is to mistake The Annunciation for a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

That last line is from the post-impressionist painter Maurice Denis, and it iterates the feet-on-the-ground essence of picture making. But it also throws out the allusive and, yes, the literary baby with the bathwater. Thoughts about narrative—about temporal flow, cultural myths and the human imagination’s range, influence and probity—came to mind while viewing Storytelling in Japanese Art, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Which isn’t to suggest that the colors and flat surfaces assembled by the painters and sculptors featured in Storytelling don’t merit attention. A story is captivating to the extent to which it is told well, and the artisans responsible for this panel painting, that devotional carving or emaki, a form of illuminated handscroll, tell them well indeed.

Anonymous, Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine (13th century), ink, color and cut gold on paper, total length of scroll: 11-5/16″ x 22′ 7-7/16″; courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

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In the work, elaborate stylization coexists with acute observation, generalization with specificity, charm with gravity. Hell is rendered in burnt copper tonalities and whiplash rhythms; the seasons with lucid economy. Shibata Zeshin’s The Ibaraki Demon (ca. 1839–40), the closest Storytelling comes to a showstopper, is a miraculous confluence of line, gesture, character and motion.

Motion as a string of events unfolding in time presides, even if it’s inhibited by curatorial prudence. Were Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine or other emaki “read” as originally intended—unrolled by hand—they wouldn’t be long on this earth.

Still and all, Storytelling is a rich, engrossing and provocative brew. If only for the simultaneously occurring narratives in Kano Jinnojo’s kaleidoscopic The Battles of Ichinotani and Yashima (c. early 17th century), the show would be worth a trip. But it contains infinitely more than that.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the February 22, 2012 edition of City Arts.

Hester Simpson at Ricco Maresca Gallery

Hester Simpson, Lush Life (2011), acrylic on panel, 12″ x 12″; courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

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The following essay is included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Hester Simpson at Ricco Maresca Gallery (until April 7, 2012).

Having followed the art of Hester Simpson for twenty-some years, I can, without hyperbole or equivocation, state the following about her abstract paintings: Beauty is guaranteed. “Beauty”, in this case, is a condition of an artist who has mastered her craft while remaining open to, and driven by, its challenges.

Simpson coaxes from acrylic paint a remarkable suppleness—remarkable because synthetic materials don’t inherently lend themselves to sumptuousness of tone and surface. Her patterned geometric shapes and calligraphic structures are luxurious in a way that seems incommensurate with the medium. The surfaces of Simpson’s paintings have a distinct tactility–a warmth and luster–that is akin to, if not flesh, then something close to it. Ask yourself this: When was the last time you longed to trace your fingertips over plastic? The paintings beg for an appreciative touch.

Through ongoing and thorough experimentation, Simpson has discovered technical means by which acrylic paint is both a sensual substance and the carrier of metaphor–of sensations that transcend the blunt physical fact of mere stuff. Big deal, right? We should expect the same from any painter worth her salt. But in an age when virtual wizardry can obscure material pleasure, Simpson’s achievement–a kind of alchemy, really–is worth elaborating upon. The pictures, though hushed in demeanor, are adamantly anti-virtual.

Hester Simpson, Green Links (2011), acrylic on panel, 5″ x 5″; courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

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There is, of necessity, a prosaic side to life in the studio–stretching canvases, washing brushes, mixing pigments and allowing the requisite time for paint to gel and harden. Simpson can undoubtedly enumerate the recipes and procedures by which she creates her signature runs of pictorial incident. But if the images were little more than compendiums of expertly contrived effects, it’s unlikely they would be as absorbing. Creating fetching surfaces is vital, absolutely. But endowing them with metaphorical resonance is another thing–and no mean feat. Simpson has, with impressive consistency, proved up to the task.

The paintings offer a vivid rejoinder to those skeptical of abstraction’s ability to embody specific states of being and emotion. Highflown talk has surrounded abstract painting from its inception; Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian talked up a good—if, at times, specious–game. It is heartening, then, to learn that Simpson approaches her art with marked humility. The work (she writes) celebrates “the ordinary rather than the dramatic”, “acknowledging imperfection [and] reflecting the lived life.” Abstraction is as much, and perhaps more, a matter of the here and now than of metaphysical aspiration. Simpson is an abstractionist who keeps her feet on the ground.

Which isn’t to say the work elides the metaphysical. It’s just that Simpson’s approach is absent of portent and pretension. A degree of sobriety, of practicality and routine, inflects the paintings, and can be gleaned in the manner in which countless scrims of paint have patiently been layered. (The waxy accumulations of pigment on the edges of each canvas also testify to Simpson’s painterly tenacity.) But sobriety doesn’t define the art. Its rhythms are too hypnotic, the palette vivid-bordering-on-libidinous and the imagery palpably human in its heady embrace of “imperfection”. A Freudian could hold forth on the hard-won synthesis of id and super-ego—minus, that is, the ego’s supplications. The rest of us will marvel at the détente brought to the dialogue between chaos and order. That it’s barely a détente at all is what makes the pictures thrilling.

Hester Simpson, Rip Tide (2011), acrylic on panel, 12″ x 12″; courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

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Gallery-goers in need of a quick fix will find themselves unsettled by Simpson’s paintings; they don’t lend themselves to a once-over-lightly treatment. True, the work’s appeal is fairly patent–only a theory-addled curmudgeon could deny the instantaneous attraction of Simpson’s palette, with its lucid array of radiant reds, breezy purples, aquamarines and bottomless blues. But give this or that image the time of day and you’ll be pulled into a slippery, allusive and, at times, unnerving experience. Simpson’s looping skeins of color mutate and shimmy before our eyes, establishing connections, setting up rhythms, missing a beat and then righting themselves as if—well, as if by magic. Simpson the paint-handler doesn’t overplay her hand.

The ease with which the paintings announce themselves is an illusion, of course. (Simpson would be the first to admit as much.) That’s the point. Was it Fred Astaire who claimed “the trick” was in not letting the audience see you sweat? Much in the way Astaire defied the burdens of gravity and the limitations of the body, Simpson brings a profound calm to images that have been realized through a prolonged, sometimes exasperating and utterly necessary process. The work is nothing if it hasn’t encapsulated the sundry decisions that went into its making—in the application of a particular color, say, or the constant accounting for shifts in tempo and space. Simpson doesn’t advertise her labors. The painting is the thing—an entity with its own peculiar and independent life.

Simpson’s recent efforts are more of the same and a brand new thing—familiar turf that has been extended, made vibrant and, in the end, rendered altogether unfamiliar. Constitutionally incapable of coasting on her considerable expertise, Simpson has deepened the scope of her art even as she distills the particulars of its vocabulary. Paintings like Green Links, Seamless and the whiplash intricacies of Lush Life (all 2011), not only give a good name to the notion of continuity of vision, they give it body, truth and, yes, beauty. The latter is a rare and welcome entity, as recognizable (and undeniable) as it is impossible to define. That Simpson has embodied not a few of beauty’s many contradictions is ample reason to relish her hard-won and stunning achievement.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Andrew Lenaghan at George Adams Gallery

Andrew Lenaghan, New Stadium, Atlantic Avenue (2011), oil on panel, 24″ x 32″; courtesy George Adams Gallery

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While looking at Andrew Lenaghan’s paintings at George Adams Gallery, I overhead a visitor exclaim, “New York has never looked so lovely.”

Really? There’s much to commend in the work, not least its crisp light and keen sense of place. But “lovely”? That’s such a mild adjective for pictures whose verisimilitude is inseparable from a pointed and, at moments, bristly animism.

Lenaghan has long been drawn to areas of Brooklyn that, when not mundane, are distinctly unlovely—a graffiti-laden building in Greenpoint, anonymous industrial structures in Williamsburg and the stained and mottled roadway bordering the Bedford Avenue Armory. Family is also a mainstay—in one painting, children watch Dora the Explorer; in another, a woman stands by the mirror in an unkempt bedroom. Geometry, as it informs the city’s infrastructure, our homes and backyards, is important, too.

Andrew Lenaghan, Sarah and Charlie Upstairs (2011), oil on panel, 24″ x 32″; courtesy George Adams Gallery

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In their details, the picturesque and domestic are rendered with a skittering line that accumulates—sometimes tenuously, always convincingly—into solid form. The cobblestone walkway at the bottom right of New Stadium, Atlantic Avenue (2011) is a particularly telling marker of Lenaghan’s pictorial abilities; the way in which arrant mark-making and fidelity to observation are navigated is emblematic of his bracing and flinty intellect.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the February 8, 2012 edition of City Arts.

Howard Buchwald at Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Howard Buchwald, In or Out (2008), acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 120″; courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

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The paintings of Howard Buchwald, on display at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, are as much a call to arms as an exhibition of art.

Listen to Buchwald tell it: “Painting is not in the service of some purpose, objective, image or idea residing outside, prior to, and independent of the specific work”. Momentarily commiserating with the aesthetically challenged, he does admit to “understand[ing] the anxiety that direct looking and feeling still produce.”

But? Any “attempt to overcome this feeling by supplanting what is right there . . . is largely beside the point.” Don’t come to Buchwald, then, with high-flown theoretical flourishes or pressing sociological agendas. Codifying art by means other than direct visual engagement stifles its integrity. Why don a straitjacket when you’re given free agency?

Howard Buchwald, Mapped (Large Red) (2010), acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 90″; courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

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A fixture of the New York art world, Buchwald believes in the eye above all. His rigorously choreographed arrays of wriggling, rubbery lines and declarative, eye-rattling colors couldn’t kowtow to extra-aesthetic imperative if they wanted to. The rhythms are too headstrong, the compositions too unpredictable, the sense of purpose fiercely independent.

The pictures have the graphic clarity of superhero comics—you know, KA-POW!—and recall The New York School in their scale and ambition, though Buchwald’s firm sense of humor is entirely his own. The black line muscling its way through Mapped (Large Red) (2010) would steal the show if it weren’t for the acidic tonalities of In Or Out (2008), a monumental canvas whose title is both plain-as-day descriptive and a challenge to the viewer.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the February 8, 2012 edition of City Arts.

Tenacity Is The Rule: The Paintings of Bill Jensen

Bill Jensen, Black Sorrow (I) (2010-2011), oil on linen, 53″ x 42″; courtesy Cheim & Read

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The following review was published in the March 11, 2007 edition of The New York Observer. It is posted here on the occasion of Bill Jensen at Cheim & Read (until February 18).

If Bill Jensen weren’t capable of making such awful paintings, his good ones wouldn’t be worth taking so seriously. His improvisatory method is inherently hit-or-miss. His scraped and scarred canvases often fail to distinguish between the grace note and the heavy hand.

Case in point: the forbiddingly dark canvases in the introductory gallery of Cheim & Read in Chelsea, where his recent efforts are on display. The paintings are reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s late attempts to channel an existential sublime. To Mr. Jensen’s credit, they aren’t as pretentious—if only because they’re hardly anything at all. They’re mainly comprised of barely perceptible fluctuations in patina. One gallery-goer, with a poetic flourish, dubbed them “19th-century landscapes engulfed in doom.”

The paintings do recall the moody scenes of Albert Pinkham Ryder, long a favorite of Mr. Jensen’s, but mostly the Ryders that have suffered catastrophic discoloration due to his notoriously blasé attitude toward materials. Sometimes subtlety is too subtle to bother with.

But that’s a handful of pictures. The rest of the 20 or so canvases, while uneven in quality, are less stark and earnest. They’re earnest enough, mind you, but Mr. Jensen’s labor-intensive resolve is bolstered by colors startlingly new to his work.

A painter for whom the natural world is less a recognizable subject than an ominous brew of portent, Mr. Jensen’s early palette was earthy to a fault. Its unimaginative tones tended to muffle, if not outright stifle, inventive arrays of marks, textures and shapes. Given Mr. Jensen’s desire to tap into nature’s grit and physicality, such a palette was appropriate. But sometimes mud is just mud.

So where did the shrieking primary colors come from? It’s as if someone turned on the lights in Mr. Jensen’s studio—or maybe the fireplace. Deep and lustrous blues, yellows and reds, remarkable for their relative clarity, burn with harsh intensity.

Bill Jensen, Dutch Rain (2010), oil on linen, 26″ x 20″; courtesy Cheim & Read

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That’s the most of it, but not all of it: Silky purples, fluctuating runs of rust and unsullied greens evince the exhilaration of a painter who’s finally getting a handle on the expressive capabilities of color.

Most surprising, because radically atypical, is the milky blur cascading through Luohan (Light Step) (2003-6)—a color that’s almost, but not really, whitish purple. Elusive and unnamable hues are an indicator of Mr. Jensen’s growth—at last!—as a colorist.

All of which would be meaningless if the palette were divorced from his process and rhythm. It’s not: Color thrives as an integral component of the whole. An admirer of Chinese calligraphy, Mr. Jensen’s canvases don’t achieve its elegance or fluidity (an attribute true of his works-on-paper), but his whiplash brushstroke does embody its slippery allusiveness.

Obscured behind abraded veils of color, Mr. Jensen’s trails of oil paint bristle and twist, at times with bracing recklessness. The signature small formats—37 by 28 inches is stretching it for Mr. Jensen—attain a monumental effect. Intuitively gauging the relationship between gesture and surface area, he creates a heaving internal scale that belies each painting’s modest size.

Mr. Jensen’s best pictures—Scorched Field (2004-5), Luohan (Persona) (2005-6), Bog (2004-6), The Red House (Jimi Hendrix) (2004-6) and the evanescent St. Sebastian (2005-6)—smolder as if they were lit from within; a glow, sometimes corrosive, emanates from beneath innumerable scrims of paint. It’s hard to know where Mr. Jensen’s densely layered paintings begin and end. Deciphering his tracks is pointless. The images can’t be unraveled; Mr. Jensen’s approach defies practical logic. The paintings coalesce in ways that mystify the audience and, as is evident from their spontaneity and momentum, the artist himself.

Bill Jensen, Luohan (Hungry Ghosts) (2011), oil on linen, 32″ x 28″; courtesy Cheim & Read

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In the catalog essay “The Elbow and The Milky Way,” the critic John Yau writes of how Mr. Jensen’s paintings “cannot be seen all at once … [and] must be experienced both visually and physically.” They achieve a “state of simultaneity, of a complexity that engages more than just our eyes.” So far, so good—but then Mr. Yau insists that Mr. Jensen shares a “philosophical basis” with Jasper Johns and Robert Ryman.

Say what? The stock in trade of Mr. Johns and Mr. Ryman, a drably pedantic literalism, couldn’t be further from Mr. Jensen’s scrabbled poetry. The pictorial seductions (such as they are) found in Mr. Johns’ and Mr. Ryman’s paintings are deracinated, banal and short-lived. Mr. Jensen’s paintings are full-bodied, bottomless and repay repeated looking.

Mr. Yau’s essay is otherwise clear-eyed and perceptive. Likening Mr. Jensen to Jackson Pollock is right, particularly given the urgency bordering on desperation that marks, if not outright defines, the oeuvres of both men. Mr. Yau sharpens the focus on the pictorial hurdles that Mr. Jensen sets for himself and, not least, his “maverick” status.

In that regard, Mr. Jensen is quintessentially American. He follows in the proud tradition of headstrong individuals, unapologetic eccentrics and outright loners punctuating the history of American art, such as Thomas Eakins, Louis Eilshemius, Arthur Dove, and peers like Pat Adams, David Fertig and Andrew Masullo.

Self-reliance may be the American way, but it’s not without social and political liabilities. In art, it’s less fraught with consequence, so it can provide a heady sense of possibility. The “wild, anarchic beauty” of Mr. Jensen’s art (the dead-on phrase is courtesy of Mr. Yau) underlines that truth and is evident—thrillingly, ineradicably—in the artist’s successes as well as his failures.

We shouldn’t ignore (or forgive) the frequency of the latter. Mr. Jensen wouldn’t have integrity if he didn’t risk falling on his ass. Nor would he make good paintings if he didn’t dust himself off and give it another go. Tenacity is the rule. Mr. Jensen is the real thing, and all the more rare because of it.

© 2007 Mario Naves