April 11 – May 12, 2013
83 Grand Street
New York City, 212 279 9219

Installation shot of Stanley Whitney: Other Colors I Forget at Team Gallery, New York, April 11 to May 12, 2013

Stanley Whitney has over five decades painting behind him.  The seven large luscious paintings currently on view at Team Gallery constitute his 28th solo exhibition, so it is maybe little wonder that, at this point, his technique appears effortless.   Indeed, the work displays a beguiling simplicity. There are sixteen or twenty rectangles in each square painting and they are, more or less, evenly apportioned four down and four, or five, across – not by ruled measurement but an equally exact though ineffable idea of rightness. These are formal paintings, grids of quadrilaterals, but casual and unpretentious, like a conversation one might have about the checkered tablecloths at your favorite trattoria.  The same sense of ease holds true for the paint application, and for a few moments one might get an impression that the brushwork is almost careless.  This is, however, a manifestly false reading and it quickly transmutes into an awareness of acute fastidiousness.

Take the largest work, for instance, the eight-foot square Bodyheat, (2012).  Hanging solo in the rear gallery, where it can enjoy the most controlled lighting, it dominates the small room with a quiet authority and grace.  The rectangles, arrayed in this particular piece five across and four down, are topped and separated on the horizontal by thick stripes that simultaneously delineate and activate the grid.  For the most part the colors directly abut, shoulder to shoulder, but in a few cases an additional fat stroke puts in extra duty.  In the top row a slash of salmon keeps the orange square from combining with the orange line just below, while in the second row from the top, a scumble of slightly darker blue achieves the same end between the blue rectangle and all but identically-colored line below.

Stanley Whitney, Bodyheat, 2012. Oil on linen, 96 x 96 inches. Courtesy of Team Gallery, New York

Conversely, the unusual blended stroke dividing the yellow from the green serves to modulate and mellow what would otherwise be a potentially harsh juxtaposition. And in the same vein, a wash of blue at the top of the pale yellow/green square in the bottom row eases the dialogue between it and the dark blue stripe above it.  Meanwhile, in the bottom right corner the paint in the lower half of the black square dissolves in drips, a permanent history of its interaction with the wet medium.

The cumulative effect of these additional strokes and wet drips is to highlight their outlier nature: there is not a single unintentional mark in any of these paintings.  Echoing this low key but firm control are the colors themselves: blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown, black and white.  Such a simple list brings to mind the basic box of 8 Crayola Crayons.  As elsewhere, sustained looking quickly alters this perception, each mottled or extenuated color being an overlay of another, the palette expanding to six variations of green, five of red, and so forth.  We are made aware that individual colors mean naught, while the syntax and syncopation of the colors are everything.

Whitney nonchalantly weaves together nearly invisible yet precise technique, lightly imposed yet persistent structure, and a simple yet sophisticated use of color. The resulting works are as playful as they are powerful as they flutter and wave against the cool white walls whose flatness they eviscerate with hardly a sigh.

Denyse Thomasos in front of her monumental wall-painting at Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn in 2006. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg Inc.

Denyse Thomasos, a painter whose works are at once conceptual and abstract, intimate and monumental, died suddenly on Thursday, July 19th.   The cause was an unexpected allergic reaction during a medical procedure.  She was 47

Born in Trinidad, her family moved to Canada when she was 6 years old.  She developed an interest in art early on, and in 1987 she graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in painting and art history. She then attended Yale, where she received an MFA in painting and sculpture in 1989. Upon graduating, she immediately moved to New York and began teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.  In 1995 she became an Assistant Professor in Painting at Rutgers.

Thomasos’s bold, sometimes monochromatic, gridded abstractions have a visceral kick that immediately draws the viewer in.  Layered fat strokes of acrylic paint hover in a constant state of flux, sketching out the frameworks of architectural structures that exist on the edge, caught precariously between full formation and total collapse. Though successful on a purely abstract level, Thomasos spoke of more earthbound, often darker themes when asked to discuss her work.  A frequent world traveler, she spent a great deal of time studying prisons and slums, looking at ways disenfranchised people are constrained, both physically and socially.  Coming from a privileged background herself, she struggled intellectually and emotionally to understand how culture can warp self-perception and, ultimately, destiny.  Taken in this light, the super-enlarged crosshatches cascading across her canvases are not a loose representation of actual places, but an attempt, repeated consistently over many years, to create a multi-dimensional map for understanding the world as we live in it.  The intensity and passion Thomasos brought to this project, as much as the subject itself, are inextricably woven into the palpable frisson her paintings elicit.

Denyse Thomasos in her studio, 2006. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg Inc.

Thomasos exhibited regularly and had over 15 solo-exhibitions. Olga Korper began representing her in Toronto from 1994, and Lennon Weinberg in New York from 1996, and both continue to do so.  She received numerous prestigious awards and grants, including multiple grants from the Canada Council, a regional NEA grant, two Pew Fellowships, grants and residencies from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Ucross, NYFA, the Guggenheim, Marie Walsh Sharpe, the Bellagio Foundation, P.S. 122, Mac Dowell, and Yaddo.  Her work is in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, along with many other major corporate collections.  Reviews of her shows appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artnews, Artforum, Art in America, and the Village Voice among many others.

Interviewed for Rutgers Observer TV in February 2011, Thomasos said, “I have had the most magical life I could imagine…every dream I’ve ever dreamed has come true…to travel around the world.  Being an artist you have the opportunity to live a creative life every minute of the day…it feels like I’m an explorer…and I get to translate everything that I’ve seen, show it in a gallery, and get feedback from audiences. I love every aspect of it…”

Thomasos is survived by her husband, documentary filmmaker Samien Priester, and her daughter, Syann.

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March 1 – April 14, 2012
514 West 25th Street , between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

Harriet Korman, Converge, 2011. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, inc.

For more than three decades, Harriet Korman has been on a mission to strip her work down to its irreducible elements. The current exhibition of thirteen modestly-sized yet surprisingly monumental paintings finds her boiling away what little fat remained of her vision. Those familiar with her work might have thought there was not much left to do without, as her previous exhibition featured simple biomorphic shapes rendered in solid blocks of color sans shadow, overlap, or dimensionality.  As it turns out, for Korman curved lines are expendable too.

Replacing the swooping forms of the preceding works is a series of triangles within grids of rectangles, with patterns and layouts resembling a child’s first geometric coloring book.  The resulting deadpan compositions work decisively to undermine the viewer’s ability to project meaning–subjective or otherwise.  In short, by deleting curves along with their subtle underlying hint of personality, Korman’s paintings appear to a startling degree to be purely objective.

There is another curious element to these artworks that may at first elude notice, so infrequently is it a factor: they are 100% flat.  In his famous 1955 essay “Modernist Painting”, Clement Greenberg suggested that to move forward painting should eschew the traditional depiction of space in favor of embracing the reality of the essential flatness of the painting surface.  Yet while this concept has found a secure place in the practice of art, it is hard to name abstract painters from Greenberg’s time to ours whose paintings actually appear without any illusion of visual depth.  Overwhelmingly, from Pollock’s drips to Chris Martin’s slavered brushwork, the perception of space, of foreground and background persists.  Not so in Korman’s work, which refuses to imply anything beyond the surface, adamantly inhabiting a single plane of existence.

Harriet Korman, Convergence, 2011. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, inc.

What remains?  Denuded of meaningful subject, other than the painting itself, or of figure/ground relationship, or of any of the content available to traditional depictive strategies, Korman bets everything on the three things left: color, brushwork, and line.   Color, naturally, starts off the conversation as it reaches out from the greatest distance. Indeed Converge, 2011, beckons convincingly all the way from the far back wall of the long floor-through gallery space.  Like everything else in this body of work, Korman favors a simple, rather than simplistic, palette.  Luminous variations of blues, reds, yellows, greens, and oranges predominate, rounded out with violets and tertiary red-browns.  Each solid color, subtly fluctuating, is applied with a careful but not overly fussy touch.  The oil is not strictly speaking a wash, but is thin enough to allow the ground to abet the painting’s substantial glow.  If one looks closely, one can discern the elegant yet matter of fact brushstrokes.

Once you get close to the brushwork, the sensitivity of Korman’s minimal draftsmanship reveals itself.  For whether the artist creates the under-drawing defining the shapes with a straightedge or not, it is clear that each tenuous border is painted without one – the color gently pulled to obey by Korman’s hyperconscious hand.  This tremolo effect, though barely perceptible, supplies the paintings with their undeniable warmth and humanity.  So, although what remains is reductive in the extreme, there is material aplenty for deep meditation on what painting can achieve.

March 1 to March 31, 2012
?532 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 367-9663

Ellen Berkenblit has been confounding expectations since her first solo show in 1984, a trend that happily extends to her current exhibition. Her dissonant, emotionally charged palette, with dark colors that would be at home in an Ernst Kirchner, is pushed to extremes in 20 new paintings filling Anton Kern’s cavernous space.  And intense palette is just an opening salvo, for while riffing on her established lexicon of female profiles (with a high-heeled leg or two thrown into the mix), Berkenblit manages to flip the traditional figure/ground relationship literally on its head.

Ellen Berkenblit, Broken Pane of Frosted Glass, 2012. Oil and charcoal on linen, 94 x 76 1/4 inches. Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York

One is immediately aware that there is something especially unsettling going on here.  The regular heroine of her past work – she of the bobbed nose, Betty Boop eyes, and shy demeanor – has been replaced.  In her stead is a pointy-nosed, gap-toothed, grinning lass, her flying blond hair – pink ribbon notwithstanding –displaying an undeniably greenish tinge.  Witch imagery, invoking tangential thoughts of spells, altered states, and female power, is alluded to but ultimately not insisted upon.

The main character’s changed appearance, while noteworthy, is not disturbing. Rather, it is her now extremely casual relationship with gravity.  Whereas previously Berkenblit’s figures existed, for the most part, in a world that recognized the existence of gravity and corresponded to traditional notions of top and bottom, her new heroine might enter the paintings from any angle: upper right or left or even, à la Georg Baselitz, from the top.  Looking at one particular installation of three larger paintings, it is hard not to resist seeing her blond protagonist doing a full loop-de-loop.

This is about more than figures in flight.  There is a conceptual inversion at play, recalling for this reviewer Shusaku Arakawa’s 1970s series of paintings combining text with colors in which legibility was undermined by the image’s visual logic.  In a similar way, looking at Berkenblit’s Broken Pane of Frosted Glass, 2012, there is a natural urge to isolate, identify, and create a narrative from the various elements: face, quarter moons, stars, leg, high-heel.  But, as with the Arakawa’s, the colors continually take precedent and pull the viewer’s eye contrary to representational logic.  The dichotomy created between figuration and abstraction simply refuses to coalesce, a frisson that supercharges the surface: it is not just the heroine of the paintings doing back-flips, but the entire figure-ground relationship.

Berkenblit has never shied away from experimentation and risk in her work.  In one past series she painted on metal grates (a series of works that looks increasingly better in retrospect) and she has worked exclusively in black and white for an entire exhibition.  This latest body of work consolidates a decade of her thinking about color, image, narration, and abstraction, the resulting optical turmoil leading to visual pleasures exciting and wild.

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October 20, 2010 – January 9, 2011
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

[Exhibition seen earlier at Tate Modern, London; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Los Angeles County Museum of Art.]

John Baldessari, Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich), 1976. Gelatin silver print with collage on board, 24-1/8 x 36 inches. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City © John Baldessari

We expect art today to be portable.  We believe that a painting, properly installed, will have a similar effect on us regardless of what city we are seeing it in.  Yet seeing the Baldessari retrospective in Los Angeles and New York were palpably different experiences for this viewer, with the LACMA presentation making a far more favorable impression.

Both installations were, without question, well done.  And while the Metropolitan left out a few works that were included in the LACMA show, it too included the key works presented in chronological order.  So the only real differences, then, are the spaces and cities themselves. LACMA’s exhibition used its new Renzo Piano-designed building, which features spacious, naturally lit galleries, modulated via Piano’s signature louver system, throughout its top floor main exhibition area.   The ample, light infused rooms evoke a subtle but unmistakable feeling of being outdoors.

John Baldessari, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966–1968. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 56-1/2 inches. The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica © John Baldessari

Which brings us back to Baldessari.  Baldessari was among a group of California artists – others include Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin – who emerged from a local variety of Pop Art in the 1960s.  A key attribute of this group was to question authority via conceptual practices, and in this Baldessari excelled from the beginning. Take, for example, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966-68. It presents itself as a simple yellow and black painting spelling out three bullet-points of advice, yet it plays a strange game.  Like Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe,  it is a painting purporting to be a sign, not a painting.  It contains none of the images it declares are essential to its own success.  And while the work is inherently critical of mass culture it is not, in fact, critical of the viewer but instead depends on the viewer’s complicity to achieve its effect.

Requiring the viewer’s participation is, by implication, also to insist on the egalitarian nature of art.  For Baldessari this manifests on a number of levels, working to undermine not only the idea of a privileged maker/viewer scenario, but also the concept of hierarchy in the works.  In Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich), 1977, for instance, an appropriated movie still collides, literally, with a large white abstract shape (or is that just a negative space?) confounding meaning while inducing drama.   Conversely, in Prima Facie (Fifth State): Warm Brownie/American Cheese/Carrot Stick/Black Bean Soup/Perky Peach/Leek, 2006, the artist sets up a faux color chart which passive-aggressively asks the viewer for their thoughts on minimalist art and what, if anything, color actually means.

Motion is pivotal in all of these works, although sometimes, as in Baldessari’s videos, the movement comes courtesy of the actors on the screen rather than the viewer.  In the deadpan and decidedly Sisyphean Six Colorful Inside Jobs, 1977, a camera stares down god-like from above as a man paints an entire room first red, then in quick succession orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.  Watching him paint, you think at first that he has painted himself into a corner, only to see a hidden door open to provide escape from the claustrophobic environment.

In a way, this mirrors Baldessari’s own escape from the confinement of being locked to a particular style, medium, or definition of art, or even, on a more quotidian level, of being forced to spend his time inside a traditional artist’s studio.  Conceptually and literally, Baldessari wants to go outside to look for ideas and meaning.  Which takes us back to why seeing this retrospective at the LACMA venue provided such a different experience.  Being outside, specifically outside in southern California, is to be immersed in the hit-the-road-and-find-yourself car culture from which Baldessari’s work could find the essential freedom and context necessary for its growth.

The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January, 1963, presented as 32 photographs in a grid, speaks eloquently of this.  The photographs impart intimations of what is to come. Motion, intrinsic to all of Baldessari’s work, is both literal and implied, as the trucks, after all, will be passed.

its unadorned simplicity of conception and its systematic, yet matter of fact cropping, The Backs of All Trucks… is pure Baldessari. His quest for discovery is transformed into a road trip, and in a small red roadster to boot.  This is in itself so quintessentially Californian, for nowhere else was this iconic part of the American dream of finding oneself in, and through, the landscape so pursued and distilled.   As you walk through this forty-year retrospective you realize that if there is one true thing you can say about John Baldessari, it is that he has always been on the move, determined to explore everything he finds along the way.  It’s been an inspired trip so far.

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Guillermo Kahlo, Self-Portrait. nd. Reproduced in the book under review.

What has been selected for this volume, under the guidance of Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, is nothing short of a revelation.  Divided into seven sections—“The Origins,” “Father,” “The Casa Azul,” “Broken Body,” “Love,” “Photography,” and “Political Struggle” —each accompanied by a short, concise essay, Frida Kahlo: Her Photos offers a panoramic view of the artist’s life, interests, and milieu.   It’s all there, Kahlo’s grandparents, her parents and siblings, her friends and lovers, and, it would seem, any and all of the assorted important people who passed through Mexico during the middle years of the 20^th century.  There is Trotsky, of course, but also Isamu Noguchi (photographed by Edward Weston), Dolores del Rio, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Ford, and Sergei Eisenstein to name but a few.

But even among this amazing group of personages, one stands apart: Guillermo Kahlo, the artist’s father.  A professional photographer himself, his influence on Frida is made crystalline through the dozens of photos by him and of him.  It is not just the straight-ahead, confrontational gaze clearly presaging his daughter’s favored compositional device; it is the undeniable modernist sensibility present from some of the earliest works forward.  In photo after photo, we witness an artist who is self-aware, at times bemused, at other times deeply self-critical.  Many of his self-portraits are nearly clinical in their unvarnished documentation; we watch as he ages from dashing young man to middle-aged stolid father to world-weary elder.  The last image, dated 1932, shows him looking frail, with white hair and cigarette in hand, and has the words “Guillermo Kahlo, after crying” written in ink across the bottom.  What talent Frida inherited from her father may be an open question, but that she absorbed his modernism and probing psychology, the key things at the very heart of her, there can be no debate.

The reasons Diego Rivera thought this photo archive should be hidden for a time are not contained in this volume.  Perhaps there are other images that were kept out that would answer this question and perhaps not.  But we can say with assurance that we are exceedingly fortunate that, decades after everyone in these photos are long dead, we are able to witness the very full telling of their lives.  It turns out that Frida Kahlo was intent on amassing an image record far beyond her own likeness, including everyone of interest around her as well.  Frida Kahlo: Her Photos is a brilliant testimony to the successful realization of her goal.

Frida Kahlo: Her Photos. Edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Text by James Oles, Horacio Fernandez, Masayo Nonaka, Laura Gonzalez, Mauricio Ortiz, Gerardo Estrada, Rainer Huhle, Gaby Franger. Published by RM, 2010, ISBN: 9788492480753, 524 pp., 460 duotones, $45

May 5 – June 26, 2010
527 West 29th Street
New York City, 212-925-6190

Jim Nutt, Trim, 2010. Acrylic on linen with mdf frame, 25-3/8 x 24-3/8 inches. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery

Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art.  His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Roger Brown, Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, Art Green, and Nutt’s wife Gladys Nilsson, almost all of them students of Ray Yoshida’s at the School of the Art Institute. Unlike the New York Pop movement, the Chicago variety took pop culture as a starting point and then diverged in two important ways. First, its focus was on a much darker, more sexually charged imagery such as that found in burlesque photographs, wrestling posters, underground comics, and pinball machines. Second, where the New York variety presented a cool, decidedly non-expressionist style of rendering, Nutt and the other Chicagoans reveled in a controlled but highly personal approach to drawing. Nutt’s earliest work in this mini-retrospective, Miss Sue Port, 1967, in acrylic on Plexiglas, presents an iconic example of this.  Part freak show poster, part Pinball machine glass, it features an electric yellow androgynous personage with one extremely large, pointed breast, bulging cod-piece, truncated arms, a horror show face, and a massive, corseted posterior. A potent cocktail of revulsion and attraction, this is precisely the kind of work that brought the Chicago Imagists to critical attention.

Over time, Nutt diverged from his Pop culture beginnings and the work began a gradual shift to a quieter internal narrative. The hyper-inventive figuration stayed, but Nutt slowly shed overt cultural references. By the early seventies, as represented in this show by the colored pencil drawing There Are Reasons, 1974, , the artist was playing with images of stage sets featuring wildly cavorting and contorted figures enacting sexually overt pantomimes. What followed was a consistent reduction in the amount of secondary information, coupled with an increasing focus on the figure. By the late eighties Nutt had narrowed everything down to isolated, singular, portraits.

The current series of refined women’s heads as presented in the main gallery is experienced as a packed and careful condensation of Nutt’s vision. For while the early works like Miss Sue Port feature tight compositions with dozens of objects and figures (the term horror vacui comes to mind), from a strictly mark-making perspective they are painted with the broadest of strokes. By contrast, in the later paintings the brush strokes are barely the size of an eyelash. Needless to say, making a painting with a brush this tiny requires literally thousands of marks. The result is a little less stuff, but a great deal more information being filled into each picture. This is no doubt part of the reason why Nutt produces but a few paintings a year. Indeed, of the seven drawings and three paintings representing the current work, only five of the drawings are from this year, and only one of the paintings, Trim.

Jim Nutt, Broad Jumper, 1969. Reverse acrylic on Plexiglass, 28 x 26 inches. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery

It is not the process of making the paintings that stands out, but their hard won commitment to seeing. Standing in the main gallery, a quiet yet powerful meditative vibration seems to emanate directly from the works. Nothing is facile in these recent paintings and drawings; every mark is precise, meaningful and clear. This is easiest to discern in the drawings, where brief strong lines delineate a myriad of features and textures against the emptiness of the paper. The paintings have the same intensity of line, and add subtle modulations of color and tone.  In whichever medium, when a female head is depicted, the individuality of the features are intensified, not obfuscated, by the careful abstraction of each nose, eye, ear, and mouth. As in Cubism, the features differentiate within a single picture because they compress many moments into a single image. But there is more to the time compression than that. Nutt’s silent women simultaneously look at us and through us.  Ignoring our pressing gaze, they look unrelentingly inward.

Shirley Jaffe, Labyrinth, 2009-10. Oil on canvas, 32 x 25½ inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Ex-pat octogenarian Shirley Jaffe’s exhibition is a satisfying delight on many levels.  Presented as a kind of mini-retrospective, complete with a catalogue and short essay by Carolyn Lanchner, the show has seven recent works with six earlier works from the previous four decades.  Forty years ago Jaffe was already forty-five years old and steering into what would prove to be her mature style.

Jaffe moved to Paris in 1949 and spent the next decade exploring Abstract Expressionism before progressing, like many of her peers, to newer investigations of what a contemporary painting could be.  By the mid-60s she had eliminated expressionistic brushwork and began looking at alternate ways of organizing the picture plane.  The Gray Center, (1969) comes near the end of this fertile period of growth.  Simultaneously lush and formal in equal extremes, it presents a large vertical grid made up of six rectangles – three on each side – with each rectangle composed of segmented triangles, squares, and ovals.  Running from top to bottom in the visual center is the purported gray center of the title, although in actuality it is much closer to a putty blue-green than gray.  Always the colorist, Jaffe slices into the upper right corner of the “gray” a section of burnt orange that sets the key for the entire work.  The paint application, too, demonstrates the careful thoughtfulness and restraint that will only grow stronger and more self-assured in the years that follow.  Not yet obvious is the artist’s abundant humor or her eventual ease in manipulating shapes, although one might be able to intuit in the center stripe a sly wink at Barnett Newman.

But if we are to throw about names, Stuart Davis and Matisse (in his late works) are more likely to resonate.  Jaffe shares these painters’ interest in a flat but highly fluid figure/ground relationship, as well as a truly remarkable ability to strip down everyday objects from the real world to their essentials while retaining a sense of their mystery.  Perhaps offering an early hint at the artist’s internal dialogue at this time is Macon, 1979.  Ten years after The Gray Center, Jaffe has completely jettisoned the stiff grid and strict geometric shapes in favor of a loose, undeniably playful series of rectangles with interior forms.  The forms, though abstract, clearly refer to things in the material world: an escutcheon pair float in the upper right next to what appears to be, just maybe, the Marlborough cigarettes logo.  Below these forms and some others, the lower 60 percent of the painting presents a large green and white half oval surrounded by a gray ground (really gray this time) with calligraphic orange lines dancing all around.  This gray ground is as fully realized as any of the prominent grounds in her later works, and one wonders whether Jaffe did not toy, therefore, with adopting this gray as the neutral space that would allow her to range freely through her pictorial ideas.

Shirley Jaffe, The Gray Center, 1969. Oil on canvas, 76¾ x 51¼ inches. Courtesy Tiber de Nagy Gallery.

Instead – for which perhaps we have the light in Paris to thank — Jaffe made off-white her primary ground of choice, creating a seemingly limitless palette of sensuous, creamy variations from the most unassuming of colors to build upon. The simple forms she created and continues to use developed an internal language all their own, playful, vibrant, and familiar in a way that borders on the uncanny.  It is abundantly clear that the artist’s decisions over the last four decades were exceptionally good ones, right up to her most recent creation, the knock-out Labyrinth, 2009-10. This is a show not to miss.

Installation shot of the exhibition under review, showing, left, Robert Grosvenor Untitled, 1986-87. Steel, plastic, concrete, 60 x 108 x 96 inches, and right, Untitled, 1994. Fiberglass, metal, plastic, and paint, 38 x 167 inches. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery

With Robert Grosvenor’s inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, it was no surprise that his long time dealer would have an exhibition of the artist’s works.  Although the pieces are older and few in number, it turns out that three sculptures by Robert Grosvenor from his middle period are the right amount to command the exhibition space at Paula Cooper’s expansive Chelsea gallery.  The works, all untitled as is the norm for this seminal minimalist, are dated from 1986/87, 1991, and 1994.   Large in scale, but not monumental per se, they are each assemblages of found industrial materials comprising concrete, steel, plastic, fiberglass, and in some cases, paint.  Such use of found materials by Grosvenor is expected.

What was unexpected is the vitality these works still convey so many years after their inception.  Undeniably, our impressions of artworks modify over time, especially as they slip free from the dialog that swaddled them at the moment of their creation and the work’s truly intrinsic aspects come into greater focus.  Sometimes this is for the better and sometimes for the worse.  This might be all the more the case with a fierce anti-Romantic like Grosvenor who actively shuns the use of metaphor in any discussion of his work.  For instance, when a word like “sanctuaries” has been mentioned in relationship to these works, the artist has pointed to the canopy shapes as only “structurally interesting”.  Even more to the point, in a 2006 interview in Pasatiempo, Grosvenor responded to the question “Do you intend (your work) to be emotive?” with “What more can it be than just something to look at?  What more can it be?”   Well, in the case of his work, quite a lot.

Confronting Grosvenor’s sculptures in the Cooper space is to confront far more than a slab of discarded concrete under a sheet of bent metal.  If, in fact, this was merely a stack of industrial detritus it could not hold the room as these works do; or claim a surrounding space, a personal space, as these works most unequivocally do.  In short, ordinary inanimate objects do not, as Grosvenor’s works do, emanate persona.

Take the earliest work in the exhibition, Untitled, 1986-87, which has the aforementioned concrete slab and metal canopy.  The slab – really a grouping of cinder blocks arranged in an irregular rectangle – rests on a blue plastic tarp, its folds from being stored still prominent.  The canopy, corrugated, curved and dilapidated, stands awkwardly atop four green metal fence posts that seem to just barely support the weight of this makeshift roof.  Completing the assemblage, metal disks resembling nothing as much as cartoon wheels, are attached, one each, to the bottom of each support post and a small additional rectangular piece of corrugated metal sits precariously atop the canopy.  So, one could, factually, refer to this literally as a pile of junk.  But that would not even begin to describe the experience of the piece. So plentiful and powerful are the visual triggers, specific emotive notes can be asserted to exist as assuredly as one lists the materials:  the tenuous legs, the impotent wheels, the protective cover, the careful placement of the concrete, the intimate scale relationship between the various objects. As open-ended as it may be, the desire to offer protective shelter is implied. A human form is referenced and, a poignant, soulful, narrative is evoked.

In the front gallery, oil paintings, a baker’s dozen, by Victor Pesce. In the back gallery, thirty small-scale black and white works, some acrylic on paper, some spray paint on canvas, by William Carroll.  Pesce’s oils: all interiors, mostly minimal tabletop still-lives.  Carroll’s acrylics: all exteriors, mostly minimal urban landscapes. Dissimilar artists, yet there is a strange resonance created in this intentional pairing by gallery director Miles Manning.

Victor Pesce, Harbor 3 2009. Oil on canvas. 24-1/8 x 30 inches,

William Carroll, NYC 466 2009. Acrylic on paper, 5-1/4 x 6-7/8 inches. All images courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Pesce’s work brings to mind a long list of modern representational painters, and an ambitious catalog essay by Greg Lindquist does an excellent job of discussing the artist’s visual relationship to a good many of them.  History and possible influences aside, however, it is the works’ quiet but persistent evocation of the uncanny that is most arresting.  Pesce’s paintings are intimate in scale, with the largest only a smidge over 30 by 24 inches and the smallest only 4 by 4 inches.  The objects depicted, usually one or two per work, are equally modest: a paper bag, a paintbrush, small bottle, a flower, or a colored block.  All muted earth tones, the colors favor olive greens, pale yellows, and forest browns.  The paint handling, on the other hand, is immodest in the extreme.  Not bombastic by any means, but thick, viscous, and insistent.  Take for example the one non-tabletop subject in the exhibit, Open Door, 2009.  To describe the image is easy enough: the corner of a room with peach colored walls, a putty olive linoleum floor, maple stained pine molding, a floor board heater in the right corner, and a small square (light switch? thermostat?) just to the right of an open doorway.  The door itself, also a shade of putty olive green, has one of those translucent glass panels common to old offices.  As with the other works, the paint has a thick physicality that suggests that at least a pound of creamery butter has been added to the medium, absurd a thought as that may be.  The physicality of the paint results in a metaphysical that is much harder to put one’s finger on.  Perhaps not surprisingly, on this point Morandi’s work is mentioned more than once in the catalog essay almost as a kind of touchstone.  Yet Morandi’s focus was the elusive space and persona created by his objects, while Pesce appears to be conjuring something else entirely: a palpable longing for permanence.  And it is an effect heightened by the inevitable contrast with the very transitory state of the objects selected – the paper bag, the cut flower, the empty bottle, and the open door.  In life, people pass through open doors, see what is on the other side, close and open them.  In the Pesce’s Open Door, the door is fully open, the space through the door only blackness, and the viewer can feel on a deeply visceral level how every daub of paint is determined to fix these things, not just on the canvas, but in time.

Time is an important element in William Carroll’s work as well, but from a completely different angle.  Diaristic in intent and feeling, the simple black and white paintings – some on canvas, some on paper -document the artist’s long walks across New York’s boroughs.  Landmarks and objects are presented only in silhouette, yet they still convey a subtle detail that is specifically urban, and urbane, which any New Yorker will recognize instantly.  It is worth noting, however, that while the artist makes dozens of rapid light sketches during his treks, the paintings themselves are decidedly not rendered plein air, but recollections aimed at distilling the experiences of a full day’s travels to a few meaningful marks.  Both the canvas and paper works utilize only black, applied in thin layers to a white ground as to produce a palette of grays.  With the works on canvas the paint is from spray cans which, after all these years, can now be referred to almost nostalgically as classic graffiti technique – and again familiar to any long time New Yorker. The works on paper use standard acrylic artist’s paint applied in thin, wet layers.  The limited mediums, in turn, are used to delineate an equally sparse number of ubanscape elements to great effect.  Take, for instance, the acrylic on paper nyc 466, 2009: an arched steel bridge in the background bisects the page as a tug boat in the foreground glides across the water and moves out of the frame on the right.  As mentioned, Carroll has applied the acrylic paint in such thin wet on wet washes as to make it respond as if it were watercolor.  So as with good watercolor technique, the puddles of pigment and staining are used here to deftly magnify and expand the emotional dimensionality.  Somehow, too, there is an undeniable air of not just contemplation, but determination transmitted via the artist’s near ascetic insistence to modulate only the gray scale to indicate distance, material, mass, fluidity, and atmosphere.  Indeed, with the works small scale, stripped down palette, and narrative of wandering, one can almost hear the artist urging us to travel light, look, and move on.  More to the point, nyc 466, with its tug boat forever in the act of vanishing off the page, is the most literal embodiment of the artist’s overall theme: the intimate dance between experience, the passage of time, and memory.

Pesce freeze’s the moment, Carroll celebrates transience, and the two shows together create a deeply meaningful and thoughtful dialogue.