September 22 to October 29, 2011
547 W 25th Street, between 19th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Installation shot of the exhibition under review. Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

Milton Resnick: The Elephant in the Room places a spotlight on paintings from the 1970s and ‘80s that show Resnick in some of his purest painting moments.  These large-scale, near monochrome, intensely physical, assertive paintings yield infinite depth to the patient viewer.  In a recent article in Art in America magazine the painter David Reed recounts his years under Resnick’s tutelage, quoting the first generation Abstract Expressionist as saying “it’s over for us, something else must be done. We didn’t make it, learn from our failure”. Resnick lamented the death of Jackson Pollock and the waning camaraderie surrounding the movement with an air of defiance and determination to pull from the rubble a pure vision emptied of “isms” and the trappings of taste.

As Cheim and Read’s show makes clear, Resnick’s efforts at attaining an art free from form and style was dirty and laborious business. These deeply emotional canvases present bewilderingly dense surfaces in which energy feels trapped, pulsing beneath craggy mountains and cavernous pools of oil paint.  Defying the grand gestures of Resnick’s earlier work, seen in the 2008 show at the same gallery, Resnick has used the build up and excavation of his repetitive surfaces as his vehicle towards a kind of painfully earthbound painting imbued with palpable reverence to the medium.  Accounts of Resnick’s personality reveal something of a curmudgeon, the kind of teacher who would smear flawed areas of his students’ work, although usually at the service of the painting.  He promoted the obliteration of image and the liberation of paint, to “let the paint do the talking.”

Lightness of touch is gone, as loose handling is eschewed in favor of dutifully executed, plaster-like finishes.  The canvases are not all callused, however, as some are almost even in surface, allowing their smoky color to become velvety. Untitled (1988) recalls Swan (1961), the massive action painting that dominated the 2008 exhibition.  Smaller than most works in the current show, the 1988 work present a cool, lunar surface is in a state of unrest.  The painting is neutral in overall color though remnants of vibrant color defy total austerity.  There is a sense of a slow, forceful swirling motion, like a maelstrom gathering energy. Resnick’s tenet that a painting should incur all energy but not release it is perhaps most evident in this work.

Milton Resnick, Straws, 1982. Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

Pure force is contained within the crusty blistered surfaces as they try to resist Resnick’s rage and ecstasy.  The endless depths of paint lead to a confrontational and impenetrable impasto that confronts and compels the viewer.  With even the most archaic form is purged and any reference to external influence is ostensibly denied.

Straws (1982) seems like a glimpse back to the 1960s and a foreshadowing of the 1990s. The paint is splattered in a repetitively downward gesture over a characteristically blistered surface.  The surface is broken into three primary colors: teal, rust and earth green.  Resnick provides more breathing room in this particular work, one of several early 1980’s paintings with this title. Cosmological blue light glows below the encrusted surface.  This painting is all emotion, anguish and heaviness.  The stoic flat surfaces of the prior decades begin to yield to modulated color.  Amorphous masses of earth color float in an amniotic greenish blue like zygotes of the archaic figures that would materialize in the next decade.

Exhaustive physical and psychic energy are contained within these canvases.  A skeptic could argue that these are a contrarian’s monolithic reaction towards neo-Expressionism, a lamentation for Abstract Expressionism’s displacement.  This seemingly willful suppression of gesture and color yields the anxiety and tension that animates this phase of Resnick’s career, anticipating twenty further years of painterly evolution.

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March 31 –May 7, 2011
530 W. 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 691-7700

iIstallation shot of Matt Jones’s Multiverse at Freight + Volume, March 31 to May 7, 2011.

Matt Jones’ Multiverse was a generously dense exhibition with works covering the entire gallery space including two floor-to-ceiling wall installations.  Jones takes a fairly simple set of materials and through a process of contemplation and punk rock slapdash creates iconic wall pieces and propped figures.  There was a video work titled Every Expression Possible (2011) that featured a masked Jones acting out many different faces and expressions against the background of a Karma Charger.  As in his paintings, Jones uses repetition here to evoke a meditative calm.

But the work is also about contradictions, and these make for visual excitement.  While Jones cites Buddhist practices and meditation as a source of creative energy, we see Wolverine masks and Black Flag logos (originally designed by Raymond Pettibon in the late ‘70s) which conjure a kind of brash male ego enterprise (the rocker, the comic book character), archetypal symbols that Jones has rescued from adolescence.  He has dusted off these two icons, colored over them and reverently slathered them with Elmer’s glue.

The floor pieces were the most satisfying part of the show.  The groupings of propped figures invited interaction.  I arrived at the opening early and there were only a few visitors but I felt I had entered a crowded room.  The figures were frozen in dynamic poses and emanated excitement.  Propped paintings, frozen in animate gestural poses, act as stand-ins for viewers.  Jones plays with materiality in ways that feel at once DIY and mechanical in their clarity of execution.  The surfaces of these propped figures were treated exactly the same as the wall pieces hung nearly edge to edge along the perimeter of the gallery.  Inkjet prints are cut to the shapes of the figures and then adhered to the plywood surface with glue.  Jones works over the prints with alcohol-based marker and adds color and abstract patterns.  The final stage of the process is several coats of thinned Elmer’s Glue spread over the surface that acts as a lacquer, sealing and unifying the surfaces.  The result of Jones’ serial method is a borderline-obsessive repetition of themes and characters that is like a visual chant–we see black and white lines repeated in the Karma Chargers and the recurrent characters throughout the works.  A hum of patterns fills the room.

Jones succeeded at pulling off a sense of serenity in a room dense with punk-inspired plywood cutouts.  Karma Charger (2011), a large inverted wedge of plywood covered in Xerox sheets of black and white stripes, is a mandala that assists in bringing about a moment of Nirvana.  The idea with this construction, according to the artist himself,  is that the viewer basks in front of the device, imbuing it with his own psychic energy and that the subsequent viewers in turn exchange the other viewers’ meditative experience. When staring into the pattern for several minutes my peripheral vision dissolved, my eyes softened and my mind quieted.  I didn’t expect to be brought into a kind of guided meditation when entering the exhibition but was pleased to find a few moments of quiet contemplation and visual pleasure.

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Jon Pestoni, Black Out, 2010. Oil on canvas, 63 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Lisa Cooley Fine Art

Among the nine new oil paintings in Jon Pestoni’s first solo exhibition with Lisa Cooley Fine Art, Black Out (2010) stands out in its breathy and brooding darkness.

All of his canvases have rich surfaces that employ both simple geometric and amorphous forms suspended in delicate, painterly fields.  Pestoni brushes or rakes the dry, vibrant color across the canvas in wide sweeping strokes.  The gestures are controlled but the work retains a lyrical sensibility heightened in part by his use of keyed-up color.

But Black Out, with its witchy, hypnotic palette, is the raspy-voiced chanteuse amongst the more restrained charm school set. A performative painting, it breaks away from the subtle poetics which dominate the show to give us something bawdy and wonderful.

A collection of dainty, white, elongated forms undulate within an inky Gothic space.  The dark canvas builds upon thin veils of magenta and translucent purple while deep neutral grays obscure small patches of rich blue and green. Opaque swathes of gunmetal sit upon this complex and weathered surface to reveal a keen inner luminosity.

Jon Pestoni at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, January 16 to February 20, 2011. 34 Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets, New York City, (212) 680-0564

September 12 – October 17
34 Orchard Street, between Canal and Grand streets,
New York City, 212 680 0564

Alex Olson, A Verb, A Noun, 2010. Oil on linen, 41 x 29 inches. Courtesy of Lisa Cooley

Alex Olson’s new paintings are geometric abstractions incorporating scribbled and scrawled text-like marks, controlled color and subtly textured, methodically plotted surfaces. Many works rely upon the grid in various permutations, which Olson squashes, muddies and buries only to excavate it once more and ultimately leave the surface threadbare displaying traces of the painting’s past, its architecture, the insulation.  In Plot (2010), for instance, a wonky self-conscious lattice is incised into the dusty mauve surface into and on top of which  the artist glops slapdash bits of paint seemingly as a strategy to debase the geometric surface. A tiny dash of vermilion, a blob of ivory, buttery yellow, baby blue and black are suspended amongst a field of one inch squares.

Olson’s generally non-descript palette vaguely recalls building materials like Tyvek siding, fibreglass insulation, primer and aluminum: there is peach, banal blues, an industrial orange, silver.  These allusions help make the paintings feel less painted than constructed.  Even in works which pose as  expressive the underlying architecture and blueprint is evident.

In A Verb, A Noun (2010) we are interested in nonsensical characters scribbled into the Rose Madder surface.  The indecipherable script begs for translation and understanding..  A dirty surface which has been raked over with a comb leaving a soft patterning across the pictorial surface.  A field of macho orange lingers at the lower right portion of the canvas.  The amorphous paint area does not poetically float or glow in a way that might recall Rothko but merely loiters, obscuring still more sgraffito.

Alex Olson, Plot, 2010. Oil on linen, 18 x 14 inches inches. Courtesy of Lisa Cooley

The most highly organized piece in the show is Thread (2010).  Here Olson has laid out her bits of material in a diagrammatic essay on painting and handiwork.  The title itself leads us to make associations to sewing, quilting or patchwork.  The painting’s elements include a continuous line in grease pencil which at times mimicks the gesture of a cross-stitch.  The surface of the painting evokes coarse, wide-woven linen.  At the upper left and lower right corners of the painting Olson has placed semi-opaque corners painted in rust and grey.  These seem to have a purpose that goes beyond simply reminding us that this is a painting with four sides, to serve as signifiers of the craft aspect of making a painting.

Olson’s deftly executed, methodical work constitutes a  first-rate example of contemporary geometric abstraction.   Initially icy and distant-seeming paintings, employing outdated tropes, reveal themselves, on closer inspection, as earnest, attentive signs of painterly history and narrative.

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July 9-September 8, 2010
237 Eldridge Street, between Stanton and East Houston streets
New York City, 212) 253-0700

Oscar Cahén, Traumoeba, 1956. Oil on masonite, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Horton Gallery

As the title of this exhibition of Canadian mid-century painters Oscar Cahén and Gershon Iskowitz makes clear, Artists Caught in Hitler’s Web brings together two European-born artists who had been persecuted by the Third Reich. Gershon Iskowitzs’ work is deceptively benign. Cloud-like tufts of white, continent-shaped masses of solid mauve and red overlaid with uniform constellations of confetti-like dots of primary hue, dance across the surface of his paintings from the late 60′s onward. Oscar Cahén’s father, Fritz Mark was a diplomat who organized a formal opposition group and published a tract titled “Men Against Hitler”.  After an arrest in Czechoslovakia, Cahén traveled to England to escape persecution but was arrested as an illegal immigrant  and deported to Quebec as a prisoner of war.  During this internment, Cahén’s artistic dash was discovered by the art director of a Canadian news journal, The Standard which began using his illustrations alongside news stories. The public interest in his work led to his early release ,beginning a prolific career as both a painter and a commercial artist.

Gershon Iskowitzs’ path toward recognition as leader in the Canadian avant garde included the most harrowing of circumstances.  After his hometown of Kielce, Poland was destroyed by the Nazis, he was imprisoned in a labor camp only to be transferred to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald.  Reportedly, Iskowitz managed to maintain something of a drawing practice while imprisoned.  After the war, with family murdered and home destroyed, Iskowitz was sent to Munich where he eventually began a study of art.  After a brief stint at the Munich Art Academy Iskowitz took up a period of study with Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka.  In the brooding Late Summer Evening (1962), Iskowitz portrays a dense and moody field of low twinkling lights appearing from veils of sap green, umber and translucent ochre.  The modulation in the brushwork foreshadows Iskowitz’s later paintings.    Iskowitz took a ride in a helicopter in 1967 and became fascinated by the appearance of the Northern Canadian landscape as seen through the patchiness of clouds.  This partially obscured aerial view format crystallized and became the framework from which he continued to work. The largest painting here is Painting in Mauve (1972) which shows a behemoth mass of towering purple encroaching upon two miniscule slivers of silvery white flanking the central form.

Slabs and chunks of teal, scarlet, fuchsia and chartreuse epitomize a fifties palette and seem optimistic despite Oscar Cahén’s dark beginning as an artist.  Cahén’s Traumoeba (1956) epitomizes the Abstract Expressionist movement in Canada.  An amalgamation of action painting, free associative drawing and dense surface, This is a spectacular example of Cahén’s mature style.  There is a central form which dominates the painting, delineated in strong black lines.  Cahén’s painting titled Candy Tree (1952) is a symphonic totem in dusty pink and warm glowing tones.  The format echoes a figure, a totem and contains crystalline segments and prismatic forms reminiscent of a kind of prehistoric cactus.  According to the Cahén Archives Candy Tree was a breakout piece and was exhibited widely earning Cahén critical success.

Gershon Iskowitz, Painting in Mauve, 1972. Oil on canvas, 90 x 78 inches. Courtesy of Horton Gallery

Cahén moved between aggression and playfulness in his paintings.  In Austin Healey 100 Engine (1954) a tangle of scrawled black lines moves across the painting like tire tracks.  The marks are painted on top of a complex abstract mound in simplified hues of red, blue and green.  Several mushroom-shaped forms are stacked awkwardly at the right of the painting.  In the obsessive black marks there is a feeling of nonsensical mapmaking or graphing. Iskkowitz is the quiet mystic in this show where Cahén stands out as outspoken and assertive.  Having survived horrific circumstances, Iskowitz committed his artistic practice to making paintings that are both melancholy and playful.  Cahén’s early political defiance carried with him in his brash abstractions until his untimely death in a car crash in 1956 at the age of 40.  The show provides a telling glimpse in an obscure but fascinating moment in mid-century contemporary art and reiterates the profound impact World War II made upon the lives of artists.

Cahén

Cahén

Iskowitz

Iskowitz