A.A. Rucci: Tondo
October 25 to November 26, 2011
Coleman Burke Gallery
649 West 27^th Street
917-677-7825

All Systems Go!
November 10 to December 23, 2011
C24 Gallery
514 West 24^th Street
646-416-6300

A.A. Rucci, Jelly Belly Racer, 2011. Acrylic on linen over panel, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Coleman Burke Gallery

Tondos are famously difficult to compose. In his Painting Techniques of the Masters (1972) Hereward Lester Cooke, a former Curator of Painting at the National Gallery of Art, commented on the tondo, in relation to Raphael’s Alba Madonna, in terms that would be of interest to practicing artists:

One of the most difficult problems for a painter is to design figures within a round format. If the balance is not correct, the picture will seem to roll like a wheel. If the design is too rigid, it will not harmonize with the circular format.

Coleman Burke Gallery showed a suite of tondos painted by Brooklyn-based artist A.A. Rucci. Rucci is an idiosyncratic painter, so the additional complication of a canvas that threatens to spin if it’s not skillfully employed suits him well.

The tondos spanned two decades. I remember the earlier ones from when we were both based in South Florida. In them headless bodies cavorted and posed in front of schematic architecture and filled-in landscapes. Their palette was often distinctly Floridian. Aldo’s perfect peanut-butter sandwich was just the prelude to a spectacular afternoon (2006) positions one of his headless avatars on top of the facade of a house in front of a sky as pink as a sunburn. Their headlessness was initially off-putting, not because of the implied violence – their body language betrays no torment – but because of their dishabille. Initially, it looked like a run-of-the-mill comment on the objectification of women.

But in the context of South Florida, it made sense. South Florida is not an intellectual place. Half-dressed, headless cavorting is simply what one does there. Facades are often the most interesting component of both buildings and persons. And in an artistic environment in which people were constantly putting on weird displays as a tactic to grab attention, Rucci managed to produce something in which the weirdness was intrinsic, even structural.

He could have stayed put and had a decent run as a Miami artist with a recognizable gimmick, but removing himself to New York turned out well for him. The headless figures went on their way to the place where symbols go once they’ve served their purpose. Rucci began working in a style informed by hard-edge abstraction in which Odili Donald Odita is an affinity, except Rucci painted some of the planes using a faux-finish technique for rendering wood grain. These textures showed up in colors that never grew out of the earth: aqua, storm cloud, alizarin.

And occasionally, as in Conquistador (2009), a parrot would appear.

Conversations with the artist revealed a thought process behind the work that is too multi-layered to summarize. Mentioned were romantic quantum entanglement, nostalgia-free history painting, the Northern Renaissance, fall foliage and its discontents, and the way one scans the urban environment while walking a dog. These last two items figure into The Fall (2008), a twelve-foot, life-size stretch of sidewalk with a single, cracked chestnut pod on it, executed in acrylic on cast porcelain, pewter, and wood. It appeared as the centerpiece of “All Systems Go!”, a group exhibition curated by Suzanne Carte for C24 Gallery that also includes Tilo Schulz,  Diego Toledo, Brendan Earley, and the ensemble of Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins.

Works by A.A. Rucci: installation shot of All Systems Go! curated by Suzanne Carte. Courtesy of C24 Gallery, New York

While not described by the gallery so plainly, “All Systems Go!” basically had an architecture theme. Schulz strung cord about the exhibition space and hung felt from it. Toledo built model towers from pine and rendered perspectives of construction framing in MDF and Formica. Earley drew futuristic buildings in felt-tip and tape. Marman & Borins presented convoluted riffs on Josef Albers in the form of Bauhaus-like furniture and grid paintings.

Not only did Rucci upstage his colleagues, but his paintings upstaged The Fall, and the smaller, simpler paintings surpassed the larger, more complicated ones. Everyone involved was working assiduously on some low-yield artistic problem. The results didn’t feel created so much as solved. And there was a dourness about the effort that makes one reluctant to criticize the labor but unable to enjoy the product.

Some of this was creeping onto Rucci’s more elaborately assembled paintings, with raised areas in the manner of Ellsworth Kelly and schematic application of color and texture reminiscent of Peter Halley. At ten feet wide, Brooklyn Heights Elementary (2008) pushed the viewer back too far for the textures — his strongest technical aspect — to scan.

He seemed to realize this, and works from 2010 to the present in both exhibitions show him painting in a more straightforward manner and a smaller scale with greater success. OnceUponATimeInAmerica (2010) at C24 is a jaunty composition of wood grain, tortoise shell, onyx, and slices of sky blue and crimson. Jelly Belly Racer (2011) back at Coleman Burke sandwiches three hard edge arrangements between brightly painted wood textures that look like they were pulled off of an old Mexican shed. The mental associations and accumulated sensations that brought this disparity of parts together are unknowable, but evidently rich and heartfelt.  And despite that disparity, the paintings come into a stable harmony.

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A visitor admires works by Leo Villareal and Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary Art's booth at Pulse. Photo by David Cohen for artcritical. see below for detail of Sandberg

It was only Thursday, December 1, but Vixen, a Shiba Inu belonging to Miami collector Sean Gelb, had had enough of the fairs. She lay on her side, panting, at the foot of a pedestal holding one of Patricia Piccinini’s mutant babies. People crowded the booth of Conner Contemporary Art at the Pulse Art Fair to gawk at it, but Vixen remained steadfastly unimpressed.

I’ve been through the trial of fair going in Miami enough times to have worked out a two-part strategy that forestalls the moment when I start feeling like Vixen. Part One is to proudly not see everything. My list for this year was Art Miami, Pulse, Scope and Art Asia (combined in the same circus tent this year), Seven, and Edge Zones. Skipping the main fair may sound like treason, but it means enough art-viewing impetus is left to appreciate the plenitude on offer at six others, which is considerable.

Part Two is to accept the fact that you are at the art equivalent of a farmer’s market. You are there only to admire and sample some minuscule fraction of its bounty.

On Thursday at Pulse, some critical part of my brain titled like a shoved pinball machine when I saw the actor Michael Douglas and the comely rear view of Catherine Zeta Jones making their way through a corridor of art made dark by one of the power outages that plagued the early days of the fair. This is no way to see art, I thought, nor perhaps Catherine Zeta Jones. I wandered toward the exit, where Paul Kusseneers, whose eponymous gallery was showing atmospheric, filmy, grid-based abstractions by Stefan Annarel, stood fuming in the half-light. Even in the dim booth Annarel looked good, but imagine coming all the way from Antwerp and having to present them that way. A longtime Miami artist speculated, without evidence but not without cause, that the fair organizers hadn’t adequately greased the city’s palm. I overheard a man in a black suit, clutching a walkie-talkie, explain to a gallery director in romantic lighting that a generator was being installed posthaste and they were not going to wait for the local utility to restore power.

By Sunday, this or better had been accomplished. I make a habit of asking dealers whether they’re having a good fair, without detailing what I mean by that. Everyone, even Kusseneers, answered yes and seemed sincere about it. So with that problem solved, it was time for a second pass at the art.

Maira Kalman, Lot-A-Burger, 2011. Gouache on paper, 9 x 13 inches. Courtesy of Jule Saul Gallery

Duane Hanson, whose work I had seen the day before at Bridge Red Studios Project Space in North Miami, came to mind upon reviewing Piccinni’s animal-human hybrid infant at Conner Contemporary. How much more difficult it must have been for Hanson to achieve sculptural photorealism with 1970s materials. This new take speaks to an imminent biotechnological future in which more and more things are going to demand human treatment despite their categorical position at the edge of humanity. As art, though, it was too illustrative and sentimental. (Charming and patently illustrative work by Maira Kalman, executed for author Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” and appearing at Julie Saul, somehow escaped a similar fate.) Also at Conner was a meticulously painted lesbian orgy on a picnic table at night by Erik Thor Sandberg, inexplicably executed on a dramatically curved panel. Doubtless there was some allegory at work – there usually is in Sandberg – but it resisted deciphering, and not to its credit.

Conner also had a handsome Leo Villareal, which I mentioned while admiring a small, animated LED piece, amber and flickering, by Jim Campbell at Hosfelt Gallery. This turned out to be a bit of a touchy subject – the gallery noted Campbell’s earlier work with the medium. Better works of technology-driven abstraction, which is still at its early stages, is at least as successful as its better constructivist counterparts. Bitforms showed a work by Zimoun in which cardboard chits were mounted on little spindles and made to spin and collide in a crowded grid. It was charmingly low budget and seemed to have a determined personality.

There was a note of controversy around some non-technology-driven abstraction as well. Daniel Weinberg Gallery had some small geometric abstractions that looked as if they were studies for Frank Stella’s protractor series, both in shape and pastel palette. They turned out to be works by Walter Darby Bannard, whose art and writings I have studied at length, and they actually predate Stella’s series.

Jus Juchtmans, 20110313, 2011. Acrylic on Canvas, 47 x 35.5 inches. Courtesy of Margaret Thatcher Projects.

Flirting abstractly with both paint and technology were Michael Laube at Kuckei & Kuckei, Sharon Louden at Morgan Lehman, and Markus Weggenmann at Thomas Taubert Contemporary. Laube had painted a variety of stripes and marks on layers of superimposed Plexiglas, and despite an initial impression of excessive trickiness they held up to repeated viewing. Louden’s deliberate, spare paintings in oil on paper on panel distantly recalled Julius Bissier, reinterpreted in high-key materials. The attractive sensibility refused to translate into her video or sculpture, as evidenced by examples thereof placed alongside them. Weggenmann sends out designs for simple abstractions and semi-abstractions to be executed in high-gloss coatings on aluminum. The lack of touch looks good in enamel-like paints like this, and big, simple shapes tend to stand out at the fairs as visual respites. Jus Juchtmans at Margaret Thatcher Projects served this purpose as well.

At a certain point of art viewing, patterns emerge unbidden from the surfeit of material. Was there an architectural trend at Pulse, exemplified by Gregory Euclide’s whimsical wall-mounted landscape sculptures at David B. Smith, Sarah KcKenzie’s luscious studies of house framing in oil (better than her larger, deadpan treatments of finished buildings) at Jen Bekman Projects, Isidro Blasco’s snappy urban photo-collages at Black & White Project Space, and Ayssa Dennis’s delicately drawn architectural fantasies at Kesting Ray? Was there some kind of weird angle on female sexuality, given data points that include Erik Thor Sandberg, Jeff Bark’s C-Print of a bosomy nude oddly arrayed in kneeling profile among strips of Super-8 film at Hasted Kraeutler, and Hillary Harnkess’s Sinking of the Bismark (2002), a naval disaster acted out by scantily uniformed crew in a style reminiscent of early Renaissance masters, at Daniel Weinberg?  Or was it just time to go home?

But not before stopping in the Impulse section of the fair, dedicated to single-artist installations. Ellen Miller Gallery, for instance, were showing the work of Deb Todd Wheeler, whose photogrammed cyanotypes of plastic bags hauntingly evoke sea life, despite their origins as garbage. Teresa Diehl closed off the booth of Galerie Anita Bekcers for a installation of predatory mammals and fighter jets, cast in clear glycerin, arranged over a spotlit, rotating mirror and covered with a camouflage net of flowers. She made it in response to the revolutions in the Middle East this year, but it grew into a transcendent, timeless narrative. I came to rest at the work of Alia Malley at Sam Lee. Her Frederick-Church-inspired photographs of the Los Angeles County landscape, either deserted or literally desert, presented inviting vistas, refreshingly free of crowds and, well, art.

Now it was time, like Vixen, to find a floor to lie on.

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September 7 to October 8, 2011
531 West 25th Street
New York City, 212-675-2656

Anne Neely, Kettle Hole, 2010-11. Oil on linen, 36 x 44 inches. Courtesy of Lohin Geduld Gallery

A few years ago, a book titled Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource by Marq de Villiers fell into the hands of Anne Neely, who maintains a studio in Washington County, Maine during the summer. There she read about the Mopang Aquifer, a subterranean water supply in Washington County that came under threat in the late 1980s when land above became the proposed site of an ash dump. Locals successfully defended the aquifer, but many other stories collected by de Villiers didn’t end as happily.

The book prompted Neely to contemplate water, below the earth and above. Her complex, diagrammatic, patchwork abstractions went from tall to wide. The horizon line, often implicit in her work, became recognizable as a geographic distance.

Neely’s adoption of the landscape motif clarified her paintings. She has an extraordinary appetite for details, and details can overwhelm a composition with clutter. Placing sky above and earth below forced her myriad little shapes into one or the other, and unified them.

Neely was ideally suited to the problem of painting groundwater, which one can only represent in a schematic. Her multicolored dots and dashes, her painted and scratched capillaries, and the translucent viscosity of her oils provided a complete vocabulary of analogues. Mopang (2010) seems to depict a cross-section of the planet’s crust. A thin line of distant hills confines a sky of lime and azure to the top fifth of the canvas. Earth lies beneath it in dirt-brown and sand-beige strata .

Towards the bottom, the brown drips over a background of indigo and lapis – water, presumably, but it is the earth that is liquid. There’s a particular grid of rounded rectangles that you get when you allow fluid paint to drip in one direction for a while, then turn the canvas sideways. The paint gathers at unpredictable points along the line of the drip, falls orthogonally, then flows into neighboring drips. Neely has executed this to lovely effect along the bottom quarter of Mopang, and filled the  rectangles in with ocher, violet, and earth green. The same colors reappear as hundreds of particles dotting the middle swath of the painting. It is as if the State of Maine’s Bureau of Land & Water Quality had hired Gustav Klimt as a geological surveyor.

Kettle Hole (2010-11) could be a forest under a night sky beyond a field of ice, or a bed of lake flora over another bed of limestone. Packets of color, formed by the knifing of white onto a fiendishly complicated background, cross the chilly scene. They look like coded messages, parcels en route to points east and west of the painting. The speeding, abstracted traffic brings Julie Mehretu to mind, though Neely does a more convincing job cohering the flurry of marks into a painting.

There’s a three-axis consideration to her use of materials that brings about this coherence. One runs from thin paint to thick, one runs from dry application to wet, and one runs from lean to fat, understood in the painterly way. (The addition of oil medium is fatter.) Neely exploits the whole range, resulting a technical dimensionality that one can pore over with great pleasure. Drips, glazes, impastos, and scrapes come together like elaborate embroidery.

Neely never allows the sentiment behind a work to turn into sentiment in the work. She has felt the problem with great depth, yet at no expense to her artistry. Thus she can produce paintings like Tidal (2010), a fiery Divisionist landscape under a sweeping orange sky. Its summery dots could be joyful. Its blue mass in the distance could be a scorched, disappearing lake. The painting understates the message, keeping within the borders of art, where it excels.

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July 20 – August 13, 2011
12 Elm Street
Rockland, Maine, 207-594-5935

Lois Dodd, Liberty Painting in N.Y. Harbor, 2002. Oil on panel, 16-3/4 x 12-7/8 inches. Courtesy of Caldbeck Gallery

The name of Lois Dodd has come up a few times in recent conversations with artists I respect. I finally got to see some of her work in person at a solo exhibition at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine. I was expecting the sort of painter’s-painter painting in which the very brushstrokes inspire admiration. Instead I found a picture of the Statue of Liberty working at an easel plein-aire.

Liberty Painting in N.Y. Harbor (2002) is no technical marvel. The easel is bent so as not to go off the edge of the panel and it appears to be resting on the outline of Liberty Island. Lady Liberty has no mouth for some reason. One can make no sense of the hand that holds the palette.  Yet there is something undeniably charming about it. Note the Twin Towers in the background, then note the date. This little painting is a terse summary of artistic defiance in the face of disaster. We are going to go on creating, it says. We can put the towers back as easily as daubing four gray lines.

Critics often lament that visual artists have not responded adequately to 9/11. Upon seeing this painting, I think Dodd delivered the appropriate message in full. Anything further would be unnecessary elaboration. The mauve shadow on the underside of the easel and the panoply of olive greens that make up Lady Liberty show that she has plenty of skill to get the job done. But there’s a more urgent matter at work. She has something on her mind that needs expression, and she isn’t going to let a couple of technical hiccups get in the way. That accomplished, she moves on to find the next subject. The quirkiness is the incidental product of a person being herself.

Consequently, her oddities are usually persuasive. The artist participates in a drawing group in Maine in which the owner of the property models outside, among the woodpile and gardening tools. Later Dodd paints from her drawings, creating works such as Nude and Bridge (2010). The figure is a violet silhouette modeled, slightly, with flesh tones. The face consists solely of a nose. She is posing with, of all things, a bicycle. The background is made of improbable greens. But it all works in its way. Dodd evokes Bay Area Figuration in miniature, with the human form reduced to bold sweeps of the brush and other playful re-imaginings of things seen.

Lois Dodd, Nude & Bridge, 2010. Oil on panel, 11-1/4 x 10-1/2 inches. Courtesy of Caldbeck Gallery

The selection on view at Caldbeck dates to 1968 at the earliest, with a wide sampling of years between then and 2010. You can see her spending decades asking herself what around her is interesting, and answering differently each time. One day in 1993, it was Elliott’s Place, a tiny white house perched on the side of a hill. As architecture it is unremarkable, but Dodd found art there. The hillside curves downward just as the power line curves upward. Elms pick up the light gleaming off the facade, tapping out a rhythm of pale gray verticals across the rectangle. Greenish umber fills the foreground and the sky, unifying the scene with a forest shadow. On another day in 1976, it was two squirt guns and a swimming mask, arranged into a striking composition of blue and orange. Once in 1985, it was downed autumn foliage on a bright October afternoon.

One common thread is the paint handling, thin and brushy with a minimum of modification. Over the decades, her subject has varied from still lifes to burning houses to whimsical scenarios involving nudes, but her method operates within narrow confines. She’ll impose strong designs, but abstraction for its own sake is out. She’ll paint the figure, but she’s not interested in the traditional realism that figure painting entails. She’ll paint flowers, but she avoids botanical exactitude. She’ll invent scenes, but there will be no illustration.

Furthermore, the subject has to be interesting for no good reason. If there’s a reason, she questions whether it’s a good subject. The paint has to do nothing except exist as paint. If it becomes polished or fussy, she questions whether she’s on the right track.  There is nothing wrong with the concerns that she has excluded, except that they impinge upon a simple problem of determining what is presenting itself to her attention and then painting it. Dodd’s take on the one-shot style proceeds from a position of purity – a temperamental purity, not an ideological one. Although they didn’t say it in so many words, this is the reason good artists had me seek her out.

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David Dawson, In the Stable, 2003 from "Inside Job: Lucian Freud in the Studio, Photographs by David Dawson" Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, New York, 2004

Lucian Freud has died. Not to minimize the sadness this must cause his survivors, his passing has hit a segment of the art world quite hard. “I always wished I could paint like him,” says the upstate New York painter Tracy Helgeson, summing up the feelings of many of us who admired his work.

Freud had a simple method, which was to arrange for models to pose in his studio for hundreds of hours while he rendered them with a loaded brush. His stroke was planar, slow, and decisive. Flake white, which is pigmented with lead and commensurately weighty, preserved every line raked into the paint by the hog bristles. His palette was neutral, causing the occasional cheery color to ring out with unexpected force. The final results were edifices of deliberation. Portraits and figures attained remarkable presence on the canvases, true, but even the floorboards took on an existential heft.

Beyond the considerable artistic achievement of his work, we looked up to Freud as a symbol of seriousness and investigative tenacity in an art world characterized by puerile whimsy and fashion. By way of illustration, in 2003 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a retrospective of Lucian Freud alongside a sizable exhibition of paintings by Laura Owens. Walking from the latter to the former was like changing a radio station from Kajagoogoo to Beethoven. That’s all I remember of Owens.

A few hours of looking at Freud, though, made an indelible mark. People wandering about the exhibition began to look Freudian, fleshy and worn by time. Such was the power of his vision. Ever after his works became a standard by which I measure other contemporary figurative paintings, mine included. How seldom any of them begin to compare.

This tribute first appeared at nysun.com, website of The New York Sun.

April 13 to May 15, 2011
54 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, 212 410 6120

Elisabeth Condon, Hello Yellow, 2010. Acrylic on linen, 37 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Lesley Heller Workspace, photo by Karineh Gurjian-Angelo

Imagine if you could speak several languages, switching from one to another to suit your thoughts, inside of a single sentence. You might begin in English for the sake of clarity, then change to Chinese for an apt metaphor, then over to French for color and texture, then to Italian for a bit of structure. Elisabeth Condon can do this, in paint.

Hello, Yellow (2010), a four-foot-wide canvas built around pourings of lemon, gold, and umber,  evokes the history of stained abstraction, Frankenthaler and Louis especially. But certain passages look tie-dyed. They upset the reference and move it into psychedelic territory. Upon them she has painted a stack of gray shapes, outlined in darker gray, through which a white ribbon runs.  It is as if she took mountains from a Giotto, paved them, and divided them with a cubist roadway, going nowhere except into itself. The scene is dotted with precise squiggles. Neil Welliver might have doodled such shapes as he recalled a long day spent tracing.

This painting shouldn’t work. It’s a pastiche of four styles. The colors are weird. The abstract portions won’t settle into their abstractness, and the figurative portions don’t amount to anything recognizable. It looks like it was painted by committee. And yet the painting is working. If there’s a committee, it must be made up of gifted artists, each the product of a different training, living together as an integrated whole inside of Condon. Hello, Yellow rolls over  my objections like a tractor.

Condon’s work takes in the landscape – whatever form it takes,  real or imagined.  Paintings hide beneath paintings in each painting. The surfaces build from stain to film to opacity. The imagery crosses from east to west coast, and east to west hemisphere, with the ease and speed of ideas.

Elisabeth Condon, Autumn Sprinkles, 2010. Acrylic on linen, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Lesley Heller Workspace, photo by Karineh Gurjian-Angelo

The artist is a voyager. Schooled in Los Angeles and Chicago, based in Brooklyn, her itinerary has included China, Spain, Miami, Tampa, and Saratoga Springs in the last two years. It seems that everywhere she stopped, a local influence took up residence in her psyche. By the time she returns to the studio, they all want to come out at once. Thus Autumn Sprinkles (2010) looks at first blush like a straightforward forest scene from upstate New York, until one notices the fan shapes and axe-cut strokes that typify Chinese landscapes. And then there are rose, rust and peach oblongs sprinkled on the surface. They’re not attached to the tree. They’re not attached to anything. They have escaped from the early Op paintings of Larry Poons and are now fluttering all over the sky to remind us that this is art after all.

Contemporary art comes with a promise of freedom. The old narratives are dead, say its spokesperson-philosophers. The categories are as blended as the breeds of street dogs. All things are possible, and few are impermissible. But it is hard to use all of that freedom. Constraints are helpful because they narrow the infinitude of choices an artist has to make. This is what I admire most about Woke Up to Find it Missing (2011). If it has constraints, it’s hard to say what they are apart from the six-foot rectangle. Over a luscious background of pastel stains, Condon has painted mountains. These mountains are striped orange and white like traffic barrels. She allows darker stains, indigo and violet, to come into the foreground. At the bottom edge the shapes flatten out into opaque areas of black, purple, and brown. It is a surrealism and Pop sandwich between two slices of lyrical abstraction, served on a hard-edge plate. The complexity ought to result in a disastrous mélange, but it’s lovely. The colors are pleasing. The composition holds. It makes no sense, it may even be silly, but the defiance of explanations only adds to the magic.

No less surprising is Yaddo Trees, Autumn (2010). From a hill of blue splashes, spattering the white canvas of the lower right corner, a tree grows. Its last leaves of the season are cranberry red, each with a blobby outline of cotton-candy pink. The sky is teal behind a mountain of stained green. The sky is a more substantial layer of paint than the mountain, which tells us something about the poetic nature of this world. While in residence at Yaddo in 2010, Condon met Jane Hirshfield. “They lie / under stars in a field,” Hirshfield once wrote about green striped melons. “They lie under rain in a field. / Under sun. / Some people / are like this as well – / like a painting / hidden beneath another painting.”

Please click HERE to read Jane Hirshfield’s poem in full

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May 5 to June 18, 2011
534 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 744 7400

Leon Kossoff, Cherry Tree, Early January, 2004. Oil on board, 56 x 48-1/4 inches. Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Leon Kossoff’s paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash show the octogenarian British painter continuing to work in portraiture and landscape, with a brush loaded with oils as if they were tar, favoring a palette based on a sooty, British gray. In that, there has hardly been any change in his work for decades. But comparing these works to those in the gallery in 2009, which were from the period 1957 to 1967, one can see a brightening. He has admitted green into the paintings, a verdancy unmixed with ashes as would have been his wont fifty years ago.

It was perhaps necessary to offset the unavoidable symbolism in the recurring subject of his work over the last decade, a tree propped up on two stakes as if upon primitive crutches. A note from Kossoff dated July 2010 explains, “These paintings are about one tree. A cherry tree in a garden that may have been part of an orchard before the nearby house was built. One large bough was deteriorating and should have been removed. Instead, we decided to support it with stakes. As time passed it seemed as if the stakes had always been there. This subject, so different from other subjects that I had been involved with through the years, became my working life. Time passed, and paintings of the tree emerged together with the [models’] heads…”

The artist gives us no reason to interpret the tree as anything but itself. But there it is, ancient, half-toppled, held up by human interventions, and yet growing upwards and outwards in fine weather hardly ever seen before in Kossoff’s oeuvre. Cherry Tree, Early January (2004), though its surface is no less clotted than is typical of him, is suffused with yellow warmth. In Cherry Tree, with Diesel (2004-5), a train speeds by in the background, brushed out in smears of paint that lend it a Futurist velocity. Life goes by; the tree persists, reclining in the sun, if not leisurely or wholly by choice. It’s as fine a metaphor for a good old age as anything ever painted. When other paintings of the same subject return to the overcast norm, they get a boost of vitality for the artist having proven that they appear as such due to his command, not out of habit.

Leon Kossoff, Christchurch, Spitalfields, 1999-2000. Oil on board, 56 x 51-1/8 inches. Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Christchurch Spitalfields, the Hawksmoor church that Kossof has studied with a sustained intensity that recalls Monet’s serial meditations on the facade of Rouen Cathedral, gets similarly refreshed treatments. The gray outlines and pitched perspective of the architecture is there as before in his work, but in a five-foot panel from 2000 it appears sandwiched between a hesitantly blue sky (cheerful by Kossoff’s standards) and a mighty green canopy, presumably a line of trees of which we see the trunk of the first.

Longtime sitters John and Peggy reappear as well. The artist’s portraits can come off as vicious. This is especially true of the early works – with all the slathering of gray oils, people in Kossoffs sometimes look as though they’ve been portrayed as a pile of octopuses.  But even here the colors have sweetened into pinks and greens, and the Venetian red line that holds them together verges on the calligraphic. A tenderness and humanity has entered into them where there was once a predominance of bombastic, albeit gifted, brushwork. After a series of head-and-shoulder portraits of John, the full-length one from 2006 depicting him in a wheelchair, alongside a dozing Peggy, comes as a shock. But the greenery beyond the window and the glad blue of the floor set him up for consideration akin to the cherry tree, assisted, but still participating in life.

“Everyone has talent at twenty-five,” said Degas. “The trick is to have it at fifty.” So what’s the trick? No one ever willed talent into being. (Skill, yes; talent, no.) One can only sow effort year after year and hope that one’s creative soil is rich enough to produce. Kossoff, who would be in a position to note that the real trick is to have talent at 85, shows the way. The persistent, vigorous exercise of his gifts has resulted in a visual spring at a time when one might expect an artist’s winter.

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March 10 to June 3, 2011 (extended from originally advertised dates)
724 Fifth Ave, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City,  212 262 5050

Jane Freilicher, Bouquets, 2011. Oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy

Jane Freilicher commands unalloyed reverence from fellow painters. I learned from a gallery director at Tibor de Nagy, for instance, that Thomas Nozkowski, whose work featured in their recently concluded “Object/Image” show, expressed elation at being exhibited alongside her. Any decent painter with a lick of sense would. As one of the last true scions of Giorgio Morandi, she combines a probing touch with a keen color sense to produce paintings of visceral power out of all proportion to the delicacy and limits of her subject: namely, as it has been for decades, still lifes set up in front of a window.

One of the delights of “Jane Freilicher: Paintings and Prints” is that some of the works were finished mere weeks ago. Bouquets, an especially Morandian composition with vases of flowers against a shadowy background, doesn’t even have a frame on it. The most intense hues in the painting appear in the chalky yellow flowers in an ocher vase in the foreground, followed by an unidentifiable blossom, a puffball of subverted pink, behind it. Besides those, there are only variations of silvery gray, earth yellow, and smoky ultramarine. But despite the piece’s undeniable neutrality, it feels saturated. (The spirit of Matisse’s French Window at Collioure infuses it.) This is the mark of a master colorist. Layers build up in one thin application of oil over another, but the final result is not a stratum so much as an authoritative burnishing of atmosphere, softly adjusted a quarter-inch at a time.

Window, also from 2011, works a higher key with equal effectiveness. Probably the most overtly Cubist work in the exhibition, the vases of flowers divide the windowsill into vase-size units, turning the lower quarter of the painting into an evocative abstraction. The windowsill itself splits into four pieces without feeling the least bit disjointed, such is the artist’s gentleness. The window frame is gone, somewhere beyond the edges of the 32 x 32 inch canvas, freeing the uncontained cityscape of Manhattan to rise up as ghosts colored rose, dust, and sand. Repetitions of pink and yellow ochre between the still life and the buildings cause them to pervade each other.  The sky is at once blue and gray, a perfect capturing of the often unsure mid-Atlantic weather.

Jane Freilicher, Study in Blue and Gray, 2011. Oil on linen, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy

This leads us to Study in Blue and Gray, also 2011. Comparison between cityscapes shows her rearranging the architecture at will, this time into rectangular sections of undifferentiated depth, a quilt of neutrals tilting towards moss, mustard, and terracotta. A plangent blue vase filled with white blooms anchors the painting with its sharpness. An accompanying gray vase of unassuming lavender wildflowers seems like it would be content to disappear. They are contrasting characters. Blue and gray tie the still life to the sky overhead and lend the city between them marked warmth. A restrained light seems to be coming from everywhere at once.

Two color lithographs from 2010 and 2011 (although the images derive from earlier paintings) are in the exhibition, and my feelings about them remain mixed. Printmaking, in this case, seems to be forcing clarity upon an artist better suited to making a patchwork of indecision, as Picasso famously quipped about Bonnard. But Light Blue Above (2010), in which two vases of flowers have been positioned on the grass some ways off from a Long Island waterway, is a pleasure, and its flattening of Freilicher’s infinitely varied touch has a charm of its own.

I have a copy of a 1986 monograph for a Freilicher exhibition that originated at the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. In one essay, John Ashbery wrote, “The artists of the world can be divided into two groups: those who organize and premeditate, and those who accept the tentative, the whatever happens along. And though neither method is inherently superior, and one must always proceed by cases, I probably prefer more works of art that fall in the latter category.” I would go further, and say that some achievements of art lie out of reach of premeditation. Nothing except an intuited search, undertaken for emotional reasons, resolved when the unforeseen has been discovered and recorded, will produce work of this sublimity.

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Laurie Fendrich, Delicate Feeling, 2010. Oil on canvas, 36 x 34 inches. Gary Snyder Project Space.

A question for arcritical readers: Has a married couple ever had overlapping, solo exhibitions at separate galleries in Manhattan? Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens couldn’t think of one, and nor could I. If their case is indeed unique, then her exhibition at Gary Snyder Project Space and his at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which overlap for nine days, is an item for the record books. Adding a delicious romantic twists is the fact that the overlap includes Valentine’s Day.

The two were wed in 1981 and they share a painting studio in a barn in upstate New York. There is also discussion of renovating a room in their Tribeca apartment so that she can work on her drawings and he on his collages while they’re in the city. “Actually, ‘renovating’ is too strong a word,” says Plagens. ‘Ridding of junk’ would be more accurate.” Both of them have had storied independent careers. He was art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has shown with Hoffman since 1974. She is a professor at Hofstra University, writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was recently the subject of a two-decade career overview at Scripps College in Claremont, California that will travel to the University of Montana in March.

Peter Plagens, The Dim View: Ricebirds. Mixed media on canvas, 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

They bring disparate sensibilities to their painting practices. Plagens’ work – with its gestural application and improvisatory attitude – has roots in Abstract Expressionism. The abrasions in his paint surfaces are signs of happy accident and copious correction.   He resolves his disorderly backgrounds by laying geometric elements on top of them. Multicolored polygons, dubbed “badges” by Nancy Hoffman, take on the role of Hans Hofmann’s structure-imposing rectangles.

Fendrich’s work, while no less improvised, builds more slowly, in a manner recalling Cubists like Juan Gris and California hard-edge painters like Frederick Hammersley. Using oils, she glazes her surfaces into a reproduction-defying shimmer, while enclosing her geometric shapes with a painted line that takes its soft, textured character from hard pastels. The day after viewing the 1993 Seurat exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum she went out and bought a box of Conté crayons. Her drawings, also on view at Gary Snyder,are constructed in the same careful manner, resulting in a smoldering intensity.

“Laurie is the optimist who keeps Jane Austen novels and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by her bedside,” explains Plagens. “I’m the card-carrying existentialist who thinks that the universe is held together with chewing gum and baling wire and could fall apart at any moment. My paintings reflect that sense of barely contained order. Hers assume more order from the beginning.”

But having worked alongside one another for many years, some inevitable exchange has occurred, suggesting a productive if subtle collaboration. Plagens’s works show increasing decision and clarity between 2007 and 2010, while Fendrich’s grow in contrast and whimsy. “Laurie’s paintings may have become a little more playful over the years as a consequence of my work having been around the studio,” says Plagens. Fendrich adds, “I may have prompted him to clean up his act a little bit.” But they don’t offer each other unsolicited critiques. Creative support takes the form instead of an occasional shoulder rub.

Are there any problems with sharing a studio?

“Only the music, sometimes,” says Plagens. “Laurie can listen to anything except rock ‘n roll. I can listen to anything except, well…”

“Regina Spektor, for instance,” she finishes. “I like girl music.”

“She’ll also put her iPod on the dock and set one song to play on repeat. She’ll start working, and I’ll come back into the studio a couple of hours later and the same song is still playing. I get myself out of there.”

They laugh, as they often do.

Peter Plagens: I Don’t Give a Damn/Every Moment Counts, at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
January 20 – February 19, 2011.  520 West 27 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 966-6676

Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings, at Gary Snyder Project Space.
February 10 – April 2, 2011. 250 West 26 Street, between 7th and 8th avenues.  New York City, (212) 929-1351

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Kristin Baker is not to be held responsible for what the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston claims on her behalf. I noted this to myself as I read the website copy for Kristin Baker: New Paintings: “This collaged layering of streaked color evokes the acceleration of matter across a surface, light through space, and action over time in ways that blur conventional definitions of painting.”

At the exhibition itself, the wall text put it this way: “[It] is ultimately her painterly attention to making, or facture, that becomes the focus. In these new paintings, Baker continues to stretch conventional definitions of what a painting is—and can be.”

installation shot of the exhibition under review, Kristin Baker: New Paintings, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showing, from left to right: Full Dawn Parallax, 2010. Acrylic on acrylic with powder-coated aluminum frame, and Within Refraction, 2010. Acrylic and charcoal on PVC. Courtesy of the artist and Suzane Geiss Co., New York. © Kristin Baker. *Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

And after my visit, I perused the press release, which promised that an October 21 gallery talk with MFA curator Jen Mergel and conservator Carol T. Henderson would reveal wonders: “They will address how curators appreciate Baker’s work because it stretches one’s understanding of painting (traditionally oil on canvas) in exciting ways… Both perspectives offer new insights into contemporary works that are pushing the limit of conventions with exciting new art.”

I’m sorry I missed that, because I would have liked to ask curator Mergel a question: Did conventions kick her puppy? Every weapon in Baker’s arsenal— squeegee painting, masking, acrylics, plastic supports, and raucous-looking abstraction— had been explored before Baker was born in 1975. She is not defying conventions, but employing them in a particular unison. Conventions are positive and enabling, and shortcomings in choosing them well or using them well are not the fault of the conventions themselves. Anyway, it is not as though anyone is forcing contemporary artists to work in a particular style. I assert further that no one—not a soul—thinks of painting as oil on canvas and only that. Mergel is directing a critique at a stultified, conventional character that exists only in her imagination, for the purpose of making Baker appear to be the revolutionary that she is not.

The MFA show consists of four paintings intended for its new Community Arts and SMFA Gallery, thusly named due to its dedication to School of the Museum of Fine Arts alums like Baker. This cruel revision of the I.M. Pei-designed Museum Road entrance is as dismaying as the new Americas Wing is stunning, but it created more wall space, and her eight- to ten-foot paintings use it well. Until a few years ago, Baker’s masked, smeared acrylics on white PVC depicted race car crashes in a style with precedents in Pop and Futurism. She has discarded the imagery, which must have taken some courage. Now the vertiginous perspectives and the tumbling autos have been sublimated into arrangements of crisp shapes. In the better ones, you can still hear the roar of the engines. Her most handsome effect is the squeegee application of dark colors on the white PVC, which results in a look akin to strips of errantly exposed film. The strongest of the four is Matter Facture, in which blue-black walls, beams, and a mighty triangular slice set up interjections of translucent rose and opaque white.

Kristin Baker, Full Dawn Parallax, 2010. Acrylic on acrylic with powder-coated aluminum frame 114-1/8 x 99-1/8 x 15-1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Suzanne Geiss Co., New York. © Kristin Baker. Photograph by Matthu Placek. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

But Baker’s talents are straining as she attempts to put a painting together without the benefit of imagery. Full Dawn Parallax is a catalog of everything that goes wrong when you’re out of your depth as an abstractionist: fruit salad colors, a composition that doesn’t suggest that any of the four edges should be the top one, and an excessive sameness of component parts that degenerates into clutter. Baker painted it on clear instead of white PVC, and mounted the panel on a framework that lifts it a foot off of the wall. The resulting transparency is enervating, replacing needed bright whites with mousy frosted plastic that doesn’t register as part of the work. Rime Affinity indicates that she should avoid making high-key paintings. She’s better with black at her disposal, creating illusory transparencies instead real ones, such as in Refraction Within. This work looks like it was collaged from enlarged x-rays, and painted over with the same aesthetic and color scheme that inspired Bumblebee the Transformer. It falls short, but it is nonetheless dashing.

There happens to be a lot of noteworthy abstraction on view in Boston at the moment. Joanne Mattera at Arden Gallery, for instance, manipulates encaustic and iridescent pigments to produce luscious surfaces that look like a fusion of stained glass and raku. Across the street at Miller Block Gallery, Imi Hwangbo is showing elegant constructions of cut Mylar, hung on the wall in layers so that the removed pieces form a topographic floral design. Choice of materials, precision of execution, and elements like the vertical cut that runs through the flowers in Sanctuary, gives these works an architectural austerity that counters a certain “girliness.”

Over on Harrison Street, Walker Contemporary is showing work by an artist with a related sensibility: Benicia Gantner, who works with hand- and machine-cut vinyl on Plexiglas or flat paper, forming vistas of biomorphic silhouettes and complicated stencils. They look like Inka Essenhigh run through Thomas Nozkowski. Ruby & Gold Waterweb makes striking use of the vinyl, all sharpness and mechanical flatness, as it depicts an implied forest scene with teeming paisley undergrowth, schematic trees, and fuchsia garlands against a flickering burgundy sky. It lent noticeable warmth to the real sky over Boston, full of crosswinds and the sobriety of November.

Kristin Baker at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 2, 2010 – March 27, 2011
Joanne Mattera at Arden Gallery, 129 Newbury Street, Boston, November 2 – 29, 2010
Imi Hwangbo at Miller Block Gallery, 38 Newbury Street, Boston, November 12 to December 23, 2010
Benicia Gantner at Walker Contemporary, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, November 5 to December 18, 2010

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