"Maureen Cavanaugh “Lovey Loverson” At 31 Grand," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Girls are different from boys.  I’ll admit it; I’m a guy from a family of guys.  I don’t know what life is like for girls.  That realm was, and still is, as mysterious as life in Tibet or perhaps on Venus.  But like most guys, I’m fascinated by the motives and desires of and the influences on contemporary women, particularly those women who make it a priority of exposing their feminine world to us, the uninitiated viewers.

Maureen Cavanaugh’s “Lovey Loverson” is a selection of paintings and small works on paper that initially seems to reinforce the common clichés of much “Post Feminist” or more recent “Chick Art.”  These works however, present a tightly knotted bundle of supposed contradictions: a cuteness that verges into the grotesque, an erotic voluptuousness that transforms into a Gothic severity, and a naïveté hiding a knowing cynicism that isn’t afraid to play the kitsch card when it suits her purposes.  Many of the subjects and poses of these paintings are a subversive codex of iconic female images: the bather, the dancer, the lounger, the seductress.  Popular fellow painters tilling similar areas in the fields of “Post Feminism” like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Karen Kilimnik seem to relish a pimp-like condescending approach to the viewer.  Yet for the breadth of historical and contemporary references in these works, there remains in Cavanaugh a stylistic sense that is at the same time more authentically expressionistic and, what Irving Sandler has quantified as, “pathetically” funky.

In “Taking Off the Pink 2” (2005) an anorexic female figure, back to the viewer, pulls a white blouse off over her head.  Her transparent pink skirt arches out stiffly like a tutu, revealing her panties beneath.  But for the accentuated contours of the attenuated body and the white daubes that highlights the spine, like an anatomy chart, this would approach classis cheesecake.  A group of “cuddly” critters including a fawn, a squirrel and an abstract peacock watch from the front in a swirl of pastel clouds.  A bucolic semi-nude gloss on the Rococo appeal of Watteau and Fragonard, or cuteness gone creepy, akin to big eyed Keane Kids on crank? 

In smaller works Cavanaugh is less concerned with the overall composition and finish, and lets the rawness of pencil drawing on bare primed canvas contrast with more heavily worked details.  In both the small works “Ski Mask” (2005) and “Skull Cap” (2004) faces of friends appear behind masks, an oft used device, that here is brought to a spooky crescendo through aggressive brush work and an odd distortion of intent.  Though no ponies or puppy dogs are depicted, Cavanaugh does have her animal favorites inhabiting the paintings.  Odd looking birds that could be kingfishers or blue jays appear often, a kitty cat lounges on a chair back as it watches over “Kim” (2005), and a pair of“Cheetahs” (2005) rest under a sketched-in branch full of cardinals. 

Life is becoming ever more complex.  The demands that society and the media place on young women through their conflicting imperatives are unrealistic.  Perhaps it’s this that Cavanaugh is confronting in her recent quirky paintings, a desire to be simultaneously a sexy vamp, and a cuddly kid, an unsophisticated outsider and a knowing art world initiate.  Beneath the rainbows and flowers, the babes in thongs and the swirling puffs of cotton candy, be careful.  There might be razor blades hidden inside this pretty package from the “Valley of the Dolls.” 

"Leslie Roberts At Holiday," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

“Ever since that September, time has gotten away from me.  Doubts plague me…”  Thus begins a line of text that, through the intricate imaginings and calculations of Leslie Roberts, is translated or encoded into a grid based painting called “Bad Attitude” (2004).  The painting is small, with a pale yellow ground.  The left quarter of the canvas is filled with columns of letters, the graphed text.  A tall rectangle of solid color blocks of acrylic gouache fills the central half, while the narrow grid on the right is made up of squares filled with diagonal and horizontal lines, circles and crosshatchings of various colors.  Without the key (the lines of text, numbered and color coded), the central grid pictures are satisfying as pure meditative non-objective paintings, perhaps a type of color exercise or digital abstraction.  Once the viewer realizes that these pieces can also be deciphered as linguistical codes, a swarm of questions engulfs the previous quietude. 

“Content is ineffable” was a slogan of the formalist abstractionists, but what if a supposed abstract work did have precise meaning, did mask a realm of covert content that without the key remained “ineffable?”  Would that work still be “abstract?”  Roberts, with this group of works delves into a Deconstructivist mode of re-interpreting text but translates it into a visual syntax that further stretches the notion of “text.”  As we transition from an analogue world to a digital one, the potential for a new gloss on visual abstraction becomes an imperative.  The presence of the grid, an aestheticized device that came to prominence with Minimalism, carries a natural capacity to express numerical, chronological or quantitative information, as well as flatten visual space.  This kind of calculus could rapidly turn into dry math and it’s a statement to Roberts’ mischievous sense of the whimsical that she’s able to keep things light.  Having watched this artist’s work over that past several years, I’ve written about a previous body of work in which she fabricated puzzles (another way to confound the viewer) usingfragments from various historical art works juxtaposed with puzzle pieces of her own photos and paintings, a type of Post-modern statement on the fracture of the image within history.  This new body of work began about eight years ago with tiny drawings made while Roberts commuted on the subway.  The development from the simple pastel colored patterns of the small works gives way to a more complex series on larger graph paper which includes notes, keys, color notations and texts forming an informational framework around the grid picture.  As the works increase in size they also increase in complexity.  The codes become denser, color blocks are overlaid with lines, triangles and circles, till they begin to weave themselves into a nearly homogenous field of marks.  Because the works are based on language there seems to be an even greater randomness of design when compared to the grid paintings of Alfred Jensen or the geometrically symmetrical designs used by some of the Pattern-Decorative painters. 

Still one returns to the idea of the visual nature of language.  The simple phrases, lists and fragments of e-mails that Roberts chooses to make drawings or paintings from have the subtle starkness of an Emily Dickinson verse, or a line from e. e. cummings.  The transcription of these mundane features of everyday life, through the use of color, codes and numbers, somehow elevates them by means of a mysterious process to the state of relevant contemporary abstract paintings.  Perhaps for Roberts the use of puzzles, codes and ciphers is a subversive means of embodying within the context of abstraction those parts of life that had been excluded as unimportant, the messy, sensual, boring or frustrating.  Things unimportant, at least til they’re gone.  

"The Very, Very Best of Thomas Trosch At Fredericks Freisure Gallery," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

"Easy access," I've heard art dealers say that's what their clients are looking for in their art excursions these days.  Problem is, with the glut of galleries, fairs, and massive "new talent" shows like The Armory Show, Scope, Working in Brooklyn, The Whitney Biennial, and Greater New York, (which despite curatrorial efforts seems to keep serving up homogenized predigested versions of the same three paintings), it's gone beyond "easy access" to something approaching force-feeding.  If we were French geese, our aesthetic livers would explode.  Fortunately, for those with a more adventurous nature, art observers pursuing the more extreme off the tourist track fair, there are occasional opportunities to catch a glimpse of artwork that doesn't fit the "taste of the week" club.  Recent shows by both Chris Martin uptown at Uta Scharf, and Geoff Davis at Andre Zarre in Chelsea demonstrate that sometimes the gatekeepers of good decorum, and the bottom line are asleep at the switch.

Thomas Trosch is another example of an artist who, though not a household name, is held in high regard by enthusiasts of the marginal, eccentric, and totally personal statement.  Trosch is an acquired taste, and though not a taste of the week, he could be of next year.  "The Very, Very Best of Thomas Trosch" is a miniretrospective covering work from about the past fifteen years, and though there are progressions, developments, and changes the uniqueness of his vision is clear. Trosch, for all his cultivated kinks, and excruciating mannerisms, shows he's in possession of painterly skills that can convincingly combine a variety of techniques from wispy pencil lines on bare canvas, to drippy opaque washes, to peanut-butter thick knifing, to thrown and tube squeezed paint blobs.  This diversity of surface incident recalls the better periods of Cy Twombly, and his scrawling drawings enhanced with turd thick clumps of paint.

The feminine focus on ladies who lunch, who visit artists studios and vernassages, who sip cocktails and have lovely matching accessories, reduces the males present to mere extras.  The extravagant almost sculptural thickness of the figures, the unapologetic decorativeness and the exceedingly sweet colors have linked Trosch's work admittedly with that of Florine Stettheimer, the 57th Street heiress and hostess of one of New York's grand "Jazz Age" solons.  A more contemporary comparison might be made to the dramatic narrative pieces by Nicolas Africano. "Japanese Lesson #17" (1992) is the earliest and one of the largest pieces in this show.  And it combines women with large bug-eyes, and text bubbles filled with conversations from phrase books designed for visiting businessmen.  Though both of these devices seem to have disappeared in the more recent pieces, considering the dates, they should be seen as precursors to the anime fad of characters with over sized eyes presented so often recently, as well as the rant containing bubbles produced by Amy Wilson, that when seen in quantity, read as left-wing schtick.  Trosch seems to revel in the discordant contrasts thrown up between his style of free wheeling paint slinging (yang) and his depictions of doll-like society ladies (yin).  As these ladies mingle, strolling amongst a collection of art objects displayed as prestige commodities, the artist uses backgrounds of Abstract Expressionist paintings and biomorphic sculpture as a painterly foil to the elegant women in pastel evening gowns, and platinum blond hairdos.  This disturbing discrepancy reads like an image of the 1950's layout wherein "profoundly ugly" Pollocks are props for fashion models, rendered by a painter channeling both Stanley Kowalski and Blance DuBois.