"Rosa Loy “9 Wege” at David Zwirner June 27 - July 28," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Imagine one of Balthus’s pubescent models running away from the chateau, joining a band of gypsies or a bizarre cult of female smugglers, and ending up in a university town behind the “Iron Curtain”. Later, she begins to paint, inspired by the dreamlike experiences of her exotic life.  And, to complicate matters further, there’s a mysterious twin sister who may or may not be real but who still holds influence over the complex comings and goings of these painted narrative tableaus.  While, to my knowledge, none of this ever happened to Rosa Loy (although she did attend the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, the legendarily liberal East German city, where she later became one of the few women painters associated with that boys’ club marketed as the “Leipzig Schule”), her paintings do invite overwrought interpretations to explicate their oblique happenings.

In “Disorientierung” (2006), Loy depicts a chilly, moonlit landscape in which two ash-blond women, mirror images of each other, struggle with a long, thick, entangling crimson vine.  Dressed in contemporary jeans, boots and winter coat, the figure on the left appears in control of the tussle, with both hands pulling on the single vine that loops around her waist.  The woman on the right, wearing what appear to be white medieval pantaloons, is enwrapped in several maroon coils that lift her off the ground.  Perhaps this isn’t a fight between twins but a rescue attempt, the sister of the world saving the sister of fantasy from the grasping tentacle of reality. 
Beyond this struggle-filled narrative, there is another battle waged here between the artist’s need to render a figure precisely, to model form and to depict a traditional sense of depth, and her desire to sprint past the fill-in phase of the painting in order to concentrate on the visual focal points of her complex compositions.  Loy, like Balthus’s late works, utilizes casein, a water-based binder with a short drying time, which requires her to work fast and make decisions on the run, so to speak.  As with watercolor, the image’s highlights seem to be the white of bare canvas, with shadows built up by overlaying glazes of pigment.  This classic technique provides a vantage point into the painterly process, which, in Loy’s case, is a precarious balance between fresh, spontaneous paint handling and a perfunctory casualness that leaves one with a sense of raw uneasiness.  Any kind of overworking deadens the surface and reduces the colors to milky mush.

Loy populates her narratives almost exclusively with women engaged in indecipherable activities.  “Exorzismus” (2006), depicts a boxing match in which the combatants wear color-coordinated gloves and miniskirts, while the image of a female archer hovers behind them as if projected on the wall.  In “Mitgefühl” (2006), a magisterial redhead, holding a crystal scepter, kneels beside a reclining girl as if ministering to her. In “Träumen” (2006), two young women wander through a dreamlike landscape amid lush hedges of tropically hued foliage. Loy’s color sense is often split between translucent scrims of neutral or pale pastel tones and slabs of saturated synthetic hues dense enough to induce claustrophobia, as with the tangle of eels in the phthalo-green-keyed “Orientierung” (2005).  The eels float up a bedroom wall like freeform calligraphy, their sickly castexacerbating a creepy dreadfulness, as the attending women wrangle their slippery prey with gray-green stained hands.  In “Septemberglocken” (2006) two women stride up a muddy umber road accompanied by a pair of triangular cobalt blue shadows so opaque they could be ridden like skateboards.

While many critics have noted the influence of not only Balthus and Giotto but also Neo Rauch, Loy’s husband, on the artist, I also see strong parallels with the enigmatic films of David Lynch, and the classically inspired paintings of Hans von Marées (1837-1887).  Like Lynch, Loy cobbles together pictures from disparate pictorial sources, twisting slightly the accepted meanings of symbols and signs to fit a new storyline.  And as inLynch’s Mulholland Dr., Loy wrests her potential shocks from the split between the fantastical and the real-world personas of contemporary women.  Loy’s struggle to unite a venerable figurative tradition within a modern painting criterion, and her placement of frontally lighted, stylized figures within a shallow space or landscape, lends her pictures a mythical northern chill that echoes the heroic late works of her fellow German, Marées. 

The hype surrounding the “Leipzig Schule,” perhaps reflecting the neo-conservative tendencies within the academy, has focused mainly on the male members.  Loy has sidestepped the clichéd sensationalism and swaggering bravura of the “bad boys” and, by offering a more authentic, less bombastic vision to the movement, she has widened its appeal. Leipzig should be glad. 

"Elizabeth Cooper at Thrust Projects June 2- July 30," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Painterly painting flat-lined, time of death, the late fifties.  Since then it has been resurrected from time to time, but these attempts at resuscitation seem more and more like picking over a carcass, trying to find organs that are still viable for transplant into some geriatric practice.  Now, in a Frankensteinian project to re-animate the dead tissues of “Tenth Street touch”, young artists are grafting together the reconfigured parts of that genre and releasing them on to an unsuspecting public.

Elizabeth Cooper has stated that her painting deals with various types of abstract “tropes” and involves a rigorous commitment to “process.”  As evidenced in her paintings, Cooper’s “tropes” are a type of Post-Modernist deconstruction of the devices, techniques and mannerisms that have been established as norms in Gestural Abstraction. Through her subtle manipulations of these established forms, the artist both demystifies and draws attention to our acceptance of them. Typically, Cooper’s painting employs drips, splatters, stains, squeezing, splotting, puddles, pouring, oozing, bleeding, gushing, flicking, squirting, and drizzling.  Their surfaces appear wet, dry, flakey, shiny, slimy, puckered, wrinkled, anodized, flocked, clumpy, chunky, blotted, clotted, cracked and dusty.  These processes and qualities are not merely lists of words, but painterly incidents, a part of the language of painting that has been encoded with specific emotional associations.  For Americans, the Abstract Expressionists were the first to impart emotional resonance to abstract painterly facture—the existentialist angst of Pollock’s urgent drips, or the tragic melodrama of Rothko’s floating fields of closely valued colors.  Cooper has studiously isolated and catalogued many of theses techniques, adding a few of her own to produce paintings that while contemporary and fresh, nonetheless ring with  historic precedents. 

The eight paintings in this exhibition, all untitled and from 2006, share a vibrant palette that might initially appear discordant yet is satisfyingly rich.  Cooper’s forms seem to ejaculate and gush forth from an edge, usually near the bottom center, across shiny grounds of monochrome enamels in designer colors like turquoise, terra cotta or harvest gold. There’s a sense of velocity and momentum in the tangles of paint as they shoot upward on the field.  Some approach a feeling of still-life, bouquets not of flowers, but of painterly material occurrences.  In “Untitled, 2006 (Pink)” puddles of thinned light blues and off-whites seep wanly up the canvas, with branches extending out diagonally like the unfurling leaves from a sprout.  Chemical reactions from the pigments, driers, gels and mediums cause the skins of some puddles to wither and pucker, changing once shiny passages to something resembling suede or orange peel.  These reactions sometimes also affect the textures of overlaid or abutting bodies of paint. 

Although the paintings proceed with a very controlled and articulate process of fabrication, the artist seems at pains to avoid any overt evidence of actual touch.  All the pools, drips and squibs appear to have been applied from a discreet distance above the picture plane as if to avoid altering the natural finish of the drying liquids.  Even the thick, slathering incrustations of knifed and tube-squeezed paint have an unconscious artlessness and seem to have applied themselves to the canvases.  In this creation of imagery without visible hand manipulation, Cooper shares an affinity with others of the “poured painting” school, like Carolanna Parlato or Jane Callister, but avoids a homogeneous, slick overall integument by allowing the different properties of the various mediums and pigments to manifest their own unique alchemical destinies.  In “Untitled 2006 (Turquoise Vertical),” through the intentional or unintentional process of inconsistent drying times, a centrally located amoeba-shaped sheath of light blue with black dappled paint almost succeeds in pulling itself free from the underlying slab of transparent black gel.  Likewise, one senses an affinity with what has been called “Pop Abstraction”—painters like Giles Lyon and Jonathan Lasker who parody and critique Gestural Abstraction and the New York School by giving their brushstrokes an almost anthropomorphic character.  This mannered isolation of brushstrokes, drips and other painterly elements replaces the notion of the gut-wrenching hard-won incident with a pragmatic matter of factness that holds the potential for dumb deadpan humor, like the mischievous paint drips from a Road Runner cartoon. 

With their unique paint mixology, glistening enamel, trendy coloring and splashes of mucus-colored gels, the works of Elizabeth Cooper seem petrified in time, somewhere between the present and the near future.  Watching paint dry has never been more absorbing. 

"George Condo Existential Portraits at Luhring Augstine May 5 – June 3," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

“How low can you go?” was the question Chubby Checker asked in his 1962 dance hit Limbo Rock.  No doubt the ghost of Clement Greenberg would be doing its share of twisting and shouting if it could witness the current situation that has turned his theories of high art versus schlock as expressed in Avant-Garde and Kitsch into “Avant-Garde is Kitsch.”

Regarding the kitsch quotient, few exhibitions in recent memory have roused the debate of just “how low can you go” more than George Condo’s “Existential Portraits.” As a self-proclaimed aficionado of “Kitsch Art,” particularly that most vulgar American hybrid that evolved during the heyday of the East Village art scene, I’ve often wondered just what the parameters and limitations truly are of kitsch.  Painting, because of its time-honored position as the epitome of beauty in the visual arts, is the prime target and punching-bag for “advanced” critics, who hope to subjugate it to socialist critical theory, as well as for subversive artist types who want to use it to shove the disgusting, pathetic mess that is life into the faces of their audience.  The Greenbergian canon of “quality” was elegantly explicit (though flawed) in its principles of evolution and ideals.  But the idea of kitsch is more nebulous, more pernicious, existing as a kind of aesthetic cockroach, impervious to nuclear strikes by the most erudite and strident of contemporary art critics, and thus able to thrive in an environment of the harshest slash-and-burn political correctness.  Still, to attempt a logical analysis of the criteria of kitsch would require answers to some of the following questions:  in a culture that for generations has succumbed to the decadence of “bad taste,” of which kitsch is a manifestation, are there still limits to what’s considered acceptable?  (In “Maja Visida” [2005] Condo seems intent on dishing out a double dose of “bad taste” clichés by combining a cheesy cigarette smoking “seductress” lounging in a revealing negligée with a cubistically fractured clown face.)   Is there a point at which a maximum saturation of kitsch is reached, and the “bad” begins a transmutation into the “good?”   (In “Jean Louis’ Mind” [2005] and “Young Architect” [2005], Condo displays such apparently effortless facility and dexterity in the execution of these “portraits” that he approaches a slickness that might just be too “good” to be truly or at least provisionally “bad.”)  Can there be a school of kitsch, a priesthood, a cult, or will that make it become academically bloodless and therefore worse or better depending on the physics of aesthetics?  (Carroll Dunham, Lisa Yuskavage, Rhonda Zwillinger and Dave Humphrey all maintain a practice within the more sophisticated realm of kitsch, and Condo’s “Big John” [2005], a cock-eyed snaggletoothed smoker in a striped shirt bears a striking resemblance to some of the inhabitants of Keily Jenkins’ bizarre world of characters.  Could these artists be considered part of a movement?) Is “good” kitsch really “bad” kitsch?  (Can Condo’s paintings eventually transverse the aesthetic spectrum and return to high art tastefulness?)  Can there be abstract Modernist kitsch or Minimal or Conceptual?  (Remove the goofball figures from some of these paintings and you’re left with atmospheric hazes or monochrome slabs that could pass as pseudo Olitskis or Mardens).  In our brave new kitsch-o-licious world, have we finally overthrown the culture commissar’s hegemony and rendered “good taste” and “high art” as derogatory epithets, establishing kitsch as the current aesthetic standard?  (Could Condo and the kitsch clan now be the latest targets for an artistic coup dé-tat by who knows what outrage?)  The list could go on, but the point is, kitsch has its own canon of values and virtues and seems to operate in an aesthetic field apart from art or anti-art, a world through the looking glass where success is failure and second-guessing the essence of “good taste” must be third- and fourth-guessed as well.

It’s one thing to assault the prevailing norms and another to challenge them with verve, originality and sophistication.  Condo seems content to expose us to the instantly graspable ”funny paper” version of cubo-surrealism, rather than delve into the more exotic and complex pictorial devices of a Francis Picabia, a Giorgio De Chirico or an Alberto Savinio.  Perhaps this flat footedness is part of the appeal, a further lowering of the limbo bar.  Hermann Broch states in his pioneering 1933 essay, Notes on the Problem of Kitsch, that kitsch is the result of the effects of the industrial revolution on the middle class, and the resulting perversion of the “Romantic.”  This condition is brought about through the commodification of sentimentality and the fluent use of mechanisms designed to arouse the desires for romantic love, spiritual transcendence and the struggle for individuality.  In short, kitsch is a knowing art that plays the heartstrings for hard cash.   Perhaps then, the best kitsch is not being produced by the likes of Condo, Kippenberger, or Ashley Bickerton, who with a wink and a nod, tease us with their intentional trickster shenanigans, but is instead the work of those “holy shamans” of the art world who create in a more open aesthetic system and haven’t the vaguest idea they’re creating kitsch. 

It seems kitsch, like our own universe since the “Big Bang”, is constantly expanding and with Wagner, by Broch’s reckoning, as the greatest of kitsch artists, perhaps that’s not such a bad end of the galaxy to be in.  

"Inka Essenhigh 303 Gallery March 4 – April 15, 2006," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

You get it? That “it” is the punch-line to the joke, the plot of the narrative, the moral to the story. With this latest group of paintings at 303 Gallery, Inka Essenhigh wants to make her points clear and tell her stories more explicitly. To those ends she is probing the boundaries of one of the last taboos of advanced contemporary painting, “illustration.” In our weird world, for an image to carry more literal content, it seems bound by the physics of perception to devices most closely associated with realism, namely perspective, chiaroscuro, modeling, etc. In Essenhigh’s case, with her stretched, bending and undulating forms, there are the added requirements of the highly delineated detail, the sleek contour and the precisely illuminated blob in creating her believably Surrealistic illusions.

Over the past several seasons we have witnessed a satisfying, if at times troubling, course change in Essenhigh’s development. This might be due to the fact that she emerged early on as one of New York’s freshest hopes for painterly stardom, and as such her artistic, business and social circumstances—like the affairs of starlets on the covers of supermarket tabloids—are under constant public scrutiny. Perhaps with these paintings it’s payback time, her opportunity to poke at the gawkers. But in doing so she has individuated the more ambiguous characteristics of her figures into sharply articulated—though distorted—faces and bodies, injecting cheesy humor into images that had heretofore retained an abstract reticence. Peter Saul’s garish, bulbous and contorted comic figures come to mind. However, whereas Saul’s pictures carry the brash, flatfooted excesses of Proto-Pop and the Katzenjammer Kids, Essenhigh’s wacky images possess a distinctly feminine sensibility—a kind of fantastically mannerized Rocco, a Middle-earth Elfin princess with a mischievous attitude.

Since switching from the glossy enameled finishes and subtle designer color schemes that brought her initial recognition, Essenhigh has maintained her immaculately homogenous surface and crisp rendering through a traditional matte oil medium. Each picture is keyed to a specific range of analogous hues. Contrasts are achieved through tonal rather that chromatic variation. In “Setting Sun” (2005) a jubilant figure strides forward through an arcing curtain of greenish-yellow light, a glowing mass of Art Nouveau tentacles at the apex of the arc illuminating the scene. Long undulating leaves, curling elongated feet and an overall murky, sea-green cast all lend the impression of an underwater tableau as seen through the plate glass of an aquarium.

These new works, rather that embodying notions of taste, fashion, and style, have instead passed through these criteria like a Trojan Horse to a more subversive and satirical content. With her eye for the telling detail, Essenhigh uses these concepts to parody and lambaste those for whom they are still relevant. In “Wrestlers” (2005), under the vast dome of a beige-brown sports arena, an enthralled female spectator watches grapplers from a corner of the ring. The length of her beautifully manicured, curling pink fingernails reduce her hands to mere decorative claws, echoed by the shoulder straps of one contender’s leotards as he struggles in knotted conflict. Is this a jab at fashion affectations that approach the life threatening, or at our culture’s infatuation with the grand spectacle of phony combat?

A hard driving go-getter in his summer whites is seen in “Subway (2005). In a rush with his nose held high, he seems to melt his way down a staircase to jump in a subway car. He cuts his way through a milky tide that only reveals itself to be yet other figures through the depiction of an exposed butt-crack and feet stuffed into conical shoes that look like torture devices. The erotic glimpse is here mingled with a comic exaggeration that says as much about the horney viewer as the overwrought seductiveness of this willing subject of the desirous glance.

The best social critique ought to be so sharp that the pain isn’t felt until the scalpel is pulled out. Through her technical prowess and stylistic panache, Essenhigh has attracted a considerable following; are her bursts of satirical shrapnel mangling the hand that feeds her? To tabulate her current effectiveness, do we need to take fashionista body count?

"Yvonne Jacquette, Arrivals and Departures, DC Moore, March 15 – April 22, 2006," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Seeing in the dark is not a simple matter.  Because of the physiology of the cones and rods connecting to the optic nerve at the back of the eyeball, in the darkness we have a literal blind spot in the center of our field of vision.  Hence to avoid this, to actually see in the dark, we have to glance slightly to the side.  The recent nocturnal paintings by Yvonne Jacquette (at DC Moore through April 22nd) also seem contain a blind spot—a gap between the expected representation and the actual representation—and to see past this breach requires the viewer not only to see slightly off kilter but to think a little less straight as well.

Jacquette is a journeyman painter who, along with a dedicated cadre of artists like Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz and Chuck Close, has established a type of realist rebuttal to the trends of abstraction that have dominated the cutting edge of discourse in New York painting since the early forties.  Like the above-mentioned artists, Jacquette has also maintained a narrow focus since the early 70s on her signature image, the aerial landscape, and it is perhaps through her mastery of this constant image that the oddness of these paintings can begin to be understood. 

We see what we want to see, and Jacquette uses this predisposition the way a judo wrestler converts an opponent’s momentum, using it against them, for a decisive throw. At first glance her pictures appear to possess an almost photographic fidelity, especially in the small pastels.  We see views we can recognize or conceptually identify.  Streetlights, headlights and illuminated rooms glimpsed through windows—depicted as pointillist dots or blocks of light yellow, orange and red—converge into compositional vectors in the form of roads, building facades or parking lots.  It’s only after we get past this skillfully crafted artifice that we begin to look askance and see the nuts and bolts of these paintings, all the futzy, funny and funky stuff hidden on the other side of our blind spot. Suddenly Jacquette’s wit and humanity begins to seep in, and everything that looked so serious and rational takes on a cast of humor and a naïve yet sincere pathos.

“Third Avenue (With Reflections) II,” (2004) is a scene rife with pictorial gambits.  Look closely at the ochre and orange avenue receding from the lower right corner to the upper center edge and you’ll notice that it’s cut two thirds of the way up by the side of a mirrored high-rise, its reflection cubistically extending its thrust, albeit warped and in reverse.  The cars rushing downtown in the rain are as stubby and chunky as handmade toys, and the blocky perspective of the apartment buildings, bathed in receding shades of earthy red-orange, recalls the faux naïve imagery of the great Chicago painter Roger Brown.

Though actual figures are rare in these pictures—I spotted only two black strollers on the lower left side of “Dark Basilica,” (2004)—the presence of people is hinted at through lit windows, a lone tugboat or the zipping cars.  The Times Building, crowned with its ball and clock tower, is the main subject of “Above Time Square,” (2003).  Behind it, the green iron skeleton of what will become a massive skyscraper stands strangely out of proportion.  Still farther back, from a single window in a mostly dark nondescript building, the cold video glow of a massive TV is the only sign of life.  The skin of roofs, roads and sidewalks are woven from a network of fluttering brush strokes that seem to give the impression that these images are themselves reflections on the surface of a rippling pond.  Is Jacquette’s use of these “overviews” related to a desire to share a sense of omnipotence, an invitation to join her as she floats above the grubby struggle of life in the street? Or do they proceed from an impulse to depict 21st century society with all the aplomb and trappings of Bruegel’s “Return of the Hunters” or “Tower of Babel”?  What could be more explicitly modern that to be awakened from a nap with the sound of a stewardess saying “we are beginning our decent please bring your seats to their upright position and close your tray tables?”  With a drowsy peek we look through our window as illuminated neighborhoods slip past below.  Jacquette’s intentions, like the paintings themselves, might be viewed most clearly when not looked at directly.

"Nick Lawrence “Bloopers, Gaffs and other Rough Patches” at ATM Gallery," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Profiles of scrappy looking heads, some chewing on shoes, guzzling booze, or eating cell phones are rendered with a ham-fisted neo-cubistic bravado that is at once repulsive and yet comically endearing.  Color is sometimes dark and turgid and at other times light and vaporous.  As a long time member, both as an artist and gallerist of the Provincetown and Chelsea art scenes, “Bloopers, Gaffs and Other Rough Patches” is Lawrence’s New York debut exhibition.  Relaying on personal experiences gleaned from observing the singles scene, he specializes in the   depiction of uncomfortable social or personal happenstances that are rendered in a brusque and aggressive materiality and facture that seems as abrasive as their motivations.  Lawrence appears to have captured the churlish attention viewers might have when, seeing a drunken hissy fit between rumpled lovers, they are nevertheless unable to look away, worried they might miss some unmentionable act, or at the least, the opportunity for a favorable self comparison.

Plying the waters of “Transgresive Art” is a popular trend, witness the response to Peter Cain’s masturbating automatons, or the glut of art dealing with sexual taboos, stereotypes, or body excrement of all kinds.  Lawrence, though, plays a more subtle game and through his connoisseurship in tainted stylistic conventions assaults more directly the observer’s pictorial tastes rather than their moralistic mores. 

In “Girlfriend Experience” (1999-2002), a one eyed female figure pours fluid from a pitcher into a fish bowl planted on a male torso’s shoulders, a swimming fish replacing the boyfriend’s head.  A clear jell of viscous resin pools over slabs of collaged paper and fabric, and clumps and blobs of modeling paste give an altogether synthetic unpleasantness to the general texture of the painting.  Shapes are inscribed with a meandering line that zips along contours, dribbles at turns and pauses to intensely pattern areas with hippy paisley.   This line is akin to Pollock’s, as it sits on top of the picture plane like chocolate syrup.  Echoes of Picasso’s late cloisonné cubism are mingled with a kind of commercial cartoon imagery popular in the late 50’s that one might see advertising cheap bourbon in Argosy Magazine.

I’d recently visited an exhibition of works by Byron Brown, a founding member of New York’s first generation of modernists.   With their use of Picassoesque pastiche, a self-dramatizing use of artistic flourishes and an odd naïve humor that seems more an affectation that a true stylistic insight, there’s a parallel sensibility in their extravagantly misguided version of Modernism.  In Brown’s case it lead to tragic consequences, a fall from artistic stardom, and an early grave.  For Lawrence, when viewed from our current state of Post Modern cynicism, it leads to a chuckle of guilty recognition and a jolting reassessment of our standards of “good taste.”

Because of his innate understanding of pictorial syntax and cliché, derived from close readings of sources as diverse as early Modernism, classic commix and Abstract Expressionism, Lawrence hasn’t limited himself to figuration but has decided to test the efficacy of his language by also delving into a type of surrealistic abstraction.    In recent works the line has thickened and an increased painterliness has developed. His bio-morphic shapes nevertheless have a similar klutzy insolence and goofy brashness displayed by his desperate figures.     “Bloopers” (2005), is a grouping of small abstract paintings that could be a parody of those very serious canvases seen as props in B grade short features about life in Greenwich Village from the Beat era.  Ameoba forms dance and undulate as if in preparation for cellular division.  A ground of modeling paste is puddled and sculpted into ribbed textures, then painted and glazed over to enhance the appearance of substance.  A palette of ochre, black and white is combined with a gaseous yellow and spots of red and blue.  Strangely these little “bloopers” seem to manifest a wide spectrum of emotions like: anxiety, pictured by repeated nervous tick lines, stress depicted with squirting drops of cartoon sweet, or pride and joy related with broad brushed beams of radiance.  Though their clunky fabrication is totally contemporary, they do recall the biomorphic designs of Baziotes and Miro, but with the added connotation of comic self-consciousness received no doubt through self actualization therapy.

"David Kapp Recent Paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Mini glaciers of frozen snow still dotted the side streets of Midtown, remnants of the record-breaking snowstorm of ‘06.  As the elevator door opened on David Kapp’s selection of recent cityscapes, I was convinced that if the radiant heat generated by these works could be harnessed, it would’ve melted the last remains of winter.

Beginning with the influence of Carot and continuing through the works of Manet, Monet and Pissarro a range of pearly and silvery greys used by these Impressionists has come to typify a quality of the Parisian atmosphere.   Likewise, Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series with its subtle aquas, greens and golds has come to stand in for the light and space of the Southern Californian landscape.  Kapp has with these works distilled an ambient quality that resounds  uniquely  to New York, especially summertime New York.  “Summer in the City” isn’t just the name of a song, it paradoxically combines aspects that Kapp uses to create his strong abstract statements in the guise of landscape.  First, the high vantage point views from high-rise windows or tall overpasses, whose downward gaze removes the horizon-line and flattens the scene to an almost map-like topigraphicality.  Secondly, brilliant sunshine on a clear afternoon casts shadows so strong that they can upstage the light and carve unexpectedly intriguing shapes as they hug forms and tail away on pavements.

As a colorist, Kapp has honed in on a spectrum of greys that range from a warm dove to a dark blue-black granite.  Although the indiscriminant use of grey can be problematic, deadening hues and neutralizing differences, Kapp instead, seems to energize it and creates upbeat harmonies through the use of orange under painting and bold tonal contrasts.  Compared to earlier shows, these pictures are more thinly painted, more tonally nuanced, less scumbled, with some passages as dry as a sun baked slab of slate on Broadway.

The ubiquitous scenes of urban highways, clogged with masses of chrome and enameled automotive color and traffic stripes, are symbolic images that express our current car culture like few others.  Kapp has employed this motif consistently, yet his development of various perspectives, compositional structures, and surfaces show the vast potential of the subject.

In “Fifth Avenue South II” (2005), a tapering swath of street is visible between tall banks of skyscrapers.  The cool light grey of the illuminated asphalt is dappled with yellow stroked cabs and the blue and white blocks of trucks.  Shadows cast from encroaching buildings stream from left to right, cutting and pinching the central shape. Space is palpable and one almost expects to hear the muffled sounds of tires hitting construction plates and distant horns honking. 

“Ticket Lines at Shea Stadium” (2005), is perhaps the most abstract painting in the show.  Viewed standing close it is a confetti flutter of whites, dark blue, cobalt and powder grey over a Naples-yellow and peach ground.  Stepping back, the planes congeal figures solidify and a teaming crowd in a parking lot appears, weaving their way between traffic barricades on their way to the game.  The velocity of Kapp’s brushstroke and the skidding scrapes from knives seem to blur the figures and impel the forward-like distortions of slow speed photography.  Add the smell of mustard and hot asphalt and it doesn’t get more New York. 

"K. K. Kozik “Shelter” And Sook Jin Jo “My Brothers Keeper” at Black and White Gallery," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Domestic bliss, an all enveloping cushion of comfortability, security, and household good taste that we might find rendered within the pages of Martha Stuart Living, or Good Housekeeping is a pictorial theme that unites many of the paintings in Kozik’s latest exhibition “Shelter.”  Also present is a mood of aloofness, a state in which, though the characters are present in urban settings, they exist in their own private reality, a realm somehow isolated from the threats, grime and worries of modern city life.  A creeping sense of paranoia and an unprecedented climate of vulnerability have struck New York since 9/11. We also face the voracious real estate development that has displaced swaths of our local community.  These attacks on the stability of our homes and home lives have rendered the thoughts of our former mundane lives a fantasy, a golden past.   In this environment it’s little wonder that Kozik’s depictions of residential solace resonate with viewers.

“Ghosts” (2005) looks like a real estate agent’s dream scenario.  A lounging couple in pajamas bracket the scene, reading the Sunday papers and sipping coffee, behind them, through massive windows, stand the uppermost portions of neo-Gothic skyscrapers. Outside snowflakes pile up and blankets of mist shroud the view in pearly shades of grey.  Luxurious accessories like a polar-bear-skin rug on the floor, and a “Rothko” painting on a maroon wall signify a world isolated not only by distance and elevation but by economics and privilege.  For those of us who can only look up and wonder about what life is like above the 40th floor, this depiction of warm candy colored comfort counter posed against the chill of an urban winter illuminates a vision that is as fantastic as any surrealist could conjure.  “Au Plain Air” (2005), pictures a Brooklyn sky line at dusk.  Flood lights and studio equipment clutter the roof of a building.  On an adjoining building hangs a canvas so large that it nearly covers the entire wall.  It depicts a redheaded girl sitting on a stone wall surrounded by fields and trees.  A window is exposed through a hole cut in the canvas.  In the foreground, back to the viewer, stands the artist contemplating the work.

Kozik constructs her tableaus with the dramatic eye of a set designer.  Perspective, scale, lighting, and color are all used to evoke sensations that amplify the ambience of the narratives.  The small scale of the figures in relationship to the whole, and their placement, as if they’re actors on a stage, creates a distance, a separation between the viewer and the subject that keeps the observer removed, a member of an audience rather than a player.  Though this might provide the artist with a reliable frame work on which to build her plot lines, it does limit the kinds of pictorial incidents and perceptual frameworks available to the viewer and tends to limit the readings to illustrations of personal parables.

Undoubtedly Kozik is technically proficient, and able to paint interior and exterior architectural elements convincingly.  In recent years the richness of her colors has provided a wonderfully believable space to her landscapes and interiors.   Her palette, which may be a bit sweet for some, is still used very articulately and allows Kozik to make her forms pop, and her planes flatten.  With “Shelter” we are privileged to witness the double developments of both Kozik’s painting and narrative skills which deserve watching.

Stepping into the sculpture yard behind the gallery, I was enveloped into another world far removed from metropolitan domesticity.  On this, my initial visit, there was a light layer of icy snow that was caked on parts of Sook Jin Jo’s wooden installation, and it provided a frosty crunch as I walked around and through this rambling gnarled construction.  The sun was setting, but the natural light played on the white of the snow and brought into strong contrast the various forms lending a sense of primitive wilderness, like stumbling into an isolated glen on a high wind-swept plateau.  The sculpture space at Black and White is a rectangle of quietude about 45 x 90 feet, with blank walls that rise up at least four meters, a unique site, and perfect for the presentation of Jo’s “My Brother’s Keeper.”  

Taken individually, the elements have a strong connotation of collage.  Upright members are twisted and kinked in apparently organic shapes.  Up close viewing reveals the limbs and posts are cut and joined from an amalgam of raw wood and milled and lathed lumber in an ironic melding.  Weathered branches have scraps of boards and worn architectural remnants inserted into the configurations as if a pre-industrial forest had collided with and embraced a post-industrial one.  Jo’s eye for analogous forms present us with a salient insight into that most taken for granted of materials, “wood.”  The configuration’s coherence is reinforced by its spectrum of earthen and woody browns, accentuated sparingly with only a few sticks of faded enamel color.  A shape that might be the trunk of a sapling is propped up by what should be a ragged root, but the spiral end of an oak banister is substituted instead.  A cylindrical limb has a 2 x 4 grafted in its middle, pricking the awareness of just how much of our constructed world is cut out of the stuff of nature.  Vertical posts or shoots are braced upright by a ramshackle network of crossbeams and buttresses.  While moving around and among the different components of “My Brother’s Keeper,” readings at different points change from architecture at its most primitive to a blighted forest with leaves and greenery desiccated and gone to a climb over a junk pile of discarded lumber headed to a bonfire. 

There is, underlying all the formalistic and “artistic” structural intentions of this work, one uniting theme that Jo’s selection of wood is sublimely and poetically appropriate for: the inevitability of death and decay.  One becomes instantly aware through sight and smell of the fragility of even the most sturdy log or beam to the forces of time, wind, weather, and rot.  Sook Jin Jo’s “My Brother’s Keeper” delivers to us city bound folk the same insights into nature and our place within it that we might experience during a winter hike through distant forests. 

"John Graham Sum Qui Sum at Alan Stone Gallery," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

John Graham, born Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowski in Kiev, in 1887, stands as an avatar within the formative first half of the twentieth century in New York’s burgeoning art world.  His biography reads at turns like “Dr. Zhivago,”  “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” and “The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.”  He was trained as a lawyer, became a cavalry officer and ardent anti-Bolshevik, and fled Russia just ahead of the revolution.  He landed in New York in 1920 and through his studies at the Art Students League made connections with artists who would become the foundations of the “New York School.”  He was a connoisseur, a hustler a, pedagogue, a womanizer and, from the evidence of this enlightening show, an intriguing painter who embodied a startling divergent aesthetic.  This museum grade exhibit, lovingly assembled by Alan Stone and gallery director Claudia Stone, is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue with essay by Harry Rand, which should become a benchmark for Graham scholars in the future.   

 It is perhaps as a result of Graham’s fascinating biography, with its many unexpected twists and turns that has confused and confounded the institutional establishment leaving him in a kind of critical no-mans-land. He was an early convert, and zealously promoted modernism, particularly Picasso’s Cubism.  His efforts as a talent scout give the first exposure to Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Lee Krasner and others.   Through his associations with a broad swath of the downtown scene he was able to introduce young artists like De Kooning to the reining masters Gorky and Stuart Davis.  The ultimate renunciation of many of his own principles, which he chose to relinquish so as to complete his final and most unique series of paintings, seems too complex, too esoteric for the simpleminded marketing strategy that in our age “major talents” require. 

As evidenced by recent exhibitions, many young artists seem fascinated by the idea of the “outsider” artist, the likes of Henry Darger or Adolf Wolfli.  An “academy of the naïve” ironically has appeared in the graduate art departments at several local universities.  Graham, however, represents the other end of the “outsider” spectrum.   He was an artist and intellectual who achieved this status not by holding himself apart from the art world in some hermetic isolation, but rather by approaching it directly, invading it to the very core, then once becoming the insider’s insider, being excreted, or intentionally progressing on to a position that was incomprehensible to those uninitiated in the strange alchemy of art.              

The earliest pictures here show a clear debt to the cubist-still lives of Picasso and Braque, but with little of their subtlety.  Graham does have an authentic color sense that overrides this seeming lack of compositional facility.  Progressing rapidly to a state of late cubism combined with surrealistic fantasy, Graham begins to produce equestrian studies, perhaps in homage to his cavalry days and love of horses, but also in admiration of the Renaissance masters Paolo Uccello and Giotto.  “Untitled” (1933), a pen and ink drawing of horse and rider, employs the heavy crosshatching and cubist planes that Gorky would adopt to such effective ends in works like “Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia” (1934).  Though a booster through his writing, curating, and socializing with the originators of Abstract Expressionism, Graham pulled back from the leap into total abstraction, but there are examples here in his mystical and metaphysical symbolism that approach it.  “Metaphysical Study” (1942) is a small painting which melds ancient and invented Jungian symbols on a field of diagonal lines.  It could be seen as a precursor of both stripe and “Pattern and Decorative” painting that became popular decades latter.  Sexual tension becomes more pronounced, and with the selection of erotic drawings presented in the back gallery and the “Women” series of portraits, Graham makes his break with the prevalent trends in Modernism that he’d proselytized so ardently for.  “Marya (Donna Ferita, Pensive Lady)” (1944) and “Two Sisters (Les Mamelles d’outres-mer)“ (1944) are pictures that alone should establish Graham as a protean force in American painting.  At a time when the Ab-Ex bandwagon was just getting rolling, these weird pictures with their classical subjects and handling must have seemed like the ultimate treachery to his fellow avant-gardists.  On closer viewing these “classic” subjects reveal a disquieting uniqueness of vision.  Though “original” these women are composed from quotations or paraphrases of Renaissance masterpieces.  Through a process of repeated tracing and the use of templates, the artist distilled the lines and forms to their essence.  The accompanying drawings reveal the underlying proportional designs as well as strange symbolic, alchemical, and phallic notations.  The presence of gashes on the throats and arms of the women have a sadistic sexual connotation, while the crossed and cock-eyes allude to the questions of sight versus perception.  It may be overstating the case but these late figure studies do provide a guide for the Post-Modern practices of recent figurative painting.  Artists as diverse as John Currin, Ion Birch, Tim Mensching, and Lisa Yuskavage owe much of their relevance and liberty to encode personal mythology into their images to the precedents set forth by Graham.  It’s little wonder that forty years after his death, the artist John Graham, is still under appreciated and misscategorized.  He appears like the alpha and omega of Modernism.  In a community founded on an agreed upon myth we call “art history” Graham created his own, a kind of shaman warrior of art, questioning all accepted wisdom, always on the move, always on the attack.  What greater threat to our comfortable complacency could there be? 

"Luc Tuymans: Proper at David Zwirner," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

“Not much” was the terse evaluation of these paintings that I elicited from a fellow spectator.  This might not account for much in the hyper-opinionated Chelsea art audience except that the speaker was one of our most renowned painters, a guy who knows a crock when he sees one, even if he has to break it.  Tuymans is one of the current darlings of the European art establishment, and has the resume to prove it. He’s been included in every major show from the Saatchi Gallery’s “Triumph of Painting” to “Undiscovered Country” at the Hammer Museum in LA, with multiple appearances in “Documenta,” a one man exhibit at the Tate Modern, and favorable mention in “Vitamin P, New Perspectives in Painting” Barry Schwabsky’s recent overview of emergent painters.   I wanted to like this show…but… 

I was put into mind of that other super-star bad boy of Belgian art, Wim Delvoye, and his major sculpture installation exhibited here at the New Museum a couple of years ago, “Cloaca,” affectionately referred to as the “Shit Machine.”  This “machine,” which had its own chef cooking two meals a day for it, would pump and process ground up food through a series of beakers containing acid and enzymes, and in two days produce simulated turds that were signed and sold for $1,000 a pop.  In that case one had to admire the chutzpah and direct honesty of the enterprise.  Perhaps not all together without merit, Tuymans is a bit more problematic, though there is still a hint of the toned down raw umber anal in some of these new paintings. 

As Raphael Rubinstein postulated in “A Quiet Crisis,” we have a couple of generations now who, thanks to TV and computers, have lost their ability to “see” painting, to read the intricate forensics of the painters hand, eye, and mind.  Add to this the Duchampian, Post-Modernist tendency to translate every object into a text and you’re left with what is perhaps the most disappointing aspect, not only of Tuylmans’ enterprise, but of so much current “art production.”  “It is weak visual matter in an envelope of aggressive critical language,” as Harold Rosenberg defined a related problem regarding the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler.  It’s rhetoric attempting to overpower the eye.

Having watched the development of Tuymans’ painting for some time, I was initially charmed by its clunky naive distortions, bold handling, and rich surfaces.  These latest examples seem both more facile yet less substantial.  Several critics adore this wane banality and the “dream like” nature that combines the technique and the images.  As for subject matter, defined in the press release as, the “image of a fragile America and a crumbling state of current affairs” seems at this point a bit tired indeed.  If these depictions of table settings, bed canopies, wall mounted thermostats and empty ballrooms can somehow be read a critiques of American foreign policy then Tuymans represents a contingent of “conceptual painting” wherein mimetic images are unmoored from the explicit meanings of their subjects, and there is a subversion of interpretation which elicits readings in whatever way deemed most relevant by the spectator.  Deconstructivism run-a-muck or aesthetics replaced by guilty political correctness?   In short, the crux of the issue is the debate and polemics engendered by the supposed subject matter (however weak their rendition, or tangential their relationship) which is far more interesting than the paintings themselves.  Yet I would gladly welcome the polemics if the decision was to make really “bad” paintings, vigorously bad, disgustingly bad, horrendously bad, and not just limply, bloodlessly not very “good.” 

The pictures do poses an odd physics that creates a visual vacuum, a kind of black-hole which tends to suck the viewer’s mind in to try to fill the void.  Admittedly, Tuymans has a light touch, is able to depict an image with minimal means and has an eye for provocative subjects.  “Demolition” (2005) is a painting ranked by Jerry Saltz as “one of the best paintings Tuymans has ever made.”  On first viewing, I was convinced it was a close up view of a serving of cauliflower au gratin.  A tiny street light cowling in the lower left-hand corner led me to think that a miniature train accessory had somehow gotten mixed in with dinner, presenting a tragic potential for chocking.  The dangers of childhood death from choking, when viewed as a world wide threat, dwarf even the dangers of terrorism and the fallout from 9/11.  It could happen anywhere!   Given the above mentioned free-range elucidation of “conceptual painting” one could therefore state this interpretation might be more “profound” than others, raising the “correctness quotient” of said painting.

  Perhaps the most discomforting quality of these paintings is their drifting sense of ennui, a state where everything is of equal interest or disinterest, total moral and aesthetic stasis.  If I had wanted to like these pictures, it would have been a misreading as their essence seems to be an attempt to present the current state of a boring repellant societal banality.  This state of intellectual indolence may be the fashion, or a malady of our cultural commissars.  Whether out of laziness or conceptual subversion, this shifting of responsibility for the creation of content or meaning from artist to viewer seems like just the latest blow to the idea of the “heroic individual artist,” obviously an anachronism long overdue for extinction in our brave new art world.   Yet I still long to really feel, to think some things still matter, that some things are still worth the grime and sweat of expressing in art.  I refuse to surrender to the blasé, and therefore must state that my finds regarding these paintings to be decisively and unequivocally…inconclusive.