Pat Passlof ‘Recent Paintings 2005-2011’ Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Pat Passlof’s unexpectedly posthumous one person exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York City marks the passing of a certain pictorial consciousness. In addition to the dozen or so paintings made during the last decade, the exhibition unfolds into a dirge for the New York School’s promise and capability. Pat Passlof, who died at 83 on November 13 just a week before her show was scheduled to open, was married for a half a century to the iconoclastic and prickly painter Milton Resnick. Passlof, more so than the already under recognized Resnick, held a quiet reputation in relation to the brighter lights of de Kooning and Kline. Like them, however, Passlof maintained a true believer’s faith in the alchemy of painting. In a documentary shown in conjunction with the exhibition, Passlof, who taught at the College of Staten Island for several years as a painting professor, states that, “All painting since 1850 is based on Cézanne. I know I am certainly based on Cézanne.”  The documentary also shows Passlof painting in her studio, a large former Synagogue on Forsythe Street that was located around the corner from Milton Resnick’s studio, also a former Synagogue. Painting confidently in her light filled studio with generous amounts of Williamsburg paint (Cadmium Green scooped straight out of the tin or Italian Pink squeezed directly from the tube to the canvas), Passlof speaks to the first mark releasing a force onto the canvas, which in turn is countered by the next mark, which will release its own counter force onto the picture plane, a force that will be corrected and restated with each additional mark throughout the painting's creation. The paintings in the exhibition, like the painting shown in the video, range in color from pastel to dung. Elements of figures and horizon lines creep into some pictures, while grids of circles or marks anchor other compositions. Similar to Resnick’s, ‘Elephant in the Room’ exhibition of late paintings held at Cheim and Reid last month, Passlof’s paintings do not create spatial illusion. Object-like in their materiality, space comes through intimations of physically sensed sky or earth. Passlof, like her partner Resnick, made paintings with her fingers and nostrils. Guileless, Passlof intends for her paintings to perform an obsolete task, that is, transform the viewer’s perception. Honeysuckle and verdant, Passlof’s last one person exhibition marks time until all such intentions have vanished.

Untitled, 2011
oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2011
oil on linen
36 x 36 inches

Untitled, 2010-11
oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2009
oil on linen
36 x 36 inches

Untitled, 2010-11
oil on linen
80 x 110 inches

Untitled, 2009
oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2009
oil on linen
36 x 36 inches

Untitled, 2009
oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2009
oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2009
oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Francis Picabia ‘Late Paintings’ Michael Werner Gallery

Strikingly relevant, Francis Picabia's late paintings at Michael Werner Gallery contextualize the pictorial and theoretical underpinnings of contemporary painting. Picabia, born in 1879, was a part of the same generation as Picasso and Braque, but is usually thought of as a painter who came to maturity after the First World War, especially in conjunction with Dada. Importantly, Picabia spent a significant amount of time in New York City, an experience that informs his work. A close friend of the other great French New Yorker Marcel Duchamp, Picabia’s paintings at Werner has singularly abandoned any pretense to a discussion with the past that characterizes Braque, Matisse and Picasso’s work.  Unlike those painters (whose individual work is gorgeously displayed in exhibitions at Acquavella, Eykyn and the Frick, respectively) Picabia’s paintings do not revolutionize, or even consider, the past. Picabia’s pictorial thinking is weaker than his more abundantly gifted peers. While Picasso, Braque and Matisse reinvented Western painting, Picabia flitted from one received style to another. Around the time Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles, for instance, Picabia was showing the Influence of the second rate Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. Later, Picabia joined the Groupe de Puteaux, a collection of painters based in Suburban Paris who practiced what Guillaume Apollinaire termed ‘Orphism’ which was a derivation of Cubism that Picasso in turn dismissively labeled ‘Salon Cubism’. The Cubism practiced by Picasso and Braque, strikingly Classical, would not look out of place next to a Roman torso fragment. Picabia’s Orphism, meanwhile, could comfortably hide behind a diamond tennis bracelet in a Tiffany’s window display. Picabia’s talent, instead, is not how he internalizes the past, but in how he utilizes the present. Displayed at Werner are Picabia’s ‘transparent’ paintings that used non-traditional techniques such as different glazes and opacities to make densely layered, collaged images. Going one step further by breaking Pop-conceptual ground, Picabia began to use girly magazines and other popular media of the day as source material for his paintings. Resembling popular illustrations, pin-up calendars or Fascist dream-erotica propaganda, these paintings spiritually borrow from the maudlin, sentimental and trivial as aesthetic starting points. Serious in intention, these images are gleefully irreverent in composition and attitude. Brash, silly and giddy, Picabia’s paintings are quintessentially New Yorker in manner and disposition. Picabia’s paintings, dangerously, say, ‘This is a lie’, and more dangerous still, ‘I am untroubled by the lie.’  Unmooring himself from pictorial responsibility, Picabia opened the door to our own current, untethered condition.  

Portrait de Suzanne , 1941

Oil on paper mounted on canvas
21 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches
55 x 45 cm

Francis Picabia, Papion, ca. 1936-38

 

Femme au Bouquet , 1942

Oil on board
42 1/4 x 30 1/2 inches
107 x 77 cm

Mère et enfant , ca. 1939-1940

Oil on wood
39 1/2 x 33 inches
100.5 x 84 cm

Bianca Beck ‘Body’ Rachel Uffner Gallery

Corporeal embodiment, with its fleshy disadvantages, excretions and protrusions, is ripe subject matter for an artist, something Bianca Beck explores in her first one person show with Rachel Uffner. Using scatological smears as an entrance into to the picture plane, Beck’s show, ‘Body’ makes an analogy between painting and the figure. Beck’s paintings split into two groups, one ‘body colors’ uses browns, clays and earthen reds, while the other ‘spirit colors’ has touches of gold, purple and silver. Small and punctured, Beck’s paintings also hint at non-human imagery, recalling a horse’s head. Small, painted logs also punctuate the exhibition, adding a three dimensional, overtly organic, component to her fragile sensibility. Soft-spoken, Beck’s ‘body’ of paintings is a hushed and vulnerable handmade wipe. Punctured, needled, charred and bruised, Beck’s painted surface does not so much occlude intransigence as speak directly to the accruing of scars, blemishes and failures the body collects over time. Fragile and abject, Beck’s paintings speak to the body, barely audible and in a whisper.    

Bianca Beck, "Untitled," 2011, oil on canvas, 19 x 16 inches, 48.3 x 40.6 cm  


 

Bianca Beck, "Untitled," 2011, oil, paper, and glue on linen, 12 x 9 inches, 30.5 x 22.9 cm

Bianca Beck, "Dance Painting," 2011, oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches, 61 x 45.7 cm

Bianca Beck, "Untitled," 2011, oil and ink on panel, 16 x 12 inches, 40.6 x 30.5 cm

Bianca Beck, "Untitled," 2011, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, 50.8 x 40.6 cm

Bianca Beck, "Untitled," 2011, oil on linen, 17 x 13 inches, 43.2 x 33 cm

Pamela Jorden ‘Sun and Moon’ Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery

Pamela Jorden’s smart, intimate one person show at Klaus Von Nichtssagend gallery, ‘Sun and Moon’ participates in a generational pictorial malaise dressed in a loose and casual painting application.  Jorden’s work, along with several young and mid-career artists, uses painterly abstraction that Roger Fry would have approved of in one of the buoyant, giddy salon d’automnes prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Employing a cool palette of ultramarine blues, umbers, zinc whites and cadmium reds that Jorden casually spreads across small linen surfaces and fabric supports. A light touch prevents her work from becoming overly cerebral or beholden to her sources. Instead her work becomes a part of a larger pattern of investigation, however subtle, into the political moment. Jorden’s ‘Night Owl’, for instance, resembles Robert Delaunay’s ‘Eiffel Tower’ from 1911 in its format, palette and composition. Delaunay’s painting uses Cubist techniques to deconstruct the ultimate symbol of Parisian sophistication, the Eiffel Tower. Jorden uses the same fracture, jagged edges and thrusting compositional momentum as Tour Eiffel. Similarity, however, is not substance. What Jorden’s painting lacks is actual momentum. Jorden, unlike Delaunay, cannot participate in any serious attempt to change consciousness. Historically stymied, Jorden’s studio practice chooses itself. Jorden turns to Delaunay’s pictorial language, with its kinesthetic shape and corporeal touch, not only for its formal splendor, but because such language intimated something catastrophic stealing into its historical moment. Jorden’s paintings, modest, quiet and sincere, transfer each studio decisions into elusive political moments.      

Pamela Jorden, Intervals of Still Water, 2011
oil on linen, 40 x 60 inches


 

Pamela Jorden, Switchback, 2011
oil on linen, 40 x 50 inches

Pamela Jorden, Night Owl, 2011
oil on linen, 74 x 50 inches

Pamela Jorden, Silver target, 2011
oil on silk, 20 x 20 inches

Pamela Jorden, untitled, 2011
oil on linen, 29 x 33 inches

Pamela Jorden, untitled, 2011
oil on linen, 29 x 33 inches

Pamela Jorden
Untitled
2011

Pamela Jorden, untitled, 2011
oil on silk, 16 x 16 inches

Pamela Jorden, untitled, 2011
oil on linen, 18 x 18 inches

Stefan Sandner 'Autonomie und Wirklichkeit' American Contemporary

Stefan Sandner’s group of thirty-four inch square paintings, ‘Autonomie Und Wirklichkeit’ at American Contemporary is a brief but intimate polemic on sickness. Conceived while convalescing from an unnamed illness, each painting is based on notes and drawings made on small post-it pages. Fragmentary and ephemeral, post-it notes by their nature prevent Sandner from longer form thoughts associated with literature’s great sickly thinkers Hans Castorp and Ivan Ilych. Instead Sandner’s notes are quick and illegible, either by intention, chance, or through the translation from their original small size to the larger platform of the paintings. Written in pigeon German, Sandner’s written/painted words breaks down and becomes an independent agent competing amongst other marks, forms, doodles, erasures and addendums. Employing both non-representational forms and linguistic tools of communication, Sandner’s intention in his painting is for both to fail to communicate meaning in the face of sickness. Congealed, sickness and language equivocates their intentions. Shamefully, sickness hides itself from others, as Susan Sontag wrote in Illness and Metaphor, “As death is now an offensively meaningless event [in advanced western societies], so that disease widely considered a synonym for death [cancer] is experienced as something to hide.” Sandner’s disease, operation or procedure is unknown to the audience. Instead, shard like, Sandner presents notes from his recovery and healing process. Illegible, Sandner’s notes cannot offer solace to anyone currently or potentially grappling with trauma. Sandner’s three feet paintings intimate—faintly—the irrevocableness of death behind the momentary passing presence of disease. Sandner’s title 'Autonomie und Wirklichkeit' (autonomy and reality) presents sickness as independent from comprehension, illegible to the audience, where recovery happens—tentatively—in form, language and partial communication.   

Stefan Sandner

Untitled

34 x 34 inches

2011 

Instillation View

Instillation View 

Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery

Time and color collude with memory in Howard Hodgkin’s exhibition of recent paintings at Gagosian Gallery. Painted on inverted picture frames inset with planks of wood, Hodgkin’s paintings perhaps strain believability in the ratio of gestation each painting was alleged to the amount of paint present on each board. Battered backs of picture frames surround pristine, often unprimed, handmade artist’s panels that have been smeared with striking cadmiums, nickels, greens and cobalts. Hodgkin has long maintained that his paintings are painterly transcriptions of ‘emotional situations’ where the painting process acts as a plein air observation of the artist’s consciousness. Retaining a signal use of primary and secondary colors, Hodgkin’s work becomes a Proustian meditation on memories’ transformation from experience to recollection held together with color. While painted quickly, each painting is a ‘memory recollected in tranquility’ that has taken years to crystalize into action.  Hodgkin’s work distills what Proust, towards the end of the Combray chapter has Marcel, his narrator describe in his remembrance of the two paths in his village:

And so the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in vicissitudes, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. No doubt its progresses within us imperceptibly, and the truths that have changes its meaning and its appearance for us, that have opened new path to us, we had been preparing to discover for a long time; but we did so without knowing it; and for us they date only from that day, from the minute in which they became visible.

Hodgkin’s paintings are indeed richest in episodes when pertaining to the intellectual life pictured through the color and texture of his panels. Aside from the personally oblique importance imbued in each picture, what remains in Hodgkin’s work is an intensely intellectual and formalized relic of color, touch and composition. Memory and emotional aside, what matters are instantaneous moments in the studio where the artist must make a specific decision regarding what color will be placed where and how. Marcel goes on in Swann’s Way

It is because I believed in things and in people while I walked along them, that the things and people they revealed to me are the only ones that I still take seriously today and that still bring me joy. Whether it is that the faith which creates has died up in me, or that reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers.

Desiring real flowers, Hodgkin heedfully re-creates his memory with the stuff of memory, color. Proust’s Marcel is alien to the present, forever recalling the flowers and walks of his childhood, mediating his present experiences through his primary innocence. Similarly, Hodgkin’s paintings are orphans of the present, recalling their past innocence, attempting recollection.

HOWARD HODGKIN
Dark Evening, 2011
Oil on wood
20 3/4 x 26 inches (52.7 x 66 cm)

HOWARD HODGKIN
Flowers, 2011
Oil on wood
25 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches (64.1 x 73 cm)

HOWARD HODGKIN
Breakfast, 2010-11
Oil on wood
26 7/8 x 31 1/8 inches (68.3 x 79.1 cm)

HOWARD HODGKIN
Knightsbridge, 2009-11
Oil on wood
40 1/2 x 46 5/8 inches (103 x 118.4 cm)

HOWARD HODGKIN
Red Sky at Night, 2001-11
Oil on wood
38 x 57 1/8 inches (96.5 x 145.1 cm)

And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day
2007 - 2008
80 ⅛ x 105", 203.5 x 266.7cm

Richard Pousette-Dart ‘East River Studio’ Luhring Augustine Gallery

Tradition, as T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘…Is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.’ Tradition as passed through multiple generations of artists—and artistic practices—is crystalized into Richard Pousette-Dart’s single voice at Luhring Augustine. Pousette-Dart’s early New York City paintings have been organized by two younger artists in his exhibition, ‘East River Studio’ on view in Chelsea. The first artist, Christopher Wool, is one of Luhring Augustine’s stable artists, and who also studied with Pousette-Dart, while the second, Joanna Pousette-Dart, is the artist’s daughter. Taken together, the show becomes both a helpful re-contextualization of a younger, and more obscure, member of the Abstract Expressionist circle, and also a meditation on the capabilities of tradition, labor, and artistic maturation.

                Richard Pousette-Dart’s works on display was created in a five year period from 1946-1951 in the titular ‘east river studio’. Pousette-Dart’s space was an old brewery in east Midtown that turned out to be his last work area in New York City. In 1951 the artist moved with his family upstate for greater access to large space and the critical calm his work required. While continuing to teach and exhibit in New York, Pousette-Dart’s work moved away from the urban towards an exploration of form and ideas not found in Western progressive painting.  Instead, Pousette-Dart borrowed different techniques and practices from both Western and non-Western art including pointillism and the culture of the Pacific Northwest. At Luhring Augustine, Pousette-Dart’s ‘east river’ paintings and sculptures show the artist already moving in these myriad directions. Several wire sculptures have a totemic presence reminiscent of folk-craft traditions while certain images dab paint into dot formations, most successfully in ‘Icarus’ from 1951 that the artist would later soften and harmonize into a coherent whole. Most paintings here, however, are raw and gorgeously incoherent. Bordering on the amateur, Pousette-Dart undermines any classicism inherent in abstract art’s utopian promise. Restricting himself to black and white, as Pollock and de Kooning had during this time, Pousette-Dart moved away from the refined elegance displayed by those two artist’s efforts into a funky eclecticism. ‘Ossi’ from 1949 and ‘Cloud Sign’ from 1950 have elements of Zen action painting as well as resembling discarded roofing tar tiles. Often cut down from larger rolls of canvas, Pousette-Dart’s paintings are strung along the stretcher bars’ edges and act as fragmented remnants of a procedural, psychic studio based dance. Nervy and broken, Pousette-Dart’s ‘east river paintings’ speak as much for today’s painter as wear the concerns of generations past.

                Christopher Wool and Joanna Pousette-Dart further elaborate and in turn diverge from Pousette-Dart’s abstraction. Christopher Wool, in his spray paint monochrome abstractions, and Joanna Pousette-Dart with her multi-paneled shaped paintings, each take elements of Pousette-Dart’s thought as a starting point for their own work. Both of these painters have moved beyond the specific formal concerns of Pousette-Dart’s own work while retaining the integrity his paintings embody. Choosing as their subject a body of important and transitional work, these two artists place themselves in a particular tradition while highlighting the possibility of mutation and change within that practice. Wool and Joanna Pousette-Dart each have received an inheritance from Pousette-Dart that still speaks, however faintly, in their current studio work. Considered alchemically, both painters have used the voice of their elder to illumine the magic inherent in art.

Richard Pousette-Dart
Icarus, 1951
Oil on linen
41 1/2 x 72 1/4 inches 
(105.41 X 183.52 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Cloud Sign, 1950
Oil and graphite on linen
36 x 74 inches 
(91.44 x 187.96 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Angel Forms, 1952/1953
Oil on linen
44 x 63 1/2 inches 
(111.76 x 161.29 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Ossi, 1949
Oil on linen
36 x 62 1/2 inches
(91.44 X 158.75 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Ebony, 1951
Oil on linen
43 x 76 1/4 inches 
(109.22 x 193.68 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
East River Sun, 1947-1949
Oil on linen
55 1/2 x 37 1/2 inches 
(140.97 x 95.25 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Bridge Horizon, 1950
Oil on linen
75 x 47 3/4 inches 
(190.5 x 121.29 cm

Richard Pousette-Dart
Animal Forms, 1940-1943
Oil on linen
38 1/2 x 42 inches 
(97.79 X 106.68 cm)