EASYREEDER

TimeOut

Ron Gorchov

(04/27/2005)

Ron Gorchov’s paintings may be easily described as: two abstracted parallel forms on concave stretcher.  The marks, a handspan apart, are both humane and aloof.  The shapes themselves may inspire talk of eyes, of electrical sockets, of animal nostrils, of yin/yang symbols—and here we find the essential strength of the work, which maintains an insistent presence, dignity, all while embracing and defying facile description.

The twelve works in the show range from giant (“Entrance,” 180 x 246 inches) to diminutive (“Labyrinth,” 24 x 34 inches).  The works, as well, span almost four decades—from 1968 to 2005.  It is remarkable how faithful Gorchov has remained to his original vision; the colors and composition of a work completed in 1976, take “Spice of Life” for example, maintain an uncanny fraternity with works completed this year, such as “Somba.”  The assumption that the next show is always bigger, a new step, is entirely absent from the history of the work, which stands through fads and movements with tacit assurance…

Wolfgang Staehle

(10/03/2004)

Wolfgang Staehle’s current show at Postmasters Gallery consists of two large-scale, one small, live digital projections.  “Midtown,” “Eastpoint,” “Niagra,” and a one-hour video, “Niagra,” re-envision the frame, in painting and technology.  Staehle’s “canvas,” in real-time, presents shifting digital stills in a panoramic scale and lush palette—and orient on New York, literally, as a window onto the nation, and by extension, everywhere else.

The notion of realism in contemporary art was tainted, for decades, by the sentimentality implied by the milieu.  Now, works in the equally loose categories of abstraction, or even pop, may also exude an outdatedness—resulting in a collapse of these distinctions.  Since 9/11, the artificiality of these categories has been particularly transparent—who could take serious the pretense necessary to maintain such barriers? …

Rose Bond, “Gates of Light”

(07/13/2004)

The Synagogue tells its story.  The stained glass windows are illuminated by an animation that flickers with the passage of years, and the aspirations of generations of immigrants.  Rose Bond’s outdoor media installation at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, “Gates of Light,” tells the story of a New York Street, and a New York neighborhood, but more broadly, it tells the New York story: the great joy, the great sorrow, is that everything changes.  Every fifty years—taking as markers the economic crisis of the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1970s—the city has rebirthed itself, reincarnating into forms unrecognizable to past generations.  For city dwellers, that is the tragedy—not just the lost favorite restaurant, but the sense of identity that roots in a home, a place of origin, that remains largely the same.  But, for city dwellers, it is also the boon of New York: that we may change, and accept change, and remain plastic to tomorrow…

Michelle Segre

(06/14/2004)

A vortex of similitude.  In the eight medium size works of ink and gouache on paper, at the artist’s first show with Derek Eller Gallery, Michelle Segre merges the biomorphic and architectural.  Segre’s lines render congruous blocks of cells and blocks of cement.  Faces will emerge, as will castles—all with an equal weight of importance.  Assumption of perspective and proportion are intentionally tortured by Segre.  Bugs outsize castles.  Looming eyeballs give the impression of immensity.  All at once, Segre’s style is futuristic fantasy and scientific illustration.  The works, with their old-fashioned precision, turrets, and suggestions of novel inner organs, harken to an indeterminate past and/or future.  Always, to Segre, with her swirling currents of ink, there is an allusion which is as indicative of the physicist’s Big Bang as of the zealot’s Apocalypse…

Hillary Harkness

(06/12/2004)

“Sailing Forth from Lesbos: Hilary Harkness’ women lay down the rivet guns to spray some real ack-ack”:

Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery.  The expectation is big paintings.  In the current exhibition of new works, Hilary Harkness takes license to show three, and only three, relatively small paintings.  Why three?  Why small?

The paintings depict allegorical scenes—cross sections of lodges and ships peopled by lanky Caucasian pin-up girls.  The women, clad in sailor suits and blue-color undergarments tailored to runway specifications, are active in their worlds, working on the deck of a battle ship (“Crossing the Equator”), or indulging in the S&M escapades of an officer’s retreat (“Matterhorn”).  The figures, evoking fashion illustrations of the 1940s, are psychologically in step with the World War 2 settings….

Super Hero Narratives

(06/10/2004)

Depicting the progeny of villains to disprove art’s mythology.

Oil on canvas.  Large and medium size paintings.  The color is energized, yet more akin to the brown and yellow hues of old prints, or comic books, than the lurid candy-shell tones of much contemporary painting.  Jonathan Meese, in “Dr No’s Son,” continues his painterly deployment of his various narrative.  Meese has previously engaged his paintings with historical subjects: Nero, Imhotep, Caligula, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler.  In his present exhibition, Meese includes references to Echnaton, the Egyptian Pharoah who first introduced Monotheism, and El Dorado, the lost city of gold.  To Meese, history is presented as “straight from the tube,” like much of the paint in his works.  History signifies not so much any independent reality as the mythology of nations and ruling powers.  Similarly, Meese’s thematic examination of Dr. No (nemesis of James Bond) establishes a concept of canned mythology.  Meese’s super villain aesthetic places his work outside the assumptions and lessons of Pop Culture, as engineered by giant corporations.  Meese’s narrative is more concerned with the anger of Dr. No and his soldiers, than with the smooth antics of Bond…

Swishes that Pack a Punch

(04/10/2004)

Elizabeth Dee

Nobody can fill up nothing like Carl Ostendarp.  A lightening-like red conniption in the lower left hand corner, and a whole wash of a pinkish/orangish red (106 x 140 inches of it) is there.  To say what it is that’s there is the challenge, as Ostendarp’s canvases are more apt to cry out what they aren’t.  Uncool.  Cool.  Articulate.  Inarticulate.  Pretty.  Ugly.  Refined.  Coarse.  Placid.  Anxious.  Complicated.  Simple.

In Ostendarp’s ninth New York solo show, and his second solo show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, three tremendous canvases, scaled to Joan Miró’s “Mural Paintings” of 1962, are simultaneously affable—conducive to a discourse with a viewer—and defiant of conclusive explanation.  In a ground of “radical emptiness,” which is a term coined by Ostendarp, a blob or form or squiggle or tuft will take on a character as significant of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as of Dr. Seuss and comic books. ..

Gideon Bok

(04/10/2004)

Despite his pedigree (an MFA from Yale in Studio Arts, a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, several years in Brooklyn), Gideon Bok’s first New York solo show leaves viewers asking, “You’re not from around here, are you?”  A group of fifteen paintings—oil on linen, ranging from 22×14 inches to 79×55 inches—make up the exhibition.  Through evolving depictions of, for the most part, his own Northampton studio, Bok works as a temporal scribe—capturing the flows and eddies of time.  In Untitled, 2001-4, different window panels take up distinct seasons of multiple years.  Tables and chairs move—shadow-like—over transparencies of days, weeks, months, years…

The Past Illuminates A Promising Present:

(03/15/2004)

Vestry Arts juxtaposes DiBennedetto, Schoolwerth with Bellmer and Tchelitchew

Notions of greatness excite and revolt serious and not-so-serious artists everywhere.

But as one gets closer to the nexus of greatness—a pig’s litter of critics, artists, dealers, and collectors who get their chance to decide—one realizes the description is silly. Very often, the difference between great and not-quite great is a weird stew of happenstance and momentum. Still, the assertion is continually made, “There’s no great art now; it just ain’t what it used to be.”

In the inaugural show at Vestry Arts, Miguel Abreu, properly disregarding such atavism, has grouped drawings by contemporary artists Steve DiBennedetto and Pieter Schoolwerth with Hans Bellmer (1902-75) and Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957). DiBennedetto and Schoolwerth are an unlikely match; DiBennedetto known for his gloppy and colorful abstract excesses, Schoolwerth for his tightly conceived and rendered madhouse realism…

Barnaby Furnas, “Works on Paper”

(01/23/2004)

Guns blazing, Barnaby Furnas returns for his second solo show at Marianne Boesky with 36 works on paper that offer a spectacle of guts, glory and the occasional orgy.

In colors archetypal of today’s print media, Furnas obsesses (and rightfully so) on issues of political paranoia, personal excess and the seemingly resolute, national impulse to self-destruction. Shady operatives lurk in the tall reeds; they twirl their guns.  In the works, bacchanals play out on a stage representing the world; with all the blood and flesh, the depiction is part orgy, part bloodbath. Other works depict battle extravaganzas of Homeric Proportions. In aptly title works, soldiers, and others, are “Blown To Bits.”…

John McCracken, “New Sculpture”

(01/04/2004)

Looking at Minimalist sculpture today is to brave reassessment of the work as comatose and antiseptic.  In the context of a slightly crazy cosmology, John McCracken brings life and spit to an evolving iconography.

McCracken, presently recognized as an early contributor to Minimalism, furthers his West Coast orientation of the aesthetic in his third exhibition with David Zwirner.  The now New Mexico-based sculptor overcomes tired design elements with a dedication more to strangeness than perfection.  Taking up the “columns” and “planks” central to his sculptural vernacular, McCracken also overcomes outmoded clichés of universality with a thematic foundation of present-moment extraterrestrialism and pop parapsychology…

The Primary Force in Politics

(12/15/2003)

Stephen Ellis articulates an argument that challenges commonplace cultural expectations

Jeremiah, of the 24th book of the Old Testament, was a seer who railed against sinners, priests, false prophets, kings, and generals, and was claimed by some to be a previous incarnation of Jesus Christ. And why has Stephen Ellis titled his current show of abstract paintings “Jeremiads?” What could Jeremiah have to do with contemporary art in 2003?

The notion that art is without politics is itself a political stance. The fact that our culture is so thoroughly inculcated with the idea of art that is free of politics is a victory of an atavistic, backward view. Creative thinking has been largely relegated to party tricks and crocodile tears—Jeremiah himself is mistakenly associated with the Book of Lamentation, and weeping. In truth, art, as the origin of language, is the most primary element of politics, and historically demonstrates itself to be just that, whether in the form of a new, insurgent written language invented by the ancient Hebrews, or an album by Public Enemy…