For anyone who believes painting's connection to an artist's observation of nature, Rackstraw Downes is a hero. Downes can spend months on a canvas, going out to a site every day for a half hour or so -- so the light remains the same each day -- observing a scene and making sketches from nature. And when I say nature, I don't mean the glorious American escape of the Hudson River painters, or even Downes' classmate Neil Welliver. I mean the complicated and well-trodden landscape of populated America. Much of Downes work, in fact, is of busy urban street...
I apologize for the photos above--it's impossible to convey the charms of Juan Usle's warm, charming paintings. He paints in thin, translucent layers, grids mostly, to which the press release for the show credits his living in New York City part time. I'm not sure about that, but the discrete blocks in much of this work makes me think of the many discrete days Usle had to sit down to get his canvases to glow like they do. At Cheim & Reid until March 15....
Chris Martin is at the end of his rope. The top of the ladder. There's nowhere to go. So why not play? If Pollock was melted Picasso, Chris Martin can be melted de Kooning with shellacked Wonder Bread (really!) sorted by a hairbrush. Most of his work in the current show is abstract and contains added collage elements to make the paintings three dimensional. I was reminded of Joan Mitchell's roll-up-your sleeves ethic to get every last drop out of a surface. Her canvases always look like she's worked hard to make her surfaces shimmer. But those were the...
It says a lot about artist Robert Irwin that my favorite work of his has never actually been created. Irwin is a conceptual artist, horse race afficionado and dreamer whose artistic career is sketched in Lawrence Weschler's superb book "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees." This book gives Irwin's conceptual art a humanity that experiencing it in person does not. Weschler's book traces how Irwin went from being a precocious teenager winning national figurative drawing contests to joining the second generation of abstract painters in Los Angeles, to becoming a mature artist stretching a rope in...
