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 corners. The first thing you notice about Downes is how realistic is paintings look. And then the second thing you notice is how unrealistic they are. The straight lines can curve, the colors can get flat. I wondered at first whether he was using some kind of wide-angle lens. But upon third and fourth looks, his canvases become complicated and personal. His dedication to repeated, specific observation has not taken out his choices. Downes is only cold in reproduction. In person, his canvases are alive. From the rough texture of his canvas to the controlled elegance of his brush strokes...
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 days of abstract-expressionism religiousness. These days, when abstract paintings are just abstract paintings, Martin's look like he's worked hard to create something novel, with loud clashing colors, bulbous islands of cushion affixed, lines of gesture dragged through a dump of paint. His real spiritual forbearer is Stuart Davis' jazz-inspired abstractions of commercial art and American signage. Chris Martin has said that he's "turning up the volume" of painting. It's hard not to listen. At Mitchell-Innes & Nash until March 1....
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 the desert for no one to see. Until the 1980s, he refused to allow his work to be photographed or reproduced because he believed the context for art as important as the piece. In the late '70s, Irwin pushed the Marcel Duchamp art-as-context idea into boredom, like when he transformed an empty room at MoMA by replacing the lights and running a string along the room. The point was to get people to notice the environment in which art is situated. Most artists working today know where this line of thinking ends, and lucky for us Irwin did it so...
