What are you doing Sunday?

Self Portrait with Striped Shirt, 2008

Sunday, I shall board the 1:38 from Grand Central Station to the Aldrich Museum to attend the opening reception of Jenny Dubnau's exhibition Head On. Click the link above to check out times, dates and online catalogue for the exhibition. I've known Jenny since the early 1990s; it's a pleasure to discuss painting with her in studio and gallery visits because her engagement with painting is so profound. It's also gratifying to observe her work evolve--she was always good,  but the work, though remaining in dialogue about painting and paint, invites directly transmitted experience that transcends the critical.

I'm particularly excited about these paintings as they represent a ripening maturity in her work. Starting from the above self portrait, 2008, Jenny mutes her palette, pushing the most subtle aspects of a color. She alters the internal scale of her figures for a more proportionally rewarding relationship to the space surrounding them and softens the lively dance of her brushwork to the barest flicker. The paintings are material, but atmospheric. Look at the stripes on the shirt, the edges of hair, eye and chin, or the strange double halo of head and neckline--they pulsate. The psychological self portraits from 2005, the nearly slapstick, black and white self portraits of 2006 and exquisite portraits of aging loved ones from 2007 search and give way, after a cataclysmic encounter with Velasquez' Las Meninas, to a more distanced, yet penetrating perception.

In Las Meninas, Jenny witnessed "vast circular space, through which dust motes fell," and that space offered the pivot she felt her work needed: literal room for human presence. In the double portrait below, the influence of Spanish painting is clearly felt in the atmospheric space and beautiful charcoal palette that invites the eye to roam. The figures and space share equal weight, enveloping and holding each other.

Carrie and Sheila, 2008

R. With Grey Shirt, 2009

After Spain, Jenny began to hire models. This brought a natural evolution to the Aldrich show, which includes artists, curators and others associated with the museum new to her acquaintance. The emotional space evolves a more compassionate feeling in the work. It imbues perception, in a paradoxical shift of emphasis, with the agency to negotiate the mechanics of vision through the body. This activity, encapsulated in flickering brushwork, becomes the true subject of the paintings.

Peter Saul at Haunch of Venison, 1230 6th Avenue (48th/49th), Last Day Today

Trumpets of joy at this briliant survey exhibition by Texan bad-boy Peter Saul. For many years, Saul taught in Texas and is now living in New Hampshire. His satiric antics are in full play in the twenty paintings of this show. Painter Susanna Coffey commented that the paintings looked immediate, as if done yesterday--and are loaded with visual ideas: flat, blocky areas of color surrounded melting refrigerators or jets, pearlescent, pellet-like teeth and sponge-like die. It's hard to know where to land first: juicy refrigerator still lifes, with striped and checkered backgrounds, linseed oil still looking wet on the surfaces; the razor-sharp articulation of "Columbus Discovers America," 1992-5, in which low, muted color sweeps into a Byzantine goldmine of yellows and Indian reds that turns out to be a group of women in chains; or the tour-de-force painting of cops on a subway crash epic from 1979, or the weird and furry paintings Saul is doing now. The overriding impression is, what a colorist. The second is, look at those edges! The longer you look, the more rewarding, on a purely visual level, the paintings become.

Saul lived and worked in Europe for eight years, returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964. He states in the exhibition catalogue that Americans weren't really studying their culture yet, so he was able to plumb its riches from afar. His work intersected with and/or likened to R. Crumb, the Hairy Who and Guston, and these intersections come immediately to mind when you see the paintings; they also conjure, from a greater distance, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, also in Europe in the late 1950s.In the catalogue interview with Chris Byrne, Saul responds to a question about why he draws distortion: "I like to draw cartoony because it adds a feeling of movement." He adds, "a great many mistakes are a good thing because they slow down the viewing, and become interesting points to look at..." and cites an incident in London in 1956 when artist Pietro Annigoni was criticized for making one of the Queen's arms too long and Saul, with 20,000 others, stood on line to see it. Saul states, "like Ingres he was trying to stretch the body a little further. A few years later I began to think about this event: 20,000 people looking at a mistake."

Saul's show is one of those that makes you wan to drop everything and paint.

Happy 2011!

OPENING RECEPTION: January 1, 1-3PM