Evolution on the LES

Mary Jones has an exhibition through March 10th-- Travel Light at High Noon Gallery Link.
Two works (one earlier, one current with these) can also be seen in the group exhibition Incise, Echo and Repeat through March 2nd  at The Clemente nearby (107 Suffolk St. at Rivington).

These ambitious paintings integrate actual scans with skeins of paint in hybrid, almost Surrealist space that originates for the artist in Renaissance portraiture. 

As in life, so too do these paintings absorb simultaneous layers of information compressed as color and image.

The associative leaps once made with simultaneous color in Impressionist paintings now vault across multiple media.

Contre jour, or backlighting the figure--a trope often used by Bonnard and Vuillard--reappears in these portraits.

Walking the tightrope between expressionist immediacy and a more stable, established tradition of portraiture. The  ambition in these paintings is great.

Riley Brewster's recent paintings in Doing What Comes Naturally curated by Robert Storr at the Resnick Foundation. Exhibition Link

These paintings were at one point the ultimate measure for me, although they have never had anything to do with the way that I actually paint. Here, earth (coat), 2018, 23.75 x 24 inches.

Brewster paints in the vernacular of Resnick himself (here, a Resnick).

Upstairs, painted strokes re-assemble as object-like notation in John O'Buck's Landscape , 38 x 60 inches.

Detail

The Key, 2018, 72 x 42, oil on canvas.

Andrew Spence, one of two eye boggling gridded works: Untitled Brown/Violet, 40 x 35 inches.

Joyce Robins, Untitled 12, 2018, oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches.

These really hold you in a psychedelic Gorky landscape: Untitled 15, from the same series.

Joe Fyfe was at Nathalie Karg in Kiss the Sky, with works made from Vietnamese kites and other materials combining poems from Artaud. Gallery Link

Speaking to a globalization of materials and ideas. 

Altoon Sultan at McKenzie Fine Art, showing works on painted porcelain such as Angle Over Folds, 2018, which here looks grey but is actually blue (the wall is white in reality). The size is 8-1/4 x 10-3/4 inches.  Gallery Link

The porcelain works were exhibited along with egg tempera on calfskin parchment mounted on panel, radiating the energy within compression in surprising spatial gaps.

Solid, geometric shapes hold the eye then emit, from their neutral color variations, a pure hue. Reality becomes weirder than invention. 

Sultan is precise, fine-tuned and thorough. Her work is beautiful.