Figure Painting: Leland Bell at NYSS and Christina Quarles at Hauser & Wirth

Leland Bell at NewYork Studio School in Paint, Precision, and Placement: a series of self portraits and multifigure paintings.

NYSS Link

Rigorously observed, yet concise, Bell's geometric planes are completely satisfying.

He's using the classic palette of transparent red oxide, cold black, and zinc white to build warm and cool neutrals.

The results are different every time as he wrings all he can from the limited palette.

We begin to know the artist by his revelatory self-portraits.

Beautiful tonal range. The butterfly's path is traced in both gesture and cloth.

The doubling of a curtain, the interlocking shapes.

Somewhere between Balthus, Helion, and Wesley,

Not to mention Poussin.

For all the reduction, there's still a lot of paint going on.

Third version of an urban couple and their cat.

Study.

Sweet, early Bell in hallway.

Christina Quarles, in her exhibition "In 24 days Tha Sun'll Set at 7pm" at Hauser & Wirth. The solidity of geometric planes gives way to gestures amidst swaths of empty canvas.

Detail

Pleasing depth to the large canvas, about 3 inches, at least 2.5.

Surroundings have more physicality than the figures.

Opticality as well.

Washes, solid areas, differing systems, coming out of drawing.

The feeling state enters: rather than the eye-to-eye confrontation with the self, bodies act quickly, sometimes furtively or restlessly, within delineated patterns. The patterns organize what's going on.

Details contain memories.

LA architecture: patios, bright color, and various applications recalling the PoMo architecture of the late 1980s, like the Memphis Group in watercolor. 

 

More Uptown on a Rainy Day: Sharon Butler at Jennifer Baahng and Jackie Saccoccio at Van Doren Waxter.

Sharon Butler, Next Moves at Jennifer Baahng, here a quartet that only the gallery's installation photos capture beautifully: https://www.baahng.com/exhibitions/next-moves-by-sharon-butler/

Wanting to capture the subtleties of the color under the moody, flickering light from the window, I opted for details.

Butler's color has always been subtle, low, but she is neutralizing the color in ways that belie her sources and imbue her surfaces with soft painterliness.

The install is a compendium of disparate cosmologies and networks, and each painting builds its own unique world, heightened by the additional canvases that extend and expand the original impetus.

Starting here...

Variegated surfaces of paint complicate straightforward color, as do the variety of lines and shapes.

What are these glitches, blotches of color inside a color?Bringing to mind Avery, and also technology, the way digital images blur and distort under faulty connection. But it's paint!

Soft and hard, like a tile floor dissolving into light.

The grid is a departure point from which the painting takes off.

Detail first, the line holding us in as the grid dissolves.

We hang on to the line but it can't tell us any more than the grid does: it's all abstract and yet familiar, so we are not lost. The touch conveys human presence while the imagery, if we can say that, imparts the experience of the screen.

The tripartite compositions are bodies of different information systems, the artist's vocabulary of block, grid, line altered by soft and firm touch.

In the back room a collection of works from the early 'aughts giving context to Butler's paintings, from

New Casualist collage (Butler coined the term in response to Raphael Rubinstein's Provisional Painting of 2009 and on Saturday October 8th speaks with him at the gallery. Her essay defining the term is here: https://brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/abstract-painting-the-new-casualists) to

early geometries to

graphite drawings

and exploratory paintings

and a new Modernism takes form, a Modernism fully conversant with technology, art history, and a new century. A modernism that insists on the human touch that bends and softens geometry.

Vignette of how it felt to see this show: outside, the street noise of horns and rain, inside, the respite and focus of a thoughtfully curated exhibition of paintings. History continues.

A spectacular debut.

Jackie Saccoccio at Van Doren Waxter: shimmering, insouciant, shot through with light.

This is her first posthumous show, considered thoughtfully by Caroll Dunham in the catalog essay for Tempestuous. https://www.vandorenwaxter.com/exhibitions/jackie-saccoccio10

It's wonderful to experience these paintings again, to have a chance to review them after the gallery exhibitions and first encounters of the aughts.

She uses a wide weave surface, that looks primed highly white, and the paint hits this surface in a randomly placed but very specific way. Pigment lands.

She lets it be. She said once it was so much simpler than she thought--and she was right.

These are relatively small paintings, from memory in the 24 inch range. Some look almost blurred, even when one is viewing firmly before it.

The photo could never convey the spatial compression in this composition but it is vividly there IRL.

The exhibition includes pastel and ink drawings on various size papers and mylar surfaces that show her concern with the footfall through space, first cultivated in her early experience at Giverny as Artist in Residence. Her first installations included these markings painted on the wall but by this point they are fully integrated with the pours.

A really fabulous viewing day.