Jen Mazza at Stephan Stoyanov

WHETHER OR NOT ONE HAS READ MARCEL PROUST'S WORKS, his "madeleine" may be familiar—the cookie that invokes his Remembrance of Things Past transports Proust through time and memory. Jen Mazza, as if to signal how books, as objects, can be similarly evocative, depicts the first six pages of Proust's novel in three paintings titled Similar in the Dissimilar (2011). The paintings are striking upon first glance, with their prestidigitator's skills and academic precision (the typeface text of whole pages recreated down to the very serif), and it quickly becomes apparent that their virtuosity belies...

Read the full review in Artillery: Killer Text on Art

Julian Hoeber at Harris Lieberman Gallery

Travel across the US and you might encounter a type of roadside attraction known as a Gravitational Mystery Spot. It features an off-kilter structure which induces vertigo or disorientation that is generally attributed, by roadside hucksters, to either some gravitational anomaly or a paranormal phenomenon. The real source of the effect, however, lies in a simple architectural trick...

Read the full review in Frieze.

Mark Flood's "The Hateful Years" at Luxembourg & Dayan

Mark Flood might be one of the most prophetic and underrated artists of the 1980s. Working in a variety of media and formats – including painting, writing, installation, modified readymades, combines and photo-collage, not to mention the records of his band Culturcide – Flood’s anti-aesthetic sensibility has influenced a younger generation of artists that includes Josh Smith, Nate Lowman and Anthony Burdin. Dating from a time when pop subject matter was treated with varying degrees of cool indifference or irony, Flood’s is a unique, unusually impassioned and intensely oppositional voice. One gets the impression that... 

Read the full review in Frieze.

Review of Tom Thayer at Derek Eller Gallery

 

THE FAMED EXPRESSIONIST EDVARD MUNCH WAS KNOWN TO leave his paintings out in the rain on occasion, a habit he explained by saying, "It will either kill or cure them." I don't suspect that Tom Thayer has ever left one of his paintings outdoors but they do have a cracked, desiccated and weathered appearance that suggests it might not matter if he did. The cut-out corrugated cardboard figures hanging from dirty strings and gnarled curls of wire also help give off the impression that this work has been sitting undiscovered in an attic for about 30 years—despite the fact that everything here is from 2012 and Thayer is only 42-years-old. ...

Read the full review in Artillery Art Magazine

Review of Benjamin Butler's "Some Trees" at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery

Originally Published in Artillery Art Magazine

One might easily dismiss Benjamin Butler's paintings as blandly pretty or ironic "bad painting," a faux-amateurish retread of early 20th century Modernism. But they are, in fact, rather subtle paintings with a deceptive simplicity that belies a lot of art-historical knowledge and painterly know-how: the kind of work that takes time to warm up to.

All of them in his recent exhibition "Some Trees" depict not so much trees, as a nearly schematic glyph: the idea of a tree. As in Untitled Forest (2012), for instance, the suggestion of branches is rendered as one or two veering curves attached to a vertical line—enough to convey "tree"-ness. Mondrian's trees come to mind, as if Butler is picking up an art-historical loose end and running with it, although, stylistically, they are more akin to Alex Katz. Similarly, Butler's nods toward Minimalism suggest an attitude of resisting both the idealism of pure abstraction and the picturesque qualities imbued in his subject.


Initially, almost everything about these paintings seems to assert their status as an object. Paint is applied in ways that are unassuming and spare: either dry and scumbled or in very thin washes. These techniques emphasize the grain of the canvas, its materiality. Green Forest (2010-2012), a piece comprised of five oddly-proportioned columnar canvases (each about 76" x 7"), similarly asserts the canvas as an object—not unlike Frank Stella's early work. Also, like Stella, Butler's marks are sometimes laid down in tracks with slight space between them, as in Autumn Forest (Sixty-Three Trees) (2012). Without much over-painting, every step of his process is visible. This makes them performative in a way that feels both loose and fastidious—that is, deliberate and controlled but not precious or fussy.

Butler's consistent allusion to trees complicates all of this insistent materiality. The overall flatness is contradicted by the tree motif, which lets space—an intimation of sky—open up behind them. This implies a horizon line situated (with one exception) outside the frame. That is, these are trees that we are looking up at, an attitude suggesting, it would seem, a kind of reverence for his subject (or, perhaps, for his early 20th-century sources). Forty-Five Trees at Sunset (2012), for instance, seems, at first, almost like a grid painting or a mosaic before suggesting, gradually, the sense of light emanating through a forest. It also has a surprising, very evocative, sense of place. Like Milton Avery, he can wring a lot of atmospheric effect out of surfaces that would seem, initially, rather abstract. In fact, the best summary of Butler's work might be contained in the John Ashbery poem from which he garnered his title (Some Trees): "That their merely being there means something"—though, perhaps in Butler's case, the reverse. For all their "meaning"—their paradoxes, ambiguities and art-historical name-checking—we are left, in the end, with the specificity of their simple presence.

Other Reviews of Benjamin Butler's work:
Ken Johnson
Will Heinrich
Roberta Smith

Review of Amy Feldman's "Dark Selects" at Blackston Gallery

In & Out, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 75 x 80

The paintings included in Amy Feldman’s debut solo show “Dark Selects” (all works 2012) all convey a sense of quick efficient activity constrained by the unity of the single driving impulse: as if a rush of practiced activity could be a way of chasing after one clear yet multifaceted thought. Each work is an initially flat-seeming grey-on-white abstract composition that is revealed upon closer inspection to preserve, to varying degrees, some traces of their painterly production – some drips, light scumbling, and over-lapping brush-strokes. The thin nearly consistent application of paint makes the presence of intermittent drips and off-hand, apparently unfinished areas seem initially incongruous while their overall flat opacity allows them to seem integrated, however tenuously. It’s this dichotomy of form and material held in an unusual and fragile harmony that generates their most unusual effects.

That is, from a certain distance the quirky elegance of her compositions seems like an unlikely result of the gestural intensity implied by the drips. But up close this sense of reserve evaporates and the exact opposite impression occurs: the overall coherence of the whole seems like a contrived or artificial product of an alternately haphazard or deliberately off-hand patch-work of marks. It is weird and destabilizing but also thrilling to see paintings that seem almost at odds with themselves. For instance, in Owed – a large circular donut shape with repeated semi-circular edges like a cartoon cloud (or anus) - the subdued coherence of the work fragments completely, reveals itself to be an utterly provisional, almost an accidental product of these accumulated visceral efforts.

Owed, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80.

Look at them even closer; put your nose right up to the surface of All or Nothing, for example, and you’ll find something else entirely: a fine spritzing of tiny speckles (like paint applied by flicking the bristles of a brush loaded with watery thin paint) distributed almost uniformly across the canvas. From farther back these speckles dissipate into a vague texture accentuated by hazy accumulations, as if offering an amorphous vibrational counter-point to the svelte grey composition. Despite her works remarkable clarity, she’s determined how their effects might differ dramatically with viewing distance or, even, how a slight shift in perception might reveal a vastly different aspect or attitude. They also play with our perception of time. Far from seeming merely quick, these speckles demonstrate how these paintings are actually crafty, pain-staking, and calculated

In & Out, for instance, features a series of concentric not-quite-circles – more like round-corned wobbly off-kilter rectangles – that seems to recede into space inconsistently and then waver as the well-calibrated negative space asserts itself. Despite its relative simplicity, it seems unpredictable in a way – as if all the capricious choices of a virtuosically idiosyncratic hand give it, spatially, a complex ambiguity. The edges of the forms seem to waver and undulate. By painting over the edges of the frame and harnessing the figure/ground relationships into an unexpected optical illusion, Feldman also manages give the painting the sense that it’s about to defy physics – to warp and weave like a glitch in the Matrix. This effect is echoed in All or Nothing – a riff on Kenneth Noland’s famous Chevron paintings. The double “V” formation is contained in a vertical banner form that seems ready to start flapping in some illusory breeze and wrest itself free of its physical support any minute.

All or Nothing, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 96 x 80

She also demonstrates how even a simple form, in the most capable hands, can become fraught and out-of-control - subject to entropy, destabilization, or implosion - once it gets too big. She’s made a point of finding the line that separates control from chaos and then stepping just over that line. In this sense, the flat graphic quality of her work is a measure of her control, confidence, and familiarity with her own visual language, while the drips, which seem almost too neat or consistent but also incongruous, become an index of her anxiety. They’re accidents, that is, but accidents on purpose (as they say.) Far from being just an ostensibly incidental by-product, it just might be that it is these “accidents” which (by adjusting all of the other variables) she’s been conspiring to engineer all along.

Other Reviews and blog posts about Amy Feldman:
Roberta Smith
Anaba
Two Coats of Paint
Howard Hurst

Review of My 2007 Show The Revolution by Lucio Pozzi as Translated by Babel Fish from Italian

The following is an old review that the artist Lucio Pozzi wrote on a solo show of mine from 2007. What’s funny is that he wrote it in Italian and I have yet to ever see an English translation. At this point, I’m not even sure what has happened to the original cut-out page from an Italian newspaper that he sent me. I’ve only ever seen the Babel Fish translation that I made by typing the whole thing out into a Internet Italian to English translation machine myself. I thought that I had lost this too but I just found it while organizing some of my computer files and thought that it would be fun to post along with some photos of my work from that show, several years ago. I think that the bizarre computerized- pigdin English is hilarious. I hope you find it amusing too.


For more images of the work discussed in this review see ElwynPalmerton.com

The trash and be a factor of the life from the beginning of the human history. We consume and lasciamo in turn the roba that it remains: from boneses of the animals that we ate in the primitivi times till packings of the objects that we buy now. More the modern society than mass increases more and l' immondizia it becomes a problem. How to unravel itself some? Now we are engaging in the recycling, one of the traditional forms of digestion of the refusals. The other forms are to unload them and to accumulate them outside hand (sure times pay a poor region in order to keep them), to burn them, to macerate them, to diminish of the production all' origin.

L' other day I spoke about this article with l' Matteo friend Rossi. He has told to have read that the Municipality to me of hung Milan l' immondizia every day in order to calculate how many persons they are remained in city durations Ferragosto. New York produces 14 thousand tons of refusals to the day. The collection differentiated, but unfortunately and a farce because and not made is tried to respect from the government. We send trash to the South, sure times even until in Africa. L' Founded America and on the waste. When it was gone via along great plains of the West, one let us behind a wake of organic and material detritus that a lot did not import because it would have them to nobody rintracciatio. The classic American peasant had much earth that abandoned us truck, tractors, scato them of latta, old shoes and broken off chairs in order not to lose time to transport them elsewhere. They grew to us over the forests. It happens during paasseggiata to find again itself davanti a carcass of automobile rusted within or around all which and clutched a great tree.

The modern artists began to be interested rather to the refusals late when by now l' industrialization had prevailed, to the beginnings of the past century. To the search of inusitati languages they came natural to estetizzare also the trash recycle it in the parnso dell' etereo universe of the galleries. The inventions of the collage and dell' assemblage they produced the first examples of transfer from a context to an other of roba that otherwise it would have been thrown, idea then digested and matured till its last conclusions from Marcel Duchamp. From, Ancient lute then recycle, the tradition dell' art of the things discarded and ramificata in thousand directions. To Los Angeles, since more and more artists asked for being able to collect fragments of metal or wood in cumuli of refusals to the margins of the city, the local authorities have constructed to time ago studies and lodgings for a pair of artists and published an announcement of competetion that offers job ags, vitto and lodging. Artists come me in mind innum-revoli dell' immondizia, but everyone differs from the others for characteristics own.

As an example Daniel Spoerri of ago a melancholically sociological diary sticking on the table from lunch where they had been left from the convitati all glioggetti of a supper. Jessica Stockholder instead composes things d' furnishing, materials and objects of consumption that then paints also, in wide decorative compositions. Elwyn Palmerton and a young artist (born in 1978) that from always it plays with the conventions of the languages d' art as they were to weave of I dominate.
It does not interest it the innovation but it tries every occasion in order to exercise own thin sensibility