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.


Even his videos—which are subjected, it would seem, to every form of analog video degradation known to man—have a "Video tape dumped in a mop bucket" feel. The best of these, Empirical Video Study is shown as a projection. Its multicolored, oscillating wave-forms and distorted abstractions remind one of what the unpaid-for premium cable TV channels (the scrambled porn) used to look like, except the colors are more muted—pale, static-y tangerines and faded, off-tint magenta's predominate. That, and its rhythms are more furtive and hypnotic than herky-jerky.


All of this would seem to be deliberately anti-aesthetic, faux-naïve, or a pointed affront to good taste except that Thayer's overall attitude isn't a rejection of (or an ironic gloss on) anything so much as it is marked by a casual but complete indifference to those standards in the first place. To pull a variegated collection of clumped-up lint from the dryer's lint filter and use it to fill in a goofy cut-out profile of a face—With the Force of the Moon and the Ocean—isn't an act that's determined in opposition to anything. It's a gesture, particular to itself—as if to say, this is the world, or part of it. It is abject, quotidian, fraught with pathos, entropy, degradation and sadness, but also charming, weirdly funny, and beautiful.


It's a refined vision, also. The overall formal intelligence and sense of economy (along with the silhouetted figures and dangling strings) calls to mind late Jasper Johns, but the general tone is reminiscent of a different artist altogether: the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still. Paintings by Still tend to feel as if one is staring into outer space and finding that there's no one out there: we're all totally alone. Imagine, then, if Still had the sense of humor to hang a Johns-like cut-out silhouetted figure in front of that existential void. It's funny, yes, but not exactly "ha ha" funny. By suggesting that we're all alone, it resists that condition by attempting to communicate—even as it implicates its own efforts as comically futile. This is paradoxical—funny because it isn't funny, and sad because it's utterly mundane: the type of thing best expressed through corrugated cardboard, lint and VCR-tracking errors—just some of Thayer's derelict materials.

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