Dennis Hollingsworth

Liquid Steps

My previous Ahora post sounded a little apologetic, rueful confessions of being monomainiacal, with slips from the net and ending with promises to do better. Shortly after I made that "wee hours of the morning" post, I discovered a Christopher Knight review of a show that I should have seen already...

I should have made it to the opening.

Bad!
Bad Dennis.
Very, very BAD Dennis.

(Self flagellation feels sooooo good sometimes. This must come from that Catholic baptism thingy that happened so long ago.)

It looks like a good show. A few friends are in it. Dave Hickey curated it, and I like Dave's work very much. The general curatorial topic is in a zone that is a favorite of mine. Dang.

I'll have to scoot over one day before the show ends at the end of this month.

In the meantime, let's check out what Knight wrote:

ART REVIEW

Just going with the flow.

The fluid form of abstract painting is celebrated in the 'Step Into Liquid' exhibit at the Ben Maltz Gallery.

By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer

One sign that a group exhibition is significant is that it changes the way you perceive works of art that you thought you knew. At the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, "Step Into Liquid" is a significant show.

Thumbs up! Great review, no matter what is written next.
A nice laurel for all my pals.

I've been looking at (and enjoying) James Hayward's paintings for more than 20 years, but I've never quite considered them in the way they appear here. Otis' guest curator-in-residence, Dave Hickey, has assembled paintings by five artists ? Jane Callister, Pia Fries, Michael Reafsnyder and David Reed are the others ? whose work reanimates a major American postwar tradition. In the 1950s and 1960s, fluid forms of abstract painting, from the drips of Jackson Pollock and the sponged puddles of color by Helen Frankenthaler to the pours of Morris Louis, had asserted a continuity between nature and art.

The aside regarding James' painting at the beginning of this paragraph is interesting. Good for Jimmy that he's finally getting recognition... but man, over twenty years and so little rain! I guess that's why Jimmy is as tough as a SouthWest cactus.

And Knight's characterization of reanimation... of fluid forms... and continuities between nature and art. Muy bien, I like that kind of talk.

The paintings in "Step Into Liquid" pick up the thread while severing the continuity. Hayward's paintings have the authoritative power and hypnotic grace of the surface of the sea, the sheer face of a mountain cliff or the sweep of a plain of grass ? yet without any recourse to illusion, metaphor or representation. Think of them as cultural equivalents rather than natural embodiments.

Big strokes for Jimmy.

(What follows is a couple of paragraphs of physical description. Here's the link to the article if you want to check it out. Better yet, go see the show. I will, for sure.)

They carve out a physical space of contemplation, from which these gorgeous paintings feel vast, unfathomable and in perpetual flux.

They're oceanic without the ocean.

Perhaps the reason why this kind of recognition for Jimmy's work is late is because Jimmy was super early, having jumped from his school daze of 60's UCLA happening/anything goes, past and over the 80's continental theory (and the pre and post phases -conceptual and multicultural theory) and therefore straight into the project of taking painting seriously... on painting's terms. This, an approach based on affirmation and not the required negation demanded by doctrinaire PostModernism.

Hayward, 62, and Reed, 59, are the show's elder statesmen. Fries, who was born in Switzerland and works in D?sseldorf, adds an international element. Callister and Reafsnyder, both born in the 1960s, are two of the most engaging younger painters working in Southern California right now. The show packs a lot into a modest space.

Good for you guys!

In the fall of 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark survey exhibition "California Hard Edge Painting," Hickey organized an Otis show of geometric abstraction. "Step Into Liquid" is its complement, focusing on wet, fluid abstraction rather than crisp geometries. Reed's luxurious paintings are the pivot between the two shows: He mixes oil and resin to crash Baroque waves of translucent paint against hard-edged rectangles, like flowing electrons moving through the windows of a computer program.

Callister's exceptional recent paintings represent a slight shift in her work. All three miraculously evoke the conjunction of land and sea, the space of a primordial shoreline where timeless stability and constant vacillation continuously trade places. Yet none is in the least descriptive, in the manner of a traditional landscape painting. A warm, fleshy pink ground is interrupted by pours, puddles, splashes and clumps of abstract color-shapes, which appeal to a sense of visual tactility.

Evocation stopping short of mere description. I like that zone too. It is nice that Knight connects Callister's implied subject -shifitng shorelines, beaches- with a description of her approach to painting.

I haven't met Ms. Callister yet, I look forward to the day.

Reafsnyder continues to update the signature motifs of modern alienation to the monumental scale of mass culture. For example, "Slippy" is a large, dark painting in which indigo acrylic has been swiped with a squeegee as a background. Then, great swaths of glossy color are smeared, splashed and dripped across the surface, while a bright orange smiley face grins out at you. Signs of pleasure come in a variety of guises, and here a visual overload of paint does the talking. Following Reafsnyder's marvelous one-man survey that closed recently at the Las Vegas Art Museum, the Otis show gives rich context to his quirky work.

Good for Michael! And nice too, that his Las Vegas show is plugged as well.

Fries' paintings are the exhibition's weak link. Each is an inventory of paint application methods, from thick wedges and troweled-on oil to skinny squiggles squeezed straight from the tube (it looks like silly string), often in pastel hues and always on pure white panels. Disconcertingly, embedded within the paint are silk-screened prints that appear to be tangled piles of crepe-paper ribbon.

Ouch. A hit, a palpable hit.

...but it's one that won't "leave a mark" since Pia's career is rock-solid.
Knight lays on a few more licks:

The point seems to be that printing fits with the other techniques because, in a world characterized by reproduction, our assumptions that direct application of paint embodies uniqueness and reveals authentic feeling are false.

True enough, but the idea is long-established (not least by Fries' teacher, Gerhard Richter), and these paintings don't have adequate visual appeal to sustain them.

True enough, perhaps. But allowances have to be made for an artist who is folding a preceeding PoMo era into the project of reanimation mentioned earlier in the review. Such a fold seems to be required if we are to be truely Modern (my definition: to reconcile the things we make with the times we live in... namely, these Post-PoMo times). One could also say that she is reaching back into the Picasso/Braque painting-into-collage times, when the Modern was so young that the PostModern turn was latent within it. Add to this, how the story of art in Europe is different from art in the States in ways that are small yet decisively significant.

"Step Into Liquid" features just 17 paintings yet accomplishes more than most exhibitions twice its size. Come on in; the liquidity is fine.

There it is.
Cheers and a toast hoisted high.

`Step Into Liquid'

Where: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays

Ends: Jan. 28

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 665-6905, www.otis.edu

Posted by Dennis at January 16, 2006 11:40 PM