Link to Post:
http://icallitoranges.blogspot.com/2013/05/richard-serra.html
Ed Schad reviews the exhibition Richard Serra: Double Rifts at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, on view through June 1, 2013.
Schad writes that Serra's drawings engender for him simultaneous thoughts of the "universal" and the "local." Schad notes that viewing the exhibition, "I think of how a Newman zip could send Walter Di Maria to the Southwest and James Turrell to a crater with a backhoe. On the other hand, I think of every moment I am at loss for words in relation to the world, how a loss splits me from the world and takes me to a loneliness that I would like to think is important but probably isn’t, how those that I have lost simply go away and how the world rises around me threatening and dangerous and glorious, and how it is both a comfort and a terror to think that nature doesn’t care about something so decidedly un-glorious as me."
Link to Post:
http://wowhuh.com/archives/1135
Ezra Tessler reflects on Blinky Palermo's Grey Disk (1970).
Tessler writes: "Once Grey Disk made its way into my mind I had a hard time not seeing it everywhere. Turn Grey Disk on its side and walk through the Met: there it is in the rounded-faces of the lifelike Roman funerary portraits painted in encaustic on wood, in the hand-carved cameos of the late nineteenth-century, and so on down the halls. Or leave it horizontal and think of nearly any painting. It mimics the golden orb of the kneecap at the center of Caravaggio’s Narcissus, the shape of Braque’s Violin and Music Score, the dark cutout oval in Picasso’s guitar sculptures, the black elliptical sphere in Dana Schutz’s Guitar Girl, the biomorphic shapes in Ron Gorchov’s pieces, and the swollen lumps of elephant dung in Chris Ofili’s work. It’s the bowl of fruit in every still life from Claesz to Matisse, the muted and dusty grey saucer in Morandi’s Natura Morta II, the skulls in seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, the ominous cloud covering Gerhard Richter’s Table and the carnal orifice of his Mouth. Cloud, face, saucer, saddle, stage, shield, palette – how can one begin to capture everything that it invokes?"
Link to Post:
http://jeffreycollinspainter.blogspot.com/2013/03/two-amazing-papers-on-painting.html
Jeffrey Collins posts two essays on painting associated with two artists associated with the Radical Painting Group: Frederic Matys Thursz and Joseph Marioni.
Matys Thursz, in his essay Leger's Palette writes: "To make paintings, I apply the best paint I know to the best linen I can obtain. Alone, I am witness to its making. It is a sensation. I have needed to know that the making of a painting is the sole importance of painting... Making then is knowing. Structure sensed and ultimately seen is cognition. It cannot reject anything necessary to painting. Painting is invention, not reference or anecdote, neither depiction or alliteration (recognize color shape or proportion external to the painting). The residuum of the painting is (the) primordial mark, (of) invented color in (given) sequence."
In the second essay, Carl Belz writes about the work of Marioni. The experience of visiting Marioni's studio, Belz writes, "was entirely grounded in painting, monochrome painting as the genre is generally known, painting pure and simple, painting distilled to what are perceived as its essentials, its roots - which is why it is sometimes called radical painting or, in the European discourse concrete painting - painting stripped of depiction and illusion, abstract painting, painting not about the world but about painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Rudolf-de-Crignis-at-Berkeley-Art-Museum-4264046.php
Kenneth Baker reviews an exhibition of paintings by Rudolf de Crignis at the Berkeley Art Museum, on view through May 5, 2013.
Baker writes: "Canvases in various hues of blue and gray, plus some very low-definition drawings, sparsely fill the walls of two large galleries. The paintings' differences in size, hue and shape at first appear too trivial to merit sustained attention. But something begins to happen for a viewer who actually stops to compare them. After a few minutes similar canvases cease looking like versions of one another, or like exemplars of an unstated program, although de Crignis (1948-2006) did say 'each painting I execute is part of a larger understanding.' Examine adjacent blue pieces and the word "blue" no longer seems adequate to describe either one. Paint manufacturers' color names add only a degree of precision. Gradually, the paintings' individual reality begins to outweigh all the available words, leaving perception as the work's content."
Link to Post:
http://icallitoranges.blogspot.com/2012/11/interview-liat-yossifor.html
Ed Schad interviews painter Liat Yossifor about her work on the occasion of the exhibition Liat Yossifor: Thought Patterns at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe Gallery, New York, on view through November 10, 2012.
Introducing Yossifor's work Schad writes that looking at Yossifor's paintings, "you confront fields of thick grey paint touched and carved from buckets of paint, blues and blacks and every spectral apparition mixing into grey. They are not delicate... the paintings come and go with each of Yossifor's sessions. You won't see the same painting twice until she has a show, for her paintings are being constantly scraped and repainted, created and destroyed. At least for me, her paintings carry grounds for extended looking, which is the art world's way of saying that they are weird, that things you didn't see before pop up and things that you thought you saw fade away."
Link to Post:
http://looksee.chrisashley.net/2012/07/10/daniel-levine-marker-at-some-walls-oakland/
Chris Ashley considers the paintings of Daniel Levine on the occasion of the exhibition Daniel Levine: Marker at Some Walls, Oakland, CA, on view through August 26, 2012.
Ashley writes "for convenience sake Levine's paintings might be called monochromes, as they tend towards Monochrome Painting, let's not choose convenience. Let’s say that Levine's paintings are not reductions from or to anything, not representations of anything but simply themselves, works made by an artist from skeleton to skin, packed with tissues and organs of material and touch, and invested with the breath and fluid of idea, intention, and process, all the essentials any painting needs."
Ashley continues: "Levine’s paintings are not programmed or artificial; there is no sameness here, no production... To make a painting is to want something new to look at; painting is, by definition, difference. Levine's paintings exploit convention - rectangle, paint, surface, wall - and embody determination, even perhaps orneriness - sleight-handed repetition, subtle variations, long distance perseverance and endurance. In Levine's work are found the pleasures of making and looking, of realization and surprise."
Link to Post:
http://thepaintedwrd.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/talking-monochrome-blues/
Thoughts on the continued resonance of monochrome painting inspired by the recent exhibition of paintings by Joshua Smith at Shoot the Lobster, New York.
The work of Smith and other artists including Thomas Kratz, Dan Rees, Julia Rommel, is considered with regard to a question with "two implicit parts: one, whether an artist still stands to gain something 'sincere,' i.e. fulfilling, from making a monochrome, and two, whether the art-viewing public has not become too cynical and/or short of attention to appreciate a contemporary monochrome."
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/in-and-around-monochrome.html
Carl Belz curates an online exhibition of recent monochrome paintings by John Zinsser, Daniel Levine, Karen Baumeister, Jeffrey Collins, and Matt McClune.
In his introduction Belz writes: "Monochrome spawned no school or movement following its appearance in the early 1960s, but it has nonetheless remained a presence in the art of our time, its directness and simplicity periodically offering respite within a culture drenched increasingly by spectacle, while at the same time demonstrating anew abstraction’s capacity to secure meaning, even when self-imposed limits seemingly reduce its options to degree zero. In varying measures, its appeal has all along been visual and conceptual, a matter of body and mind together accounting for its integrity as art."
Link to Post:
http://jeffreycollinspainter.blogspot.com/2012/03/quote-of-day-03-02-2012.html
Jeffrey Collins posts a collection of writings on painting by Joseph Marioni including the essays The Radical Place of Painting, Socrates and the Alligator, and Noting Color.
In Socrates and the Alligator Marioni writes: "What I propose, to this gathering of painters, is that we seriously consider a radical break with the problems of the art world establishment. By this I do not mean that we should establish a new formal academy or that we should posture ourselves in an ant-theoretical stance against the art world. I am proposing that we rethink the history of painting from the point of view of a painter... that we disengage the profession of painting from the problems of the art world and then let us see how painting will appear independent of the needs of the art world to use painting as a vehicle to transport cultural ideas."
Submitted by Brett Baker on January 31, 2012
David von Schlegell, Grey Over Yellow, 1992, Oil, Polyur on Aluminum with Wood, 19.25 x 22 inches (courtesy China Art Objects, Los Angeles)
David von Schlegell at China Art Objects, Los Angeles on view from January 7 - February 4, 2012
David von Schlegell is known primarily for his large scale, outdoor, and public sculpture projects; however, he began his career as a painter - learning to paint from his father. He returned to painting late in life. His final show was at Althea Viafora Gallery in 1991, and it focused on monochrome, poured paintings on wood. These last works form the core of a new exhibition at China Art Objects in Los Angeles. Images of von Schlegell’s early paintings are difficult to come by, but an early expressionist landscape in the Smithsonian evokes a romantic approach to nature still evident in the later paintings.
David von Schlegell, Horizontal Blue, 1961, oil on canvas 40 x 48 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum
Von Schlegell’s experience as a sculptor, however, is the primary influence on these paintings, which reveal a fascination with the material states of paint and poetic transformations that occur from one elemental state to another. The paintings are made from a viscous mixture of oil and Polyur - an industrial paint - poured onto wood panels. The resulting effect, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer noted recently in Artforum, is that “each panel is a gradient field of darkly pooled pigment with a concentrated opacity that simulates surprising depth.” Though solid, Von Schlegell’s pooled fields of paint retain their aqueous appearance while their resinous quality alludes to both amber and varnish, a material made by combining burned amber with linseed oil.
In these final paintings, material is subjected to both a physical and philosophical alchemy that returns von Schlegell the sculptor to his romantic, painterly roots.
David von Schlegell, Cerulean Blue, Light to Dark, 1992, Oil, Polyur on Wood Panel, 48 x 48 inches (courtesy China Art Objects)
David von Schlegell, Dark Red Over Blue, 1991, Oil, Polyur on Aluminum with Wood, 19.5 x 22 inches (courtesy China Art Objects)
