Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2013/05/frieze-unprimed-immediacy.html
A photo blog by Sharon Butler photo blogs images of paintings from the Frieze Art Fair that share a common trait: unprimed canvas.
Butler begins: "Since the early days of Color Field painting, working on unprimed canvas or linen has given the impression of a certain unfinished immediacy--more like the page of a sketchbook than a finished painting. At Frieze this weekend, unprimed materials (or the look of unprimed materials) were plentiful, suggesting that painters are still interested in a new realism that subtly fuses a sculptural attention to objecthood and materiality with two-dimensional shape and image."
Link to Post:
http://www.burnaway.org/2013/03/please-be-clean-when-you-do-it-interview-with-jim-lee/
Ridley Howard interviews painter Jim Lee on the occasion of the exhibition Jim Lee: Please Be Clean When You Do It at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, on view through March 31, 2013.
Lee comments: "I need to work and not really know that I am making anything in particular. I guess that’s why I work on multiple pieces at the same time. It allows me to keep moving without focusing so much on the act of painting - in the end, I just want to make things. There shouldn’t be any hierarchy in my process. Oil paint is no more important than latex, and linen is no more important than a piece of plywood. When I paint in this manner, the pieces become more interesting to me…I lose track of what is actually occurring."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2013/02/23/peter-sorian/
David Carrier reviews the exhibition Peter Soriano: New Work at Lennon, Weinberg, New York, on view through February 23, 2013.
Carrier writes: "What is a painting? For some time, artists have been answering that question in very diverse ways by taking painting apart into its constituent elements. Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray focused our attention on the stretcher; Julia Mehretu and Cy Twombly dealt with the painterly gesture; and Mel Bochner and Sol LeWitt, the role of drawing. Peter Soriano, who in the 1990s made colored sculptures from polyester resin, now is seeking to make his art more portable by doing improvised wall paintings, schematized landscapes based upon plein air drawings. His original contribution to this ongoing artistic dialogue involves bringing a new visual resource into the discussion... graffiti." Carrier continues: "anyone who loves painterly visual art can enjoy Soriano’s wall paintings, which are joyous, truly ‘gay’ in the traditional sense of that word. Seeing his paintings coming from the bitter cold of an overcast winter day, I thought of Henri Matisse’s late cutouts, a perhaps strange but not-irrelevant association. Constructing diagram-like markings, which diagram nothing, Soriano shows how far reaching aesthetic effects can be created by using minimal means."
Link to Post:
http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/2013/painter-painter-reframing-medium
Julie Caniglia interviews Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan, co-curators of the exhibition Painter Painter at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, on view from February 2–October 27, 2013.
Crosby comments that there is "something about the resolute materiality of painting that continues to attract artists. These are objects that follow deeply subjective and individual ways of thinking, as expressed through specific materials. In this show you will see works that are stained, collaged, sprayed, cut up, stitched, assembled, glued, smeared, rubbed, and so on— some works are years in the making. Painting offers a frame for contact with this very physical presence. It’s a vivid contrast with our daily routine, where we experience so many images by using a cursor, linking to them, altering them, navigating away from them. Painting resists this kind of experience. A lot of artists today embrace that notion to an extreme. They go where the materials take them, not where the history of painting tells them to go. "
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63597/enduring-meaning-in-an-old-medium/
Patrick Neal reports on the recent panel discussion “… towards meaning in a plural painting world,” moderated by Katy Siegel at Hunter College. The panel including Raphael Rubinstein, Merlin James, Dana Schutz, Richard Shiff, and moderator Siegel, set out to: "examine the condition of painting in its contemporary context... [to] discuss whether the current plurality in painting dilutes meaning, or if it is just a case of many people doing many interesting things. How do we advance meaning given the plethora of dispersed, diverse, yet all seemingly functional approaches? Is the basic idea of advancement even a useful paradigm anymore? These issues will be explored with the aim of presenting a more critical dialogue about work made with paint."
Neal notes that "A consensus emerged that painting’s intrinsic qualities, as an infinitely plastic medium, are what give it strength. Shiff mentioned how close painting is to thinking, a very immediate process that is hand and body oriented but can also assimilate other technologies. Because its mechanics are so simple, painting allows for tremendous inventive freedom, and may for that reason be spawning so many of the hybrid offerings we have today. He mentioned R.H. Quaytman as an example of a painter maintaining an ongoing historical dialogue while broaching new ground as well. Likewise, James mentioned the artist Soutine, whose work could be perceived as political, but those passions are subsumed into the warp and weft of his paint handling."
Link to Post:
http://briandupont.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/a-provisional-explanation/
Brian Dupont defends the current trends of provisional and casual painting.
Dupont writes: "Artists today are confronting an increasingly ramshackle future where aesthetic, political, economic, and ecological promises have been revealed as failures. If they are seeing a future where issues of scarcity become more urgent, materials must be recycled or scavenged from surplus, and long-held political standards become increasingly irrelevant, it would seem natural to see trends in painting (re) emerge that question formal equivalents of these standards. The long-term success of painting can be attributed to its ability to colonize and assimilate outside ideas and approaches, stretching form and content to the breaking point so that the project of the medium is ultimately made stronger. If a provisional vocabulary can provide a timely reinvigoration of the expression of individual concerns, that should be all the ambition anyone needs in a painting."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63349/when-paintings-come-apart-sharon-butler-on-the-inside-out/
Thomas Micchelli interviews painter Sharon Butler about the work in her exhibition Precisionist Casual at Pocket Utopia, New York, on view through February 17, 2013.
Butler comments: "To be honest, I’m a little apprehensive that some viewers will have... a sense of condescension or even indignation towards the seeming lack of skill and effort involved. As the Met points out in the excellent Matisse show that’s now up, making something look effortless isn’t always easy. But it’s worth trying to do well, if that’s not too much of a paradox. I guess what interests me are the metaphorical possibilities of lethargy, bad decisions, mistake-making, and turning things inside out as reflected in a painting. From these things, I reckon there is quite a bit to infer about not merely how we perceive the world but how we live in it."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/note/simon-callery-and-sam-cornish-discuss-richard-smith-kite-paintings/
Simon Callery and Sam Cornish discuss Richard Smith: Kite Paintings on view at Gimpel Fils, London through January 12, 2013.
Cornish begins: "despite how much [Smith's works] play with the physical conventions of painting, in terms of the stretcher etc., they remained something which to me was like an image... they read instantaneously, they read on a flat plane, as a whole thing, and that part of that instantaneousness was the presence of illusion; particularly with the cross works there was a thing, the cross, that existed in a sequence of twisting illusionistic spaces; and that even the things which are most physical, most outside the conventions of the rectangle, i.e the twisted shape of the works, the protruding bars and the falling string, all felt to me like they were caught up in this singular, illusionistic, instantaneously read ‘thing’, even as it sort exploded onto the wall."
Link to Post:
http://wowhuh.com/archives/950
Lane Relyea considers trends in contemporary painting in relation to "the talent economy."
Relyea addresses the tendency in painting towards "steady, routinized, repetitive labor and use of personal-scale, low-budget materials, and ... [an] overall sense of precariousness and impermanence." He argues that "it may be that what most recommends this kind of painting to a place of centrality in our D.I.Y. age is its superior associations with the studio, that artisanal site of making and doing, rather than in the power of painting to induce certain modes of reception like immersion or opticality or semiotic critique. This is especially true of such conspicuously made or crafted paintings, paintings worked on by a single pair of hands, with a plasticity both hard and yet malleable enough to withstand being heavily manipulated while still yielding form. Furthermore, what so enables such work to convey pure doing, to straddle both D.I.Y. and anonymity, to suggest an artisanal performing of subjectivity albeit in an impersonal mode, is precisely that they are paintings, rather than belonging to some other category of art. That is, rather than a special preserve of unique individuality, here painting stands as close as one can get to just doing stuff, purely making things. As Barry Schwabsky writes in the introduction to the recent Phaidon catalog Vitamin P2, 'The ordinariness of painting has become one of its most important characteristics. Painting is so familiar, so well-known that it’s become the default mode of art-making. The ordinary art made by the ordinary artist is likely to be painting.' "
Link to Post:
http://thepaintedwrd.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/till-the-world-ends/
An essay that proposes links between pop culture attitudes (music and dance in particular) and the "provisional" trend in contemporary painting.
"Dancing, at least as it might happen in a club to the tune of Kesha’s songs, is a kind of ecstatic yet responsive expression, the physical enactment of an internal reaction to an external stimulus. Something similar might be said of abstract painting, both in regard to the process of making it and to the process of viewing it, both of which can be emotional and even rapturous. In thinking about the relationship between pop music’s fascination with end times and life in post-crash America, I couldn’t help thinking about the a similar rise in visibility of abstract work concurrent with pop music’s 'apocalyptic abandon.' In the past two years, several critics attempted to theorize practices in this very broad vein, most prominently Raphael Rubinstein and Sharon Butler, whose respective terms of 'Provisional Painting' and 'The New Casualists' focus on the unfinished appearance of such work. Butler describes this tendency as 'calculated tentativeness,' but I would like to propose the opposite: what if we think of such work not as trying to look incomplete, but as rejecting completion as a contemporarily relevant state in a late capitalist society where instability and precariousness reign? Here, even perfection won’t help you get a job, and it certainly won’t save you from getting laid off. In this view, we might think of contemporary abstract painting more like music, and particularly dance music: remixed and faded into the tracks before and after it such that it never ends and becomes instead a perpetual experience of the present."
