Link to Post:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2013-05-01/doubling-down-on-simon-hantai/
Elisabeth Kley previews an exhibition of works by Simon Hantaï on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, through June 22, 2013.
Kley writes that the current show includes "six works from Hantai's 'Tabula' series, created in the early 1980s, with their slashing leaf-shaped areas of unpainted canvas. Visions of plenitude and emptiness expressed through process rather than representation, these medium-size paintings also resemble portraits of tattered plastic bags. Kasmin will also be showing examples from earlier groups of works, the 'Etudes' and the 'Blancs.' Representing Hantai's first discovery of positive empty shapes, a mural-sized black-and-white 'Etude' from 1969 (approximately 10 feet tall and 15 feet wide) is covered with a multitude of small empty areas resembling overlapping sharp blades of grass. Describing this series, Hantai once declared, 'It was while working on the ‘Studies' that I realized what my true subject was—the resurgence of the ground underneath my painting.'"
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://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=8749
David Harper previews the exhibition Surfaces, Supports: Tatiana Berg and Evan Nesbit at Storefront Bushwick, on view November 16 – December 23, 2012.
"Berg's work is fast, active, and smooth. She has described her work as being about an 'indulgent painterly lust.' For Berg, the space of the surface of a painting is 'performative' and her process an energetic jumping back and forth from canvas to canvas. On the other hand, Nesbit's process appears slower, with a strong relation to gravity. It feels organic, tactile, methodical, and philosophical. His distinctive method strives to subvert traditional picture making by painting the canvas the wrong way, pushing paint from the back towards the front."
Link to Post:
http://www.paintersbread.com/2012/09/painting-how-you-feel-not-how-you-should.html
Michael Rutherford writes about a selection of painters whose instincts are leading them to make work beyond the limits of "the plane."
Rutherford writes: "Professional skateboarders have a saying, 'skate how you feel, not how you should,' and the most experimental and engaging artists have always operated just like that - working how they feel, not how they should. Currently, I see painters and others asserting their freedom and pushing the progression of painting in increasingly fresher ways. Specifically, I’m noticing more loosely hung, sometimes radically altered or reattached swaths of canvas (among other things) without need of being held taut and hung into place by stretchers. In other examples, the stretcher bars remain, but they’ve been reconfigured in diverse ways with vastly different intentions. But in the most arcane instances, paint has been applied to other objects altogether: utensils, detritus, you name it. It’s clear there’s no further pushing of the picture plane here, but some rather bracing yet energizing examples of painting post-plane."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/12/claude-viallat-exploring-casualist.html
Sharon Butler blogs about painter Claude Viallat and the Supports/Surfaces group in relation to contemporary painting.
Butler remarks that Viallat's work "strikes me as a precursor to the Casualist aesthetic... I find Viallat's relationship to the Casualist abstraction of artists such as Chris Martin, Rochelle Feinstein, Tatiana Berg, and Lauren Luloff fascinating."
Link to Post:
http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/artists/dolla
Raphael Rubinstein blogs about the under-known work of Noël Dolla.
Rubinstein maintains that Dolla has made "...some of the most significant statements in and about painting... with dishtowels, handkerchiefs, fishing lures, pillowcases and rolls of 14-centimeter wide muslin."
Rubinstein also notes that Dolla was "Fascinated by domestic readymades and also by pure color, passionately committed to painting and intelligently irreverent towards its pretensions, equally ready to uphold the legacy of Malevitch and Barnett Newman (his two greatest influences) and to pursue what he has called “humiliated abstraction..."
Also make sure to check out Rubinstein's interview with Dolla in lingo4.
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/05/talking-walls-at-painting-center.html
Sharon Butler posts about the exhibition Wall Works, curated by Stephen Maine, at The Painting Center, NYC on view until May 21, 2011. The artists install and discuss their work in two excellent videos. Wall Works is "an exhibition of painting, drawing and installation engaging the gallery's walls as the primary support and framing device... A wall painting inflects the surrounding physical space differently than a painting-as-object does, becoming indivisible from the viewer's perception of that space."
Link to Post:
http://stevenalexanderjournal.blogspot.com/2011/05/alan-shields-at-greenberg-van-doren.html
Steven Alexander visits the exhibition Alan Shields, Something Goin' On & On on view at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York through June 24, 2011. Alexander writes that Shields' work is " ...deeply rooted in a ritualization of the painting process and an assertion of art-making as an ancient practice... the large paintings possess a rich merger of painterly field and constructed objecthood -- at once offhanded and painstakingly built."
Link to Post:
http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2011/01/martin-barre-at-andrew-kreps/
Beautiful installation photos of Martin Barré at Andrew Kreps. The exhibition runs through February 12, 2011.
Link to Post:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/fyfe/fyfe4-16-10.asp
Joe Fyfe reviews two exhibitions of work by Simon Hantaï.
Fyfe describes Hantai's technique of "pliage": "In pliage, the painting's canvas surface, previously treated with poetic delicacy, was instead subjected to a methodical violence: scattering blobs of black paint over its face, letting it dry, crunching it up, painting on it more before it was mounted. Most importantly, pliage became a kind of painting method that could be realized with only an inconstant surveillance of the artist's eye. As the art critic Carter Ratcliff put it, Hantaï mixed 'the clarities of vision with the intuitions of touch.' "
