Xiyadie, "Natural Pleasures" (nd), 14 x 14 inches (all works courtesy the artist and used with his permission)

LOS ANGELES — Being different is never easy, more so when you live in an infamously restrictive and conservative Communist Chinese society. Born in a farming village of the Shaanxi province, Xiyadie (a nom de plume meaning “Butterfuly in Siberia”) turns traditional paper-cut art into colorful, risqué pieces dealing with gay love and life.

Portrait of the artist with his works. (image courtesy Flazh Art Studio) (click to enlarge)

Xiyadie (pronounced Zhee-yá-dee) is currently exhibiting The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly at alternative art space Flazh!Alley Art Studio in San Pedro, California. Within 50 14-inch by 14-inch pieces created over the course of 25 years, the artist manages to cut out provocative scenes that make viewers take second, third and fourth glances just to make sure they’re seeing right. Are those two men getting hot and heavy? What kind of “natural pleasures” is the artist portraying in the piece of the same name?

Xiyadie’s papercut art makes viewers work to get it everything straight (pun intended) in their minds, which makes it even more impactful once we realize what we’re looking at. The artist marks each of his works with a mythological beauty by using multi-colored papers, cut out to form flowers, butterflies and other symbols, as if to suggest that his works — as daring as they are — should still be seen as an extension of the traditional Chinese canon.

Like many gay Chinese men, Xiyadie is also a gay married father living in Beijing. His 23-year old was born with cerebral palsy and his 21-year-old daughter is a college junior; both still have no clue as to their father’s true sexual orientation. His works don’t confine themselves to the sexuality of gay life and his scenes illustrate life beyond the bedroom.

In the Red Door Series, Xiyadie cuts with painful precision the emotional battles that rage in the process of coming out to his wife. Gone is the artist’s playful rainbow-colored experiments. In their place, an angry red paper marks the alienation, hurt and sorrow he and his wife experienced and continue to struggle with every day.

"Sneaking Around" (nd), 14 x 14 inches

Within The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly, one gets a clear sense of the artist’s exhilarating, clandestine joys and deep sorrows. He says, his works weren’t made for profit, but simply for expression. “Paper cutting is my own spiritual world. It is my world. In [that world] there are no worries and sorrows, only peace and free imagination.”

Gallery owner Joe Flazh says acceptance of Xiyadie’s work has been overwhelmingly positive because the artist touched on emotions that are deeper than sexual orientation. “[Xiyadie] addresses subjects that are relevant to the LGBT community, but also to any person, gay or heterosexual, male or female and parents. Comments have varied from, ‘I understand this piece,’ to, ‘I remember going through situations like that with my parents or kids.’”

"Disco" (nd)

Universality aside, Xiyadie wisely used papercut’s inherent beauty to tackle a touchy subject that could have set off political bombs. “Despite the fact of the sexually explicit works, there’s no hint of pornography, sleaziness or exploitation about them,” Flazh says. And perhaps that is part of Butterfly’s charm. Rather than propel on us the cold, hard facts, Xiyadie flutters and expands our minds with a flourish.

"The Reconciliation (Red Door Series)" (nd)

"Against the Wind (From the Butterfly series)" (nd)

"The Flight (Red Door Series)" (nd)

"Twining" (nd)

"Running Away from Home (Red Door Series)" (nd)

"Gardening" (nd)

The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly: A kaleidoscopic vision of life by a gay Chinese artist is on view at Flazh!Alley (1113 S. Pacific Ave., San Pedro, California) until July 14.

Installation view of "Thomas Nozkowski: New Editions and Related Drawings" at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (all images courtesy Senior & Shopmaker)

If there is one constant about Thomas Nozkowski that I would single out, it is his lifelong insistence on subverting conventions. In 1974 he began painting on canvas board measuring 16 by 20 inches. (Let’s be clear here — Bill Jensen never painted on this small a surface because it had no historical precedence).

He used an inexpensive, mass-produced product, the same kind that comes in “paint by number” kits and carries associations with “Sunday painters.” No wonder his defiance went largely unnoticed, particularly when the 1980s rolled around.

In that hothouse decade of overstatement, his paintings weren’t big enough to fill three galleries at once; didn’t incorporate piles of broken dishes; had no nudes in soft-porn poses overlaid with nasty, stream-of-consciousness imagery; had no one masturbating. Unlike many of his peers, he made no claims on behalf of his work.

For more than half a century — at least since Hans Namuth’s photographs and film of Jackson Pollock painting — the art world has equated subversion with theatricality, which increasingly plays into mainstream society’s desire for spectacle and distraction. (No wonder there are reasonably intelligent people who think Jeff Koons is radical and even avant-garde.)

Going to The Pace Gallery didn’t change Nozkowski, which you can’t say for every artist who gets picked up by a blue chip venue. In his second exhibition at Pace (October 22 to December 4, 2010), he paired twenty paintings, all of which measured 22 by 28 inches, with the same number of drawings, all of them around 8 by 10 inches.  (Only eighteen pairings were actually shown, with the other two pairs in the office. All twenty pairs were reproduced in the catalog.) The reason for the pairing was simple enough; Nozkowski had done a small drawing in colored pencil after every painting.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled (P-90)" (2010), oil on paper (click to enlarge)

By hanging the painting and drawing next to each other, Nozkowski challenged the viewer to see the works as separate, but related — a further working out of a motif. However, instead of the drawing being a preliminary work for the painting, which is the usual sequence of things, it came after the painting. The point wasn’t to see similarities, but to make more and more distinctions, and to trace the decisions the artist made after leaving one and going to the other.

Even among his most ardent supporters, the consternation was immediate. David Cohen titled his review: “Ground Control to Major Tom: Please re-hang your show.” And yet, what Nozkowski did wasn’t theatrical or, worse, gimmicky. Given that he wanted to show the paintings and their related drawings, he had two choices: to hang the paintings and drawings far apart from each other, or close together. The conventional wisdom is to sequester them in separate quarters. Nozkowski defied that wisdom.

*   *   *

While the show was up, Nozkowski used the catalogue as the basis for a second series of twenty drawings after the paintings, this time done in black-and-white. (Another constant is his tenacity — he’s got a memory like a steel trap and he never lets go of anything). The twenty black-and-white drawings are now mounted in a grid on one wall of his current show, New Editions and Related Drawings, at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery.  It makes me wish for a show including the twenty paintings and both sets of drawings. A show like that would be a revelation.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled (M-28)" (2011), gouache and colored pencil on print

Drawing is one of the things that holds Nozkowski’s work together. He has done drawings in ballpoint pen — among other materials — in response to books he’s read; recalling movies he’s watched; while remembering art works he’s made or studied; or jotting down, on a moment’s inspiration, things he’s seen — almost none of which we can figure out from looking at the work. At the same time, if he likes a motif in a painting that he’s working on, but knows it has to go, he will move it onto a work on paper. One work leads to another, eventually forming a maze of motifs. One could say this maze is a fairly accurate reflection of Nozkowski’s view of life.

*   *   *

At the heart of Nozkowski’s practice is improvisation, a willingness to take something (anything) and do something else to it. He seems to have been one of the few of his generation to understand Jasper Johns’s declaration: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it, etc.”

*   *   *

The other binder in Nozkowski’s work is reflected in a remark he made to me in an interview, where he said that he always “go[es] to the opposite of what the logical move would be.” In other words, he begins by undermining his own immediate assumptions and responses to a particular experience.

This is what subversive artists working in our postmodern epoch share. They don’t have a style, which is, in the end, both a brand and a judgment. How can you produce a brand and be subversive? (It’s like selling torn jeans made by Armani!) Subversive artists always try to undermine conventions, including those that might influence their practice.

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How far does a subversive artist go? Why all the way, of course. In Nozkowski’s case, this means that he does something in his prints that seems counterintuitive. Rather than deriving them from his paintings, as most artists do, he generated a number of his recent ones from drawings. “Untitled #1″ (2012) is a 7-plate/8 color aquatint, with a 2-block woodcut comprising thirteen colors. It improvises off of his “Untitled (P-90),” an oil on paper done in 2010. While the print has more than twenty colors, it seems to operate on the principle of bright (light) and muted (dark).

Thomas Kozlowski, "Untitled #1" (2012), 7-plate aquatint with 8 colors, 2-block woodcut with 13 colors

Nozkowski joined two shapes — one long and narrow and the other bulky and squarish — along a horizontal border near the top. A thin band, pressing against the  top edge, spans almost its entire width, like an I-beam with angled edges at each end; this has been divided into nearly three dozen different triangles, trapezoids, rectangles, and parallelograms.

Nozkowski further divided the geometric shapes into two groups: the black, gray, and white irregular ones that extend from the top edge; and a band of slightly different-sized rectangles, each done in a different color. The band of rectangles — which lie end to end like a row of children’s blocks — forms a brightly colored zone between the black, gray, and white shapes above and the bulky conglomeration of mutely-colored rectangles below.

A large squarish-form, which is made up of many small, mostly vertical rectangles, hangs down from the I-beam like a beehive surrounded by a cream-colored atmosphere.  It is a mishmash of vertical and horizontal rectangles that are all extremely muted in color. The highly varied but barely visible color seems to have been the result of overlaying the creamy, atmospheric color over the shape’s already muted colors. It looks like the sun reflecting off a wall of colors, making it impossible to see. They have literally been whited-out.

The cumulative effect of these three contrasting elements — the black, gray, and white band, the row of brightly colored rectangles, and the conglomeration of rectangles in which the creamy white has diluted all the colors — is the vertiginous feeling that one is looking at something as well as through something.  Our eyes keep refocusing.

Thomas Nozkowski, "Untitled #5" (2012), 4-plate aquatint with 22 colors (click to enlarge)

He achieves similar jarring shifts in a very different way in his etching, “Untitled #5″ (2012), a 22-color aquatint, in which variously-sized cream colored hexagons perforate a black field, and the only color is found in the hexagons lined up along the edges.

It’s as if Nozkowski wants to discover how far he can go before something falls apart and becomes chaotic and arbitrary. What an unlikely thing he has done. In “Untitled #1,” he has made most of the print appear as if it is behind a muted white scrim. It is nearly impossible to tell whether the ground is separate from the form or covers it. I cannot think of any other prints that remotely resemble the two I have discussed.

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In the generative oil on paper, “Untitled (P-90)” (2010), which Nozkowski used for “Untitled #1,” the I-beam spanning the top goes from mostly from maroons, reds, and pinks on the left to blues and greens on the right. However, the colors between them don’t seem to follow any logic. Nozkowski undermines viewers’ expectations in different ways throughout a work, encouraging them to take the composition apart and, more importantly, put it back together.

*   *   *

Nozkowski has been celebrated for being “mercurial” and “provocative”  and making “sumptuous” works (Cohen’s terms). I am reminded of Wallace Stevens who wrote in his poem, “It Must Give Pleasure”:

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

We have yet to consider Nozkowski’s work, and all its formal compressions, in a broader context, preferring instead to isolate him. The reasons for this withholding seem obvious—a deeper analysis of his work would go a long way toward subverting the art world’s elevation of all those other artists who possess an abundance of style and opinions, but, in the end, have very little else to offer us.

Thomas Nozkowski: New Editions and Related Drawings is on view at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 804, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 16.

Dana Schutz, "Flasher" (2012), oil on canvas (all images courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice.

Instead of accommodating herself, like a good student, to the pressures of the historical moment, Schutz turned the tables. If painting was no longer possible, then what would it mean to depict the impossible in bold colors and clear forms? At once macabre and funny, her early painting “Face Eater” (2004) joyfully defied the doxa, the repressive discourses demanding conformity.

*   *   *

Piano in the Rain is the title of her current and her first exhibition at Friedrich Petzel. In a painting with the same title as the show, Schutz depicts a young woman wearing a robin’s egg blue shirt and violet bellbottoms and playing a piano in the rain. She is seated in a nearly flattened profile, but the piano is tilted up slightly toward the picture plane. This spatial contradiction isn’t the only one you’re likely to notice. The young woman seems to be both sitting outside, with a raincloud floating just above her head, as well as inside a room (or on a stage?), a suggestion conveyed by the two dark green horizontal lines spanning the width of the painting. These formal paradoxes reverberate with the contradictions implied by the subject. (Who in her right mind would play a piano in the pouring rain?)

The image of a young woman with long brown hair playing a piano in the rain might initially seem like a metaphor for the absurdity of painter’s situation, but it’s not.

Dana Schutz, "Piano in the Rain" (2012), oil on canvas

For one thing, the image evokes Walter Pater’s statement: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” Music shapes time without needing to resort to narrative or reference. This state of self-sufficiency is what Wassily Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka wanted to attain in their art. It would seem Schutz also wants to achieve this state but recognizes that it is impossible; the rain intervenes, messing up the otherwise ideal situation.

Here is another line of inquiry: Is the young woman playing something “original” or is she “interpreting” someone else’s music? What does it mean to be original if you are a pianist?  Are you appropriating someone’s music if you play it? Are there clear distinctions between originality and appropriation?

Or one might consider these questions: What is the meaning of rehearsal and repetition? Is there a correlation between a pianist’s daily engagement with her art (practice and play) and that of a painter?  What is the meaning of skill and its opposite, de-skilling, in this context?

If there is absurdity in the metaphor, it emerges when we draw equivalences between the two disciplines through the lens of academic theory. Should we listen only to de-skilled pianists to prove our bona fides in a post-studio world? Is there something obsolete about the physical contact the pianist has with the piano? Should we only listen to pianists who never touch the piano? (The pianist, we might remember, does touch the piano and the sheet music when playing John Cage’s notorious 4’33”.)

*   *   *

Correspondingly, the absurdist situations that Shutz depicts as embodiments of the painter’s predicament inform us of the extent to which her inquiry is motivated by a philosophical disposition.

In the largest, most crowded painting in the exhibition, “Building the Boat While Sailing” (2012), Schutz’s deft manipulations of space could serve as an instructional manual for art students. In the lower third of the painting, from left to right, she depicts four figures, each of which activates the surrounding space differently.

Dana Schutz, "Building the Boat While Sailing" (2012), oil on canvas

On the far left, a woman sits on the edge of the raft (an irregularly shaped geometric board tilted away from the picture plane), facing out. She holds two pieces of wood, each pierced by two nails, as if they are cymbals. Although her shoulders, head, and hair are largely flat shapes, they come across as solid and weighty.

Beside her, but lower, is a woman in the water, presumably pushing the boat forward. Her head, shoulders, and white hand (abstract shapes) and the bottoms of her feet rise above the water. Unless the woman is shaped like a horseshoe, with her head at one end and feet at the other, the configuration is impossible.

The third figure is an upside-down man — a position most likely inspired by a painting of Christ being lowered down from the Cross.  Sprouting from the painting’s nether regions, the figure flattens everything out, even as the figures around him activate the space in individual ways. On the right, slightly angled in from the painting’s right edge, a woman seated cross-legged faces away from us, engrossed in what’s going on in front of her.

If the boat (the painting) is a vehicle that is capable of transporting us (the viewers) elsewhere, then what does it mean to both build it and sail away at the same time?  Perhaps the boat (painting) isn’t supposed to take us anywhere, that it has been doomed at least since the death of God.

Does that make it as worthless to build as to deconstruct, which the figure boring into the wood (the bore is near the exact middle of the painting!) might seem to be doing?  If you do both at once, does that mean you are a dumb painter rather than a smart conceptualist? There is a sharp bite to these paintings, but, as we all know, some bites can be enjoyable.

*   *   *

Dana Schutz, installation view of "Yawn" paintings at Friedrich Petzel Gallery

This is what Schutz does so well — she asks questions that challenge the answers given by others. More importantly, she asks her questions by folding them into the painting. There is nothing extraneous, no overt or didactic message. We get everything in the work by unraveling it. There is no secret hermeneutical code we must possess to unlock the door.

One question that Schutz addresses is the porous border between abstraction and representation. In “Flasher” (2012), a man opens his flesh-colored coat, which is indistinguishable from his skin, revealing a wristwatch, scissors, schematic eyeglasses, and an array of crosshatches — which allude to the ones Jasper Johns deployed in his “Corpse and Mirror” paintings — across his torso. The “Flasher” has exposed his marked, naked body, and it has turned out to be largely abstract.

*   *   *

There is a disturbing pathos in Schutz’s work. A young woman holds a flame to her ear, while holding her index finger to her lips, as if lost in thought. She is so disconnected from her body that she doesn’t feel any heat from the flame. The colors are jaunty, while the face is impassive, a distant relative of Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse Walter.

In the back room of the gallery, Schutz mounted five small paintings of a plump, almost featureless, young woman caught in the act of yawning. Given how many times each of us has yawned in public, the paintings seem to be having their revenge. They are bored by our constant know-it-all self-regard, and you can’t really blame them.

Piano in the Rain continues at Friedrich Petzel Gallery (537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 16.

Eight Extraordinary Greens (all photos courtesy of Mixed Greens Gallery)

If you have walked around the streets lately you will notice something odd. New Yorkers are smiling. Yep, it’s that time of year again, the days are lengthening and the sun seems determined to start shining. This time of year reminds us that we live not only in a world of our own construction but that somewhere out beyond the sidewalks and computer screens lurks NATURE. This is the time of year to daydream of lakeside cabins and fresh vegetable patches. For those of us who aren’t urban gardeners, or who haven’t invested in a CSA it can be tricky. Jenna Spevack’s current exhibition at Mixed Greens seems take a shot at this popular preoccupation.

Her exhibition Eight Extraordinary Greens is part public service announcement, part experiment in farming and part installation. That artist has installed a number of domestic household objects re-fitted with lights and trays of micro greens. These sculptural “microfarms” pay homage to the artist’s first experiment with urban-in house gardening in her own apartment. A tray of greens is exposed to lighting tubes within the confines of a vintage leather suitcase. Past a greenhouse-bookshelf and desk lie the facsimile  of a vintage kitchen and living room. The prop-artworks are bathed in the glow of bulbs reflected in tiny patches of green. This image is arresting in that it is unexpected.

Eight Extraordinary Greens

Viewers are invited — as if they are visitors to a hypothetical home — to wander around and to purchase the greens for a self imposed price. You are then invited to either take the greens home or to donate them for the artist to deliver to a food pantry. Proceeds from the sale are recorded on a print/receipt and hung on the wall to record the collective value of the greens harvested during the exhibition. Proceeds from the sale of these art-greens will be donated to urban agricultural projects “Bushwick City Farms” Bed Stuy Campaign Against Hunger’ or Added Value.”

Full disclosure, my visit to this exhibition taught me about three great food based not-for-profits within two miles of where I live. There is indeed an educational value to this exhibition. On another level though, I don’t think I learned anything significant about why I should grow my own food, how to grow my own food, or even where to buy affordable, sustainably farmed, organic goods. The installation of under the couch greens seems a little more like a novelty than any sort of practical suggestion.

Eight Extraordinary Greens

What are the larger implications of a project like this? I think if anything it serves as an honest departure point for conservation. I hope that visitors are tempted by the delicious greens and intrigued by the installation. Sure, the receipts on the wall tell us about what the gallery goer might pay full a bundle of micro greens, but does that really give us a larger snapshot of the value our society places on food? I honestly doubt it but I think that’s ok. Art doesn’t have to take the place of education, volunteering or other types of civic involvement it need only inspire.

More and more we see that artists seek to engage the social sector. I’m a long standing fan of activist art collectives and street artists that actively push their message and information out on to the streets and into the mailboxes of the uninformed. The point has always seemed to me, to inspire and to invite wonder. While the social good is certainly important, and I find it difficult to take issue with something that is well intended and that I support, the installation felt as if it lacked something. The focus, unfortunately, seemed on the idea of the project rather than it’s presentation. I would hold that even a conceptual artist like Joseph Kosuth relies on the visual impact of art. His installations are effective I think in particular because they do pack a mean aesthetic punch. If you want to make me care, awesome, stop me on the street and I’ll listen to your pitch, I’ll probably even give you money. Unfortunately canvassing for social causes is not art and shouldn’t be confused as such. I only venture to say that, while the issues are important, don’t let them stifle the experience or the point you are trying to convey might get lost in the shuffle.

Eight Extraordinary Greens runs at Mixed Greens (531 west 26th Street, 1st floor, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 2.

Syd Mead, "Disaster at Syntron" (1978) (all images courtesy BravinLee Programs) (click to enlarge)

BravinLee Programs in Chelsea has one of the most eye-popping shows currently on display in the city’s art galleries. The gallery has invited Syd Mead, the futurist designer behind such cult classics as Blade Runner (1982), Aliens (1986) and Tron (1982), to exhibit his creations at their West 26th Street space.

Syd Mead checking out some student work at the Vancouver Film School (via blog.vfs.com)

The futurist visions are painted with gouache on board and reveal a very hedonist vision of the world of the future. Figures are sensual, details are abundant and the angles shift to see the world from above, below and from impossible perspectives that give the universe he imagines an ethereal tint.

What’s peculiar about Mead’s work is how it feels strangely familiar even if it is situated in another time. Like Victorian visions of the future or images of the late 20th C. created during the Jazz age, there is a slice of life feel to these scene that make them as appealing today as when they left his desk or easel.

In an era where almost all illustration is done on a computer, it’s enjoyable to see this artist’s mastery of a very physical medium that gives his visions an inviting veneer. Yet this future is not without its faults. There is no poverty, disease or sadness in Mead’s world, only 1%ers whose lives who all seem to enjoy the endless improvements brought to their lives by technology, which should be no surprise as many these images were commissioned by corporations and visually seduced the viewer with their glistening vision of commercial products.

There is also the peculiar fact that it’s hard to visually date many of Mead’s images. Some of his images from the 1970s look like they could have easily have been created last week, while others from a few years ago appear steeped in a 1980s vision of the future. This confusion doesn’t appear to be as much about details of fashion or style as competing visions of luxury that each decade projects onto consumers — in other words, the future is like shifting sands in the desert and there’s a new dune each place you look.

I received a small tour of the show with co-owner John Lee, who is an obvious fan of Mead and his work. “Syd’s work appeals to me. He’s a legend that not everyone knows. I didn’t even know who he was until around 1995 — but always loved Blade Runner. It’s a thrill and an honor to have his work in my gallery,” he says. “If I were the emperor of Japan I would designate Syd Mead a goddamned national treasure. If I were the queen of England I would fucking knight the artists I like. But I’m neither so I did what I could and gave him one person show at Bravinlee programs.”

At last week’s opening, according to the New York Times Wheels blog, “Lee established a Skype connection on his iPad for visitors to the gallery to converse with Mr. Mead in his studio in Pasadena, Calif. It was futuristic moment in itself.”

"Enzmann Daedulus Probe" (1979) (click to enlarge)

"Hypervan - Crimson" (2003) (click to enlarge)

"Hypervan Profile" (2005) (click to enlarge)

"Party" (2000) (click to enlarge)

"Cavalcade" (1996) (click to enlarge)

"MegaCoach" (2010) (click to enlarge)

"Running of The 200th KD" (1975) (click to enlarge)

Syd Mead’s Future (Perfect) continues at BravinLee Programs (526 West 26th Street, Suite 211, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 30.

Quayola, "Strata #4" (2011) (image courtesy Bitforms gallery, NY)

Davide Quagliola (aka Quayola) an Italian digital artist, loves art. He loves his Roman heritage, brimming with Renaissance and Baroque innuendos. And he loves classical images, and the beauty of the algorithm.

Quayola  has created one of the most startling custom morphing technologies from his super-duper London based server rendering farm, transforming paintings from the ceilings of churches and museum collections to go inside, underneath and outside trompe l’oeil and encaustics. “Strata #4,” one of  his video works on view at Bitforms gallery in Chelsea was commissioned by the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille, using the iconic paintings from the museum’s Flemish collection of Peter Paul Rubens’ and Anton Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces.

Quayola, "Topologies - Velazquez, Las Meninas" (2010) (image courtesy Bitforms gallery)

What Quayola really looks for is the alchemist’s secret, the golden rule or mean of proportions that can underlie eternal works. His HD video series about two paintings in the Museo del Prado‘s collection “Topologies — Velazquez, Las Meninas” (2010) and “Topologies – Tiepolo, Immacolata Concezione” (2010), structurally dissolve as you view them. In collaboration with an HDR photographer he works with huge images, 20,000 x 20,000 pixels, running a raw analysis to discover what is really within the paintings. Employing  a triangulation algorithm that generates thousands of polygons, he takes these icons of perfection and turns them into a mesh continually deforming itself.

Through distancing himself from the Italian land of his birth by residing in London, Quayola has decontextualized his heritage just enough to thrust it into a new century.

You can watch Quayola’s “Strata #4″ (2011) online.

Quayola’s Strata continues at Bitforms (529 W 20th Street, #2, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 16.

Chuck Webster, "Untitled" (2012) (all images courtesy ZieherSmith gallery)

Chuck Webster is in his early 40s. He has been showing regularly in New York for nearly a decade. This is his sixth show at ZieherSmith since 2003.

In his first show, a single row of nearly three hundred works on paper snaked around the gallery. Done mostly in ink and watercolor, they consisted of emblematic forms more or less centered on the paper’s largely unmarked ground.

Chuck Webster, "Untitled" (2012) (click to enlarge)

There was a lot going on in these drawings. Webster wasn’t programmatic and didn’t seem to be pursuing a style. He used different kinds of paper, from thick white rag to antique sheets slightly yellowed with age, and was conscious of the kinds of interactions happening between his medium and the surface.

He wasn’t interested in being an artist of the moment — that is to say, being ironic, cute (or “cutist” as Peter Schjeldahl once said in another context) or showing piles of doodles, as if drawing were some desperate, mindless activity (a way of filling up time).

Webster not only made drawings but he wasn’t precious about them. He also wasn’t afraid of influence or of riffing off other artists, from Louise Bourgeois and Martîn Ramirez to Paul Klee and Anna Zemånkovå. It was exciting to see the work of a young artist who was so voracious and disciplined, wild and direct. It suggested that he was unguarded, that he wasn’t looking over his shoulder for approval.

*   *   *

Two installation views of the paintings of Chuck Webster at his current show at ZieherSmith gallery.

Since that first show, Webster has gained deserved attention for his work. In contrast to his seeming unlabored drawings, his paintings, which are done on wooden boards, are often worked on for up to a year.

The board is necessary because Webster likes to put the paint on and sand it off. Eventually he arrives at a distinct form, which, as with the drawings, is centrally located. He tends to work with a handful of tonally related colors in each painting. They help establish the mood and the light.

Many of Webster’s paintings are relatively modest in scale, which connects him to Forrest Bess, Bill Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski. Some might put Arthur Dove in this mix, but I am not one of them because I don’t think Webster is nostalgic or claiming to be spiritually enlightened, which also separates him from Jensen.

The fact that Webster entered this territory and has more than held his own is a testament to his determination. For one thing, his images tend to be spikier, and have more repetition, than the older artists he was looking at. There is something faintly dangerous about them.

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Chuck Webster, "Untitled" (2012)

Until this exhibition Webster titled his paintings. In addition to leaving his paintings untitled, he decided in advance to work on a consistently larger scale than he previously had, and to develop and explore a form as it moved it from painting to painting. There are seven painting in the exhibition, but I also saw three in the gallery office and consider them part of my experience.

The structure that Webster is here exploring is a stepped form that owes something to Navaho blankets. He uses a thick line to make the form’s border, appendages and interior lines. The thickness of the line confers gravity, as well as a sense of slow forcefulness.

The linear form, whose interior is usually painted a different color than the surrounding ground, evokes a two-story pueblo with TV antennas sticking willy-nilly out of it, as well as a caveman’s version of the fortress in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). For all of its weight, the forms seem animated, as if they might pick up and move elsewhere.

By focusing on one form, which he never repeats exactly, I got the sense that the artist is trying to consolidate what he knows and attempting to learn something else at the same time. Webster certainly knows how to make an interesting and often mysterious form, but he has seldom put it somewhere believable. Now it seems that he wants to expand the premise of his work, to go beyond the realm of mysterious things and make places where such things might exist.

The one pitfall he faces is making that place too schematic and based on visual shorthand, something that Carroll Dunham has never quite overcome. This show doesn’t tell us enough to surmise how successful Webster will be.

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Chuck Webster, "Untitled" (2012) (click to enlarge)

In these paintings Webster is able to make things that seem simultaneously brute and comical, which is not an easy combination. They definitely represent a move away from his earlier work.

It seems to me that there are two things he should consider — one is opening up the color in his work. In the painting with a red linear structure overlaying a larger whitish ground, which is surrounded by watery turquoise-blue brushstrokes, I had the sense that this was on his mind, that he wanted to see what he could do when he moved beyond a palette of related colors and tonalities.

The second thing that occurred to me while looking at this exhibition is that he ought to consider how to complicate the figure-ground relationship — something that Nicholas Krushenick, Nozkowski and Helmut Federle have all dealt with. (I am suggesting that he think of the whole sheet when drawing). I think there is a lot more that Webster wants to fold into his paintings, and these might be ways that for him to do so.

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The Chuck Webster painting in the back room.

In the back room there is a rather modest-sized painting with a simple stepped yellow form outlined in mostly dark blue. It looks like a 1950s robot with its antennae (or were they arms?) hanging down, each topped by a red circular shape (or thinly applied blob). The form is resting on a red ledge streaked with green, the remains of an earlier, painted-over effort. Two pink forms (feet or tongues?) pointing inward, slip out from beneath the flat yellow robot.

There is something funny, irrational, tender, and unexpected about this painting. The weathered surface, the pink-and-green streaked ground — elements that sometimes seemed like a backdrop in the other works — finally all came together.

Chuck Webster Paintings continues at ZieherSmith gallery (516 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until May 25.

The entrance to "Venus Over Manhattan" (all photos by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

Upstairs from “Larry,” in the Carlyle Galleries Building at 980 Madison Avenue, Adam Lindemann’s latest art toy, Venus over Manhattan, was unveiled to the press Wednesday morning. Un-designed by the architectural firm Toshihiro Oki, it defies the traditional white cube and underscores (with conspicuous beams and bludgeoned cement covered with deliberately bare drywall) the building’s fraught architectural history. With a façade that sports the “Venus of Manhattan” sculpture, a work by Wheeler Williams who was a noted supporter of the now notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, the building, under landmark protection, was forced to run through a series of proposals before it was allowed to add residential floors back in 2008.

Flying Venus, Crouching Adam: "Venus of Manhattan" is a work by the commie hating sculptor Wheeler Williams and it adorns the façade of 980 Madison Avenue (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

At 10am, New York Observer columnist, power collector, and upstart blue-chip art market pundit, Adam Lindemann is holding court, surrounded by a circle of rain-drenched press, and espousing the wonders of the À rebours novel, the theme he chose for the gallery’s opening event and premier exhibit. The gallery is dark, the works, spot lit. The cave-like closeness provides a very nice escape from the weather. Journalists stuff pastries into their faces, sip coffee and peer contentedly about. Many of them are familiar with Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 book; just as many are not. Lindemann is glad to explain the whole shebang to all of them: from what we gather, the show is about mankind making “decadence” by defying the norms of society and nature.

I’m quite thrilled to notice that the exhibit, À rebours is extremely true to the book — though one noticeable omission was a wandering bejeweled tortoise. Like a bibliophile going to see a movie emblazoned with the title of their favorite book, one could have worried that the theme would be treated shabbily. But Lindemann has it all covered in an amazingly literal translation of literature into display.

Entering the gallery, as a small Gustave Moreau, "Apollon recevant les offrandes des bergers" (c.1885) framed by a pair of Cesar's bronze "Candelabres" (1997) greet you.

The book’s anti-hero, the Duc Jean des Esseintes’ beloved Odilon Redon is represented with four works, including the large “Le Chevalier Mystique” (1892), and his character’s style of appropriating sacred “objects consecrated in earlier times” receives it’s literal translation in the form of fetish objects, including a (purported) Jivaro shrunken head, some Papuan bone daggers and, in a few happily contemporary twists, David Hammons’ untitled “African mask,” and a giant, hairy, lascivious wall hanging by Piotr Uklanski. It’s all complimented by the darkness and the perversely unfinished drywall surroundings.

Recalling that Des Esseintes makes himself ill with sickening perfumes in an arduously concocted “symphony of scents,” I suggest a perfumed atmosphere to Artemis, associate gallery director and artists’ liaison at VoM. It is, I explain, a gesamtkunstwerk gesture that I first discovered at the Neue Galerie when they used wafts of exotic perfumes and synthetic earthen scents to enhance the viewing of their Otto Dix show a couple of years ago. Artemis is receptive, “That’s a great idea. We can go à rebours.” Or did she say overboard?

The low lighting wasn't conducive to good hand-held photography but these images give you a taste of the baroque installation. Clockwise from top left: a large yellow painting by Walter Damn hangs beside a pitch black sculpture by John Chamberlain, a Warhol portrait of an American Indian is coupled with a console by Rafael de Cardenas and 19th C. Papuan bone daggers, Andra Ursuta's "Breath Hold (Discipline and Vanish)" (2010) is a balloon with a noose, and Piotr Uklanski's large vaginal "Untitled" (2012) visually contrasts with Bernard Buffet's large clown painting (1991). (click to enlarge)

A gleaming black Chamberlain, its overhead light casting a seriously value-added orchid shadow on the floor gets a lot of attention. Over it’s shoulder Andra Ursuta’s bungee cord noose, “Breath Hold” (2010) seems to dangle from what appears to be a marble balloon, though the checklist indicates is cast urethane. A Bernard Buffet, “Les clowns musiciens, le tube” (1991), which would, I’m guessing, seem birthday party-bright on a white wall, now blares a trumpet call of melancholy from the darkness nearby, its sad-clown subjects seeming all the more sour for being set alongside tokens of mortality and loss, like the noose, and like Olivia Berckemeyer’s ghastly ghost ship “Frozen Endurance” — they pop in spark-like dots from the darkness, flotsam from the flames of what, in the 1880s would have been considered a very sick mind. It’s worth noting that no one curates Buffet nowadays into shows, particularly in North America, so the choice of an artist who is best known for his heyday in 1950s and 60s Paris is a bold move.

Jeff Koons' "Violet-Ice (Kama Sutra)" (1991) sculpture with Lucas Samaras' "Fowl III iMovie N. 463" (2006) in the background. (click to enlarge)

I wonder if Adam Lindemann has turned Des Esseintes into the quintessential curator? The ‘zine that accompanies the show describe Des Esseintes as: “an eccentric aristocrat who recoils from the manners and values of conservative Parisian society and flees to the countryside to immerse himself in art collecting and exotic fetishism.”

But do I ask about this when I finally catch hold of Lindemann? No. Instead I ask him about his own collection and if the (horrid) Koons in the corner (Lavender Ice) is “his.” Gross, I know, and Lindemann wastes no time telling me so. He’s irritated. I’m the third person to ask him questions about which pieces come from his personal collection.

“Would you,” he asks suddenly, taking me aback, “go downstairs and ask Larry which pieces in his gallery are his?” And before I can get my breath (eyes rolled into the back of my skull in search of a quip), he says, “Well then, why me?”

“Because,” I venture, carefully “I think we see you as coming from the outside. As a collector … ”

“I’ll have to do something about that,” he says.

À rebours continues at Venus over Manhattan (980 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until June 30. The exhibition is accompanied by a free ‘zine, available both in print at the gallery and online.

Valerie Hegarty, "Rug with Grass" (2012) (all images by the author unless otherwise noted)

Dirt is getting its moment in the sun. A cluster of recent shows in Chelsea and downtown make the most of soil, making it a good time to think about earth art again.

Rob Carter, "Faith in a Seed" 2012 (view through the peep hole) (click to enlarge)

At Art in General, Rob Carter has created Faith in A Seed, a big, wooden hydroponic box of with seeds sprouting into young plants inside. Quaint house structures are also placed in this field, which encourages the perception of a live farm diorama. Of course, it’s more than that.

An elevated platform in the room provides a good aerial view of the installation. Alternatively, peepholes burrowed into the sides of the wooden box provide some really funky “ant’s eye” views. Memory gems shined from “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Antz,” “A Bugs Life” or any other film that gives you a view of someone crawling through the topsoil. The installation also has looping videos of sprouting plants. As a whole, the experience rekindles a fascination with the miracle of a seed — that with a bit of sunlight, water and time, tall green stalks come from a speck of dust.

Rob Carter, "Faith in a Seed" (2012) (click to enlarge)

The big reveal in the press release is that the artist the three little houses are replicas of the homes of Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau and Sir John Bennet Lawes. As the plants grow more in the coming weeks, the houses will eventually be overtaken by the green. The title of the show, Faith in a Seed, is derived from a quotation by that notoriously verbose but nevertheless charming Thoreau, which can be summed up simply as “Seeds. Good.”

Just a few blocks away from Art in General is the legendary New York Earth Room by Walter De Maria, operated by the Dia Foundation. At first glance it’s a room of soil, but the contrast with Carter’s show made me wonder why nothing is ever seen growing in it. There are spores everywhere, and virgin soil doesn’t usually stay blank and empty for long.

As it turns out, there has been a systematic effort to purge mushrooms from the earth room over the past few years. The work also requires an elaborate raking maintenance regiment. So what looks like just a room full of soil is actually a carefully manicured and highly artificial construction. That’s the glory of a work like this. Your first impression gets proved entirely wrong. It’s a good thought exercise, reinforcing the Buddhist tenet that not everything is what it first seems.

Walter De Maria, "New York Earth Room" (1977) (image courtesy of the Dia Foundation)

Soil is the result of decomposed matter. An old rug fraying and devolving into dirt with plants growing around and upon it is one of Valerie Hegarty’s most dynamic sculptures in her recent show at Marlborough’s Chelsea gallery. The piece, “Rug with Grass” (2012), plays on the idea of how nature can reclaim an object; Hegarty casts the processes of entropy and decomposition with visual wit.

The majority of art renders dirt as a blank, boring, dull thing in the background. Soil deserves more. These shows are refreshing because they give soil a personality. Carter conjures a childlike excitement with the potential and growth of sowed seeds. De Maria shows how even something as innocuous looking as piled earth can be invisibly policed. Hegarty finds an aesthetic sensibility in that slow process by which all matter eventually becomes dirt again.

Valerie Hegarty: Altered States closed at Marlborough Chelsea (545 West 25th Street) on May 5. Rob Carter: Faith in a Seed is on view at Art in General (79 Walker Street, Tribeca) through June 23. Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room is on continuous view at 141 Wooster Street (Soho).

Block partiers wandering through Hélio Oiticica's "Penetrável Filtro" maze (1972; all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

In unofficial conjunction with the inauguration of Frieze New York on Randall’s Island, the galleries on Chelsea’s 26th Street decided to go big and throw a block party last Saturday. If there is one kind of party that galleries excel at, it’s glamorous and exclusive after-hours functions, on a rooftop suite somewhere far above the streets of Chelsea; if there’s one area where galleries are found unanimously wanting, it’s dealing with the public, with “regular” people, the viewers who venture through their doors simply to look and not to buy. Considering this, it was surprising and encouraging to see high-end Chelsea galleries reaching out, in a coordinated effort, to the art-going public.

The crowd on 26th Street (click to enlarge)

After days of speculation and numerous press emails promising a “pedestrian-only” extravaganza, by Saturday night I was downright curious to see how this party would turn out. There were rumors of a DJ (Hannah Bronfman), a band (Dreamshow), New York City’s finest food trucks (Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, Morris Grilled Cheese Truck, Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream), not to mention 28 participating galleries.

The night began with an air of anticipation. I saw Gregory Volk and Jane Cohan zigzagging the block importantly, and Shepard Fairey listlessly entertaining fans in front of Pace Prints, where his latest show opened that night. By the end of the evening, however, I had decided two things: First, that this particular “block party” was actually more of a disorganized, albeit glorified, night of openings and closings, and second, that galleries shouldn’t try to be what they’re not — that is, fun, welcoming and egalitarian. The 26th Street block party felt like the type of affair galleries think “normal” people enjoy, in an out-of-touch, Mitt Romney kind of way: what does the layman do in his spare time?

Beth Cavener Stichter, "The Sentimental Question" (2011; click to enlarge)

The party’s good intentions fell flat beginning with the inability of the galleries to close the street to traffic. Instead of having the block free to wander between the galleries, food trucks and impromptu stage, attendees were stuck navigating the width of the sidewalk. Crowded enough on a normal Thursday night of openings, the sidewalk rapidly became like midtown during rush hour. The food trucks compounded the problem by leaving people with nowhere to eat their food. Standing awkwardly on the sidewalk, trying to dip my dumplings in sauce while well-dressed, elderly gallery goers looked on with disgust, I realized this wasn’t the atmosphere I’d had in mind. The band, only viewable from the street, was almost impossible to see. And topping off the mayhem was the arrival of the FDNY, called to save a stuck and overcrowded elevator on its way to Shepard Fairey’s opening; after the ordeal, Pace Prints closed for the night.

Despite the flaws of the party, there was some good artwork to be seen. At Claire Oliver I was impressed by the contorted and sculptural animals of Beth Cavener Stichter. Stichter’s stoneware-based, mixed-media sculptures look like creatures out of an Aesop’s Fable, with lifelike detail. Her animals, emotionally distraught and physically tortured, are awkwardly bent over pedestals or mounted ungracefully to the wall.

The James Cohan Gallery showcased the California-based artist Mauricio Ancalmo. In a piece titled “Dualing Pianos,” two grand pianos face off in the main room of the gallery, while a roll of white paper feeds through both instruments and a computer. Conceptually ambiguous, the monumental sculpture referred to some kind of mediated and impossible conversation. Meanwhile, Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibited the not exactly relevant though lovely, documentary-style photographs of Martha Rosler, taken on the streets of Cuba in the early 1980s.

Julia Fullerton-Batten, "Broken Eggs" (2005)

Many of the 26th Street galleries showed more interactive art, though I couldn’t be sure if the decision was coincidental or intentional. The most successful gallery in this department was Mixed Greens, which exhibited Jenna Spevack’s playful sculptures making the case for indoor, urban farming. Her sculptures, equipped with florescent lamps, grow living greens inside, under and on top of everyday, interior furniture. Alternative ways of farming in yardless communities is certainly a worthy topic, and Spevack tackles sustainable living in a humorous manner. Galerie Lelong, taking interactive art to an absurd level, exhibited the maze-like sculpture of Hélio Oiticica, making viewers sign a waver before they were allowed to walk down a small, gravel hill. Away from the street level, searching out hidden galleries, I discovered the surreal, advertising-inspired, fashion photographs of Julia Fullerton-Batten at Jenkins Johnson, as well as haunting smoke and ash drawings by South African artist Diane Victor at David Krut Projects.

Jenna Spevack, "Eight Extraordinary Greens" (2012)

While the 26th Street block party had its problems, I think the idea was a good one, and I wish the execution hadn’t been so poor. Not all galleries are exclusive: Some are meant to be alternative spaces, venues where young and unknown artists can show and perhaps even sell their work, but those galleries aren’t usually in Chelsea. The galleries on 26th Street should work to be more inclusive, but the overall atmosphere of the block party seemed false, as if for one evening they pretended their audience and clientele were different. If the galleries in Chelsea are going to convince us that they’ve changed, they’re going to have to try a lot harder than that. Letting us walk on a few artworks and throwing a public party once every few years isn’t going to entice people. The only thing that gets me walking toward Tenth Avenue is the prospect of seeing some truly interesting and provocative art.

The West 26th Street Block Party took place on West 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, in Manhattan’s Chealsea neighborhood on Saturday, May 5, 6–9pm.