ArtSeen
Gregory Amenoff Facing North
Alexandre Gallery April 12 – May 27, 2007

The quandary with Gregory Amenoff’s paintings is that he has never stepped back and interrogated that initial flush of deep feeling he had about the American visionary tradition, particularly Arthur Dove, at its most optimistic heights. More often than not, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Marsden Hartley are haunted in their work, while Dove settled a little too easily and often for hackneyed symbols—the glowing orb of light in his paintings isn’t just unreal; it’s downright banal. And make no mistake; I am a fan of Dove, but I am not in complete thrall of his paintings when he settles for symbols. They are his weakest works, if his most popular.
In Amenoff’s recent exhibition, Facing North, which is his first in five years, he continues to align himself with the symbolist vein of the visionary landscape tradition, which starts with early Siennese painting, the Lorenzetti brothers and Sassetta, and continues through Samuel Palmer and Odilon Redon to the American branch (Ryder, Hartley, and Dove, and more recently Forrest Bess). Many of these artists believed they were conduits, which some observers have construed as a kind of madness. Herein lies the problem. How do you become a visionary artist in the 21st century, without resorting to received symbols? I don’t think you have to go mad to do this. Bill Jensen has done it, and, in a different way, so has Chris Martin, perhaps because they are willing to embrace awkwardness, discomfort, and embarrassment without turning these actions into a style. There is a range and variety to their work. Their inconsistency is their strength.
In Facing North, the artist returns to the lava-like surfaces that were integral to the paintings that first gained him attention in the early 1980s. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, he used rabbit skin glue and distemper to flatten the surface into image. It is also during this period that he began introducing symbols of trees, thorns, and stars into his work, which helped accommodate it to a more literary analysis, a this equals that kind of equation. In the new paintings, all dated either 2006 or 2007, Amenoff applies viscous oil paint to panels, and the surfaces are full of sensual passages, scumbling, trails, daubs, and dabs of paint. There is a crusty lusciousness to the surfaces and colors that is akin to cake frosting, after the cake has inadvertently been left out on the picnic table a few hours too long.
Compositionally, Amenoff generally places a geometric shape in and against a semi-representational landscape that contains water, mountains, sky, and vegetation. Sometimes the shape, like the faceted “Arch III,” flattens the landscape out. Other times, as in “SunPillar,” it becomes something we can see and see through. The light is gorgeous, as is the palette. Amenoff loves to paint, and there are lush virtuoso passages in nearly every painting. But all of this doesn’t quite lift the painting to the realm the artist desires. The biggest predicament is that everything that he puts into his paintings fits together so well. Even when he is disrupting it with a geometric shape, the internal logic and scale of the jigsaw puzzle-like shapes line up too smoothly.
By domesticating the visionary, Amenoff tips his scenes into the domain of the pastoral, which isn’t necessarily bad. He is a painter for whom decorum is a tad too important. He wants viewers to know that both he and the world we live in are well behaved, and each of them will do the right thing. Light from a radiant sky rises from behind the barren mountains. A yellow arch floats in the sky, glowing. The sea churns in its rhythmic striations. These symbols relegate the paintings to the picturesque. There is nothing impolite about them, nothing disquieting. We are not left wondering, what the hell is going on? They don’t subvert our childish conviction that there is a surface logic to reality, and that whatever governs it is not daemonic or beyond understanding. Amenoff hasn’t superseded our logic with one that allows the possibility that invisible forces might suddenly and unexpectedly manifest their troubling presence.
By any accepted standard, these are extremely beautiful paintings, but, for the true visionary, conventional beauty and received symbols were never really the point. This is not to say that Amenoff can’t do what he set out to do, and become a visionary painter. I also don’t mean to suggest that one cannot make a breakthrough and create great paintings at any point in one’s life. In order to do that, I think Amenoff has to face the issue of distinction and trust; he has to let each painting take him somewhere, and he has to trust that it will become something that he has never seen before, something that might even scare him. He has to stop noodling with the surface, adding flourishes here and there, and he has to believe that visions can come from the most ordinary events and things, and that they can rise from the very ground on which he (and no one else) is standing. It is not an impossible task.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings
By Jonathan GoodmanDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
Tom Sachs, in a mid-career showhis first at Acquavella Galleriesis offering handmade paintings aligned with classic American, mostly commercial iconography: a reproduction of the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup wrapper, the McDonald's Golden Arches, an American flag. These images are so ubiquitous as to have taken on definitive status, giving them an authority nearly ethical in their quality; all this despite the fact that Sachss paintings are mostly of logos of things to be sold.

Joseph Holtzman: Six Recent Paintings
By Gilles Heno-CoeDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
Holtzman finds an excellent collaborator in Sam Parker, whose refreshingly visionary approach shares the painters energy and tongue-in-cheek humor, qualities that are often lacking in the woefully conventional and overly-serious New York art scene. Holtzmans first solo exhibition on the East Coast, much like his installation at the Hammer Museum in 2014, features an all-encompassing environment of color and pattern, visually situated somewhere between Biedermeier, Arts and Crafts, De Stijl, and 1980s Pattern and Decoration. This campy atmosphere of celebratory excess serves as the perfect backdrop for his recent oil on marble paintings.
Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness
By Karen ChernickFEB 2021 | Art Books
This second monograph on Jones fleshes out the details of the artists biography using records kept at Howard University and interviews with former students such as artists David Driskell and Akili Ron Anderson. Rebecca VanDiver reinterprets Joness work, arguing that she nimbly laced together American, African American, African, and European artistic traditionsin order to fashion a brand new one.
Freddy Rodríguez: Early Paintings 1970–1990
By Susan BreyerDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
Hutchinson Modern & Contemporarys inaugural exhibition at its East 64th Street gallery space, Freddy Rodríguez: Early Paintings 19701990, features a selection of paintings and collages by the Dominican York artist.