The Brooklyn Rail

If Ezra Tessler’s recent paintings call to mind pillows, it is not only due to their lumpy disposition, but also the harmony between surface, substrate, and support that lends them a dreamlike quality. His constructions of wire, resin, and paper pulp swell outwards, their edges failing to contain the colors and patterns that wrap around their backs. The paradox of pillows is that they yield to the very objects they support. Tessler’s are visions that have hardened and defined their own form, and they share the exuberance of Mondrian’s last paintings, where structure gave way to rhythm and feeling.

Some of the paintings in the present show, Where the Stress Falls, could be described as close-ups. The irrecoverable home (2023) is like watching a tube TV at close range: near enough to feel and hear the static, colors dividing into bands of primaries. The specificity of Tessler’s colors—brown, yellow, red, and black—in concert with the painting’s soft edges reminded me of two disparate phases in Blinky Palermo’s career, where form took precedence over color, and then vice versa. There is something heraldic about these compositions, which seem less painted and more emblazoned—perhaps color that is molded appears more intentional than color that is squeezed out. But Tessler’s compositions are no less enigmatic because of their medium. Consider the 2022 painting Wicker basket and a short knife, which is invaded by black rings like olive slices or octopus suckers. It has a miraculous effect in its rainbow gradient running between that loose pattern: as the right edge turns from red to purple the figure/ground relationship reverses, the flat yellow background winnowed down into circular glints and the black marks beginning to glow pink. The whole thing is an asteroid tumbling and turning its face toward a warming star, or countless blinking eyes on an angel’s wing.

In two tiny compositions in the back room, One way street and Each one another (both 2023) Tessler modulates his surfaces to a more intense degree, building the pieces entirely of paper, pigment, and string. A green folds over and curls into white, passes under another element, and comes out yellow. Four circles, orange, red, pink, and paler pink, ride along a wave of white, like a stop motion of a traffic light. It is not so much that substrate and surface are working in harmony, but rather they are one and the same. Scale here works to Tessler’s favor, as these diminutive and grasping strokes act like petals unfurling or pages turning in an illuminated manuscript.

The show’s title invokes music or pronunciation. The stress—in painting, or composition, or speech—is not always evident, as in North weather (2023), which resembles a drippy, dappled cowhide, believable except for its pink color. But in some pieces, quickly alternating colors do indicate a sort of rhythm. In the most complex painting in the show, Space is the wake of time (2023), three vertical bands disrupt a patchwork shell of green. Those pasted strips, themselves made up of thinner strips of brown, black, yellow, red, and blue, don’t follow a pattern; yet certain colors do line up horizontally along the composition. You can squint and identify yellow patches in relative alignment, then you can shift focus and train your eyes on blue or red, which are more disparately scattered, and fall back on the black strips, which meet in the middle. It must be intuitive for Tessler to have achieved such a perfectly imbalanced composition, as it couldn’t have resulted from any math or automatism. Beyond those formal concerns, the painting has a singular moment of levity. On the top of the leftmost band, a gentle curve cuts across the stripes, shifting red into blue, brown into yellow, blue into red, red into black. It mirrors the curve of the painting’s entire armature, and in doing so, calls attention to the fact that this is not pigment resting on a surface, but rather a surface made of pigment. Color, for Tessler, is less decoration than structure. Painting in this way can create image and form in the same action. That curve is a revelation, like a wrinkle in the pillowcase suddenly warm against your cheek.