The Brooklyn Rail

David Zwirner’s current exhibition, No straight lines, is a tribute to the self-taught American painter, Jon Serl (1894–1993), organized by artist Sam Messer, who befriended Serl in 1989. Paintings by Serl hang alongside works by a number of contemporary artists: Brook Hsu, Josh Smith, Louis Fratino, Katherine Bradford, Dana Schutz, Andy Robert, and Messer himself. With the exception of two taxidermy-inspired fowl sculptures by Smith and Andy Robert—likely references to the roosters and chickens that famously populated Serl’s studio home in Lake Elsinore, California—the vast majority of additional works on view are oil painting homages to Serl’s folk vernacular. Unlike Serl, the accompanying coterie are not autodidacts, but the exhibition occasions them to emulate his freely rendered flat figures and elongated proportions in prismatic palettes.

The show features paintings from across Serl’s nearly fifty-year career, and not only expresses reverence but also successfully clarifies Serl’s aesthetic worldview. Like other American “outsider” artists from the epoch like James Castle, Bill Traylor, Purvis Young, Howard Finster, Gertrude Morgan, and Minnie Evans, Serl’s expressionistic character studies fixate on and exacerbate certain features of his subjects. Such is the case in Waltz (1963), a fantastic earth-toned painting where a hawk-haired man in a v-cut suit puckers his crooked, swollen lips and palms a smiling woman—presumably his lover and dancing partner—whose undulating blue dress swathes his right leg. The two figures almost become a single, sinister form, distinguished only by their tonal differences. Serl’s expressive distortion approaches, but stops short of, the morphological. Though this has prompted some to align his work with Surrealism, Serl was not guided by automatism, nor did he emphasize arbitrariness. His references are less attuned to the subconscious than they are to the eccentric personalities that Serl met as the son of two traveling vaudeville performers. In Randall Morris’s 2013 essay, “The Hawk King of Elsinore” he quotes Serl’s characterization of his peripatetic childhood as a “white trash past,” observing that it informed the subtext to his work.

Moving through the exhibition, one recognizes certain continuities that mark Serl’s oeuvre: in terms of thematic content, he turns and returns to enigmatic narratives. There is an elliptical, folk-story quality to his work, abetted by masked faces and theatrical, claustrophobic compositions. In addition to his penchant for flat, vertically elongated planes, Serl paints his figures in rows. Take, for instance, Once There Were Four (1962), in which three mourning women, painted in coal-moss malachite cloaks, waver beside the edge of a sapphire pond. Behind the figures is an overhanging skeletal scaffold, and the upper-right corner is marked by a fleshy crucifix, suspended in a pendant and supported by an angular tree trunk and wooden post. The rightmost woman arches her head into her hands, her crooked arm balancing her figure; her eyes, nose, and lips are scrawled in small streaks, her meek visage caught in a despondent frown. The middle figure—this one more ambiguous, with shoulder-length hair and the very same shrouded vestment—places a blue-and-white spotted shrub of forget-me-nots by the ground. The leftmost figure, also holding a bouquet, turns away from our vantage and towards the barren woods. A vaporous enigma suffuses this mourning scene, the uncanny element manifesting in the off-kilter, skin-colored crucifix, which indexes the absence of the titular “fourth.”

Like his palette, Serl’s forms are punctiliously considered. In a 1981 Los Angeles Times feature, Serl noted that “I go by a line or a hint of a shape that is already there.” The “line” of three in Once There Were Four is repeated in one of the most haunting works on display, Here (1973). Three russet-gold ducks, whose beaks droop like carrots or a seventeenth-century plague doctor’s mask, meet the percipients gaze with hollow midnight eyes. Unlike Untitled (ca. 1970–79) and Cockfight (ca. 1960–79), where, respectively, a fish and two roosters are naturalistically depicted, Serl takes anthropomorphic liberties in Here, clothing the ducks in alabaster cloth caps and rendering them with glowing white legs. Throughout, Serl’s facture is only slightly impressionistic, his brushwork less flurried than fluttered.

Josh Smith’s Untitled (2024), a cast of seaside tropical trees with outgrowth leaves sprawling like stretched fingers, painted in brilliant coral, apricot, and azure, is closer to Thornton Dial’s style than Serl’s. The same can be said for the sole abstract painting on view, Andy Robert’s Autumn (2024), an amalgamation of rusted and blanched smudge-skeins on linen stapled to a board—the “impoverished” approach is here achieved by medium and construction rather than vignette and form. These are the two outliers in the exhibition as, unlike Serl’s paintings, they do not attend to an uncanny figure or series of figures, but betray a more generally naive approach—in Smith’s case, to the landscape, and in Robert’s case, to the canvas vis-à-vis errant gestures. Dana Schutz’s Driver (2024), on the other hand, depicts a mange-faced figure steering a wheel in the sky with gargantuan fleshy hands, his toothpick legs bookending the highway beneath him. The work acutely approaches the distended proportions and enigmatic narrative of Waltz. Similarly, in and “here no longer” (for P.A.) (2024) Messer cakes thick slabs of impasto into butter and cream layers, shaping them into rows of teeth that resemble typewriter keys, not only paying homage to but also extending the confusion of form that we find in Serl’s rows and portraits. Messer brings to bear the rational kernel of what philosopher Christian Helmut Wenzel calls “negative aesthetic ideas,” which use form to frustrate beauty and express anxiety, fear, and jealousy—the very thematic content that recurs in Serl’s vignettes.