The Brooklyn Rail

Many years ago, the feisty, open, and unpredictable Cynthia Carlson was one of my teachers in art school (Philadelphia College of Art, as it was called then, now closed). I had her for Collage and Assemblage, a freshman elective, then in Junior Painting a few years later. Carlson (and Ree Morton, who was also teaching there, they were as thick as thieves) would blow in weekly on what felt like fresh winds from New York—which was made to appear as an exciting, accessible scene. Carlson was already actively exhibiting—in the biennial and another group exhibition at the Whitney, Extraordinary Realities¹—as a neo-Surrealist.

Soon after, inspired by a recent interest in mountain-climbing, Carlson progressed to an abstraction of crumbly, ridged, impastoed pictures (one could imagine getting a fingerhold into them and hanging on). These encrusted surfaces quickly morphed via the use of pastry-decorating tools, from the by-then eccentrically shaped canvases into continuous walls of wallpaper-like patterns of squiggly gestures that soon once more transformed into representations of flowers.

Now fully a progenitor of what was then called the Pattern and Decoration movement, if she did make traditional painting objects, they were small and might only contain one exaggerated brushstroke, and were either diamond-shapes or parallelograms, used as a multiple element in variegated painted wall units: ambitiously large temporary and/or permanent site-specific installations in art spaces, institutional lobbies, and other public areas.

Her curiosity always leading her like a bloodhound straining on the leash, Carlson has forged ahead breathlessly for over sixty years through wholesale shifts of subject matter, format, and method, into bodies of work that include a series of insect portraits (with their Pattern and Decoration carapaces), as well as another of people’s pets, mostly cats and dogs, also arranged on walls en ensemble. Another was a series of large drawings of funerary monuments, shown at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Over the years, many more investigations were instigated and genres examined, adapted, or exploded.

For around the past decade, she has returned to the realm of the abstract painting, but in a decidedly fragmented version of the conventional rectangular picture made up of reassembled variations with small canvases and wood attachments. Aspects of this harken back to her formative years as a student in Chicago, to the Hairy Who, self-taught artists (some of whom she toured the country seeking out in the early 1980s), and the influence of feminism, endeavoring to throw off or simply ignore the dominant culture of minimalism, conceptualism, formalism, and, perhaps most importantly, seriousness. I remember a fellow student complaining that “Miss Carlson was sitting in painting class looking at a Bruegel book and laughing; what’s so funny about Bruegel?”

But she was onto something. In my recent discovery of François Rabelais, I understand now that she had picked up on his depicted inclusive generosity, a characteristic of Bruegel’s era. This was maybe a eureka moment. A consistently playful element—appearing in the past sometimes as simply goofiness and even sentimentality—has been a hallmark and is also apparent here (the current exhibition features selected paintings made from 2016 to 2022). But I am only seeing it in this more recent work the second time around.

I wrote a catalogue essay on some of these same paintings a few years ago. Then, I focused on pictorial syntax and did not note the humor. Now, it recalled my re-reading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on Rabelais. He describes the deep philosophical meaning in the Renaissance conception of laughter as “one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world as a whole … certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.”²

These are comic, theatrical amalgamations filled with quizzical rumination as well as parodistic ferocity. Carlson has stated that in these paintings, she drew on her experience of seeing the late works of Georges Braque: “he managed remarkably mysterious and complex spaces.”³ In Carlson’s hands, Cubism’s breaking up of the picture plane results not so much in a confounding puzzle as a farcical labyrinth, often with blank sections that approximate a kind of vortex.

Jostling Pleasure Seekers (2019) for example, has the most active, seemingly capricious surface, full of feints and seemingly random patches of paint that eventually reveal their structural purpose. Backgrounds of mauve and gray gradations are divided by dry black painted lines that function as trompe l’oeil seams. Opaque holes link up with beaker-like kidney shapes, evoking bits of a laboratory gone mad, nestled upon brushy scumbling. Additions of small planar canvases buttress an emptied square zone and a blank indentation; Day-Glo colors signal intermittently, as they do in almost every work.

My personal favorite is A Ruthless Policy (2021), a title that also describes her overall project, which like the others, reveals its surprises over time, not all at once. It has a half-round plane on its left that, with its improvisational painterly marks over a wet pink ground, makes us conscious of the painter as author. Nearby, a grid-like red mesh overlaps this field. There is something reminiscent of costuming—it is slightly kimono-like—and the proportions of each element are uncommonly pleasing, even harmonious, despite its disjunctions throughout.

The most recent work, Daring Efforts (2022)—also the smallest at only 20 by 20 inches—is a series of tumbling rectangles that descend in diminishing size off a mother plane into the viewer’s space. The same antic colors persist here, edged brushily—lime Day-Glo, industrial orange, blacks, grays—but one can admire the subdivisions breaking up the surfaces, the sketchy mid-air architecture that holds the contraption steady, never surrendering to the merely performative.

These patterns and constructions, these indexes of painting tropes and bulbous shapes, are a kind of costuming, a strut on the board. There is an earthiness to the work that belies its airiness. It’s like what T.J. Clark wrote about Dubuffet’s paintings: “the level on which they truly affect us …[is] the power of their lightness.”⁴