The Brooklyn Rail

James Clark and Cordy Ryman’s two-man show, Light Constructs at Helm Contemporary, is cleverly curated. Two gallery walls are flanked by a constellation of Ryman’s recent acrylic-on-wood constructions, some shaped as square cubes and others as irregular trapezoids, rectangles, semicircles, parallelograms, and quadrilaterals. A number of box constructions, such as 55 Box Grain (2024), are banded with deep black, off-white, butter-yellow, and tangerine-orange zebra stripes. Others, like Compass East Chunk (2024), display diamond-shaped patterns of concentric lines that extend around the cube’s partially unpainted edges, exposing and highlighting the bare wood’s rivulets. Others boxes are spotted or lined with meandering twists and a handful, like Shingle #1 and Shingle #3 (both 2024), plot flat shards and mottled brushwork into an alien mosaic. Ryman’s wooden cubes and fragments are, viewed individually, quite humble. Received from a distance adequate to perceive them as a total pattern, however, they are rather sensuous. Ryman has spaced each wooden piece at regular intervals, a judicious arrangement that allows them to function as constituent “simples” of a wall-spanning complex sequence.

By contrast, Clark’s sculptural installations do not form parts of a system but are instead individually self-sufficient. In TASTEE (2017), a garnet-hued oblique vinyl cylinder is folded into itself, its twisted edges pursed into the shape of a heart. A cathode straw emits light from its center, the lightning reflections echoing hot white across its inner and outer pink chassis. Most of Clark’s works similarly incorporate electroluminescent wire, radiating a fluorescent glow across off-kilter plastic sleeves and fixtures. In his 2021 essay, “Illumination: The Sculpture of James O. Clark,” Jonathan D. Lippincott writes that “Clark names Dan Flavin as an artistic inspiration,” given both artists’ use of “simple, mass-produced fixtures.” Yet as Lippincott correctly observes, there is a critical difference between the two: “[w]hile Flavin embraced the sleek sameness of manufactured bulbs and fixtures, Clark’s work has a very clearly hand-made feel to it.” Coeval to Ryman’s rough finishes and casually applied paint, Clark complements exposed wiring with rough-hewn gleaming plastic. Works like Clark’s Wink (2021) underscore the cheapness of his material with a semi-transparent, kite-shaped sheet of plexiglass affixed to a fuchsia spheroid. The wire construction and metal nozzle adjoining the sculpture’s two elements is left uncovered, showing the work’s built nature.

Curator Karina Argudo’s pairing of Ryman and Clark is motivated by both artists’ engagement with radiance. Compared to Clark’s twisted LED and electroluminescent fibers, Ryman’s scattered fluorescent vermillion-faced cubes enjoy a more subtle light source. Positioned on bare white walls, they glow rather than shine. Luminescence is not the sole arena of convergence unifying the two artists’ practices, however. Both artists also make use of unfinished, humble forms. This is particularly evident in Ryman’s Shingle #2 (2024) and Clark's “Silloloqui” (2024) series. In Ryman’s box constructions, metal nails are left partially un-submerged. Clark’s silver leaf and brick dust whitewashed wood prisms, dotted with silvery phosphorescent pigment, are decidedly smoother. In Ryman’s case, a bristle-like collection of tacks attach splintered wooden cubes to a rough rectangular board. It is here that we can espy the “casualism” that, in her June 2011 article, “ABSTRACT PAINTING: The New Casualists,” Sharon L. Butler attributes to the intentionally “off-kilter” and imperfect aesthetic favored by artists like Lauren Luloff, Amy Feldman, Joe Bradley, and Ryman himself.

“Casualist” works, Butler notes, are marked by their “abrupt shifts, their crosscurrents, and their purposeful lack of formal cohesion.” This is an apt description for a number of Clark’s works as well. Unlike Ryman, however, Clark is by no means what Raphael Rubinstein calls a “provisional” artist, as his sculptures do not employ modular forms that can be reconstituted to produce novel arrangements. But there are a number of stylistic attributes that often accompany such “provisionality”, which we also find in Clark’s work. In his The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art, Rubinstein underscores the “provisional” artist’s penchant for “loose paint handling,” where “filled-in shapes” are accompanied by “lots of empty primed canvas.” Indeed, just as this “looseness” was a way for the “provisional” painters to distinguish themselves “from Minimalism and its fetish for flawless surfaces,” Clark creates a similar distancing effect with his exposed wiring and plastic gleam.

This exhibition also acknowledges how Ryman’s casualist “provisionality” builds on art historical lessons conveyed by Clark, a veteran artist of the antecedent generation. In Ryman’s constructions, an apparently handmade quality endows his mark-making practice with art historical meaning anchored in Post-Minimalism’s embrace of the everyday. Clark is, admittedly, not the sole precedent here. As I noted in my review of Ryman’s previous exhibition, Monkey Mind Symphony at Freight + Volume, Ryman’s practice of fitting boxes with wooden protrusions and jagged paint stripes also has an important forebear in Dan Basen’s boxes. Basen’s loose handling of paint was itself galvanized by the “tramp art” that he and his co-gallerist Jolie Kelter collected and exhibited at their West Hartford and East Village gallery, the Hobo Gallery (also known as the “Flame Gallery” and, later, the “Rose Gallery”). Like Clark and the “provisionalists,” Basen was dissatisfied with the sterility of Minimalism and post-painterly abstraction, which he castigated in a pair of 1970 articles published in the avant-garde artist publications Corpus and New York Element. But despite the folk vernacular he purposed, Basen also closely adhered to the Dadaist practice of taxonomy, inserting objects into open-faced box constructions, fitting vessels with sardine cans-cum-pendulums or lining them with matchsticks. Like Joseph Cornell and Wayne Nowack, Basen was a cosmologist. Clark is not; his constructions do not frame found or built objects, but are self-effacing in their sheer materiality. This is precisely why they provide, in this exhibition, such a productive complement to Ryman’s closed wooden boxes, which achieve both their “casualism” and overall modular structure by way of humble painterly marks, irregularly applied and at times coated with a luminescent glow that emanates from their surface.