The Brooklyn Rail

In recent years, we have seen a growing number of artists develop a mode of abstraction characterized by adumbrated panoramic expanses in monochromatic tones, marked by the occasional interlude of brushes of color. Describing an antecedent approach to abstraction that he termed “neo-modern” in a 2012 essay of the same name, David Geers highlighted an uptake of abstraction that traffics in “hybridized materials … inoculated with a dose of the everyday” that protects “against charges of pure abstraction.” In his current show at Amanita, World-Honored One, Nicholas Campbell stakes out a related neo-formalist position that hews less toward material experimentation than the suggestion of naturalist illusionism, whether it be the possibility of light breaking from an arboreal conglomeration or cavernous crags.

The exhibition press release provides the first indication of Campbell’s naturalistic sensibility. It describes his canvases in representational terms, referencing “Hieronymus Bosch’s underworlds and the subdued landscapes of Ralph Albert Blakelock.” Yet there are no visual traces of either an underworld or the landscape to be found in the paintings. There is not even a marked relationship of figure and ground upon which we might anchor a geographical terrain. There are, rather, twists and turns of rusted, gold-hazed light that flake and swell towards the upper edges of the canvases. With the exception of the square-shaped World-Honored One (all works 2024), each work’s top edge is illuminated, while the picture plane is weighted at its bottom, burnished bronze tones effaced by Stygian plumes.

The canvases are rather large, which is to Campbell’s benefit. Properly viewed from the front, their size overtakes one’s visual field. Ariadne, Leader, and Nirvana all measure around seventy to eighty inches tall and a few inches shorter across their width. Ariadne’s title refers to King Minos of Crete’s daughter (best known for assisting Theseus’s escape from the Minotaur) and displays diaphanous cleaves of russet-brown mist, while the top edge is furrowed by copper-red. Among rivulets of acorn and wheat-gold, runnels of light break in uneven turns. As we move further down the picture plane, we observe a tightening-effect, actuated by the introduction of auburn breaks that scatter into black, wave-like undulations. These rake into the corners, endowing the work with a sense of weight.

This vertical weighting-effect is not necessarily a novel device. Leo Steinberg alluded to it in his 1972 study, Other Criteria, when he described the traditional structure “of the picture as representing a world, some sort of worldspace which reads on the picture plane in correspondence with the erect human posture,” with the image’s top edge coeval “to where we hold our heads aloft” and “its lower edge” gravitating “to where we place our feet.” If the verticality of this head-to-toe correspondence were the sole means by which Campbell made good on his promise of quasi-naturalism, we would still be far from Bosch’s underworld or Blakelock’s tonalist landscapes. Given that Campbell is an abstractionist, we ought not expect his terrain to be peopled or populated, but in works like Ariadne and World-Honored One, both his coloration and his brushstrokes remain too unevenly scattered to indicate any semblance of the empirical, natural world. Light does not lace but erupts and twists such that it resembles nothing but paint's flaking—a rich and interesting dissonance, but not one we can, in any meaningful sense, identify with the even-hued tones of the natural world. Leader and Nirvana, however, are more successful on this front. In these works, Campbell’s coalesced forms betray a distinct pictorial depth.

In Leader, russet has been displaced by mountainous deposits of red ore that burst into semi-circular ringlets from the canvas’s center. Two emulsions of tangerine-orange, swaddled by cantons of charcoal-bitten rouge, suggest the depth of a sky’s expanse, where daybreak might tenaciously break through the soot-smoked red fog. Similarly, in Nirvana, hill-like mounts are outlined in wavering puce threads. Where two of these slight structures meet, a contoured trail of roseate-mahogany umber travels downwards, like a mountain’s furrow scratched into the earth. Towards the center of the work, dahlia red hatches pour into scarlet emulsions. As in most of Campbell’s paintings, the bottom edges wrinkle into a browned-copper obscurity. There is enough pictorial depth here to suggest a terrain, and here Campbell’s distinctive compositional approach does license an acute sense of naturalism.

In a number of Campbell’s works, the coalesced umbral palette is interrupted by trickles or strokes of bright alien color. Pocked within the center-right expanse of Nirvana is a sapphire blue dart; further to the right are electric green rays. These remain purely painterly, interrupting the expanse of quasi-naturalism. Campbell’s neo-formalism, which espouses a broadly naturalistic bent, occasionally betrays a latent commitment to modernist devices, such as anti-naturalist mark-making. Here, paint becomes purely self-referential, at odds with the possibility of a tonalist landscape or underworld tract. On the one hand, such bright, variegated painterly interruptions dissuade literalist interpretations and allow for poetic vagary. But, on the other, Campbell works are already generous enough in their suggestibility, with coalesced surface shadows that never entirely admit natural structures. As such, these colorful abstract whims—although relatively rare—tend toward the decorative. But Campbell’s canvases, at their best, provide what might be cropped glimpses within a larger panoramic expanse, tangled bands setting dawn’s daybreak alight.