The Brooklyn Rail

On view at Paula Cooper Gallery are two related groups of late oil paintings by Bay Area painter Jay DeFeo, made during the last decade of her career before her death at the age of sixty in 1989. This period of activity marked a return to oil paints and canvas after a long stretch of photographic and collage-based work that had occupied her since the completion of The Rose in 1966.

The Rose, an approximately two-thousand-pound, 11 by 7 ½ foot oil painting was created over an eight-year stretch in a low-rent live/work apartment on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street. DeFeo’s physical health deteriorated in the process. The work’s white, chiseled, low relief forms a radiating surface that can be read like a sculpture made of paint. After DeFeo and the painting were both evicted, this unwieldy canvas was removed by crane via the building’s fire escape, a process documented by filmmaker Bruce Conner. It was exhibited briefly and then taken to the San Francisco Art Institute, where it was stored behind a false wall. Removed and restored in 1995, the work is now on view nearby at the Whitney.

Garnets on the Boulder offers a welcome opportunity to re-examine the artist out of The Rose’s shadow. The horizontal Grey Profile (1983) is the first work encountered in the hallway. Thereafter, seven large canvases hang low in the double-height main gallery space with room to breathe. For DeFeo, the 1980s were a time of consolidation. Finding herself with a tenure-track teaching position and the financial stability to expand her studio space, she accepted representation by a commercial gallery and regularly mounted shows for the first time.

These works approach painting unsentimentally. DeFeo used a photocopier—in her words, “a sketching device”—to prepare images to render. Dark brown and grey modeled figural passages preside. Collisions of subjective image are structured, scaffolded by elusive reference to physical armatures. A chair’s dislocated armrest or a lacquered hairpin could serve as a jumping-off point. Off-center consolidations of impastoed multi-colored swatches jam up against sharp diagonals created with masking tape. These furrows of drop-shadow recall the home mechanic testing airbrush techniques or applying pinstripes to a hot-rod.

Her canvas surface feels like a sheet of heavy paper. Utility, pliability, ubiquity, and flatness come to mind. Three of the larger horizontal paintings are, in fact, painted on paper mounted on canvas: Grey Profile, Bride (1986), and Untitled (Reclining Figure) (1986). The sides of her “tableaux” here are often a single saturated color, most likely the result of stretching and folding the already painted fabric. Some of the mounted works are covered by strip frames to obfuscate the paper’s edge. Her focus does not seem to land on the painting as an object. These surfaces are for reception and presentation.

This appears to be confirmed in examples of process photography taken by the artist in her studio. Photos show some paintings unstretched, tacked to the wall. Stretched canvases are propped up vertically on cinderblocks surrounded by corresponding preparatory works on paper. The impression when viewing these paintings is that of looking at another thing yet to come. In contrast to the present sculptural physicality of The Rose, these works seem to offer a suggestion of a monumental sculpture, not be it.

The difficulty in nailing down just what this might be is central to DeFeo’s success. She was an artist with a clearly defined working process. Investigating this process itself is its own reward. As she noted, when a viewer insists upon a recognizable object as the work’s subject, “they lose sight of what I’m attempting to do; that is, portray the esthetic harmony resulting from the uniting of the geometric and organic forms.”

John Dewey describes something like it in Art as Experience: the entire significance of the process of representation lies in the organization of materials, lines, and colors. The artist’s subsequent concentrated observation is what develops a new form, a form which carries its own aesthetic emotion. This artistic, emotive impulsion is contrasted with photographic documentary reportage, such as of a crime scene, for instance. DeFeo’s painterly work dovetails with Dewey’s foregrounding of organization. But in her astute hands, the use of photography functions differently. Her reporting captures the “fleeting images” she mentions in her journals. DeFeo’s metabolization of the photographic seems to account for the particular emotive form generated here.

The second gallery is occupied by a cohesive group of smaller abstract oils on linen with mountain landscapes as their subjects. While space operates around the central figures in the larger works, here the frame is zoomed-in, full bleed. Burgundy, blueish-grey, and opaque violet strokes are scrubbed, troweled, and elsewhere feathered into the uniform surface.

A mechanical tension is present even in these more painterly works, created from subtle shifts of facture, chroma, or application. A white-speckled, stone-grey triangle on the lower-right side of Alabama Hills No. 20 (1987), for instance, could be the result of sanding the surface, creating a distinct spatial break from the brown-purple background. In Garnets on the Boulder (1989), she bisects the background. Dividing the field into a smooth black top half and a flat grey lower register, it’s as if she dropped a false horizon line behind a starkly delineated mass of marks. This black and white “rock” smears into the left side of the canvas.

The waxy surface of the almost baroque Smile and Lie (1989) wades into the outer waters of how far DeFeo could push ambiguity. Tenderly scraped whites, greys, and undertones of blue hinge around a single, ruthless, black diagonal edge in the center of the canvas. This opens upwards into a curling blue-black abyss across the top of the work. Alabama Hills No. 15 (1986) includes an actual string embedded in the grey paint film across its middle, feeling as if it were caught somewhere between a happy accident and an unbelievable and completely unlikely allusion to the binding of Isaac. The vast scale she achieved in these compact surfaces could indeed fit such grand Biblical subjects. As the artist noted, “I don’t have to have great significance and meaning behind my subject matter. I just get very excited by exciting shapes and forms and things that interest me as far as form is concerned.”

This refreshing exhibition allows for the opportunity to view these final canvases for the many merits they hold close. The struggle of art, as Dewey notes, lies in eloquently transforming “mute” materials. At an artist’s best, that eloquence carries enough momentum to create a new art, a falling away of categorical terminology. The resistance of Jay DeFeo’s work is simply the purposeful product of its own rigor.