The Brooklyn Rail

Color Clímax presents an extraordinary dialogue between two artists. While the paintings by Sérgio Sister and those by Karin Lambrecht are clearly distinct, their correspondences underscore the differences and thus provoke greater attentiveness in the viewer. This is no arbitrary two-person exhibition: Luis Pérez-Oramas’s astute curation (illuminated by his excellent exhibition essay) coordinates works by both artists, often along the same walls. The choice to do this, rather than keep them separate, heightens the engrossing and silent conversation between the images, and in doing so reveals contrasting approaches to color, both materially and indexically. Color cannot be isolated—indeed, it is everywhere and nowhere at one and the same time. Color always happens already; we are thrown into a world of color from the very inception of consciousness. It is preexisting and primal—a fact recognized by both Sister and Lambrecht.

Color is frequently associated with emotion. But before this association is codified and given value, it’s crucial to remember that emotion is in many ways the driver of consciousness, not an effect of it, and that emotion originates in the body, anterior to thinking. This corporeality is, in itself, the basis for our shared awareness of being. And in this exhibition, feeling and thinking appear to connect and directly coauthor the works. The colored surfaces of these paintings invoke moods and associations that appeal to more than our sense of sight thanks to their assertive tactility.

Sister’s paintings tend toward a particular range of color and are never exactly monochrome, but evoke the moment-to-moment shifts of a changeable mood or a transforming climate. While earlier in his career he created figurative, politically-charged paintings—he was incarcerated and tortured for his political beliefs under the Brazilian dictatorship that fell in 1984—Sister began working with abstraction around 1989. The literal surfaces of his works obfuscate nothing, but are factual, indexical to truthfulness. Sister’s abstract Violet and aluminum over red (2015) is a good example of Brazilian modernism and closely related to the monochrome. His extreme sensitivity to paint as a smear of one colored material over another (that of the support) is expressive, beautiful, and direct.

Lambrecht’s painting is similarly striking and honest, but follows a different trajectory—one loaded with symbolic and authorial heft. She studied with Joseph Beuys and developed an interest in materiality as a skin or layer, to be both inscribed with symbol and text and incarnated with gestural color. Take, for example, Yes (2017), in which a complex combination of acrylic emulsion pigments, charcoal, soft pastel, and copper on canvas retains atmospheric space and surface inscription. A work by Lambrecht that includes pigments in acrylic emulsion, fabric, and copper on canvas subtly recalls the materiality and surface of Sister’s work—but the affective difference is what thrills most in this close encounter between the artists.

It is stimulating to see the two artists’ formal concerns cross over and echo one another in a productive transference. This dialogue is unusually specific for a two-person exhibition. We find many extraordinary correspondences: in materials, shapes, colors, and surface. Both artists interpolate the viewer, using irregularly shaped supports and, on one occasion, a gap between parts of the same work, together with a variety of materials and approaches to paint facture. All this makes for a visceral experience of painting, here conceived as a physical, materially embodied thing. The exhibition shows us this obdurate materiality even in the way both artists use paper: in images laid out on that thin, flat sheet—little more than a white surface—their shared responsiveness to the skin of the world is laid bare in color, mark, line, stain, glaze, and the buckle of the paper itself. Nothing is superfluous, everything matters.