Raphy Sarkissian
Raphy Sarkissian is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.
At 447 Space, Hughie O'Donoghue's paintings have arrived like cargo—heavy, freighted, not entirely welcome until they are.
Geometric abstraction today carries a layered visual memory. In Fits and Starts, Robert Storr works squarely within this terrain. Rather than offering a singular resolution, the exhibition is structured as a confrontation between the clarity of a geometric vocabulary and the materiality of paint.
In I Crave to Be All, Mai Blanco’s thought-provoking first solo exhibition in New York, the self-portrait embodies maternity as a lived experience. Here buildups of unconstrained brushwork culminate in buoyantly stylized and theatrical bodies, often positioned within semi-representational landscape settings.
In 1983 the English art critic John Russell, commenting on the newly-executed series of paintings by Sean Scully that are now on view at Lisson Gallery, remarked, “Whoever said that abstract painting was finished?”
When viewed from the street through the storefront glass of the gallery, the peaceful and harmonious landscapes of Isca Greenfield-Sanders may momentarily register as peculiar revivals of a bygone era or strange adaptations of photorealist painting. In Seven Trees (2024), credible perspectival illusionism prevails, revealing a depiction of scenery where light and animated branches convey the lure of the natural world. Wildflowers and Distant Lake (2024), mounted adjacent to Seven Trees, imparts the thrilling vastness and limitlessness of nature.
These most recent paintings of Liliane Tomasko present abstraction as a conduit for self-reflexivity. Upon color-drenched surfaces, raw traces of paint and concealed brushwork give rise to visual spaces wherein maelstroms of undulating bands and illuminated forms incite yet halt recognizable imagery. Painted wet-into-wet, free-floating marks give way to veiled and unstructured masses poised in space. Translucence and opacity meld into one another.
Too elegant, too tactical, too perfect: such were the characteristics of Anish Kapoor’s hyperreflective sculptures of the unforgettable and exuberant exhibition held at Lisson Gallery in New York some four years ago. With immaculately polished surfaces, those optical devices, whether immense or human in scale, appeared as matchless catalysts for arresting phenomenological inquiries into the parameters of vision and the paradoxes of visual representation.
Tranquility and reflective expansiveness pervade the walls of Peter Blum Gallery, where the diaphanous colors of John Zurier frequently haze the distinctions between the concrete and ineffable, between opacity and luminosity, between tangible matter and color.
September 2023ArtSeen
To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting
To Bend the Ear of the Outer World, an engaging exhibition astutely curated by Gary Garrels, brings together abstract works by forty-one artists in Gagosian’s two Mayfair galleries.
The enigmatic paintings of Arthur Cohen, mounted elegantly on the walls of the Scully Tomasko Foundation, exude both linearity and painterliness. In this exhibition, titled Ripped Terre Verte, lyrical abstractions blur the boundaries between the finished and unfinished, between unity and disunity of forms, recalling the tenets of the outstanding exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, held at the Met Breuer in 2016.
Intentional and accidental marks of the artist’s hand, purposeful and irresolute expressions of gesture, vigorous and reticent swaths of paint: these are the oppositions that govern the gestural idiom of Richard Hearns, a prolific painter of abstracted landscapes.
Severe yet expressive, hermetic yet lucid, circumspect yet luxuriant, the geometric abstractions painted by Robert C. Morgan are absorbing explorations of form.
A leading champion of contemporary artmaking, Sean Scully has come to project his image of an artist as a formalist conundrum, as intimated by the above metaphor that exudes a sense of pathos.
In Hovnanian’s exhibition the definitions of medium and message, artist and spectator, addresser and addressee, sacred and secular, along with the aesthetic and the real, have been rendered interdependent.
Here the boundaries of form and content dissipate, as medium and message are rendered interchangeable, undermining the closure of meaning and anticipating those interpretations that emerge from the perception and intuition of the observing subject.
One of the most intriguing exhibitions of recent years is Liliane Tomasko: Evening Wind at the Edward Hopper House. Scattered somewhat randomly upon the walls of Hopper’s living room and dining room in Nyack, the abstract painterly marks on surfaces of paper, notwithstanding their aggregation of luscious streaks and seductive palettes of subdued and brilliant hues, register as self-contained entities. Yet the seeming abstractions of Tomasko, framed within her overall body of work and the context of Hopper’s self-absorbed human figures, translate as conduits to the perceptual states of the human subject, as cryptographs of the subconscious, as passages toward the unconscious. These works compel us to reconsider the referent of the term “abstraction.”
