Patron Magazine
New York Arts Magazine
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recently from the Dallas Morning News:
Shilpa Gupta and Peter Halley
for, in your tongue, i cannot fit
& Peter Halley
Cell Grids
How does art speak? Does it mumble incomprehensibly or articulate with elocutionary flair? Do we actually “understand” art? Or is that the wrong question to ask? Art objects impact our minds and bodies as conversations with different degrees of openness, mystery, and narrative suggestion. What is clear is that artists are drawn to address the world in dramatically unique and aesthetically specific manners; each method adopted by an artist encompasses certain possibilities and elides others. This flexibility of purpose is on full display in the several shows currently on view at the Dallas Contemporary. I was struck in particular by the structural and thematic differences presented by the exhibitions of Peter Halley and Shilpa Gupta.
Peter Halley offers his usual vibrant geometries of painted rectilinear shapes. His exuberant exhibition focuses upon Cell Grids—think the old computer game Tetris as large-scale paintings. Halley is a modernist brick layer building various canvas shapes tethered together to create a larger rectangle of multi-colored arrangements. There is nod to Piet Mondrian and his carefully tuned color blocking. What’s curious about these nearly interchangeable works of art is how paradoxically loud and quiet they are. The bright colors almost yell at us, but the sameness of the paintings and their solidness also make them feel mute, like immovable boulders. Halley pays close, almost severe attention to the intensity of his colors placed in relation to a textured surface that feels like the shell of a craggy moon. Oddly enough, each segment of monochrome color is pock-marked in a uniform manner. The variety and tone of the colors, such as a toxic lime green or a deep bluish black, reveal or hide the textured skin when seen from a distance. Once viewed up close, however, the entirety of the bobbled surface becomes equally apparent. Halley expands upon the idea of a stacked grid by using separate wall cubes that sit in the middle of the large room. Hanging his paintings on both the outer walls and on the cubes in the center of the gallery makes the masses within his canvases mirror the inner architecture of the exhibition space. Almost as an aside, Halley obliquely notes how our lives are universally defined by living within industrially constructed spaces.
Shockingly different from Peter Halley’s technicolor paintings is the emotionally affecting installation by Shilpa Gupta. Entering through heavy curtains into a mostly dark room one is confronted by a series of 100 ceiling hung microphones and 100 floor-standing spikes. Each spike is pierced with the poetry of a writer incarcerated by their own government. Also filling the space are myriad voices reciting the poems and washing our senses with the forsaken, angry, and righteous words of those who paid a strict price for their art. Gupta creates a complicated and stirring experience akin to being immersed inside a dramatic incantatory performance. The darkness of the room almost implores us to picture ourselves in the role of a prisoner, as if we too are trapped within a dank unforgiving cell. The poems emanating from alternating hung microphones, are elegiac and haunting—repeating declarations overlap as actors perform the words like a flowing river across time and continents. The evocative phrases are read, sung, whispered, and insistently intoned in a whole host of languages and with a wide range of cadences. It’s a mesmerizing and astonishing experience to walk within the installation and hear disembodied voices call to us, pleading for their humanity. I was deeply moved as I tried to imaginatively reconcile the reverberating chorus with the unique lives of the individuals, suppressed, and often tortured into silence. Gupta’s poignant and heartfelt means of returning the jailed poets their lost voices comments upon the influence of language and the indomitable will of each individual, even when everything was taken from them by the Kafkaesque machinations of institutional power.
Hadraawi who was detained in 1973 echoes:
And when even laughter becomes a crime
our country has unfinished business
Rabi’a Balkhi, detained in the 10th century calls:
If you want love until the end
you must
eat poison but call it honey
But, perhaps Gopal Prasad Rimal, detained in 1940 says it most clearly:
Firm like the Himalayas, we never bowed down.
recently from Glasstire:
One Work, Short Take
Nairy Baghramian: 2022 Nasher Prize Laureate
Nasher Sculpture Center
Nairy Baghramian was recently awarded the prestigious 2022 Nasher Prize. As part of the award Baghramian offers a small exhibition of her sculptures gathered into an installation. Later this fall Baghramian is scheduled for a full-blown exhibition that this current show presages. The mixture of objects now on display, entitled Misfits, 2021-2022, are pill-like shapes loosely inscribed with calligraphic paint sitting amongst intermittingly colored wooden poles and a family of other shapes formed from walnut wood. The placement of the various objects feels carefree with an underlying precision and rectitude found in each form. What’s clear is that the artist is deeply attuned to the nuance of profiles, surfaces, and material transitions, as any good sculptor should be. Beyond this, a nascent narrative undergirds the arranged objects. Curating a constellation of relationships within and between her artworks Baghramian deftly creates a simultaneously casual and controlled series of connotations, as if we’ve stumbled upon a uniquely aesthetic junk yard or a formally sensitive kindergarten playground. It’s difficult to speak only about one object, but for me the most evocative of Baghramian’s Misfits is the largest of all the sculptures.
In this work Baghramian is almost footnoting other forms, such as hand-crafted furniture, puzzle games for children, and most strongly the sinuous shapes of Henry Moore’s reclining figures. By mixing these associations the artist complexifies our looking and feeling about the object. Further deepening the backstory is the walnut wood that is used as the predominate material of this particular Misfit. The elegantly striated walnut is a remnant used by her artist friend Danh Vo, who obtained the wood from a cleared orchard owned by the son of Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara was well known for his sharp stance on the Vietnam war. The history of this material has a particular spark when used by Danh Vo, but merely becomes the received backstory that any object might have when used by Baghramian. By purposefully adopting a type of co-making with Vo, Baghramian is literally at play with another artist. It’s of no small import that the sculpture feels like the prow of a small ship or a polished jungle gym to be climbed by young feet and searching hands. In Baghramian’s usage the larger main form is raised on wooden stilts and occasionally penetrated by wooden or marble dowels. It’s a sculpture as bug, built of different parts implying a sly sense of movement. In fact, all the works in this room of materials feel like they could be infinitely rearranged or rolled into a different position.
As “misfits” these sculptural objects harbor eccentricities; what’s curious is that each has an offbeat peculiarity such that the sculptures feel at home with themselves, and also happy together. Baghramian’s skill in the making and her thoughtful orchestration imparts a sense of determination to the objects, even as they hold fast to quirks, associations, and buried histories—much like the complicated lives of human beings.
recently from ArtForum:
Mathew Cerletty
THE POWER STATION
Mathew Cerletty’s airless, photorealistic paintings of mundane consumer goods exude the seemingly anonymous nature of all possessions. Yet the things depicted in this exhibition—including a looped leather belt, a yellow rubber duckie, a clothes-drying rack, and a furry stuffed animal—become talismans of incarnate presence through the artist’s ruthless attention to detail, his almost preternatural skill, and their unnervingly front-and-center journalistic presentation.
In Snow Shovel, 2019, Cerletty features the titular object standing upright on an icy bank. The tool’s rocket-red handle grip and blade contrast vividly with a luminous, gradated sky of lavender and pale rose. The inert shovel feels anthropomorphized—likely due to the artist’s exacting, even loving, portrayal. Oddly, the image calls to mind a classic of regionalist art: Grant Wood’s American Gothic, 1930. The air of sobriety and straightforwardness that permeates Wood’s famous portrait of a farm couple (and their iconic pitchfork) lines up remarkably well with Cerletty’s painting of a shovel. While both objects are severe and steadfastly vertical in pictorial orientation, they also illustrate a spectrum of labor across the twentieth century: from hard agricultural graft with sharp metal tools to suburban tasks performed with an implement built from cheap wood and light plastic.
One also senses that Cerletty has subtly recontextualized his fastidious interpretations of dull, store-bought items for the Covid-19 era, particularly in the way one interfaces with these things during the anxious isolation of quarantine. Take Ottoman, 2020, which suggests the dual capacity of objects to comfort and confine. The footstool—plush, oversize, and green—seems like the kind of appointment you’d find in a therapist’s office to gently rest your feet on as the doctor calmly takes in your every word. But the garish teal space the item sits in is oddly pharmaceutical—the color of an old hospital gown or a bitter pill. Cerletty, like late painter Robert Bechtle—whose deadpan pictures of nuclear families and cul-de-sacs radiate a subtle, unsettling magic—can transform the dumbest of objects and plainest of settings into moments of deep uncanniness. But Cerletty also highlights how our lives are inundated with base, commercial stuff—we’re bombarded by the advertising machine that insists our lives will be improved if we would just buy, buy, buy. Whether we’re minimalists or inveterate collectors, Cerletty’s paintings imply that we assert our value and define our sensibilities by what we choose to live with.
Yet above all else Cerletty is a rigorous observer who has a deep connection to representational painting and its illusionistic strangeness. Consider Manila Envelopes, 2020, in which a pair of the office items—one recto, one verso—appear delicately bathed in light. The clever compositional relationship between the two figures highlights the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of perception. The envelope in the foreground, with its back facing us, is reduced to a flat, floating rectangle; it reads as an almost nonobjective shape. It produces a drop shadow on the envelope hovering behind it, whose flap is open and whose metal closure is visible. The artist plays a visual game that makes us seesaw between realism and abstraction, space and nonspace. Like all the other works in the show, Manila Envelopes is deeply unsentimental, yet it possesses the gravitas and wonder of a trompe l’oeil letter-board painting from the seventeenth century.
The title of Cerletty’s exhibition, “Full Length Mirror,” indicates that the artist wants us to see ourselves reflected in these deceptively unassuming portraits of everyday objects. But he also asks us to scrutinize them closely in order to locate and appreciate the unique qualities inherent in each one.
recently from the Dallas Morning News:
Robyn O’neil
Over 50 apocalyptic and magisterial drawings by the artist Robyn O’Neil are on display at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Documenting 20 years of production, the artists’ first major museum show is brooding, with waggish interludes occasionally interjected. To say that O’Neil’s large drawings are impressive is an understatement; they are crafted with an almost perfect and unbending clarity. While O’Neil’s maniacal work ethic is often discussed (her drawings are made over the course of thousands of hours of labor) the heroically scaled graphite drawings are more than mere feats of monastic determination. They also prove psychologically charged images that exude a sense of dread and wonder. Because many of the drawings are mural sized, the viewer is enveloped by the cinematic enormity of the dramatic world depicted.
In poetically titled works such as “As darkness falls on this heartless land, my brother holds tight my feeble hand” O’Neil renders the world such that one can almost taste the briskness of the air and feel the chill upon one’s skin. Slowly drawing her images with the same brand of pencil, O’Neil builds her drawings moment to moment across the large expanse of her paper. Her process is akin to a fresco painter puzzling together an entire image, section by section over the space of a large wall. In later works she adds a shock of color, or collages smaller drawings on top of larger creations. In all cases, and at every stage of her career, she deliberately constructs a deep, almost luxurious patina to the surfaces of her drawings. Vast undulating oceans, or snowy vales set the stage, and by contrast emphasize the awkwardly comical renderings of tiny men in 1980’s sweat suits. These men are busy. Their activity in early works like “Everything that stands will be at odds with its neighbor, and everything that falls will perish without grace” feels relatively benign and slightly absurd. They hug and pal around. But in later drawings things quickly take a turn for the worse--humans are humans after all. In these darker works the little actors representing humanity begin to show their true and often violent motives. From this point forward in the chronology of her art, O’Neil’s work exists as an acerbic satire for human immorality and degradation.
The sweat-suited men traipse around their domain, filling their lives with unseemly and suspect activities. Despite the beautiful, delicate, and bravura quality of her drawings, O’Neil’s art ultimately feels anarchic and unnerving. The disposition of her work is not dissimilar to the social viciousness found in the short novel Lord of the Flies, or the nightmare paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Like Bosch, O’Neil favors portraying a large world with small incidents occurring throughout. Within her imagined landscapes, middle-aged men seem to pointlessly build fires, or fly in to rages as they run around the landscape enacting strange male rites or angrily bludgeoning each other to death. Occasionally small pockets of familial or brotherly civility are to be found, but mostly they behave badly.
In the colossal work entitled “Hell” O’Neil unleashes her id as she enacts cruelty upon the cruel. Note the men being expelled from a fiery volcano. Yet, a pathos is underneath all of her creatively torturous efforts. Despite the bleakness of the world depicted and a distrust of all things human, there is something Shakespearean about her art. O’Neil tackles the big subjects of violence, tenderness and death. Hers is an introverts’ art, at home and sympathetic with animals and the natural world, yet deeply skeptical and critical about human nature. In her reckoning humans negatively impact their environment, but the land, the sky, and the roiling ocean always have the proverbial last word, destroying the hubris of human ambition.
In work starting in 2013 O’Neil shifts gears and makes a series of colorful drawings that prove something of a respite from the portrayal of the ills of humanity. These smaller drawings of land and sky appear plaintive and distinctive. In colorful images like The Sky in Kerala, the stark world somehow suggests a slight glimmer of hope, if not in society, then in the grace of the land and in the unadorned inevitability of tempestuous weather.
recently from ArtForum:
Margarita Cabrera
Political art can be didactic to a fault. Margarita Cabrera’s exhibition “It Is Impossible to Cover the Sun with a Finger” overtly expresses the artist’s indignation about societal ills but avoids the pitfalls and limitations of art made solely as agitprop. In her expanding series of soft army-green sculptures of desert plants, “Space in Between,” 2010–, Cabrera collaborates with immigrants who have crossed the US-Mexico border. Her volunteers embroider their stories—encapsulated in family names, home countries, dreams for the future, and flags of Mexico and the United States—onto repurposed border patrol uniforms. The artist then fits the cloth over wire armatures in the shapes of Yucca, Agave, Nopalea, and other plants. Reading these individuals’ desires, woven with colorful thread into in a material symbol of the power of the United States, the viewer is compelled to reflect on the thoughts and motives of those driven to make the dangerous and uncertain journey. Cabrera humanizes an issue that is too easily depersonalized in our fractious political climate.
In What Lies Between Earth and Sky, 2019, Cabrera attached dozens of bright blue plastic buckets above wooden broom and mop handles mounted horizontally on the wall, forming one large rectangle. The impression is one of a panoramic horizon. This simple but visually arresting assemblage is at once a nod to the border’s desert landscape and a monument to the economies of immigrant labor. Cabrera’s thoughtful probing of the human impact of immigration is unmistakably partisan; her support of the community is clear in her own studio’s labor practices. Yet the resulting work seems to be aimed at persuasion more than protest—so that all viewers might feel the weight of these stories on their chests.