Oil And Water

Patrick Shoemaker, Hindrance, 2016
Oil on canvas, 46 x 44 inches
Image courtesy Anna Zorina Gallery, New York

Exhibition Review

PATRICK SHOEMAKER “Fire On Fire”

Anna Zorina Gallery

February 25 – April 2, 2016

Figures intertwine in Patrick Shoemaker’s paintings, yet it is unclear if any given interaction is a dance or a fight. In Hindrance, a couple tilts this way and that, swinging vertiginously against an ochre background. Are the two locked in a tango, or are we witnessing the final blow of a wrestling bout? The painting’s title suggests the second, but the image looks incongruously joyful. In other works in this exhibition, the contest is between a person (or multiple people) and an animal, such as in Beast Beating, where five figures dressed in glowing yellow, red, and blue, grapple with a bear-like animal against a maroon and pink background. Altogether “Fire On Fire,” the artist’s first-ever solo exhibition, featured fourteen small to medium-sized paintings ranging from 15x13 inches to 58x58 inches.

While the works are not exactly narrative, visual themes and archetypes recur, including the fire of the show’s title. Flower forms crop up throughout the paintings, perhaps more symbolic than real, since they always conform to the idea of a cartoon rose or a tulip shape. Water takes on the feeling of a freighted symbol: Bringing Water is a close-up of a person carrying what looks like a book, but could be a fire bucket. The figure in Soft Traipse certainly carries a bucket. Translucent layers in the paintings look like water as they interact. Many works contain “rays” like those in Charles Demuth’s My Egypt, where the picture is sliced into subtly different-colored wedges. In Pour, one of the larger works, such a layer turns objects a different color, from burnt sienna to pinkish beige.

Shoemaker’s surfaces are thickly painted in oil so that no texture of the canvas shows through. The compositions fit tightly together like jigsaw puzzles. Surfaces are glossy, but at the same time soft. Contours are blended with a dry brush to leave feathered, irregular edges, and colors glow through the shallow spaces between different layers of depth. Shoemaker’s figurative paintings recall Milton Avery’s: solid planar backgrounds, broad simple shapes, and figures with no faces. Like Avery, or Bob Thompson, he uses colors with lots of white added to them. Rather than being pretty, here the colors create a somber effect.

Sometimes the artist uses background patterns that gesture toward Matisse, as with the rough plant-like forms of Zig Zag. The lower part of Red Boot is taken up by a shape that echoes one of the modernist master’s cut-outs: palm or seaweed, divided into sections of pink, green, and blue. The unmodulated flatness and anonymity of Shoemaker's shapes and figures, instead of making them generic, allow them to feel universal and timeless, even iconic. The paintings grab hold of you quietly and insistently, and their vibrations mesmerize. Shoemaker manages to evoke something ghostly, wistful, and genuinely moving.

--Jeff Frederick

Patrick Shoemaker, Beast Beating, 2015
Oil on canvas, 48 x 46 inches
Image courtesy Anna Zorina Gallery, New York

Patrick Shoemaker, Pour, 2016

Oil on canvas, 54 x 44 inches

Image courtesy Anna Zorina Gallery, New York

Lots With Little

Exhibition Review

JOSH SMITH “Sculpture”

LUHRING AUGUSTINE

September 11 – October 31, 2015

New York

Doing something unexpected has become expected of Josh Smith since he first made the infuriatingly egotistical yet ingenious move of painting his own name.* By repeatedly finding new ways to challenge the public, he has built up a contemporary legend rather than an easily pinned down body of work.

Smith’s current exhibition at Luhring Augustine Chelsea features painted works on cradled plywood rectangles, whose mainly white surfaces are marked by skittery lines of graphite. Most of them have splotches of color from ink, watercolor, paint pen, or grease pencil. Earlier marks have been painted over in white (or erased), and the surfaces are artfully scuffed and smudged, which adds to their richness. Several of the smaller works show a delicate pattern of vertical cracks all over, as if they had been left out in a barn for some time.

The initial impression is that these redo Cy Twombly’s drawings, especially those of the 2000s, like the spiky Sesostris series. What color there is matches Twombly’s palette: reds and violets, a touch of green or turquoise. But Smith’s pieces also have the wide-open white fields and sparse, simple delineation of Miró’s mid-1960s paintings, and Smith’s vertical or angled linear marks sometimes resemble birds or insects.

The artist doesn’t give you much. There is an almost perverse reserve in his laying down only a few, skinny, countable marks on each surface. Yet somehow, maddeningly, the pieces work. Though they remain ciphers, they manage to create space and to suggest movement using limited means. Their complex textures are engaging. The scale is satisfying.

The twenty-two works in the exhibition (ranging from 32 x 26 inches to 63 x 51 inches) are a perfect fit for the gallery space, distributed according to size in the various rooms. Not easily distinguishable at first glance, the works are more compelling together than any one would be alone, as was also the case with the monochromes Smith showed as part of his double New York exhibition in 2013. Here you sense that the artist may have created many more of these works than are on view. 

The first paintings I saw by Josh Smith were on plywood panels, 5 x 4 feet, hung on the wall with washers and screws at the New Museum in 2009. Smith later made works with the same dimensions but on canvas, perhaps having been encouraged by his gallery to create what collectors understand as “paintings,” namely works on canvas with stretchers, which can be sold for more money. In the current exhibition, each of the works, on plywood mounted on foam, is framed in a white shadowbox, and the checklist gives a thickness for each (2-1/2 inches) in addition to its height and width. Hence the title of the current exhibition, “Sculpture.” One can imagine Smith saying, as he showed his new batch of panel paintings to the gallery director: “This is what I have been working on lately. So call them sculptures.”  

--Jeff Frederick

* The “name paintings” build abstractions around the absurdly obvious structure of the letters of the artist’s own name. Their unconstrained self-aggrandizement taps into something primal, both in the making and in the viewer's reaction. They are graffiti as a protest of the baldest and most desperate kind against death.

Images: all works Untitled, © 2014, 2015 Josh Smith; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.