Hot Take

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-004, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and Lowell Ryan Projects.

Exhibition Review

Hot Damn!

Will Bentsen

Lowell Ryan Projects

November 7 – December 19, 2020

 

It ought to be illegal to review a painting exhibition remotely. With abstract painting especially, scale, texture, and surface are important parts of the content of the work. But given the global pandemic, and despite a distance of 3000 miles, that is exactly what I will attempt to do. Because of the limited number of works in Hot Damn! and the availability of generous documentation—large individual images of the works plus installation shots—it seems possible, in this case, to say something meaningful about the exhibition.

 

Will Bentsen’s show at Lowell Ryan projects in Los Angeles consists of nine paintings, all acrylic on canvas, all untitled except by numbers. All are body-sized at 72 x 60 inches. The works generally have a maximum of four colors, in distinct areas rendered as contiguous fields or flurries of strokes. The reduced palette of the paintings gives them a raw, primal feeling, as captured by the show’s blunt, cheeky title.

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-005, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

With the works installed as an ensemble, the colors cover most of the spectrum. There is a recurrence of green, gold, orange, pink, and ultramarine blue. Few darker colors appear, except in WB-004 and WB-008 which are partly structured by the use of brown. Bentsen’s chunky strokes, with limited variation in size, range from a long dash to thick loops that recall the net-like structures of Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series. Joan Mitchell’s paintings of the 1980’s, and Howard Hodgkin's mature style may also be influences on Bentsen’s loaded arching strokes. The artist occasionally departs from this technique: tall thin loops of green appear at the right side of WB-002, and WB-004 has concentric squares of pale orange that undergird the composition. 

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-006, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-002, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

 

Bentsen sometimes pours acrylic paint, producing an effect that evokes Helen Frankenthaler’s work. Lower layers are often stained into the canvas, with another color pushed up against the poured area or laid on top of it. Large shapes move toward the edge of the rectangle, with upper layers loosely woven and white strokes sometimes applied on top. Blank canvas is persistently visible at the edges or through semi-transparent layers of paint. Untidy organic shapes strain against the neat rectilinearity of the paintings’ supports. 

 

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-009, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

There is an undeniably performative aspect to Bentsen’s works, and the gesture so much in evidence is one of reaching or yearning. These abstract compositions do not feel like landscapes; rather there is a persistent suggestion of animals, or animal-shaped parts. The flat fields of color are like skins laid out. Brush strokes may be bones or antlers. Yet ultimately, a lightness and slapdash quality render the works hopeful and exhilarating. Just as Bentsen’s expressive use of color owes a debt to the Fauves, he himself paints like an exuberant, wild beast. 

 

--Jeff Frederick 

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-008, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

Will Bentsen, Untitled No. 1 (8-14-20) WB-003, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

Summer Brooms

Cat Balco, Large Red Beach, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. All images courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art/© Cat Balco, 2019.

Exhibition Review

Cat Balco
Rick Wester Fine Art
526 West 26th Street, Suite 417
November 7, 2019 – January  25, 2020

The works in Cat Balco’s current exhibition, “My Exploding Stars,” are an antidote to the horror of our current political situation: they present a meditative space that is buzzing with positive energy. They also show a significant shift from the artist’s earlier paintings of just this year, center-focused abstractions made up of handmade strokes in pastel-colored patterns which Balco called “Stars.”

Balco says she developed the recent compositions by zooming in on sections of her previous  paintings, yet the strokes are so enlarged that it is not easy to find a direct correspondence. Made using push brooms, in a move reminiscent of Ed Clark, the new paintings are built with foot-wide or larger slabs of color. They are almost landscapes, but can also be seen as purely indexical marks on canvas, a record of their own making.

Cat Balco, Wide Open Angles, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches.

An obvious influence is Franz Kline, who famously blew up his ink drawings with a projector to arrive at his signature black and white abstractions. Here, Balco has figured out how to make a Kline work in saturated color. Her paintings also have an affinity with Frankenthaler’s vivid late-1960’s compositions, and with de Kooning’s Parkway Series, or his Door To The River.

Cat Balco, Blue Diamond, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

The exhibition consists of twelve medium to large paintings, all square, ranging from 40”x40” to 72”x72”. These ambitious body-sized works grab your eye and then don’t let go. And the bigger they are, the better. Diagonal strokes suggest a vortex pushing back into space, and many of the top layered strokes are at put on at angles to the square. (Three of the paintings have “triangle” in the title.) Occasionally Balco uses color to create a drop shadow, a technique that appears often in the Star paintings. This has the effect of teasing open what remains a determinedly shallow depth.

Color in the paintings is summery, with super-saturated reds and yellows, pinks and oranges, cooled by medium and light blues. Titles like Large Red Beach, Summer Rectangles and Red Blue Sail conjure a seaside mood, and triangles of blue often evoke water. The brushstrokes, or broomstrokes, are intensely visible, and strokes with splatters at the edges can be quite moving. Transparency is also effectively used. These paintings are performed, expressed, but not contrived.

Cat Balco, Red, Blue Yellow Triangles, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

Balco has said, as quoted in the gallery press release, that she tries to make the works in nine or fewer strokes, and one wonders if there is some relation to “Seven Plus or Minus Two,” the number of items we can keep in short term memory at one time (the reason for seven digits in phone numbers). Maybe nine strokes is the largest number of elements we can simultaneously keep in mind while looking at a painting. There is a great deal of hope in Balco’s paintings, communicated in the intensity of the colors and the power of the strokes. I walked through the gallery drunk with a kind of joy.

--Jeff Frederick

Cat Balco, Red Blue Sail 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

External Reflections

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 641), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

Exhibition review

Patrick Berran
Chapter NY
249 East Houston Street
September 10 – October 22, 2017

Patrick Berran’s latest paintings at Chapter NY have the electricity of a classic Jackson Pollock: what at first appears to be a complicated visual explosion is in fact a carefully regulated site for contemplation. But instead of being gestural, Berran’s paintings are the product of a mechanical process that seems to remove the hand of the artist.

The artist’s sketchbook drawings, which may be non-representational or representationally inspired, are enlarged on a photocopier to the point of breaking up into irregular spots, like a television static pattern or animal-print fabric. Berran then uses a solvent to transfer these patterned fields onto canvas, interlacing them with sharply defined or soft-edged fields of color. Layers are piled up and sandwiched to create semi-permeable screens. Berran’s paintings are full of skittery, off-register marks reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953). Warm peachy pinks and hot oranges and reds glow from beneath the surface like blood under the skin.

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 645), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 643), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

The exhibition includes six solidly medium-sized paintings and one small canvas; all are Untitled, 2017, and all are acrylic and toner on panel. Each is satisfyingly layered with areas of color and pattern overlapping in bar-like rectangles. Long, thin forms at the sides or running through the middle echo the edges of the canvas and the stretchers that support it. Streaked or cloudy atmospheric passages, as well as frequently asymmetrical compositions, create tension between the hand-made and the mechanical. Subtle shifts in color appear as you get closer, with gradients spanning multiple hues. While in Berran’s previous work the forms were often laid on top of a white background, here the figure/ground relation is more ambiguous. Dark or saturated colors may serve as ground, like the black edges in Untitled (PB 643) or the reds and yellows of Untitled (PB 645). Yet all the paintings have white showing through, reasserting the originary canvas. The complexity and generosity of the compositions has a Turneresque sublimity, but the consistently reasserted rectilinear framework reassures us that things won’t get out of control. In contrast to the calm clarity of Diebenkorn’s rectangle-based Ocean Park series, which is equally abstract and contemplative, Berran's work is infused with a punk rock style informed by surfer and skateboard culture. The affect is similar to the heavily postered, torn walls of Jacques Villeglé. Berran’s contrasting hot and cold colors (icy blue reappears), along with his liberal use of black, give the paintings a contemporary, digital severity.

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 646), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

In one work, Untitled (PB 646), an insistent smaller frame in the middle of the image suggests a mirror. But instead of seeing ourselves or the world reflected in it, we see a patterned surface of warm gray and black that closes off vision, and redirects our view outward to the margins of the canvas. Berran’s paintings are viewfinders on an internal world, screens on which raw visual experience is distilled and transformed into rich, layered notations. They invite us to look inward as we are looking out, and to recognize the buzzing complexity within.

--Jeff Frederick

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