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.

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

You Had To Be There?

Full installation view, "Return to Problem," 2015
Image courtesy Reena Spaulings Gallery, New York

Exhibition review

ED LEHAN, “Return to Problem”
REENA SPAULINGS GALLERY
May 17 - June 14, 2015
New York

Ed Lehan’s “Return to Problem” exhibition at Reena Spaulings has ended, which makes this writing timely. For most of the show’s run, words were required to access its primary focus: opening night. 

Lehan created an installation: a dropped acoustic-tile ceiling over most of the exhibition space, and his carefully scrawled word “experiencer” on one wall. During the opening, he served mojitos from industrial buckets on the gallery’s already raised wooden floor. After opening night, visitors encountered just the leftover, off-Minimalist stage set. The air was lightly scented by undrunk mojitos, prompting the question: what happened at the reception?

Mostly the usual: talking and drinking. The show’s economic critique – no framed works to buy! – was conventional; the Relational Aesthetics dynamic was familiar. But Lehan’s mojito fest closely resembled Rikrit Tiravanija’s Thai feasts. It also recreated Lehan’s installation of the same show in London,* where he lives, and recalled “The Opening” exhibitions by Merlin Carpenter, Lehan’s colleague and friend from art school, one of them even at Reena Spaulings (see this excellent review of Lehan’s show). Was this really just another (conceptual) art reception?

What was this experience about? What is an experiencer’s role? What kind of fun was this party? Asking these questions must have been part of the evening. Let’s explore some answers through unexpected precedents. 

The low-ceilinged space suggested Floor 7½ in the Spike Jonze / Charlie Kaufman film, Being John Malkovich (1999). A chute from this floor leads into Malkovich’s mind, where many visitors share one character’s refreshed feeling: “I knew who I was...everything made sense.” Soon visitors get ejected alongside the New Jersey Turnpike. The Reena Spaulings stage set similarly proposed an alternative reality. Lehan wanted his word “experiencer” – plus the alcohol of opening night? – to nudge visitors beyond our tired Marxist roles of producers/consumers of culture, toward a “crisis” (“What are we doing here?”) and heightened awareness (the same question, in another key). Then we got ejected alongside Canal Street.

But experience is not always coherent, or uplifting. In Remainder (2007**), the hit novel by Lehan’s compatriot, Tom McCarthy, a rich, amnesiac everyman tries to restage situations where living had felt "fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired...I wanted to...feel real.” The plot turns exquisitely, intensely chilling as the man increasingly controls his reenactments and loses control. Lehan’s repetitions could likewise be traps as easily as springboards. The dropped ceiling evoked decades of generic institutional/office spaces (and a Richard Serra installation), but it didn’t necessarily help visitors see Lehan’s resistance to artistic uniqueness. His clue, “experiencer,” supposedly named his new role, but it could have been his command to us. I love multivalence, yet I wanted a more revelatory chute into Lehan’s mind.***

The exhibition deepened when I talked with the gallery’s representative. Visitors at the opening probably gained from their fun conversations, too. Lehan’s scrawled word invited us continually to “Return to [that] Problem”: what’s going on? Such dialogue is an excellent model for viewers engaging with art.

-- Karen Schiff

Buckets of moldering mojitos, and wall with Ed Lehan's handwritten "experiencer," 2015
Image courtesy Reena Spaulings Gallery, New York

* Lehan claims that the London exhibition was markedly different, perhaps owing to the characteristics of the space and the sociopolitics of drinking mojitos in Hackney. The New York gallery features peeling paint, red Chinese writing in the far windows, a windowed door high in a wall. In East London, mojitos are the yuppie drink which signals a decline in that neighborhood’s bohemian art culture. Beyond these distinctions, local cultural assumptions about the genre of the gallery exhibition itself most likely made Lehan’s work read differently in the two locations.

** McCarthy wrote Remainder in 2001. After enduring publishers' rejections, it was first printed by small presses in France (2005) and England (2006). It sold well in museum gift shops, then gained wide popularity and critical acclaim following the Vintage edition in the U.S. (2007).

*** Did “experiencer” indicate Lehan’s optimistic belief in a non-capitalistic reality? Was he cynically infusing the notion of experience with a fiction of escape? (How) is his decision to hold an exhibition, where the lowered partial ceiling imprisons visitors as subtly as any ideology, itself a complex gesture of hope? Do Lehan’s anti-narrative, anti-aesthetic repetitions (merely) fill McCarthy’s (and Simon Critchley’s) prescriptions for art, in section 14 of their “Declaration on Digital Capitalism” (Artforum, 2014)? Perhaps Lehan’s “crisis” is exactly about wrestling with these questions.

Muscular Atmospheres

Rebecca Salter, Untitled AG14, 2014
Mixed media on muslin on linen, 18 x 20 inches
Image courtesy Howard Scott Gallery, New York

Exhibition review

REBECCA SALTER, “First Light”

HOWARD SCOTT GALLERY
April 13 - May 23, 2015
New York

JOHN ZURIER, “West of the Future”
PETER BLUM GALLERY
February 13 - April 18, 2015
New York

Soon after entering “First Light,” Rebecca Salter’s new exhibition at Howard Scott Gallery, I started questioning my standards for abstraction. Salter’s grey, atmospheric canvases have such a consistent vagueness that I wondered: did their consistency make them strong? Or did their vagueness make them weak?

My real questions lurked deeper: why do I value “strength” itself, and what is that? Clearly I wanted Salter’s paintings to avoid the pitfalls of “zombie formalism,” and to be as tight and strong as the writing we aim for on Wallscrawler. But when is abstraction visually “muscular”? How could I assess this quality in artworks that look...soft?

In this exhibition, variously sized rectangular paintings suddenly seem to dissolve into deep chasms. Diverse greys and indigos accumulate into sometimes gloomy fogs. (Salter lives in London.) Spatial ambiguities emerge from scrims of painted gauze glued over the canvases, and because of shadowy spots that punctuate the lighter grey atmospheres. Up close, some spots have hairy edges, like the stray threads that cling to some rough contours of the applied muslin.

Roughness also appears in idiosyncratic details such as an off-center water stain in Untitled AG14. It permeates the off-kilter grids that structure the paintings’ ethereality. Salter creates geometric fields by folding her materials, overlapping wide lines of thin pigment, and (as in Untitled AG25) extracting threads from the fabric at irregular intervals. 

These techniques aerate the dense markmaking from Salter’s earlier work at Howard Scott and in a two-venue retrospective in New Haven. Throughout, her layered glazing of materials reveals her years of ceramics training in Japan, and her subtle gradations of dark tones echo her experience as a printmaker. If fields and grids aren’t your taste, you might see the work as esoteric tie dye. With time, the paintings gather steam -- build muscle.

This phenomenon reminded me of visiting John Zurier’s recent exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery, “West of the Future.” At first the show looked like vacant neo-expressionism, but soon a sensibility surfaced. A bright atmosphere filled the room. It turns out that Zurier had been moved to represent the “soft” summer light of Iceland’s northern Skagafjörður region...just as the work in Salter’s First Light was inspired by the return of daylight at springtime in the Lofoten Islands, in northern Norway. Knowing these frameworks helps to identify these paintings’ underlying pulses, and to name the drives that keep them from being merely formal explorations of material effects. 

Inner compulsion distinguishes “muscular abstraction” from a “zombie” mimicry. Purpose cannot simply be declared in a press release; it must be palpable in the artwork. For artist and architect Maya Lin, “a strong, clear vision” emerges from a white-hot impulse. Expanding on that insight obscures it; paring down again allows it to reveal its elemental power.

A strong motive does not require articulable content or political injustice; it can manifest in a feeling or a mood. Salter abstracts a shimmer from murkiness. First Light beckons like a quiet buoy in Chelsea.

-- Karen Schiff

Rebecca Salter, Untitled AG25, 2014
Mixed media on muslin on linen, 43 x 59 inches
Image courtesy Howard Scott Gallery, New York

Exhibition Review: TRUDY BENSON "Shapes Of Things" LISA COOLEY

Trudy Benson, Re: Composition, 2014

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 77 x 80 inches

Image courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York.

Exhibition review

TRUDY BENSON: “Shapes of Things”

LISA COOLEY

April 4 - May 3, 2015

New York

Trudy Benson’s “Shapes of Things” promises to be one of this year’s ten best shows of new paintings.  The exhibition of nine works on canvas, six medium-to-large (the largest is 76 by 108 inches) and three small, at Lisa Cooley gallery, shows Benson moving in a new direction with profundity and skill.

Benson’s earlier canvases featured an accumulation of wide, obstructive planes, often with figural geometric objects anchoring the centers. These works dealt in super-saturated color, borrowing garish 1980s graphic motifs, specifically early MacPaint software effects.

The new paintings are more airy, open, and provocatively incomplete. Painted elements build up into layers of screens. The initial impression is of black and white paintings with one color added. Upon further inspection other colors may appear in scattered pockets.

Because of the openness of Benson’s intersecting systems, the buff color of the raw canvas becomes an important part of the palette. As one title reveals, the works are “Tan Grams”, a reference both to the color and to the tangram, a Chinese puzzle whose flat, moveable geometric pieces are evoked by Benson’s forms. Beyond the black, white, and tan, Benson’s colors are mostly intense: the unnatural green in “Thoth” could come from an overeager environmental group’s logo. The use of primary colors and graphic motifs give “Re: Composition” a strong affinity with Mondrian or Miró.

The airbrushed doodles of the initial, background layer of the paintings, in black or sienna, are another new element. These spindly jottings, sometimes looking like single-cell organisms or chain mail, are blurred at their edges, almost bleeding into the canvas. While reminiscent of Michael Williams’ graphomanic airbrushing, Benson’s underlayer marks are urgent and insistent, as though they have some news to impart. The airbrushed passages feel like the riskiest part of the works because they are so nakedly present. 

Over these, with plenty of space peeking through, are larger stenciled shapes, parts of which are masked off and rolled over. Linear slabs of paint are laid on so thickly that furry peaks stand up in them like frosting. Over the rolled passages, piped lines are extruded directly from the paint tube, into drawings that form frameworks or diagrammatic figures. In “Thoth” the lines create a cartoon beast who may be the Egyptian god of writing, a man with the head of an ibis.

Benson’s complex imagery feels sincere, as if there is a real need for these paintings to exist. The new work may demonstrate a greater sense of art historical consciousness, yet Benson’s paintings refuse to take themselves too seriously. In “Banana Phone,” a flat, white shape is banana-like, and airbrushed coils could be the phone cord. “New Shapes”, with its widely looping black and white paint, salmon slabs that look like pool noodles, and a two-tone setting sun, humorously recalls the graphics of the popular 1980s television show, “Miami Vice.”

New Yorkers are lucky to have Trudy Benson working and showing in our midst.

--Jeff Frederick

Trudy Benson, New Shapes, 2015

acrylic, enamel, and oil on canvas, 80 x 77 inches

Image courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York