Drawn Habitats

Linda Matalon, Untitled [diptych], 2019, graphite and wax on paper, 50 x 76 inches

Exhibition Review

Linda Matalon

Emmanuel Barbault

325 Broome Street

November 5 - December 20, 2019

Linda Matalon’s thoughtfully installed exhibition of careful yet strong graphite and wax drawings is called “Canto,” ostensibly as an homage to the poetry and sensibility of Dante.  Certainly, the works have enough suffused brightness to merit the epigraph from The Divine Comedy in the gallery catalogue:  “When the dawn opened, and the night was not.”  But “canto” also translates to “I sing,” and the drawings do come across as arias with sensitively rendered shapes emerging, off-center, from densely layered fields of marks and diverse visual textures. 

The overall effect of the erasures, oily saturations, small rips and abrasions, smudges, and shadowy underlayers is of a thoroughly lived-in world.  The shapes that populate this world — many of them proto-circular, though no circle is closed or even close to round — appear hopeful in an effort to find their form, yet register a slight sadness in their inevitable incompletion.  Such is life.  Life also emerges from the drawings — which range from a small, older sample to mostly medium-to-large works — when they are examined over time.  Lines that are in dialogue with the primary shapes can be seen lurking beneath the picture plane, behind more defined forms. 

Linda Matalon, Untitled [diptych], 2018, graphite and wax on paper, 30 x 44¾ inches

The cumulative experience of the drawings takes hold after sitting on the bench in the center of the gallery, which Matalon designed and produced for the space.  The wide, thick, buffed wood — and the raw wood support underneath — complement the drawings, so that the furniture becomes part of the overall installation and architecture.  A visible seam in the milled surface even echoes the compositional structure of some of the drawings (including one duet of large, erased photographs), which consist of adjoining sheets of paper.  

Installation view, Linda Matalon, Canto, 2019

These drawings are daring without having bravado.  Their smudges and waxiness have much in common with large drawings by Roni Horn and older paintings by Brice Marden (especially his unfinished bottom sections).  Their palette, layered density, and reference to an Italian classic suggest the work of Cy Twombly.  Florence Derieux's catalogue essay suggests a connection to Eva Hesse, which fits the sense of fragility in translucent materials.  Still, Matalon’s formal language expands on her own unique vocabulary.  After spending time in this beautifully considered exhibition, everything else I looked at — not only the outside world, but other exhibitions — seemed garish.

— Karen Schiff

Linda Matalon, Untitled [diptych], 2019, erased photograph, 16 x 45 inches

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.