Ortuzar Projects
Positions
Matt Connors
June 21 – August 9, 2024
Show link: https://www.ortuzarprojects.com/exhibitions/matt-connors
Matt Connor’s show Positions at Ortuzar Projects has nine paintings and five drawings. I liked six of the paintings. Overall, the show is a victim of its ambitious scope. My favorite part was the wall with four medium-sized paintings: Dream Gossip, Dark Knock On, Macaw Shard with Void, and Huib. These four paintings together achieved an exciting feeling of coherence through difference. Dark Knock On was the best of the four—it’s the most visually and emotionally enigmatic. Dream Gossip, on the other hand, with its bright colors, mix of interlocking organic and circular forms, and black interwoven anchoring elements, was the most recognizably Matt Connors. It leverages motifs and compositional strategies he has successfully harnessed over his career. The three paintings to the left of Dream Gossip, in their own ways, subverted this Connors special. I couldn’t tell if this subversion was a showing off or a reveling in playful inconsistency. I think Connors wanted to explore the power of variation—and of zooming in and out (literally and conceptually) on his favored compositional decisions. The juxtapositions supplied an ambiguous tension, borne of measured variability, that could have worked well if it had permeated beyond these four paintings.
All the paintings and drawings were completed in less than six months, which maybe is a marker of productivity. Unfortunately, this show felt like a rushed look at everything Connors has created so far this year, without true regard for the show itself. It felt scattershot. Although, there is potential in building a show around the idea of an unselfconscious studio visit—if implemented more intentionally.
Two of Connors’s paintings—Inset Counter Poise and Post Counter Poise—featured a cropped visual passage set against a solid-colored background, cropped the way a Polaroid is cropped—i.e., centered left-to-right but closer to the top than the bottom. The smaller Post seemed to be a study for the larger Inset; curiously, they were hung on opposite walls. It was satisfying to compare and contrast them—Post has a desaturated cerulean background while Inset a temperature-neutral off-white. The imperfect smudges on the off-white background of Inset were welcome interruptions. Both deploy successive approximations of the same compellingly inscrutable composition—a composition that I automatically read as blue-and-white curtains obliquely bisecting a green-and-orange awning. Because Connors doesn’t cite Post as a study, it’s interesting that he therefore proposes both the washy and sketchy facture in Post and the wet-on-dry approach in Inset as valid endpoints. Moreover, Connor’s paintings often seem related to photochemical phenomena, so his photographic cropping generated a noticeable reverberation.
The two largest paintings—Erik’s (sic) Trip and The End Threatens to Obscure the Beginning—were especially out of place. I wanted to like them. Each painting strives to deliver an immediate statement via a commanding gestalt. But they suffer from conceptual underdevelopment, and their size compounds their missteps. Admittedly, the halo-like outlines in each emit an alluring shimmer thanks to Connors’s thoughtful order of operations. I couldn’t help but think artists like Math Bass have more rigorously extended the language of symbol-like abstraction honed by artists like Richard Smith. That’s not to say I wasn’t excited to see Connors push himself beyond his bread-and-butter terrain of painterly jigsaw arrangements whose edges seductively bleed without bleeding. Perhaps Connors wants to contribute to a crisper and more graphic conversation—I think these two paintings demonstrate he could, if he focused on it.
By far my least favorite painting was the unnecessarily framed Found Twice. The yellow dot amidst the purple was a snappy detail. Yet the painting felt like it was rendered using a dreary smoothing tool on autopilot, and the boring white frame threw Connors’s seriousness into question. The energetic, saturated hues fail to compensate for an otherwise staid effort. Speaking of frames, the five drawings were moderately interesting—reflecting the overstretched range of the paintings—but they were punctuated by glaringly shiny thin metal outlines. These annoying little frames added to a sense that this show was phoned in for an artist who died 50 years ago. Hardly! Matt Connors is only 51 years old and continues to make exciting paintings, as evidenced by the four that I described first. I’m not against framing, but these rote frames emphasized an entirely avoidable spray and pray attitude that needlessly risks integrity of vision for diversity of collectorship. I believe Connors is above these sorts of logistical blunders—blunders that blunted the show’s ostensible eros. Though I did have Ariana Grande’s positions stuck in my head when I left the gallery.
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Peter Blum Gallery
The Shape of Color
Marina Adams, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Marley Freeman, Joe Fyfe, Nathlie Provosty, Julia Rommel, Pamela Helena Wilson
May 29 – July 19, 2024
Show link: https://www.peterblumgallery.com/exhibitions/the-shape-of-color
The show’s title is a bit trite, though I’ve always liked Ben Shahn’s classic The Shape of Content. Color can arguably become content, and, in their own ways, at least five of these seven artists do grapple with some of color’s ineffable qualities. And it’s always interesting to think about the way in which our perceptions of color might be relative—how our individual subjective qualia are perhaps only linked by agreed-upon color names. Do colors shapeshift between us? They can certainly transmute within us if activated properly—I think about Albers’s Interaction of Color or 2015’s viral blue/black versus white/gold dress.
I can say with confidence that Adams, Freeman, and Rommel are talented colorists. Rommel’s painting Planet Janet served as the soul of the show. Look at those purples and greens! Meanwhile Freeman’s were the MVPs. Freeman’s small paintings eggs and Footprint spark an interesting conversation with Rommel’s small paintings 1992 and Cat Nap. Likewise, Adam’s two large paintings Every Color Tells a Story and Eye of the Tiger inconclusively debate Fyfe’s two large untitled paintings. Adams covers her entire surfaces with paint; Fyfe leaves most of his surfaces unpainted. Fyfe’s third, smallest painting was my favorite—it most succinctly revealed the nonchalant dynamism of his paint and found material pairings. Collocating one painter’s small paintings with another painter’s large paintings worked well, or at least preempted turf wars.
This was my first time encountering Bernadet’s and Wilson’s paintings. The breezy density of Bernadet’s paintings served as counterpoint to the knowing openness of Wilson’s paintings which slant-resonated with Fyfe’s unprimed tableaus.
Provosty and Rommel point toward buoyant impishness, Freeman toward wistful introspection, and Fyfe toward curious diffidence. I wish the show had fully committed to internal coherence, to a more singular affective vision. This show succeeded when it proved how evasive color can be, and how impressionable it is. Subtle inflections in facture, layering, and juxtaposition can wield color, suggesting inherent instabilities. At times these paintings tempt us to believe color can be pinned down.
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Below Grand
Window and back space galleries
Menopause Recalls Puberty (M.R.P.)
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
July 13 – August 25, 2024
Show link: https://www.belowgrandnyc.com/mrp
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Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s Saturday evening opening was my first time visiting the collectively-run gallery founded by Andrew Woolbright. It’s a charming, scrappy artist-run space. Andrew gleefully told me that it’s probably the cheapest game per square foot in town. The opening was energized, and Molly told me that she installed the show herself. She is based in Connecticut, and her show effectively channels a New England do-the-most-with-the-least spirit.
Zuckerman-Hartung used both of Below Grand’s spaces—a walk-in window visible from the sidewalk and a very small room (closet?) in the back. I liked the two paintings hung one-on-top-of-the-other on the wall within the window. These two paintings project a compelling slightly-off quality. In a bit of antigravity magic, the top painting Rip it Up and Start Again feels heavier and the bottom painting Brass in Pocket lighter. Together they look knowingly vertiginous. They confirm Sharon Butler’s decision 10 years ago to highlight Zuckerman-Hartung as a force in casualism. These two paintings deftly play layered chunkiness off unprimed airiness. I felt like I was toggling between Ender’s Game deep space and Flatland surface dwelling.
The back space is jampacked. The floor-to-ceiling grid of photos functions as a personal archive of sorts and makes the room feel like a turn-of-the-century video store or cherished, not-yet-shuttered bookstore. At a talk I attended last year, Molly said working in bookstores as a young adult had been formative, and she noted her recent interest in learning about people’s lives through archives. I tend to think hewing to a Fosterian archival impulse is overrated. Yet Zuckerman-Hartung’s installation seems more to do with her professed interest in anti-sequence than archives per se. The array of skinny orthogonal wooden beams supporting little flag-like works propagates a satisfying hall of mirrors sense of dimensionality. The beams project from the grid’s interstitium and recall the armature of a mom-and-pop display.
Molly is quite funny. Her work isn’t funny but it betrays her witty sense of humor. There is something juvenile about the way Zuckerman-Hartung ceaselessly tinkers with accessible materials. Yet her work has undeniable gravitas. Her practice feels perpetually youthful—and Menopause Recalls Puberty reminds us that youth does not have a monopoly on growing pains. M.R.P. is good because it turns the spatial constraints of the gallery into assets, nimbly convinces us of her expanded use of materials, and breezily argues for cultivating off-the-cuff dexterity.
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James Fuentes
And
Jessica Dickinson
May 3 – June 15, 2024
Show link: https://jamesfuentes.com/exhibitions/and
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Jessica Dickinson’s paintings productively combine her tinkering sensibility with gritty atmosphere. The installation was aggressively symmetrical—two paintings stage left, two paintings stage right, one painting at center, and a curious-looking platform in the middle. The drawings—rubbings of her paintings—were laid out like a large picture book and attested to the way time can feel nonlinear, and narratives disjointed. I wish I could have turned the page and seen more of them. Dickinson’s paintings screamed delicate sensitivity, and I like sensitive painting, but I couldn’t help but compare this show to Lesley Vance’s recent show at Bortolami. Whereas Vance integrates meticulous labor with sensitive form, Dickinson’s nimble sensitivity to color and texture felt frequently overshadowed by her thick limestone polymer grounds—grounds that implied brute force more than anything. I kept thinking about the limestone grounds because they are unique. But I also think the grounds and their attendant chiseled marks risk overcompensation. Maybe Dickinson could have achieved more with less conspicuous effort.
I’m not sure if her paintings successfully disprove the compositional maxim that too many of the same size shapes is to be avoided. My sister’s running joke of having trypophobia (fear of repetitive patterns, such as small holes) came to mind. In the end the paintings overcame this trap, the way Ryman’s and Martin’s do—by creating a unified experience that is more than the details. Though Ryman’s and Martin’s details are compelling, too, which is one of the reasons Dickinson is not yet in their company. What is icky can also be yummy (even to the same person), and Dickinson’s (obsessively) chiseled grooves can admittedly be satisfying. I could picture myself chiseling into these surfaces, negotiating a varied application of pressures. I thought of Ando’s creamy concrete punctuated by traces of seams and circular cones.
Despite their urban provenance, Dickinson’s paintings flirt with suburban hobby paintings that revel in self-satisfied layering of paint. I didn’t expect this. Her sometimes-awkward pairing of a girding architecture (e.g., strong verticals) with amorphous carved vector fields got dangerously close to this vapid territory of layering for layering’s sake. Yet Dickinson’s tightrope was intellectually compelling precisely because it prompted such comparisons. Many New York paintings look too much like a stereotype of a delipidated urban fossil. Not hers. Her partially distressed surfaces and sturdy substrates instead interestingly evoke flimsy shabby chic furnishings—uncanny versions.
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DIMIN
THE LIVING ROOM
Hannah Beerman
June 7 – July 12, 2024
Show link: https://www.dimin.nyc/exhibitions/19-hannah-beerman-the-living-room/works/
The five paintings at Dimin represent Hannah Beerman’s ability to seduce by oversharing. Affixing objects with a personal salience to many of the paintings begs questions about when oversharing is useful. Many of us might be better off sharing more about our personal lives, even in the workplace. Beerman’s paintings engage with this debate. To be sure, Beerman’s paintings don’t bare everything. In the painting showponies and underbellies we see a blue “reusable bag”, but we don’t get to know the bag’s backstory.
Four of the five paintings generously provide us a visceral entry point—and common reference point—via the objects. I excitedly realized her painting long side includes the same dog toy that my dog played with for years. I would guess I wasn’t alone in this reaction. And the way Beerman subtly embeds her objects into the painting surfaces, by partly painting or cutting them, prevents the objects from merely soliciting cheap thrills.
Beerman’s paintings would have a completely different affect if she employed trompe l’oeil instead of assemblage. Her commitment to idiosyncratic assemblage ends up making her paintings vulnerable and down to earth, in the way that spontaneously visiting a friend before they have a chance to tidy up reveals a certain unvarnished window into their life. Beerman uses the word “guts”, and it does take guts to glue a wig to your painting, because such a move risks being obvious and derivative. Yet the seamless choreography between her choices of found materials and color dodges these pitfalls, such that I only fully appreciated her risk-taking after the fact.
Beerman has an interesting relationship to paint handling. It feels like her facture swoops in and gently taps you on the shoulder. fragile, the one painting of the five that doesn’t feature an object, softly distributes cursive letterforms that wink at Twombly while interestingly intermingling with the charged yet delicate gyrating backdrop. Even in this painting, you can feel the presence of the nearby objects permanently hugging the other paintings. Beerman’s chosen objects are integral to her current practice, and I’ll be curious to see how her relationship with readymade thingamabobs unfolds.