haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

After drip paintings came stained canvas, from postwar artists who could leave more to nature and nothing to chance. So what comes now? How about color carried to your eye by the wind and by paint?

Violeta Maya returns to the materials, imagery, and style of the late 1950s, with acrylic, raw pigment, and plenty of canvas to let them breathe. This is nothing but painting, in a tradition where abstraction is just that, just as for Susan English in Chelsea. It is also much of her best work, but she took me most by surprise with canvas hanging freely from four wooden arches and, every so often, billowing upward.

When it comes down to it, nothing really separates Abstract Expressionism from color-field painting except, perhaps, a heading in a textbook. Drips, stains, targets, or slashes, it was all gestural abstraction in postwar art, where only the gestures had changed and not so very much at that. It was, if anything, just a matter of temperament, as the delicacy and violence of flung paint gave way to the lushness of poured paint. One could almost call it a matter of male and female temperament, of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning joined by Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. One could, that is, had not galleries begun to rediscover such women artists as Michael West (Corrine in real life). As for the richness of poured paint, with color as a target, field, or veil, it all but belonged to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Maya risks a return to not exactly unfinished business, but fashionably close, at Nicelle Beauchene through February 15. Painting is no longer dead, they say, and anything goes, but “anything goes” can take art only so far. It does, though, allow a certain breathing room. Barely in her thirties, she works in Madrid, just as galleries have begun to see AbEx as an international movement, with a steady flow of artists back and forth between New York and Europe. She counts Japanese art as an influence, just when museums have looked again at Asian art and seen calligraphy. She sometimes works on multiple panels to stretch color further, and Chinese or Japanese art can unfold across several sheets of paper as well.

She takes her own claims lightly. As the show’s title has it, with an almost British reserve, “Me Atrevo a Decir que Esta Pintura Está Viva” (I dare say this painting is alive). A painting’s title takes her acknowledged pleasures under advisement, in English: Enjoy the Ride While You Can. The stains unfold horizontally, leaping across canvas or in counterpoint. The four hinged arches are physically attached, much as the panels are attached visually.

Their canvas, too, can leap only so far. If a breeze enters the gallery, it is a gentle one, and the fabric builds up around a point of rest on the floor. They and the wood approach sculpture, with its own imagery. They resemble mirrors, with their rounded top, a bit taller than a gallery-goer. Maya may look at her work and see just a bit more than herself. It is her Miedo a lo Desconocido, or fear of the unknown.

Speaking of a leap, my little history skips over a good third of the twentieth century. After gesture came Minimalism, before Postmodernism, in dialogue with it, or insistently itself. It also came with its own idea of late modern art. It spoke of art as object and image, line and color, space and light, the thing itself and the thing to be seen. One could subsume them all into contrasting elements of painting, edge and field. Susan English takes just that as her art, at Kathryn Markel also through February 15.

English translates the nearly invisible traces of the 1960s and 1970s, as in Agnes Martin, into pale, matte colors. They vary within a field, like the sky, and a horizon line is implicit, as is gesture, although landscape itself is not. This is as pure as abstraction gets, but it has plenty of excuses for line—the line surrounding a painting or separating its parts. She stresses it with contrasting colors and panels, where the viewer must determine which truly bounds a color field. She also paints in white along many an edge, just short of a frame. The quiet colors and stable borders give every reason to slow down.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

For Mary Mattingly, nature’s most intense colors come out only at night. One could almost call them supernatural.

Mattingly photographs an exotic garden, set in an uncertain world. Its glow seems to come from the flowers themselves, in dense clusters of yellow, orange, purple, and blue. They run more to spheres than to the petals, like artificial lights. The surrounding greenery could almost stand in for wiring in a museum or holiday display.

They pop, but Mattingly’s “Night Garden” cannot altogether penetrate the darkness, at Robert Mann through February 7. Just try to imagine where you are. It could be underwater for the depth of black and the shimmer of light now and on the surface. Could those be fish swimming by or just more flowers soaking up the light show? They could belong to a nighttime landscape as well, with distant hills, more than once, and a full moon. It unfolds in layers, including layered flowers, like a landscape painter’s means of defining depth. The shimmers form veils or curtains waiting to be pulled aside.

Not that one could expect to see more, not when color like this cannot penetrate the darkness. The heightened contrast between elements helps create the interplay of natural and unnatural. Nature here seems perfectly well observed, in a painterly tradition going back the Romantic landscape and to flowers in close-up from Baroque still life through Beatrix Potter to Georgia O’Keeffe. Double exposures and darkroom additions, I assume, are allowed, including actual lamps, but nothing in violation of ordinary linear perspective. Hills have the breadth of the Hudson River School and an atmospheric blue. A trained eye could identify the flowers.

Mary Mattingly must have trained herself all over again. She began modestly enough, with twilight visits to Socrates Sculpture Park on the East River waterfront, where she has herself contributed her Water Clock. One may remember it more for trees, lawns, and art than for flowers, with the Noguchi Museum a block or two away. One may expect less of nature anyway in the coldest weeks of the year. Try to enjoy the irony of a school football a quarter mile up on Broadway with strictly artificial turf. But then the photos have no indication of place or time.

She began, then, not in the studio, but with chance discoveries in a neighborhood respite. It is hardly a botanic garden, but it will have to do. Still, she says, the park inspired her to take clippings from its flowers and to study them with care. Yet the crispness and color come equally from photography. Remember the bright, halfway creepy look of early color photography, as with William Eggleston, when they hardly passed for art? Mattingly retains that look but in the color that she has seen.

A skeptic could find a little too much artifice and beauty. These photos do not shy away from special effects. And who can object, as in her past work, to reminders of climate change? Still, she knows what to keep in reserve in the blackness. It obliges one to see art and photography, too, as a work of the imagination rather than a mechanical record—and a discovery as much as a creation. Maybe sunlight will return come summer, but for now it is up to you to say where and when you are.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.