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art reviews from around new york

Hilary Pecis opens her home and studio to visitors. She takes one into the lives of her neighbors as well without so much as a person in sight—but what lives, and what a life.

Once you have been inside, you may never want to leave. You never could take it all in, not when her compositions run every which way and there is so much to see. It gives new meaning to “pattern and decoration” in painting, without an unbroken pattern and with too many specifics in time and place to write it off as decoration. Now if only you could be sure that you would not stand out like a sore thumb, at David Kordansky through October 12.

Pecis deals not just in sunlight, but in sensation. She brings you close to share the intimacy and outside to take in the view. Cats glare back, as cats do, but so near that they could almost be in your lap—or you in theirs if only they had one. Books fill shelf after shelf, and you may want to step past the flowers to inventory every title. Besides, books, too, can be an arrangement of shapes and colors. So can coffee cups, tablecloths, chair cushions, and the furniture to hold it all.

The bursts of sensation keep coming on a front lawn where trees and flowers compete with the architecture, white stones on red soil, and each other. Here, it would seem, people celebrate Christmas year round, to judge by a plastic Madonna and shepherds. But no, this is LA or an ideal version of it, where welcoming warmth and sunlight last through December. Still, a New Yorker would recognize the signs of home. The shepherds could pass for family by the porch waiting to see you, like Brooklynites on a stoop. Just one painting leaves home entirely, but there, too, for a single destination—and the shop sells flowers.

“Pattern and Decoration” arose in the 1970s as one more nail in Minimalism’s coffin. Artists like Valerie Jaudon and Miriam Schapiro combined feminism and excess. It also proclaimed painting’s special nowhere, where patterns matter more than what they cover. Pecis, in contrast, stuck to Southern California, but also to a sense of place. It seems only right that the flower shop gives its phone number on the awning. You could look up the area code online for a map of LA. You could look to the books, with an enviable choice of artists and philosophers, for a reminder of who you are.

Of course, they also define a class—a class of readers, but also of buyers. If the coffee cups have a further clash of geometry and color, you can assume that smart shoppers brought them home. These shoppers keep up with contemporary design and have the money to do so. But you could see that from the homes themselves, from the breadth of a porch and gabled roof to an alluring stairwell broken by shadows. I could easily feel guilty about belonging there. I may not live like this, but I do love the right artists and have read the right books.

Pecis can seem a lightweight—and ready confirmation of one’s suspicions about money in art. The show opened the week of New York art fairs, with their display of wealth. Still, she is not taking the easy way out. Maybe the movement artists better known in New York would look less comforting if they shared her sense of place. Her very wildness disrupts a skeptical narrative as well. The flower shop has its own profusion of signs and samples.

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

Over twenty years ago, a Manhattan neighborhood was just beginning to thrive, and a commercial gallery was already shutting its doors. It could be a lesson in gentrification, so often driven by the arts—the very studios and galleries that development would quickly chase away. Yet it was just perfect for Keith Sonnier. His light fixtures all but demand an industrial space in line with his industrial materials, while it takes an impressive setting to show off his art.

It was 2003, between Soho and Tribeca but to the west—a neighborhood not yet known as Hudson Square. And it was the last show at Ace, a humongous gallery that showcased artists who subvert a certain idea of art. One could get lost in it, not least when the art offers one’s sole illumination. It happened when David Hammons left a gallery-goer with only the thin blue beam of a pocket flashlight, and it happened one last time with Sonnier and his brighter lights. It helped rescue him and Minimalism for a twenty-first century idea of subversion, and it had more than enough space for a proper retrospective. The artist, then in his sixties, had always one foot in “process art” and one in sculpture, and it showed that one never really had to choose.

Now Sonnier, who died in 2020, comes to Chelsea, at David Kordansky through August 9, where sculpture wins out right away. The process, in contrast, takes its time, as process will. Each work gets a partitioned space to itself, and each refuses to stick to the wall. Is it still Minimalism? After a recap of my past review, I pick up on the evolving present—together as a longer review and my latest upload. His very artistry may have hurt his reputation, but it could stand up to a changing city all the same.

What do you think of when you think of a light fixture? It could be a backdrop for living, and a charming photograph has Keith Sonnier at ease in an armchair, with a fragile neon tube bursting out above. Not that he ever went for invisibility. A fluorescent tube for Dan Flavin may nestle neatly into a corner, much as metal plates for Carl Andre rest on the floor. They refuse to depart from the architecture of the room. Sonnier delights in it. His thinner tubes may rest on glass panes or trace a twisting path of their own.

Then again, you may think of the chill of fluorescent light, marquees, and advertising, a chill that you would never allow in your home. Sonnier, though, incorporates older incandescent bulbs nearly as readily as neon. In fact, neon may loop right around them, as well as around itself. It embodies a mantra from the 1960s, drawing in space. A fixture for Flavin all but dissolves the corner and itself, leaving only a soft glow that identifies the work with the space of the room. Sonnier’s has a life of its own.

Still, this is not home decor, and these are industrial fixtures through and through. The bulbs themselves have the steel cap of off-the-shelf hardware. He makes a point of not distinguishing the bulbs from the tubes, with titles like Neon Incandescent. The commercial and the sculptural are one and the same, and their final composition accepts and shapes them both. The 2003 show revisited his career as an empty landscape with one foot in urban reality and another in science fiction. This one sticks to abstract objects and real space.

It also sticks to three years, from 1968 to 1970, when Sonnier’s late Modernism had few challenges beyond itself. Minimalism was giving way to Post-Minimalism, a precursor of the Neo-Minimalism more common today. When Robert Irwin dissolves the work in light, he also multiplies the fixtures in a dizzying illusion. When Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle, and Jackie Winsor put the neo in place, they evoke the tactile nature of space. The work becomes dangerously close to the human body. And Sonnier, who grew up in Louisiana’s Cajun country, calls one series Ba-O-Ba—Haitian French for the effect of moonlight on the skin.

He, too, impinges on the visitor and the room—and not solely as sculpture. Tubes cast their shadows like tentacles on the walls and floor. They may follow the top edge of the glass panes or cut across it. Light penetrates and reflects off the glass. The work is always just larger than life. Still, it retains its late modern logic. Colors do not stick to primaries, but rather to ROY G BIV.

With his measured excess, Sonnier’s could be the art of gentrification. It has lasted through the rise and fall of Soho, East Village art, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and now the Lower East Side. One can only guess at what that means for the rush to Tribeca. Sales had already begun to fall before the pandemic, and Chelsea itself has, I shall guess, dropped to half the size of its peak. Sonnier comes in November to Dia:Beacon, where Irwin has space for his own dizzying multiplicity in parallel lights.

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