When it comes to Art Galleries in New York, I have to admit, I have a crush on the Lower East Side. Perhaps that’s trite, but I don’t care.  I have been watching with cheerful expectations the last couple of years as one after another small, independently owned gallery moved into the neighborhood. The gritty, DIY aesthetic of the storefront gallery is something that appeals to me on a visceral level. There is something more personable here.  I no longer feel the need to rally against the white cube aesthetic of museums or larger Chelsea galleries when standing in the charmingly askew planes of a gallery that’s walls have begun to sag.  There are a number of incredibly well curated, exciting contemporary galleries in this neighborhood. Needless to say, I can’t resist excitement when a promising new one joins their ranks.

Toomer Labzda gallery- run by husband and wife team  Helen Toomer Labzda and Christopher Labzda- opened its doors on Forsyth st. on June 24^th. Their first exhibition is an impressive display by British artist Mia Taylor.  Taylor’s first US solo exhibition is indicative of the artist’s colorful, zany oeuvre. Her wall mounted sculptures feel like playful finger jabs, the relentless tickle of an artist reciting the vocabulary of modernism through a sing song warble. Her timber, paper and cloth construction are neon, cheerful and for all of their whimsy, have a rough and tumble edge that left me slightly uneasy. The artist’s drawings are equally as vibrant and seem to shoot neon mind waves throughout the room. I respect the sparse paring of objects in this exhibition, a strategy that tends to lend them the formal weight they deserve. I did leave the show wishing I could see more. The result was like the whispered first words of a promise, a hint of exciting possibility both from the artist and gallery.

Courtesy of the Artist

Ryan Wallace is a painter and mixed media artist who lives and works in Brooklyn.  His body of work spans a range of influences, re-purposing a variety of art historical and popular references into a fluid vocabulary of rough, playful abstraction. His paintings vary in size and medium but are united by their alternating notions of fragmentation and unity and by a moody, often diffuse tone. His compositions reflect the payload of modernism viewed through the dust covered lens of a gritty, sun bleached kaleidoscope. His interest in the way information is presented, transmitted and stored results in a sensibility that is equal parts science, mysticism and high fives. I had a chance to stop by the artists Greenpoint studio recently to talk with the artist.

HH: You went to school at RISD, your background is in illustration, have you always been a painter?

RW: I don’t have a deft touch. I have to work things into submission to gather my bearings. I tend to make a mess and then clean it up. There is room for this approach in painting. Painting has always felt most natural to me. I’ve been making sculptures and other three dimensional experiments lately but those even feel rooted in my approach to two-dimensional picture making. I stumble into these efforts as a result of not being able to articulate a tone or idea on a flat surface.

HH: You frequently work in the space between painting, collage and printmaking. Perhaps you can speak to this. How do different mediums fit into your practice?

RW: They all inform one and other. I’m always interested in finding new ways to use materials that are endemic to their specific properties. Certain types of work I can only resolve on paper, others on canvas or panel. The limitations of each lead to breakthroughs in others. In this sense the formal quality of materials is a very important part of my practice. I think I have a consistent sensibility and the outcomes are guided by the materials themselves. It keeps making things interesting. I couldn’t sit down and make ten paintings one at a time one after the other. While an oil painting is drying I may work on a mold for a sculpture or a piece on paper. It keeps the experience of being in the studio feeling fresh. I am free to work on what feels appropriate at the time. I think it also keeps a thread between the variety of media within a body of work.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: You are constantly working on several bodies of work, each embodies a separate formal element of your practice. Your make collages, what you termed “proper oil paintings,” spare minimal “tablet” paintings, as well as evocative unique prints, how do you imagine each as part of the whole?

RW: I see it all as one body of work composed in parts revealed at various times.  I have mentioned before Brian Eno’s idea of a song as a selection lifted from a larger soundscape. I see my work functioning like this as well. That each piece is a selection of a larger atmosphere or timeline. Sometimes these parts are ripped from this environment and sometimes taken as an elegant slice or section. Certain paintings seem to be disintegrating or building themselves in front of you. Lately I have been looking at the Timeline pieces functioning like an Atlas and the other works as specificities within this larger collection. Atlas is also the name of particle detector at CERN that I have done research on. I like when monikers fall into place like that and this is often how I come to title works. In regards to my last show. I started the (((Ω.))) paintings in the summer of 2009. I developed them to a certain point then I photographed them and put them away for a year or so. Then, I bitmapped and tweaked the pictures in Photoshop and made lithography plates from those images. These plates became the basis for the works in the large square grid in the show. As I began those works on paper, I switched from newsprint to a finer, whiter drawing paper and Mylar to catch the run off from the plates in the printmaking process. Those pieces of paper and Mylar make up the cut pieces in Mist (Timeline) 3 and other works with the collage elements. Then I looked at everything and went back to finish the paintings that I had first started. From there I felt that the gestures in the work could be played with in a different way and maintain a similar tone and the Tablet paintings are the result of that exploration. So there is a physical and material relationship between the work as well as a conceptual link.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: Your collage pieces especially are defined by their use of form, there are clearly references to painterly tradition and modernism, but you draw equally from science. Where do you gather these influences?

RW: I read a lot of books and magazines, I attend seminars from time to time. Youtube and the web are valuable resources for research.

Right now I’m watching this:

http://www.wimp.com/bighistory/

I focus less on specificity and more on the gesture of these types of ideas. I am especially interested in the human condition, how we operate, perceive and interpret the world around us.   I see a parallel between our own personal fears and desires and the way that the public views developments and trends in the sciences. The fuzziness of reality and imagination.

I recently read an article in Discover about how teams at the University of Rochester and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  were having success with a series of quantum experiments showing that measurements performed in the future can influence the present. They call this Reverse Causality. Destiny is another more familiar word. They were studying this by observing particles under a laser run through several mirrored reflections, over a prolonged period of time, much longer than is typical in these types of experiments. I saw this as a very similar approach to making a painting. You sit and observe and wait for things to happen in front of your stare and you go back, revisit marks and areas and make necessary adjustments. My work isn’t about the science of Reverse Causality. I will tap into an idea like this in terms of its approach to observation and time and philosophical nature and use that as a starting point for my work. Science has given me a lot of starting points in recent years.

What I find fascinating or worth further research isn’t important to the work beyond getting me to begin it.  I am just trying to make pictures that contribute to the dialogue of painting. I see each piece as “a painting” not a painting about this or that.

HH: When did you start using collage, how do you approach this process?

RW: I have always made collages. As far as how I apply it now it began by wanting edges harder than I could make with paint. I was cutting out images and shapes from paper to get this type of edge and collaging those pieces into narrative, architectural paintings. As the work began to abstract more and more I still had these piles of cut paper and mylar laying around. Some pieces were of recognizable things and some were just scraps with color and texture that I had built up.  I shared a studio at the time with the artist Joseph Hart. He uses cut paper and collage as a primary method in his work. He moves the pieces around on the page and makes malleable compositions that he plays with until they are glued down. I found this technique to be a fast way to find surprising results that I employed in my own work. Having this detritus around I was able to experiment with familiar material during this period of transition.

HH: Your paintings reference both the celestial and the grid, is there a logical intersection for the magical and the rational?

RW: When I present a piece like (((Ω.))) Cycle,

http://www.ryanmwallace.com/Guerrero8.html

those are the precise kinds of concerns that I am hoping to incite within the viewer. I try and keep any opinion out of the work but use materials and visual cues to guide its reception.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: Your works seem to champion a level of instability; there is a sense of both momentum and collapse. There is something dystopic, though your paintings are composed of light there is darkness, where do you fit in this contradiction?

RW: The notion of serenity subverted is a common theme. This brings us back to the blur and fuzziness of perception that I am interested in. With those paintings, I am aware that they reference Ross Bleckner’s light paintings at the same time as aboriginal dot paintings. The big bang and the big crunch. This white light is our symbol of creation and of death.  I like the ambiguity of all of this.  I think it breathes mystery into works that at first glance feel so direct. I find that it helps the viewer come to the work on their own terms.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: The introduction to your recent catalogue quotes Pierre Chardin. Can you elaborate on the significance of “the omega”?

RW: The Omega Point is a term that he coined in his book The Phenomenon of Man. Chardin’s theoretical “Omega Point” describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. While I find these types of theories beautiful I am wary of lofty singular ideas and predictions: the end of the world, a raison d’etre for evolution, one supernatural being, universe, politic, etc. The nature of this singular event is subverted by painting more than one.Here is total consciousness….wait, maybe it’s this one.

I used this idea as the starting point for works in a recent solo show at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco. A critic wrote this about this installation:

http://www.ryanmwallace.com/Guerrero1.html

“This visual reverie is interrupted in the installation by the sheer  repetition of nearly identical canvases in tight proximity to each other. The frequency seemingly degrades the potency of each piece, shifting the interpretation of the sequence of paintings to the act of repetition itself. Robbed of this perceptual intimacy, the series as a whole shifts to a veneer of pop decadence, as if the canvases were nightclub promotions.”

He really understood what I am doing, though I’m not sure that he realized it. I found this very complimentary, I think it was meant to be critical.

HH: We’ve talked about your influences, from sci-fi to physics. Who are some of the contemporary artists you’re looking at today? Is there anyone who you feel pushes you?

RW: I find the artists closest to me to be the biggest inspiration.

Last week the best shows that I saw were by Mark Grotjahn, Picasso, Sol Lewitt and Katy Moran.

Tara Donovan’s show of pin paintings at Pace was exceptional as was the recent Rudolf Stingel show at Gagosian.

HH: Your starting a gallery in East Hampton, tell us a little bit about it.

RW: It is called Halsey Mckay Gallery and we are now open. The name is a combination of our grand mothers maiden names. Mckay is also my middle name. I opened it with my good friend Hilary Schaffner. She is an artist and in recent years has focused more on curatorial endeavors. She has a strong background in photography so between the two of us we have a pretty thorough appreciation of a broad spectrum of work. We are working with several artists but for the main exhibition area of the gallery we are focusing on one and two person shows. You can see images of our first show by Patrick Brennan here:

http://www.halseymckay.com/patrick-brennan-there-is-an-ocean/patrick-brennan%E2%80%93there-is-an-ocean

We are really excited to bring artists that we are close with and whose work we believe in to the Hamptons where there is a great understanding, history and support for visual art. It all happened very quickly and I feel very fortunate to have such amazing artists to give opportunities to and a great space to show the work in. The artists that we have in our schedule are truly emerging. They are all showing in New York and abroad and have exciting careers but may not have appeared in a biennial or major museum show yet.  We are hoping to be able to exhibit these artists work in a setting that doesn’t have all of the pressure of a big New York show but still is exposed to serious patrons, artists and those who appreciate great work. The community in East Hampton can provide this.

HH: What are your plans? Upcoming shows?

RW: It’s a busy summer that I am really excited about.

I will be in Grasping for Relics at Zieher Smith organized by Patrick Brennan.

Summer Whites at Rachel Uffner curated by Eddie Martinez and Sam Moyer.

I’m releasing a book that I made with Oakland publisher Land and Sea at my friend Annabelle’s shop on June 17th. This is a joint release along with beautiful books made by Dave Kennedy Cutler and Ruby Sky Stiler.

I will be in a show at Blackburn 20/20 as part of a fellowship that I did at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

I am curating a show at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton called Domestic Goods. May 28-June 28. This is a large group show of some of my favorite people and artists.

At Halsey Mckay we are putting on five exhibitions from the end of May through September:

Patrick Breannan May 20-June 7

Joseph Hart & Ruby Sky Stiler June 10-July 4

Chris Duncan July 8-July 31

A Group show curated by Rachel Uffner August 5- September 6

Glen Baldridge & Bryan Graf September 6-October 3

Courtesy of Morgan Lehman

To be honest, I haven’t found myself spending very much time in Chelsea as of late. For one reason or another I find myself chasing the promise of art in the Lower East Side along Orchard Street, or running through the galleries scattered across Williamsburg.  This said, I was happily surprised when I walked into Andrew Schoultz’s opening last week at Morgan Lehman gallery. The gallery features primarily young, emerging artists and the exhibition felt all the more vibrant considering its 23^rd street environs.

Courtesy of Morgan Lehman

The exhibit, Unrest, is a gargantuan attempt at wrestling with the American psyche. The artist mines symbolism from our national mythology, combining a sense of history with the dissonant bustle of contemporary life. Hulking brick monuments crumble and atomize, obscured by a swarm of personal and historical imagery. Trappings of mysticism and state authority recall the visual vocabulary of our founding fathers. The gallery’s press release explains that “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Japanese Earthquakes and the BP oil spill all fuel this new body of work.” While none of this is perhaps readily apparent, what we do see is a certain level of zeitgeist, an expression of the collective unease. In “Black Flag Storm” an arc like boat, with sales made from collaged squares of international currency is assaulted by a hail of black flags (traditionally a symbol of the anarchist.) As in many of his other pictures, it is as if all the  trappings  of the establishment have themselves arisen from slumber to aimlessly mill about in an anxious moshpit of  sacred regalia.

Courtesy of Morgan Lehman

Perhaps what I enjoyed the most was the level of whimsy. There is a sense of playful abandon and optimism that evokes art’s ability not only to remind and empower but also to distract and refresh.  In an age of Fox News, where politics is dominated by punditry, Schoultz’s brand of esoteric caricature is all the more refreshing. We are shown the thin line between the rational and the irrational between the official and the personal. What we are left with is a sense of unease and the possibility of subtle disobedience.

Ann Marshall, Beige, 2011. Courtesy Subliminal Projects

The classical figure has been admired throughout history and mastering the depiction of the human figure has long been considered the cornerstone of artistic practice. To perfect their representation of human anatomy, musculature, and proportion, artists throughout the ages turned to ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. By imitating ancient precedents, the Old Masters of art developed a classical figural type that remained the predominant mode of representation for centuries. Following, the 16th and 17th centuries of the Renaissance took the classical figure to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. In the present day, these leading contemporary artists have a heightened ability to understand and interpret their subject, while emphasizing the mind-set and methodologies that have guided artists for over five hundred years. Their figures are influenced by characteristics of today- feelings, surroundings, beliefs, and relationships, incorporated with new techniques and mediums, while still holding true the fundamentals of the classical form, thus becoming the New Masters.

The New Masters exhibition focuses on today’s leading contemporary artists and their approach to the classical figure with works by Mary Jane Ansell, Sean Cheetham, Ron English, Benjamin Bryce Kelley, Miles ‘Mac’ MacGregor, Ann Marshall, Stephen Wright, and Jonathan Yeo.

“New Masters” On view May 7, through June 4, 2011

Subliminal Projects

Courtesy of the artist

Vince Contarino is a New York based painter. His multi-layered canvasses explore the  language of abstraction.  From first glance there is something illusive in Contarino’s canvases, a tension between the forthright and the concealed. The artist often repurposes forgotten brushstrokes and colors, pasting them into his collages and works on paper. The result is something both beautiful and challenging, a floating soup of the painterly. Contarino’s belief in the ongoing relevance of abstraction is mirrored in his extracurricular activities. His most recent curatorial project, “The Working Title”, organized with painter Kris Chatterson, opens at the Bronx Art Center next Friday. I recently had the chance to speak with the artist over the phone.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: Perhaps you could tell our readers a little about yourself. When did you start painting, how are your recent works different from the older ones?

VC: I made a conscious decision to move to NYC and become a painter right after receiving my undergrad from the Ringling School of Art & Design, near where I grew up in Sarasota, FL. It was an eye-opening experience, and I was pretty much starting from scratch in terms of developing work that I could call my own.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of seeing the artist’s hand in paintings, but also respond to work that involves conceptual thought and decision-making. There is a certain trance-like state that we all enter to varying degrees when we make our work, but I am invested in balancing that with more conscious thinking about the marks I make and the relationships they have to each other in the paintings.

Having a simple approach is important to my process. I love the economy of drawing with pencil on paper and the free-handed unpredictability of translating those ideas into my paintings, that in the earlier work were more directly fluid.

I worked for years like this until I eventually took a break from this approach and began making collage works on paper composed of discarded marks that opened up a more assertive and investigative way to expand the language of my paintings.

HH: To paint abstract today is a loaded activity and can mean so many things. Do you feel the pressure of previous generations?

VC: I think artists working with abstraction today have the advantage of hind sight, and rather than being intimidated or exhausted by the weight of history, these conversations with previous generations offer a variety of methods in developing your own voice. When I look back at the hard-lined stances of particular movements of those that came before us, there is a pattern of reactionary abandonment, or dismissal of certain approaches by the latest generation in order to move things forward.

What is happening now feels like it takes on a less defensive stance on making art, and encourages the freedom of working in an open dialogue with the past, seeking out and elaborating on previous approaches that may have been have marginalized or forgotten.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: I am especially drawn to your acoustic series, along with your recent collages which seem to be a point of departure in your painting. Can you speak to these works, where did they come from?

VC: I started the acoustic series over the summer as a way to further explore using discarded marks in a limited setting. Kind of similar to how a singer/songwriter might come up with a new song on an acoustic jam.

Some other things on my mind while working on this project have been the lingering effect of early cinema, particularly Film Noir, cut-and-paste DIY punk show flyers, and a desire to create this ever-evolving black shrine that I can reference when working on my paintings.

The removal of color gives them the preliminary quality of a drawing while searching for ideas through value, texture and placement. Instead of attempting to reinvent form, I’m left with works that create a visual dialogue based on my collections of shapes and gestures. I prefer to allow the complexity to reveal itself in the process by creating depth on a flat surface and organizing the finished works through various configurations in my studio.

HH: What part does editing and self selection play in your work?

VC: An important part of my studio practice involves searching for casual gestures and pairing them with more deliberately constructed forms. While there is room for chance and discovery, I try to operate in a middle ground that is neither restrictive or self indulgent, continually editing down the paintings to their most important elements.

HH: Let’s talk about your upcoming show, The Working Title. What gave you the motivation to start curating shows? Why abstraction?

VC: This show in particular came out of an online project called Progress Report, that I co-founded with painter Kris Chatterson. It is dedicated to artist features, studio visits and is intended as a curatorial resource for ourselves and others. We wanted to create something that was highly visual, had a more editorial, photo-journalistic feel, and would give our readers a glimpse of the creative process from the working artist’s perspective.

Both Kris & I are interested in the elasticity and possibilities of abstraction in our own work and were offered the opportunity to put this show together based on the work we were featuring on Progress Report.

The organization of this exhibition was specific about arranging contrasting approaches that would encourage unpredictable relationships from a curatorial perspective. Minimalism, post-modern, geometric, gestural, formal, process-driven works occupying the same space. Our feeling is that artists are now more able to work as painstakingly detail-oriented, gesturally-free, or conceptually focused as they please, employing and breaking systems to be absorbed and enter into the work.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: How do you feel curating ties into your artistic practice? Are there tie ins from the studio or vice versa?

VC: One of the best things about living in NYC is the direct access you have to other artists through studio visits. The art world can be a hyper-social place where real connections and critical conversations are hard to come by. While we were both already exchanging studio visits, Progress Report was instrumental in meeting artists that we respected and our artist features acted as a time capsule of what others were making in the moment. Staying active and interested in what your peers are making and being dedicated to your work is a healthy extension of your own practice.

HH: When and why did you start Progress Report?

VC: Progress Report was founded just over a year ago, and born out of my contributions to an online visual journal, started by Kris Chatterson called KCLOG that was a log of all the exhibitions we were seeing throughout NYC. We were particularly invested in the increasing number of artist-organized shows that started appearing during the recession of the past few years.

Being in the NYC hotbed of chaotic, creative energy…your work improves (or not) at a pretty rapid pace. The single most important part about living here for me has been the support and intellectual exchanges with my peers. The art world is a business, and should be treated as such, but the relationships you share with other creatives are the ones that you must nurture and develop, as they have made the same commitment and sacrifices you have in deciding to live the life of an artist.

There are only a handful reliable registries that give us exposure and offer opportunities, so we wanted to start something that was more invested in giving a deeper understanding of the artists, their process, and why they make the work that they do. Keeping this self-generated approach as the focus of our project by supporting other artists’ work in tandem with the artworld-at-large, was and remains the impetus for Progress Report.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: Can you tell us about the recent initiative, artists selecting artists. ( Does this new Progress Report initiative have a name?)

VC: The idea for Progress Report from the beginning, was to get other artists more involved in who was being featured on the site. To this end, we came up with a new section called “Take Five”, an opportunity for previously featured artists to feature five artists of their choosing that would allow the project to generate new content in an organic way and give the site a more diverse feel.

Artist Websites -

vincecontarino.com
progress-report.org

Reclining Plate Face, 2009 ©Andrew Guenther

Paper Plate people, hotdogs and drug paraphernalia. These are some of Andrew Guenther’s subject matter. Referenced from his own life and pop culture, his work is highly personal even though it may seem even the slightest bit anonymous. Guenther’s unique aesthetic sensibility combined with vibrant colored drawings and paintings, immediately grab the viewer. His silver gelatin photographs look like they could have been taken decades ago. His latest sculptures of fish and naked ladies accompanied by a photograph of the full moon seem pure and earthly.

Andrew Guenther is based in Brooklyn and was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois. Andrew has exhibited widely both in the US and abroad, and curated an artist’s storefront space in Brooklyn for a few years called Arts Tropical. He is represented by Freight and Volume Gallery in New York.

Carissa Pelleteri: Your art seems to be inspired by your everyday life and surrounding objects. What do you do regularly that inspires you, which is manifested into your work?

Andrew Guenther: I do a lot of things regularly—my schedule is pretty predictable and my likes and dislikes are very idiosyncratic. I don’t think any of these things manifest themselves in my work. I walk a lot. Walking is where I do most of my thinking and I’m alone with my thoughts. I guess it’s this byproduct of walking that translates most often into my work. Since I don’t write things down on the walk, the only things that fall into my art practice are the things that stick.

American Medicine II, 2009 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: While some of your work may be viewed as humorous and wacky, it also holds a kind of pure, raw sexual energy…and some escapism. Hotdogs, Plate Faces with women’s bare chests…American Medicine. What are you saying to us?

AG: It’s interesting that you picked up on the escapism. One’s own thoughts can be both visionary and toxic. I make my work for myself, first, and I’ve always felt like an outsider watching things develop around me. I still take responsibility for my actions and thoughts but I think a lot of my own mental energy is tied to the greater public consciousness and that is when people can relate at some level to what I am doing.

For me, “American Medicine” suggest everything that is right and everything that it wrong. Medicine is supposed to relieve or cure illness. It can also damage parts of the body while working on another.  “American Medicine” is apple pie, macaroni and cheese, baseball bats, rock music, anything bought or sold, water in plastic bottles, meth, illegal firearms, foreign policy etc. I think “American Medicine” is the title of an unwritten poem that crept it’s way into a few artworks that I did.

Hotdog Nap, 2009 ©Andrew Guenther

Cork with a Whisker, 2010 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: How did “Hotdog Nap” and “Cork with a whisker” come about?

AG: I work very intuitively. “Hotdog Nap”—saw the light, had the sausage, and set up the tripod. “Cork with a Whisker” came out of a family conversation at the kitchen table. I found a whisker near the window where the cat suns herself and there was a champagne cork rolling on the table. We were talking about street vendors hawking products in the city and I put the two items together as a joke, exclaiming “get your cork with a whisker here!” The object became very special to me as something that should never exist. I’ve been collecting the whiskers for about three years now and have about 12 different sculptures.

The Painter, 2008 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: In the drawing: “The Painter” this character has a face. When did you decide to stop creating faces of physical beings in your work? Why was the plate face born?

AG: I still make drawings of the figure in “The Painter” but he is really skeletal and cartoon-ish with his bulging eyes and flailing tongue. He’s this over-sensitive drug addled investment banker that takes long lunches in the park to stare at women or smoke DMT in the bushes.

But you are right—I have stopped working with the face of the figure because I don’t want to conjure the spirit of someone I don’t know. I’m superstitious like that. I don’t draw from photographs or use friends in the work anymore, in particular, because I believe that the rendering of a face carries a spirit of an individual whether invented or from reproduction. I don’t want to fill up my studio with this spirit energy–I don’t know if the conjured entity is good or bad.  It sounds kind of foolish but when you are sitting in front of a painting and you have drawn this face staring back at you in convincing detail, you know that that person exists or has existed somewhere. The plate faces give me this blank, unaffected and childish playfulness, so that I can focus on composition.

Bite Me, 2008 ©Andrew Guenther

Horse, 2010 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: The vibrant color scheme in your paintings, drawing and sculpture work is fantastic. The inspiration and execution in your photographs is played out a bit differently. Why photograph in black & white and not in color?

AG: I feel that I am able to use photography in trade for some things I used to do in painting. I like to keep the paintings uncluttered with cultural references and black and white seems to have a documentary aspect to it—very to the point. I also like the relief of not having to decide how to depict specific objects or things.  I could never paint the horse to get the same weight the photograph carries. I could have probably done a linear study in pen and paper of Hotdog Nap to achieve the joke layer, but I would have never shared that afternoon light pouring over the textured fabrics of the headboard and sheets. I also like the immediacy of the photograph despite the long process from camera to paper.

CP: Tell me about the plate face made in gold and silver leaf. (I love it). Your latest sculptures are in a simple, pure white base. Why the more minimal aesthetic versus the colorful work?

AG: I have been attempting different methods to work over the photographs in the studio for some time. The paper is difficult to work with in a lot of media. I like Araki’s take on using different media over the photograph, but even his end up as simple color splashes or stains. In working with photography I have also found the medium is most often approached very traditionally. Much like a ceramics studio where everyone is using these earth-tone glazes over things that look like pots. I always enjoy perversions of a medium—sort of like when I tried to get screaming active guitar pickups in a traditionally buttery sounding Les Paul.

Tropical Hotdog, 2010 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: Can you tell me about your recent show in Japan?

AG: Japan was very exciting and overall the show was received very well. It was my first trip to Japan and I had all these ideas about the country beforehand. I think media and film had filled my head with a neurotic city with busy and frantic people. I found Tokyo and the vicinity to be one of the most relaxing places I have ever been. Returning to NYC, I found my appetite sickened by what I was eating before I left. There is a special level of care and quality put into food in Japan, presentation aside, that I would feel better after eating basashi [raw horse meat] rather than a slice of New York pizza. I could see myself living there for a few months of the year. In relation to my work, I feel that some of the humor was mis-interpreted or lost, but I think parts of it were appreciated in a different way—the more serious and poetic elements.

Plate Face, 2008 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: What can we expect to see at your show at Kaycee Olsen Gallery in Los Angeles this coming May?

AG: Papier-mâché plate face lady reliefs, formal color paintings, and small photographs to carry out the narrative. I just found out today that papier-mâché is French for chewed paper . . . so I think it is perfect for the plate faces. I originally started to use papier-mâché because of its low environmental impact versus slabs of paint.

Artists site: guentherart.com

For his third solo exhibition at Triple Base in San Francisco, Jay Nelson has masked the entire gallery floor with hand cut, custom shaped panels of ACX plywood. He’s divided the space with a new wall, and installed two separate arrangements of recent works in traditional, consciously transparent orderings. Nelson’s constructed all the necessary tools of perception (the wall, the work, even the floor) and pieced it all together to create an abstraction that according to the artist, was developed “with as little intention as possible.”

The exhibition begins with fifteen small works on paper grouped together in the three rows of five. Nelson’s decision to consolidate the drawings that make up “Abstract Composition 1-15” into one entity is important. Individually they are systematic illustrations arranging and rearranging the visual anatomy of the plywood. But as a network, the drawings go a step further and reveal the basic mechanisms for navigating the rest of the work.

While everything in the show was forged in a mirrored logic, the real winners are Nelson’s paintings. In the paintings, unlike in the rest of the work, Nelson’s purposeful disregard of intention moves past any system of omission. Made without external influence, the paintings begin to play at the intimate inner workings of the psyche. They are visually engaging, and transcend their own object-hood through a materially sound testimony of the self.

Courtesy of the New Museum

George Condo was born in 1957, meaning he is 53, the same age as my mother.

The artist’s newly opened retrospective “Mental States” at the New Museum, was exceptional in part for this reason. It was refreshing to see an exhibition of this weight and vitality at the New Museum. It was especially exciting considering the artist is not “younger than Jesus” but 4 decades into his mature career.

At the risk of seeming vague or trite, or both, there is something timeless about George Condo’s Work. During the 1980s, while friends like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Mary Heilmann were developing their own signature styles, Condo wasn’t. Rather, he was constructing his toolbox. The artist has become a master of appropriation, not of material but of style. He has an uncanny ability to pull inspiration and support from across art history. An avid museum visitor, the artist constantly footnotes artists as disparate as, Picasso, Bacon and Fragonard.

Courtesy of the New Museum

Mental States begins in the cavernous fourth floor gallery, the back wall is plastered with paintings. Hung in the classic salon style, one gets a sense of the history with which Condo plays. Here, accompanied by a strong dose of wry humor, are the cubist-esque jumbles, the Bacon inspired anguish, and even the brown soup of a renaissance style portrait background. Rather than feeling disconnected, the display unifies. Each painting functions, as a unique facet of the artist’s idiosyncratic, and ultimately rewarding oeuvre.

Downstairs, on the third floor, the exhibition is broken up into three galleries, loosely organized by theme. The first room, labeled “Melancholia” is home to a group of particularly forlorn couples. I was particularly struck by the characters depicted in “The Stockbroker”. Awkward and misshapen; the strain of Condo’s cartoon subjects is almost palpable. The next room, “Manic Society” is almost a relief, though the bacon-esque contortions of these paintings are hardly cheerful.

Courtesy of the New Museum

The last room is a testament to the artist’s ongoing relationship with abstraction. “Black and White Abstraction” from 2005, is a particularly aggressive reference to de Kooning’s black and white paintings from the 1950s. At first glance, this and the other paintings in the room seem masterful exercises in gesture and tone. Upon further examination, the languid cartoonish drawl of Condo’s figurative vocabulary begins to reveal itself, one eye, nose and face at a time.

This is what is so wonderful about the artist; there is a fantastic tension in each painting. Subsumed in a variety disguises, it is only after real examination that the artist begins to emerge, peeking out from an imagined past.

Excavations Non Objective, Michael Filan’s solo show of abstract paintings are on exhibit as part of the Intercultural Church’s 50^th anniversary celebration through the end of August, 2010.  Filan uses brilliant enamel paints, which he refers to as light, the intensity of color serving as his “mystical guide”.  Dripped, poured and sprayed on recycled monoprints, with paper pulled away in some areas, exposing the work beneath it, a new genre of painting is brought forward, fueled by curiosity and impulse.

These handsome “pictures of nothing,” Kirk Varnedoe’s coinage for abstract art, are brushless and daringly drippy inventions which have been skillfully curated by Frank DeGregorio on free-standing, staggered walls with negative space above and below the paintings, allowing viewers to mix’n’match paintings in groupings from a variety of angles with great affect.

Enthusiasts of abstraction will see the influences of de Kooning, Frankenthaler and the lesser known Morris Louis, and more importantly, the quiddity of the art form in the delightfully, joyful gallery space known as the Treasure Room.