Category: reviews

by John Mendelsohn

Nora Griffins’s paintings are scrappy, high-spirited, improvised works that feel like visual diaries of life on the run. Saturated color, woozy pattern, and images of fish, animals, and art pile up and jostle for a place in the sun. Surrounded by artist frames, which serve as shelves for a variety of objects, the four nearly six-foot square paintings and four smaller works are a kind of declaration of independence for this artist. They bring together ideas and motifs of her earlier work, but here with an expansive, imaginative panache and free-wheeling energy.

In the painting Koi, zones of blues and purples are set off by free-form areas of cadmium red, creating a patchwork pool for the swimming goldfish. This painting shares with Empire State (Zebra) a kind of psychedelic intensity, with each form or space between becoming a place to record an impression of the fleeting world or a painterly sensation. A series of cascading, irregular blocks in green are echoed in a variety of smaller grids, all of which contrast with sections of yellow and aqua animated by daubed speckles. At the center of all the antic activity is a serene, multi-colored zebra. 

Liquid Days (zzz Cat) is a painting dominated by a looping lattice in Grannie Smith apple green and lavender, with flashes of purplish red. On top of this field, lounges a tabby cat in tones of purple. A crenelated outline in yellow haunts like a phantom presence, along with the sculpted palm prints that hang on the gesturally painted frame. Altogether, the result is an immersion in trippy high-jinx, a feeling of crazy, ordinary freedom.

The fourth large painting, Glass Flute, has a water-like rippling pattern in yellow and yellow-orange, overlaid by three images: two outlined ducks, an inset that looks like a quotation from one of the artist’s earlier works, and a detail from the Manet painting, The Fifer, here in grisaille. The combination of all these elements is cryptic, evoking the kind of mental conundrum that David Salle has specialized in. But here, the loosely rendered images and the funky abstract squiggles and dottings reveal the artist’s idiosyncratic touch, suggesting a receptive spirit that is open to the multifarious gifts that the world is continually offering. 

In Griffin’s paintings, large-scale visual exuberance carries in its wake signs of the artist’s personal affinities. Together they create a theater of the artist’s inner world, made accessible and public-facing. Her impromptu, reckless works convey a feeling of charged avidity for a life that she wants to share with us.

The sense of Griffin’s personal stake in these paintings is embodied in their every aspect, including the objects lodged in the frames, suggesting both private revelation and a guarding of the extraordinary act of self-exposure that painting entails. The objects surrounding the canvases, à la Jasper Johns, include painted eyeglasses, turtles, palm prints, the artist’s initials, and souvenir Statues of Liberty, which give the whole enterprise a rakish New York City vibe.

In these works, Nora Griffin melds a number of different impulses: a devil-may-care rawness, using paint as a blunt instrument of sensation, a desire to create a personal dream-logic from juxtaposed color and image, and an affirmation that painting can be a poetic art that is on the street, in the museum, and in the heart, all at once. 

Nora Griffin / Liquid Days at Fierman West, 19 Pike Street, New York, NY from June 3 to July 2, 2022.

by D. Dominick Lombardi

My first thought seeing this solo exhibition of Jerry Kearns paintings at Studio Artego is collage. The Pop artist Erró comes to mind, an Icelandic born and current resident of Spain and France who approaches his work much in the same way as Kearns, by first making a collage study. Another commonality is that both Kearns and Erró create powerful socio-political paintings based on those pieced-together preliminaries that always seem to have more than a bit of dark humor and irony in the messaging. 

Kearns’ paintings are brilliantly rendered with great precision, mostly featuring blissful clouds bathed in brilliant light. This backdrop, which in one instance is a bold and blazing sunset, can either enhance or contrast the narratives in very compelling ways. The exhibition’s title, What The…?, may refer to the artist’s constant state of concern and bewilderment regarding the way the world seems to be unraveling and regressing, especially here at home. Most of the paintings feature a comic book style subject, something in the manner of Graham Ingles (1915-91), featuring high contrast shading and theatrical gestures, modified a bit for more graphic impact. For instance, in Shade (2020), we see a determined grave digger that looks like it could have come right out of Tales From the Crypt, working feverishly as the soul of his unfortunate victim heads for the heavens. Works like this, and the silkscreen print Hard Rock (1992) take on even more urgent meaning as the strength of Roe v Wade once again, is being tested. Even the use of Mount Rushmore, representing four powerful men deciding the rights of women, really brings home the fear/submission of the woman in the foreground. I wonder if the man/boy responsible for the pregnancy were also subject to trial, fine or jail, if the powers that be would still be so committed to their cause. 

 Stormy Weather (2021) reveals the many techniques the artist has mastered over his extensive career. In beautifully applied and blended acrylic paints, with the occasional use of thin pencil line or graphite, Kearns shows us his focused wizardry with form, color and composition. Even the comic book style references can vary, like in Stormy Weather, as a more 1940’s Modern Love type mix is combined with a symbolic silhouette reference to the BLM protests on the left, and a slightly trippy fem fatale center/front. It is also quite clear in this instance, that some things just make sense aesthetically and compositionally for the artist, as he strategically divides the picture plane with a pair of dainty legs that split the narrative, suggesting the golden ratio. Top right, the passionate politics being played out here are observed by two beautiful and very curious birds perched on hanging ivy, perhaps representing hope and a peaceful end to this complex drama. 

On the main wall opposite the entrance hang three works: What The…? (2022), Alpha (2020), and Diva (2022). All equally sized and similar in visual weight, they tell distinctly different tales. What The…? encapsulates how quickly an uneventful walk on a perfect afternoon can end abruptly and painfully if you don’t watch your step. Something that is happening more often these days as many of us are staring more at our phones than what is right in front of us. Alpha is the most eye-catching and strange of this trio. It features a bouncing baby in mid-flight, joyfully spreading its limbs. Covered in ‘tattoos’, the narrative transmitted from the baby quickly becomes oddly troubling. When analyzing the body illustrations, biblical or strong christian references, such as glimpses of Christ’s hands on the cross, maybe a pregnant Mary and winged angels traversing the otherwise innocent form now becomes far more weighty. Diva is the most direct of the three, showing the passage from earth bound to heavenward as the subject’s hands become transparent and thus transcendent.

Jerry Kearns is much more than a Pop artist. The way he layers his narratives and brings added intensity can be jarring, intoxicating and perplexing to the point of no return. This all happens because his paintings trigger deep emotions, enlightening us with thoughts unrestrained by time. His focus moves freely and fluidly, uninhibited in his search for truths that are not confined by any preconceived order – and as a seeker of truth, you have to think and project multidimensionally and Kearns does that beautifully and indelibly. 

Jerry Kearns “WHAT THE…?” runs through June 17. Studio Artego is located at 32-88 48th Street, Queens, New York, 11103.    

by Mary Hrbacek

Almine Rech presents “In Its Daybreak Rising,” an exhibition of eighteen new abstract oil paintings by Sarah Cunningham. The exhibition is unusually focused and pure in its means. The semi-abstract works with representational underpinnings speak for themselves; their surprising immediacy quickly engages the viewer. One is not asked to read long texts pertaining to the show, or to contend with convoluted explanations of current trends that abound from the Metropolitan Museum to galleries in every art district in New York.  Abstract painting comes in many guises; the works are often visually attractive, but ultimately fail to convey meaningful content, which would make them matter more authentically.  Beauty is never wrong if it is authentic, but without an in-depth foothold, it can tilt toward the decorative, Sarah Cunningham’s works have no link to decoration. The psychologically complex works present configurations of thick worked media that create depth, movement, and inner space.  

The loosely built-up, manipulated paint results in a warm relaxing vibe that sets the viewer at ease, while it draws the eye ever deeper into an exploration of the pictures’ elements. The vehicles that drive the works are the intricacies of long, medium and short strokes, thinly glazed areas penetrated with washes and scratched lines, and colors unaffectedly mingled. Beneath the independent, freely brushed strokes there is a vision of a landscape space which provides structure to some of the works in the form of organic natural elements such as flowers, waterfalls, the sky, sunlight and trees.  These primeval elements make the works disarmingly genuine.

While the paintings relate to masters of the past such as the expressionists, El Greco, Albert Pinkham Ryder and even the Impressionists, they present a contemporary universal aura.  Their individuality and originality are underscored by the almost diarist psychological narrative that unfolds progressively as the formats are built up and torn down in moves that stress potentiality and growth. The seemingly casual, surprisingly intuitive yet urgent application of the paint is refreshing. There is little reference to figure-ground in these works; nothing could be less descriptive. In the large triptych “A Wounded World Still Holds Us” (2022) one can realize a landscape dotted with trees, and a forest pathway that appears to have undressed dancers moving in a clearing.  There is a bubble embedded on the left that illustrates a possible shipwreck, with surviving figures on the beach. Most of the works seem to evoke a twilight to dusk light effect, creating a moody, but not especially melancholy ambiance.  The primary colors of slashing, overlapping strokes merge, evoking primordial seasonal intervals and rhythms. 

Cunningham’s use of purple-pink, red, orange and yellow opens up the ochre and blue-green nature inspired surfaces to provide added inferences. Sometimes flower petals dominate a canvas loosely, sometimes the swirl of undergrowth is implied. Lakes are hinted at, but very subtly. What matters is the artist’s character expressed in her expansive inspirations. “River Mouth” (2021), an unexpected work that embodies an exploration of deep pictorial space, is apparently designed with a waterfall in mind. 

In the work entitled “Siren,” colorful butterflies and birds appear to be flying aloft, close to a cleared walkway. Viewers must suspend judgement and relax to allow the paint to tell its story; there is only inherent poetry and imagination to lead one. The piece entitled “Turbulence” (2001) appears to be inspired by an immersive forest fire approaching two trees, which may be referencing recent global forest   conflagrations. Some of the warm colored hues tinge the works with the feel of autumn or sunset, that mediates the role played by blue and green, with their intimations of nature, earth, life and renewal. Red is associated with the life force, with flames, blood, sacrifice and love, and in Japan and Korea with the sun. Yellow symbolizes life, fire and heat. The appeal of this group of paintings is their repetition of related and recreated styles and formats that put the mind at rest while engaging sensory feelings and visual insights.  

The titles are mysterious and thought provoking; they comprise personal poetry that doesn’t reveal much that relates to the artist’s intentions.  Some of the titles refer to machine culture, which is puzzling and enigmatic in the context of these apparently environmental images that unite the artist with nature’s patterns.  Cunningham seems to be playing with the viewer, keeping any obvious interpretations undercover.  “Machine Dreams,” “Dressing in Limbo,” “After-life,” “Folding Is A Kind of Fading Out,” “A Wounded World Still Holds Up,” “In Their Bilious Calling,” “Shrine,” and “Siren,” to name but a few, all present a cross between references to life, and to philosophy, in tension with natural allusions.  There is a significant metaphoric narrative in effect, though underground, non-descriptive.  

The blended strokes that merge together overlap potential boundaries, providing viewers an unfathomable consciousness of being inside someone’s head, flowing with the endeavors, thoughts and movements of the artist.  Cunningham’s approach to the picture plane seems to reveal pure exuberance, although there are dark sections at work as well, mitigated by thickly applied warm bright hues that in some instances suggest the dawning light of day.

I find these works to be liberating.  Cunningham doesn’t seem to care to please others; she paints for herself in her unfettered unencumbered style.  Her distinctive moves make the works flow from one to the next to create a unified story of her mind, that expresses itself in freedom of thought manipulated by painterly interpretation.  The paintings are highly sensual and visually engaging without the intercession of weighty conceptual dogmas to interrupt their authenticity. The art is alive; it is enough and it speaks for itself.