Category: reviews

by John Mendelsohn

New York has a rare opportunity to see the work of the Italian modernist Bice Lazzari (1900-1981). The Mark & The Measure, the title of the exhibition at kaufmann repetto, organized with Richard Saltoun Gallery, captures the essential elements of Lazzari’s art – an intimate touch and an intuitive sense of visual structure. Together they combine to create works of unusual delicacy and power, animated by a musical pulse and emotive overtones. Over time, Lazzari’s abstract work evolved from gestural paintings, to strongly material pieces, to rhythmic, minimalist statements.

Lazzari wrote, “In paintings, I love light, space, rigor, structure, synthesis … and a little poetry.” The work in this survey exhibition, spanning the last four decades of her career, displays all of these qualities, and a pervasive, personal sense of mystery. This feeling is conveyed in the title of Laura Cherubini’s essay, Bice Lazzari: The Inner Life of Signs. In her essay, Cherubini points to specific influences on the artist’s work, and to a “lucid and epiphanic condensation of memory” (quoting Marisa Vescovo), that her work embodies.

Among the memories that shaped Lazzari’s paintings are her years working in the applied arts of weaving, textiles, mosaics, and murals, collaborating with Italian architects and designers. This work liberated Lazzari from her early training in figurative painting, opening her to the possibilities of geometric design and abstraction. The creation of continuous visual fields and an awareness that art was one with architectural space would go on to inform her paintings. Particularly resonant of this period is Lazzari’s Untitled from 1949 (the titles are translated from the Italian), a minimalist grid in deep red and black tempera on paper.

Beginning in the 1950s, Lazzari was able to devote herself to painting, first to geometric abstraction and then to gestural works, such as Night Writing, a storm of agitated, slashing strokes. Collage 1, with its blocky, emphatic forms and raw texture seems informed by both the “matter painting” and angst of post-war Italy’s Informalism.

Lazzari was born in Venice in 1900, where she studied the violin as a child. She moved to Rome in 1935, where she lived for the next five decades. Music’s ongoing influence emerged after a period of crisis, in the new direction Lazzari embarked on in 1964. There is a sense of fugitive feeling embedded in the physical surfaces of these works, such as Testimony, an atmosphere of tonalities that emerge from the surface of tempera, glue, and sand on canvas.

Similarly, in the powerful Sequence 3, a series of seven dark lines recede in perspective, suspended in a field of striations, that itself hovers like a vignette in a dream. The effect is that of an existential declaration of both individual agency and enveloping impermanence.

From the late 1960s, until the end of her life, Lazzari’s work incorporated the structural, the musical, and the lightness of material form in works that are by turn spare and intense, minimal and maximal. Untitled from 1967, paradoxically dense and subtle, is a dark, minimally woven field with extremely fine lines of lighter weft, divided into three columns by two warp lines in red and white.

In Untitled (Q-435) from 1972-73, dark space is traversed by tonal bands, the lightest of which is demarcated by a sequence of light and bold backslashes and dashes, alternating with blocks of emptiness. It is unaccountably moving, like a message in transit, sent out in the night, with and without hope of being heard.

Acrylic no. 6 from 1975 is both like the score and the playing of a musical composition, whose notes are fine and finer lines in black and red, shivering with the slight vibrato of the artist’s hand. A strict sequence is established, and then interrupted by two small, surprising anomalies that resonate in a vast white silence.

As Bice Lazzari wrote, “everything that moves in space is measurement and poetry. Painting searches in signs and color for the rhythm of these two forces, aiding and noting their fusion.”

Bice Lazzari: The Mark & The Measure (Selected Works from 1939-1978): kaufmann repetto, 55 Walker St., New York – May 12-June 17, 2023

by Jonathan Goodman

Costas Picadas comes from Greece, having been brought up in a family of doctors. But, eschewing that way of life, he decided to become an artist and studied in Paris before moving to New York City, where he now lives and works. A few years ago, his paintings were messy affairs, being taken up with dense overlays of rounded globular forms, much like the cells you might see in a microscope. Often, too, scribbles would make their way across the picture plane to the white sides framing the composition. The results were energetic and entertaining, as if the painting had forgotten its own boundaries.

But quite recently, Picadas has become a bit more restrained. His current works make use of similar drop-like forms, but the overlay of skeins of line is mostly gone. In consequence, the artist has moved more closely to classically defined abstract expressionism, an idiom so powerful it still effectively supports current efforts in the genre.

The ab-ex movement was enabled to a good extent by the efforts of foreign-born artists, and so Picadas is working within a decades-long tradition, It no longer makes sense to characterize this work as evidencing the original cultural influences on the artist practicing the style, Instead, the vernacular has become thoroughly international. The efflorescences of Picadas’s paintings are understood at once as joining the efforts of previous artists in New York.

Yet there are differences, too. Remembering the medical background of Costas’s family, we can imagine his imagery as coming from pictures taken with a microscope’s magnification. The works are hardly compositions for doctors to study, but perhaps there is a trace of medical rigor to be found in the pictures. In the painting Biome 2 (2022), globules in white, with designs within them drawn in a very light gray, drift across the entire composition. They are painted on a grayish wall of bricks. In the lower part of the work, small splotches of black dot the areas between the globules accompanied by pale green, inchoate forms and even a single golden form. This piece surely looks like a slide of some foreign bacterium. The surface, which is busy, carries the interest, although we are unsure about a precise meaning beyond the dense arrangement of diverging shapes.. In Biomae 11 (2022), a black vertical column acts as the major support of the image, but light blue-gray lines, forming circles and rough, undefinable forms, cover the dark mass rising upward. Thinner lines adorn the sides of the column, whose brute force is softened by the embellishments.

In a separate but strikingly effective group of works, Picadas uses a computer process to generate imagery closely aligned with the body and with nature. The work is small and figurative, but exquisitely detailed in ways that emphasize not only the overall gestalt, but also the sharp details. Lungs (YEAR?), Costas posts a highly detailed, highly realistic vision of the organs of breath: a trachea moves down the composition to split into two pipes, one each going to the semi-oval shape of each lung. Covering the lungs are small black blotches that combine with a tree-like maze of slender stems, ostensibly to carry the oxygen to the rest of the body. The graphic immediacy of the image astonishes; the sharpness of detail feels microscopic. In another image, called Heart (YEAR?), the reddish-brown semi-oval shape of a human heart anchors the thin stalks bearing black blossoms that rise from the upper surface of the organ. Here anatomy meets the lyrical bent of nature, and both appear enhanced by the affiliation.

Picadas’s art reverses our expectations by merging the intuitions of the process, its justifications as an interpretation of what we see, with the much more stringent detailing of natural (or scientific) imaging. In his case, the merger makes sense in that he comes from a family whose vocation was scientific in nature. By softening his effects a bit, Picadas mkes it clear that the scientific methods contribute well to a view most effectively disposed toward painting, rather than to the rigors of the lab. Picadas uses his background well, but medicine never overtakes his pictorial intelligence. We can conclude that the painter’s merger, between cellular depiction and free-wheeling abstraction, consistently results in compelling art.

by Christopher Hart Chambers

Francesco  Igory Deiana’s  exhibition comprises three different mediums and several entirely disparate approaches to art making: drawings, paintings, and sculptures. The salient unifying feature is that all of the work is exquisitely well crafted. The paintings, which make up the bulk of the show, are rendered in latex and acrylic in solid bright colors, for hard edged abstractions with strong, simple graphics. Ribbons of color, some shiny, some matte, wriggle down and across the surfaces. There are emblematic wings that might be borrowed from a Bavarian crest and stylistic serifs flare off in the otherwise essentially symmetrical compositions. In the back area of the gallery one larger and one smaller painting face each other. These two portray folding screens adorned with various abstracted motifs.

The monochromatic graphite drawings are backed with smudgy cloud formations like shimmering or dappled light. Atop this parallel vertical straight lines run about an eighth of an inch apart, like piano strings, twinkling in and out of the gloaming hypnotically. They are poster sized vertical rectangles; hung in a grid four across and two high. The imagery is cut off midway in a crescent so that the way they are displayed one has to either bend down or be very tall to look at either row straight on which forces the viewer to experience them peripherally and swoon a bit with the illusionistic Op Art effect.

There are fewer sculptures: a couple of globes resembling balls of wool and a cast, pigmented resin human head. It is not clear what ties these pieces in thematically with the rest, but in its gestalt the display is entirely appealing and sensually gratifying.

Francesco Igory Deiana: CRAZY ANGEL at Ruttkowski;68, New York City from April 7, 2023 to May 13, 2023

by Jonathan Goodman

Alvin Roy, a painter of considerable gifts, was born and raised in Houston during the Civil Rights era. He studied first at the Houston Technical Institute, then moved to New York City to further his studies at Pratt Institute. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, he enlisted in the Marines. This decision provided him with the chance to travel and experience other cultures. In Okinawa, Roy studied watercolor techniques with a local master, also internalizing the recognition that the spiritual life of an object is as important as the formal attributes it consists of. Roy has remained in Houston for more than forty years now, using mixed-media assemblage to create bas-relief wall pieces. Jazz, an important influence, occurs in his work in the form of saxophones, keyboards, and colorful patterns that reflect the texture of the music. Roy also turns to Egyptian culture, imaging pharaohs and, also, figures of ancient spiritual archetypes. Most recently, Roy has resorted to mixed-media techniques and collage on paper to explore the quilting tradition in the southern United States and to address the history of the Underground Railroad.

Roy’s formidable energy is evident from the start. His work, at first glance, looks entirely abstract, but the reliefs are more truly described as a mixture of abstract and figurative influences. His recent series, “Talking Heads,” regularly includes white vertical bars, decorated randomly, that divide the large painterly field occurring behind them. Color is important in its own right, but oneiric forms are also found. Eyes, noses, mouths, and, every so often, a full figure can be found in these complex assemblages of abstract shapes, often pieced together as one would find in a quilt. Roy’s colors also are unusually strong; they are dense, often dark, and luminous, as if rising from the night in a dream. His talents are such that he has found a way of connecting with history and culture more by implication rather than by direct illustration. His multi-cultural approach, evident in the combination of forms, materials, and allusions, make him a national artist of note—even when his inspiration is deeply personal.

Perhaps the most accomplished element in Roy’s work is his ability to create intricate genres: partly non objective, partly figurative; both sculptural and representational; and measured and free. In many ways, this is the manner in which an innovative exploratory artist works—by merging genres, images, and materials. In Roy’s case, such combinations are made stronger by the framework of history, as well as references to the ancient art of Egypt. We are living in a time of unusual eclecticism, and Roy’s composite efforts make wonderful use of the old and the new. Certainly, the work’s overall impression tends to be one of colorful abstraction, but recognizable figurative elements, sometimes partially hidden by the overall pattern of the paint, also make their way into Roy’s art. One instinctively feels that his historical references structure and deepen the paintings’ ability to communicate. It is not easy to find such a successful mix of histories, and patterns informed by those stories, in works that convey a visionary point of view. Alvin Roy’s work can be viewed in a virtual gallery at:

https://bit.ly/ccapalroyex

by Anne Leith

Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature, is the title of Saul Acevedo Gomez’s recent installation at Swivel Saugerties. The title references Magritte’s painting ‘Forethought’, depicting a tree branching out with a curious group of diverse flower varieties, and like Magritte, Gomez’s work is a layered puzzle of ideas and images, including what Magritte called ‘language games’. Gomez’s subject matter is nature, but not depicted in a naturalistic way – he creates drawings of rooms with artwork and text, such as canvases leaning face towards the walls, childlike depictions of trees and flowers on strips of paper, personal notes, references to other artists and writers, and cryptic commentary. These drawings reflect on how we are failing in our attempts to keep the planet healthy – and to the anxiety that provokes – perhaps due to a lack of forethought?

Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature was situated in a small bank vault room, ‘The Safe’. The installation included tiled floors that match those in the drawings, which enhanced the effect of entering into a claustrophobic diorama of ideas. The enclosed space of The Safe, with its echo chamber of sound was the perfect setting for creating a deliberate sense of unease, with the implication that ‘nature’ is now a precious commodity that is locked away in a man-made vault for safe keeping.

Each drawing is an exploration of ideas, deliberately hidden and ambiguous, with canvases leaning against the walls, the front side unseen. The interiors walls of these ‘rooms’ are layered with repeated childlike drawings of trees and flowers and hand-drawn wood grain, creating an attractive decorative space then subverted by scrawled dystopic messages. Text and titles such as Don’t Worry We Got Art, How To Be At Peace With Nature, and Sit and Meditate The Fire Is Coming pointedly undermines any sense of comfort or simple pleasure in the images. One example is Find Me If You Are Feeling Anxious, which includes a drawn computer link to search for How To Enjoy this Moment and the back of a canvas roughly drawn with the text I Hope You Start Panicking Today.

Gomez creates a matrix of illusion in these poetic works, connecting art, nature, and the internet – complex yet refreshingly clear with well-thought-out ideas. His drawn link motif to internet searches such as How Can I Experience Nature emphasizes the non-experiential way we interact today with the nature around us – as do the canvases leaning against the wall – another level of separation from truly seeing what is going on.

This intriguing show is layered with meaning, and handsomely offers up a troubling look at one artist’s view of the state of man/nature/art and the ideas surrounding their interface today.

Saul Acevedo Gomez: Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature, Swivel Saugerties, Safe Room Project, 258 Main Street, Saugerties, NY 12477 November 12 – December 11, 2022