Jensen group show

Kelly Knoebel Roeth Bambury Innes Judd
Jensen
4 February - 6 March 2010

In the big downstairs space this six person show of regular Jensen artists, has mixed in some surprises - including some spectacular works on paper by legends Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd. The work as a collective body of geometric abstraction coheres well, though varying in its use of painted materials, the key chromatic (and dramatic) component in many items being a vibrant orange.

The 2 row 10 unit woodcut by Judd sets the tone. Typically it is permutations on a theme, with a five variation outer frame lined up on top and its removed rectangular centre positioned below. Both types of woodgrained orange shape, framed but not under glass, are traversed by single or double horizontal and vertical lines - the logic being tight, all possibilities intact.

Callum Innes has two wonderful ‘additive-subtractive’ paintings where orange and black oil paint has been applied (along with various other colours underneath) with sweeping horizontal arm movements, and then the righthand half of each vertically hung canvas slowly removed via the vertical application of turps. The process is very evident from the coloured stains and rivulets on the stretcher sides, and the ghostly smudges and scrubbed blurs on the canvas proper.

The only New Zealander here is Stephen Bambury. His single rectangular painting is related to pitted panels in his recent Jensen solo show. Here overlapping matt blue-grey and white-glazed black oblongs create a tension with a shiny black section in the centre, while two adjacent orange rectangles glow on the top left and bottom right corners.

The layers of thin white washes on the top right black rectangle have dark blurry edges and are comparatively abandoned, loose even (they could almost be sprayed) – with a very faint orange horizontal streak peeking through underneath near the top. This makes the work devoid of the tightly interlocking (and – I think - much superior) structure apparent in other similar, more recent works.

On the large wall by the office are two panels, one blood orange, the other soft Prussian blue, by Winton Roeth that are arranged one above (but not touching) the other. They are affected by gold lines bordering their outer edges, for the metallic colour is comparatively unstable – deepening and paling as you move past; disturbing their perimeters – unlike the intransigent velvety, paired oblongs enclosed within.

Imi Knoebel’s six sets of overlapping, paint-brushed, paper sheets play off qualities of hue and Albers’ Law of Simultaneous Contrast against directional striations caused by brush bristles agitating the wet painted surface. The striations within both the large and small sheets of each pair vertically descend above one stroke that horizontally traverses along the lower edge.

Each pair is positioned so their bottom edges are flush, and their optical qualities are difficult to determine - ie. is the colour the result of careful mixing by the artist, or the result of a very considered choice of painted background? Is the colour we perceive actually on the paper or in our brain? The large sheets alternate in their tonal qualities, also exploring nuances of chromatic temperature. They and their companions are under glass, and within stainless steel, welded burnished frames.

Ellsworth Kelly’s works from the mid–seventies provide the deliciously vibrant and eloquent flat shapes he is known for. One is a screenprint, the other a lithograph. The latter is a horizontal curve over two metres long. There is barely detectable embossed, straight edge above it that seems to enclose the hill-like form as if in a delicate, flat box.

This is a good introduction to the overseas artists in this show. The Kelly, Judd, and Knoebel paper works are particularly unusual.

(As in order of discussion, the images are by Judd, Innes, Bambury, Roeth, Knoebel and Kelly.)

Works on paper

Group show: C6H10O5 4
Jensen
June 9 – 21 July 2009

This works on paper show has a dozen artists participating and thirty-one items on display. Not all the works are purchasable: two (a Nauman drypoint and a Ryman aquatint) being on loan from private collections. Some of the works, like that of Ellsworth Kelly or Alex Katz, you rarely see in this country.

It is a good looking hang, with strategically positioned grids of prints arrayed amongst the rows of single items on the three mdf walls of the large downstairs space – and punctuated by the occasional lusciously painted block sculpture (on solid cardboard) by Elizabeth Vary.

Almost all of the work here is about tactility of surface; sensual qualities of thinly layered coloured paint or ink within rectangles, parallelograms or line. Two intriguing works by Winston Roeth of concentric circles are between Kenneth Noland and Ugo Rondinone in his use of that form. Impeccably spaced lines (dry tempera in one, soft fluffy pastel on coloured field in another) create their own internal tensions, but are not too big. They are intimate works that draw you in close to study the edges of their taut curved lines.

Taut but organic lines figure prominently in the suite of six 1993 Brice Marden etchings and aquatints (Han Shan Exit), a silvery grey homage to Pollock but even better. They feature a crisp thin wobbly line that is deceptively precise, used to create a superbly dramatic calligraphy that seems loosely wrapped around the human figure.

Callum Innes’s watercolours are like pages in an open book: transluscent layers of thin rectangular colour separately applied side by side and then over both. The dried watercolour pigment has left mottled ripples like those on the surface of a pool, but much much finer, with a delicate slightly cloudy chroma.

A drier stickier sort of surface, less liquid, is found in the aluminium and acrylic works by Stephen Bambury. They are of silver horizontal and vertical rectangles positioned at right angles to each other over a black square. Bambury inventively aligns the silver panels at different angles and alters the proportions of the black corners peeking through the intersecting edges. The surface quality of the silver paint has finely lined striations and smears, not so much scraped as direct application.

This is a good exhibition at Jensen - though perhaps it could have been more adventurous. It is very surface dominant, about seduction of the eye. One wonders about some of the non-painting artists this gallery shows like James Casebere and Tony Oursler and if they ever do preparatory drawings, and if so, on paper other than Arches. A scribbled text can be a drawing, and a brilliant writer like Oursler must make notes, and Casebere makes 3D models that surely he plans. The current display is a bit too much about finished product, whereas the rough and ready, more unpredictable processes of art thinking are immensely interesting too.

Jensen group show

E=MC2 (Innes: Sandback: Umberg)
Jensen
22 April - 29 May 2009

In this exhibtuion Andrew Jensen has selected these three artists to contribute two works each in a show that could be about quantum physics (the above 2 is meant to signify ‘squared’) - not so much referencing time and its experienced materiality, as phenomena such as black holes and the intangibility of surface.

Fred Sandback’s two minimalist sculptures are very distinctive with their use of tautly stretched double threads of black (sometimes grey) acrylic yarn to suggest planes. When not implying solid sheets, these wondrously intriguing lines push the eye up into the rafters to check out the nearby wiring and grid formations of the parallel wooden beams, or below, the oil, ink and paint stains on the oft repaired concrete floor.

The two Sandback works are quite different. One is a single box shape with no lid (like a U) in front of a long white wall. The other is of three vertical rectangles where two are on the same plane but separated by the distance of their own width. Projecting out from halfway between them, at a right-angle, is the third oblong.

In contrast to such linear austerity, Gunter Umberg’s paintings deal with spatial depth via the deepest and darkest of tones. Dry powdered black has been repeatedly applied on to wooden panels using a dammar binder brushed on in alternating horizontal and vertical strokes. This creates a very delicate woven texture. You’d swear it is from a thin light fabric but not so. The sheenless pigment creates a dense void that draws you in through the solid panels. One is like a very tall narrow doorway. The other is a square positioned high on the wall. It has thick bevelled sides that suspend the surface away from the wall so it hovers in front of it, while paradoxically creating a window through.

Callum Innes is widely known for the use of subtraction in his painting making processes, but in this show only one of the two paintings involves that, a work where a large rectangle of horizontally aligned viscous black paint has a centrally positioned thin vertical line cut down into it, and drawn on turps is used to remove inner residues.

The other work, the additive one, involves using a brush to flick specks and globules of thick red oil paint onto a canvas covered with wet shellac, and continually picking out and resetting bits of crumbling half dry paint by hand until the shellac hardens. Innes’ myriad splinterlike fragments, as with Umberg’s work, are deceptive. They look like traces remaining from the application of a solvent, but the ‘islands’ of paint remnants are much thicker. Many of the delicate traces come from slivers of oil skin that have later been relocated.

For anyone interested in the continual reinventing of paint application and process, the spatial depth achieved by superdark fields or the perceptual nuances of linear sculptural form, this is a wonderful show. A treat for lovers of abstraction.

Putting it on, taking it off

Callum Innes
Jensen Gallery
26 August - 20 September 2008

In this country the additive and subtractive processes of using materials to create artworks haven’t received the analytical attention as you might suppose they deserve, but in recent years ‘subtraction’ has been increasing its profile, in painting as well as sculpture.

Before I get to Innes I’m gong to meander a little. The links between the three artists I discuss here are obvious.

I first came upon the notion of ‘subtraction’ in the first Billy Apple work I ever experienced, a print room in Christchurch’s CSA which Billy had emptied out in 1975 as one stop on his national tour – all light fittings, switches, drawing pins – every superfluous item removed. Not only was the natural light and austerity very beautiful, but I was particularly impressed by Wystan Curnow’s wall statement:

The result of subtraction is absence. But absence cannot be defined as the result of subtraction. The reason being that absence does not necessarily imply there was anything there to begin with.

I really like this statement because it deals with what is visually evident. It insists that you think about what is before you – and what might be missing.

Judy Millar is another artist who employs subtraction, not as sculpture (like Apple) but as part of a painting process that is meant to exemplify irony. In her 2003 catalogue How to Paint Backwards, Anthony Byrt in an essay discussing the wiping off processes claims that her paintings ‘carry that sense of the viewer being able to penetrate the fluid surface with relative ease and it’s this fluidity that creates a desire for immersion rather than just surface contact.(p.5)’

So what is the significance of this ‘immersion’? I'm probably over simplifying but Byrt talks about the ‘weird spatial relationships between gesture and ground’ that cause underlying blocks of colour to ‘appear to be overpainting above her marks (p.6).’ The ‘painting backwards’ process is intended to deconstruct any expressionist connotations by acting out the role of making gestures ‘of expressive self’ instead of making marks that functioned sincerely as ‘an expressive act of self (p.3)’.

Yet in Millar’s work, like Apple’s, the process is not readily apparent. Though talked about as ‘looking back’ and embodying ‘inside–out-ness’, the material evidence is hard to perceive. The viewer needs a textual or verbal guide to understand a method that is so subtle it would reveal itself more by touch than by eye.

Not so for the related processes in Scottish painter Callum Innes’ production. The principles involved are comparatively detectable, though the number of turpentine washes needed to remove brushed on paint would be impossible to ascertain from the smudgy exhibited traces. Sometimes he leaves no traces at all so that some once paint-covered surface areas look completely untouched.

On Jensen's ground floor there are 15 works. If we analyse there are basically five sorts of painting:

(1.) The well known Exposed Painting series where the stretcher is divided up so that one rectangle of horizontally brushed on oil paint is left untouched. Some areas of white gesso look totally virgin, while the rectangle below shows traces of repeated vertical dribbles and thin stains of diluted pigment. Sometimes plummeting down from the bottom righthand corner of the painted rectangle is a solitary, smoky, curving, linear lick of dissolved pigment. Enigmatic and gorgeous.
Often there are varied treatments of oblong edges too.

(2.) The diptyches. Each is a stretcher divided in half; one side painted and left intact, the other with partially paint removed, so that the canvas looks smudged with faintly blurry traces. Sometimes the sides of the stretcher reveal paint remnants.

(3.) Two metre high works on paper that are framed and under glass. These look like bark patterns, like some sixties Australian ‘tree-based’ abstractions. Dramatic vertical rectangles, they have rows of repeated negative ‘brush’ lines erased into the paint.

(4.) Large smoky canvases covered with vertical lines that are sometimes so fine they even look scraped. They are powerfully evocative, beautifully composed with large portions of stained, ’removed’ canvas. The angular shapes make them vaguely reminiscent of the American artist Clyfford Still. They could initially be mistaken for charcoal drawings.

(5.) These speckled canvases have painted on shellac that has then been dissolved to leave specks and little crumbling islands of solid matter. They (the islands) seem thrown onto the canvas but are not. The surface has been painted first and then a solvent thrown on, I suspect, to leave eventually untouched grains of residue.

Innes’ trademark rivulets, stains and trickles are very seductive, especially when he combines his processes with careful placement of solid or semi-dissolved rectangles. Like those of Bernard Frize and Alexis Harding, Innes’s shows are a treat. It is always a pleasure to engage with the pigment application processes and procedural logics such innovative painters invent.