The muted colors and meticulous details perfectly evoke the reproductions in art books and catalogs of the 1930’s and 40’s. She has lovingly observed and recreated their discolored, brittle pages, corners often bent or missing, and brown stains of once clear mending tape now long gone. The copies of pages are usually somewhat askew on a pale warm gray background. The art is carefully reproduced, the text identification done with a keenly precise hand.

Mazza has chosen the works of Non-Objective artists Mondrian and Klee, and several lesser-known Cubists like Rudolf Bauer, Jean Xceron, and George Morris. Anyone willing to sink into the sensual pleasures of a second-hand bookstore, with its fragile volumes of aging paper and unexpected discoveries, will share in her delight. Seeing familiar paintings, now icons of non-representational art when they were freshly created and relatively unrecognized, one will understand her desire to both preserve and integrate her own voice with that history.

There are also several paintings obsessively reproducing small open notebooks complete with penciled note-taking and opened security envelopes in varied states of undress. Mazza shares a world of the signs and language of intimate communication.

A Bascove: What brought you, someone who painted brightly colored, highly-charged female nudes and lush still lifes, to work in the subdued tones of this recent work?
Jen Mazza: Good question!  Funny, I did not really think about the figurative works as nudes as there is so little of the body shown, but I suppose they could just as well be nude as clothed. To me the work has always been about painting and about language. From the still life, to the narrow focus in the figurative pieces on the mouth and the hands—both locations of expression; verbal and gestural language—to the new images focused on formal elements of both written and painting language: the abstractions, the intervention of shapes or structural aspects of written language—punctuation etc.  But I suppose, although what I depict in any given series is certainly not an accidental choice, I do generally consider the “subject” is a means to an end, a catalyst in articulating an idea, so it is common for my subject matter to change. And though it is probably surprising to say it, my palette has not changed much as far as what colors I use—the grays still have a lot of color in them—though you are right that the overall effect is quite subdued, no more the flush of blood just under the skin!  The chromatic grays allow the background to operate as surface, but also as space — keeps it more ambiguous, more open.

AB: What drew you to the images of Cubism and Russian Constructivism?
JM: Though I have been looking a lot at Malevich and his contemporaries, the new series of paintings relies on reproductions of abstract paintings that are mostly American, or made in the U.S., and usually from the 1940’s. These usually black and white reproductions are on pages I have literally cut or torn from books with heroic titles like ,”Pioneers of American Abstraction” or “New Frontiers in American Painting.” Black and white reproductions once frustrated me in their lack of correlation to the original artworks, now seem somewhat in the nature of “authorless texts”, or perhaps unwitting collaborations between painter and printer. In the paintings, the formalist reproductions are represented still circumscribed within the rectangle of the page, which, with its dog-eared corners or other signs of age serves both to enclose the image and to push it back in time. In this way the images seem to remain in a citational form, as quotations of an original.

Though initially, through the process of painting, I really do inhabit these works as a maker, when this layer is complete I subvert the images by overlapping my own interventions: geometric shapes — and constructivist forms as you mentioned; an organic shape quoted from a Moholy-Nagy painting or a red oval taking its color palette from a Liubov Popova painting — add to these the formal compositional elements of written language: punctuation, parentheses, asterisks and so on.

AB: Your subject matter seems to be constantly evolving. What’s inspiring you now? 
JM: I am still interested in verbal and written language and the language of painting, though what form the upcoming work will take is still vague and illusive — I am sure it will come into focus soon enough. I’ve come to trust the process over time.

Last spring I took a trip to Bulgaria, out of a desire to be confronted with a language that would not only be opaque to me, in that I did not speak it, but would also be visually incomprehensible: Cyrillic characters literally make no sound when I look at them. Whether this experience was a parallel to the “soundless texts” of symbols I was already incorporating into the “Graft” paintings, or if it will lead to some new level in the work I have yet to discover.

The post Educated Copyist: The Work of Jen Mazza appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Rather than using flat color, Jacquette’s forms are slowly built with layered, short strokes, creating textures that shimmer with the sensual richness found in the works of the Impressionists.  In New York Natural History Museum II the foreground roof structures and rooftops almost vibrate with brilliant blue purples and ceruleans enveloped in roof tar black. Foliage, painted in mauves and dark browns, encircles the Museum and its neighbors.   It’s a view that overlooks Central Park, with a delicate line of night-lit buildings at the top edge of the canvas and a New Yorker’s wit of a miniscule Guggenheim, in pale blue green, poking out above the trees of the far East Side.

From the velvet, almost iridescent-toned pastels on paper, basic positions and relationships are noted. Beautiful in the haunting way that comes only from a first impression, their saturated color and intense blacks create a depth that is almost vertiginous.  It is enlightening to compare them to the larger paintings in these rooms.

With Whitney Museum Under Construction II, what were faint and secondary elements in the original drawing, the streets and roads on either side of the site, have developed into essential components in form and color. The highway by the Hudson River becomes a powerful circular force that directs the eye right to the blue center of the canvas, the point of the Museum’s steady growth. The headlights of the moving cars and the motion lines added around the vehicles on both the right highway and the pink-hued streets on the left edges, add an energy that contrasts with the quiet stability of the building in process. A strip of raised gray and pale blue rises up, like the nearby street, from an entirely different angle, alongside of architect Renzo Piano’s massive construction site. Blue shapes of its empty floors seem to transition into the flow of the river itself.

Most intriguing is a series of collages where, as in a Cubist dream, shapes cut out from a previously made landscape print are playfully reconfigured as pure geometric form. Changing perspectives and realigned structures create variations of each landscape and the homes scattered across them.

Yellows, golds, white and blue lights infuse the darkness of the multiple perspectives of Late Sun Above Madison Square Park II.  Pattern against pattern is used to convey spatial distance.  Round, warm salmon-pink shapes indicating the ground level balance each other on the lower corners. Somehow we hover above both. Although it is a nocturnal scene, the sky is a vibrating blue that matches the building’s lights. The lush mound of trees is built over the same blue, with a multitude of dots of black, brown, and dark green. There is a rare sighting of human forms on the glowing path through the Park.

By A. Bascove

The post Painting from Above with Yvonne Jacquette appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Here are a few of my favorites:

I hope Judy Pfaff had as grand a time creating Night Blooming Ceres as we have in experiencing it.  It hangs on the wall, lit from behind, with florescent tubes expanding its delicacy and translucence. Pfaff ‘s wry humor is in full display as we recognize her unlikely materials. Ranging from honeycomb cardboard, melted plastic, paper coffee filters, and Chinese lanterns.  They brilliantly create a glowing flora of texture and light.

Structural Detour 13 is a fine example of Nicola Lopez’s eloquence with the chaotic geometry of urban structures. With a bright red orange background, she has layered printed remnants of girders and steel beams, fragments of an exploded construction site.

Delicate plastic filaments and cooper wire shimmer like jewelry in Nancy Cohen’s Contradiction in Terms. In the soft green and aqua colors of sea-tossed glass, a multitude of gem-like transparent and opaque surfaces are entangled together, as though they were caught in seaweed and found washed up on the shore.

Imaginary constellations are formed in Victoria Burge’s lyrical meditations on space. Ink washes over the faint echoes of a map to give depth and the impression of clouds within her illuminated skies. There is ample room for conjecture as interpretation can veer between stars, flight paths, or city lights; those secret connections in the darkness.

In stark contrast, Susanna Heller’s work bursts with the frenzied use of paint, impasto strokes and drips of the expressionist hand. With a strong color palette, variations of warm and cool grays are a background to teals, pale yellow, sienna, and the occasional shock of red.  Necklace of Stones depicts the violence of demolition at the edge of a city. Urban imagery is shown at a high point of disorder and transmutation.

Melvin Edward Nelson brings a sense of spiritual fervor and intimations of transcendence. His dreamlike, visionary images are riveting. Planetary Ladder, 1964 is a work of pastel pinks and vibrant violet watercolor. A strong black grid dominates the center of the page as it reaches towards an otherworldly sphere. If you look closely you’ll see faint lines and handwriting showing through from the back side of the paper. It has obviously had a prior life.

By A. Bascove

The post The Land Before and After Time appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.