Little of that movement exists in the new collection now on view at Marlborough.  And though the theme of this series is “reification,” which suggests a solidification that might intend a termination of movement in the technical narrative as well, too many of these paintings nevertheless feel inert beyond the theme, which should not preclude a heartbeat.

Two works in particular highlight the contrast.  In Transubstantiation, one of few paintings in the exhibition with any kind of pulse, we are witness to a collection of statues in an Indian temple.  That they are statues indeed warrants scant motion upon the canvas, and considering the theme it is what we might expect.  Parrying those expectations, however, Desiderio charges these figures with animating energies that bring them fluidly into being.  They are not just alive, they are actively so.  This “activity” is borne out mostly in the technical landscape of the painting—a push of orange from a severed limb, prods of shadow, the weighted applications of legs, the bracketing of bodies and positioning of hands—all nudge the eye inward toward a highlighted rump, then onward and around.  The movement in itself generates a kind of sub narrative in the painting we are obliged to participate in, be it consciously or not.  Our contribution here is in reading motion into the hips; an erotic thrust that course upward and outward through each of the four figures, infusing each with an enlivening, sensual spirit.  The figures spark alive at the play of our eyes and in that instant their entire domain shamanically shifts.  Transubstantiation becomes the most interesting piece in the show because the artist forges pathways on a technical level that encourage a reciprocal viewing.  The painting opens itself to the eye and allows our imagination to wander and take root.  It comes alive because we are the living presence moving through it.  We, then, become comrade in the artistry.

Vincent Desiderio, Ekphrasis, 2013. Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.

Ekphrasis, on the other hand—an enervate triptych mere footsteps down the wall—attempts to capture in one of its three panels an instance of outright motion: five stop-framed skaters in a roller derby match.  Roller derby is that grand spectacle where teams of women brawl and spit and elbow each other headlong out of the rink—a pleasurable display of thuggery that generally whips the crowd into a playful frenzy.  The sport, the women, and the crowd all allow wholesale license for the artist himself to be equally playful in the rendering, joining in his subject’s good fun, but Desiderio will have none of it.  What he gives us instead is a sour, sad little portrait of women who are more skittish than draped in natural swagger.  They mope, as if shrinking from some stern scolding.  Observing them is no easy task (nor is it pleasant), for nothing in the scene pulls us in, particularly not these symbolic creatures, but nothing in the artistry as well.  There are the gauzy delineations of craftsmanship, but the effect is thin and insubstantial.  Worse, the image is utterly devoid of presence, which makes our viewing slightly unsettling because a suspicion creeps in that the Desiderio we’ve warmed to over the years has in the interim been snatched off by Pod people.  As with the Pods, something of a replacement hand feels at work here, one fallen soft, somnolent, and one-dimensional.  Lacking in particular is any distinctive voice, which in absence strangely unspeaks the painting’s title.

“Ekphrasis,” by the way, literally means to “speak out,” and it refers to the act of describing an object of art in a dramatic and lively manner, as when, for instance, a poet describes a vase.  Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn is a high example of ekphrasis.  The artfulness of the description is part of a long rhetorical tradition dating back to the Greeks who laid out rules as to how an ekphratic description should play out.  Implicit is the obligation on the part of the storyteller to communicate the essence of the art piece—its timeless nature, its internal poetry—so as to conjure in the mind of the audience a vivid representation.  The third panel of Ekphrasis clearly fails in that obligation.

But so too does the second.  The middle panel in this large triptych is a sliced view of Degas’ bronze sculpture, The Little-Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, though lost are the curves and bursting adolescence of the original.  Desiderio’s depiction, far from being in the ekphratic tradition, is more egregiously dispirited and dull.  His languorous dancer is either tired, bored or simply can’t be bothered.  She is given 1/8 of the canvas to express herself and, frankly, even that feels too much.  Its tandem placement with the skaters, rather than producing an interesting juxtaposition or an amplifying linkage on some compelling idea, instead only siphons our interest further off.  By the time we’ve taken in the complete canvas, which includes in the first panel a terrace view of an apartment/office bloc, we, like Degas’ stand-in, can no longer be bothered trying to thread meaning into the disparate, if impenetrable narrative.

Ekphrasis emphatically fails, and for many of the same reasons so too do the majority of paintings in this listless exhibition.  One feels the artist has become overly bound in his own rigorous discipline and is now trammeled in ways no longer healthy to a lyrical, creative expression.  Karloff’s mummy in The Awful Indifference (a lovely new work!) might offer a word of caution against wrapping oneself too tightly in the cloth of the ancients.  Apart from the intellectually stimulating Three Acts of Defilement, which reads as a tacit indictment of the art world, few other paintings in this new series have anything to say that hasn’t gone buried in hermeticism and glaze.  On display here are the exquisitries of craft, and that is not enough.

By Christopher Hassett

The post Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The animating strike is the question, “what does it mean to be an American today,” an idea that resides as much in abstract notions of America as in a chimeric Americana, in those fabled high periods of yore. America today is a country far downwind from those onetime peaks, and in the lowlands things have begun to smell a bit foul. The stench no doubt lifts from the Corpse Politicus, our national institution that’s been so supremely bungled by the very leaders we entrusted with its care.

It should be noted, if we are to ground this exhibition in the current moment, that America is a nation assuredly polarized, and the rift is unflaggingly wrenched wide by “representatives” who insist on dividing our national oneness into a sumless, disunioned bunch. A fragmented citizenry makes for easy pickings, and in a few short decades our elected leaders have stripped the communal landscape bare, colluding with their corporate consorts in defunding or outright dismantling the social and cultural fabric that at one time wove this nation into a believable fiction. At hand now is nothing short of a masturbatory farce, and it is the Americans—the noble subjects of this show—who must suffer through the requisite, never-ending cum shot.

The new divide manages to make everyday acts of being as much political as they are inherently personal. To be gay in America, immigrant, pregnant, jobless, uneducated, uninsured, hungry, without heat; all speak to a political beyond the personal. Further pushing our private selves into the political sphere is the fact that we as citizens are now routinely surveilled: our phone calls, emails, online searches, purchases, our point-by-point movements throughout the day. All of which makes us, whether we like it or not, political beings who possess a certain anxiety-producing potential, a truth that terrorizes our government enough to warrant an obsessive homeland reconnaissance.

The press release for Corpus Americus acknowledges these tensions in citing Habeas Corpus as derivation for the exhibition’s title. Translating as “you shall have the body,” Habeas Corpus, the release states, “is an important, often-manipulated legal instrument safeguarding individual freedom from arbitrary state action.” The theme, then, offers a rich platform for raw, unchecked expression and, one would’ve hoped, fearless interpretations of what it means to be an American today.

So it is curious how tepid some of the works in this exhibition are, or how unspecific they are to any experience uniquely American. From another angle, namely curatorial, I puzzle at an allowance for artwork that fails to explore the implicit tensions in the show’s title and explicitly addressed in its stated theme. Certainly some do, but easily a third of the works do not. For instance, how does Margaret Bowland’s The Tea Party, a well-crafted painting of two children lazing in their party dresses amongst fine linens and a goose, articulate a “distinctly American” experience? The goose brings me straight to Europe, but that might be my own skewed reference points. Instead, I’ll drop my focus to the lower registers of the painting where an oily-milky substance pours down from on high and splashes in at the girls’ bottoms. Are we to infer something American in this? Might there be some veiled environmental commentary about, say, how current practices in the oil and agricultural industries are dirtying or endangering our children? Perhaps, but then the girls in the painting remain perfectly untouched. More specific to the curator’s own citation of Habeas Corpus, one has to wonder how The Tea Party is anywhere in the same universe as “safeguarding individual freedom from arbitrary state action”?

The same questions arise when looking at Simon Leigh’s Cowrie #82, a glazed stoneware representation of, well, a cowrie. The piece feels so oddly out of context in an exhibition attempting to explore meaning in being a citizen of this land that it demands your full and considered attention for no other reason but to understand its placing. What is it about a sea shell, this sea shell, that speaks to the American experience? I walked away clueless.

Still, there are a handful of strong representations in this intimate, twelve-piece show. The standout is Doron Langberg’s On All Fours #3, a work of brute eloquence that communicates the full poundage of what it means to be an American in the first decades of the 21st Century. The painting sits just on the representational side of abstraction, an ambiguous medial that in itself speaks starkly to a now generalized American experience–that of alienation, isolation and despair, of feeling unseen, unrepresented, and permanently on the out. The figure in the painting is a muddied totality of it all and his body no longer bears the weight. He is fallen to such an extent that it implicates each one of us, while as a society we are all the more culpable for allowing such wholesale slippage to occur in our midst. Few amongst us would note this one’s plight for he is so far sunken, more of soil than flesh, a mere mound of ochres and raw umbers that hint only minimally at a presence. While the forces dragging him low seem nearly gravitational, as if from the inward collapse of some existential black hole, what keeps him there is the crushing tide of the world around him which crashes-in at his back in broad and abrupt strokes of blue. America is not one for lifting its fallen, preferring they languish for the long, slow fade; on his own, the figure in On All Fours #3 will not be standing anytime soon.

A small delight in the exhibition is Mario Moore’s, Grisaille of Oshun.  Stylistically simple, with a palette straying little beyond the primaries, the painting is a gracefully understated study of an individual who is unmistakably American because she is so fiercely individual. Moore taps squarely into forces of womanhood that find equivalence in such natural phenomena as typhoons or earth-rending quakes. His heroine is all soldier, a panther in spirit who will tear the flesh from any fool who attempts a cross or any system that conspires to marginalize or estrange. It would be our error to believe she’s a sheltered thing come of age through shaded narrows of innocence, as might be inferred from the cover of an early issue of Jet magazine at her feet. In its early years, Jet—belying their wholesome covers—steadily chronicled the grueling, often murderous struggle for civil rights. At the same time, the magazine offered a crucial, unchallenged voice to the nation-shaking ideologies of that movement’s towering leaders. Perhaps more relevant to the heroine of Grisaille of Oshun, Jet would later give prominent coverage to feminist/Black activist warriors such as Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver. We’d be wiser, then, to assume the magazine at her feet is but one in a lineage of teachers in the art of war. Yet though her fist lies like a hammer at the ready, what allows her to lift into the highest representation of an American in this show is how open and easy she is, how ready to nurture and warm all who enter her care. To that end, she is as much an American archetype as a Woman for the ages.

By Christopher Hassett

The post Corpus Americus at Driscoll Babcock appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Part of what disquiets in this utterly hushed series is the spectering of Quinlan’s aggressive hand, which haunts in ways comparable to the cramping of a limb not long ago severed. It manifests as fitful revenant in openly hostile attacks against the negatives themselves, which are scarred with slashings and steel wool scourings and experimental broodings borne of plain artistic urge. A good dozen-plus prints in the show reflect the latter. As fly to wonton boys, killed solely for the sport, the negatives for these prints were left for hours or days in chemical baths, eroding or outright obliterating any image that might have been and erasing with it any expectation as to what a photograph should even minimally convey. To that end, these prints merely allude to photography, working as they do in the same medium. They are acting, however, in an alternate other: as medium in a kind of necromancy. They conjure rather than represent.

Summoned prominently throughout the series is the artist’s twin sister, who appears in various states of alarm, wistful cheer, or melancholy. In Sister,we find the twin relatively pert, with a ready smile and kitten in hand. But something is off. The kitten has a glaucomic, breathless glare, as if held too tightly in her handler’s grip. The sister, for her part, is not so much showing off the kitten as using it for shield against a lens that seems a shade too intrusive. Its placement, however—the kitten’s—leaves the twin partially defaced and her remaining eye is Cyclopian and slant and communicates a presence only half there. She could be looking at us or through or nowhere at all. The shot’s dis-ease is further amplified by the intervention of the artist herself, the other half, who nearly halves the image again into chemical abstraction, then attacks what’s left with fingernail-like gashes that cut at the kitty’s already traumatized face, around the sister’s nose, across her forehead.

I suspect a conflict. And since this show so ruthlessly prods at the imagination yet so graciously and receptively allows for an imaginative response, I propose an interpretation, however partial, one that’s fraught with sisterly cattiness. Mindful to the show’s title, something indeed feels hanging in the space between picture-taker and subject, a separation of sorts, a curtain. Might it have anything to do with the lounging male friend we see in Tulips?  Tulips is one of two prints in the exhibition that is a rephotographing of photograph. In other words, the artist pins a snapshot to a wall and shoots it again in place. The other such print, a virtual twin of the first, is Lady. The single difference being the snapshot in Tulips is swapped out for a snapshot of the sister. As they hang in the gallery, the sister in Lady looks back grimly toward the male friend in Tulips, as if in judgment or in longing. Finally, in Open City, —the last we see of the sister before the series moves entirely into abstraction—the twin looks entirely worn, as if from years of loss. In her hand is a photograph that bears the considerable weight of her gaze. What faintly bleeds through the backside of that photograph appears to show a photo within a photo, as if she too is looking at the same image we look at when viewing “Tulips.”  What is the relationship between the sister(s) and this male friend, and is it a corroding source of sibling tension?  The remaining abstractions in the series prevent any firm conclusions, which in a way duplicates the interesting and disorienting effects we experience when viewing at least half the images in the collection, i.e. it effectively obliterates our ability to see the whole.

Eileen Quinlan, Sun and Stars, 2013. Gelatin silver print. Image courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery.

Of these abstractions, one of particular interest, in part because it works nicely as a metaphor for the show, is Sun and Stars. The composition is a record of its own developmental decay, a kind of graphic birthing that comes in allowing the negative to waste away in a corrosive wash. The result here, as if through a chemical big bang, is a spacial, densely celestial realm that orbs and turns and at its outer edges frays. In it a ghostly traveler floats up from the thick, clutching to the tatters of some astral fabric as he attempts an entry into the illumined core. Though not yet through. He remains ever at the edge, in the purgatorial peripheries of a lovely, long-sought world.

A companion print—yet another twin, though this one in way of a polarity—is Top Down. Top Down is a charged, lightning-blast of an image that would be no stranger amongst Dore’s masterful illustrations for Dante’s Divina Commedia; his “Burning Graves—The Heresiarchs” would be its perfect companion. Quinlan’s image would likewise welcome an embedded quote from that same canto Dore so splendidly illuminates:  “And now there came over the turbid waves a crash of fearful sound, at which both shores trembled: a sound as of wind, violent from conflicting heats…”  Indeed, the image crackles in white hot shards that crystalizes its upper spheres before flaming Phoenix-like into a simmering darkness. Top Down is the burning heart of Curtains, a series that otherwise roils in its own quiet storm.

By Christopher Hassett

The post Eileen Quinlan’s Curtains at Miguel Abreu appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

My impression, however, in moving through the two-level group show was that the artists in the gallery’s meandering lower level were engaged in a more interesting and urgent discussion about a virulent kind of masculinity that is proving to be not just failed but fatal to the long term existence of our species.

The spirit of this debate is embodied, literally, in the works of the Moscow collective, Tanatos Banionis, a commando band of artists/tattooists who employ Japanese warrior lore to illustrate narratives—now permanently etched into the flesh of their models—that detail a militarized movement away from the temporal self toward a more venerated, higher-Eternal Being.  Seen historically, this often obligatory journey was best achieved through selfless acts of sacrifice, for country of course, though with grave consequences to what was left smoking in the rear.

It is those consequences that seem to be the real talking point of this exhibition.  The idea finds its thesis in Ultra Violet’s printed manifesto, “Killing is the ultimate crime…,” where mid-declarative the question is posed: “Is the membrum virile a tumescent weapon of mass destruction?”  The query could easily be a direct response to Tanatos Banionis Divine Wind, a seventeen minute video installation that weaves images of feminine submission with relentless male aggression—the latter in a maniacally ironic nod to honor, duty and lasting glory, with the interim between duty and glory being assuredly terminal.

Tanatos Banionis, Untitled, 2013. Digital C-print. Image courtesy of Rox Gallery

Exemplar of the heroic arc is the Japanese kamikaze, the renowned and exceedingly feared WWII fighter pilots who time and again gave their lives for country by missiling their planes, and themselves, into enemy warships. But to what end? The Moscow collective’s five large-scale digital prints, all Untitled, suggest instead that what endures is the unconquerable Feminine, in particular an Earth that absorbs and abides until at last it snuffs the annoyance out. In other words, the membrum virile is and will continue to be a singular weapon of destruction that may very well lead us to our doom, but the Earth will journey onward nevertheless, remnants of ourselves left as mere markings on her back.

Symbols of Earth, the women in the five prints similarly submit their backs for engravings not of their own design but for the artistic and political purpose of Tanatos Banionis. In this way they become kamikaze-like in offering forth their flesh for a greater good beyond themselves. On each are inscriptions exclusively of war—samurai, Empire commanders, supplicant infantry in rivers of blood–all sanctioned by the overseeing eye of an Imperial Sun. Meanwhile, our view of the women is always from behind. They do not sanction such action, nor should we infer complicity in their passive stance. As with Earth, theirs is an energy more untamed and lasting, and ultimately far more feral, than the gunshot will of historical man.

This argument is supported in the negative by artists such as Jack Greer and Dave Schubert. Greer’s photographic tryptic, The Incredibles, depicts a Manson-like trio who represent a strain of masculinity gone wholly awry, an assessment that in no way excludes the central figure of a hoodied, silver-toothed woman with “GOD” thickly tattooed onto her forehead. Faint hope that these three will ever act as caretakers of their communities or the planet, though we can be sure they will take freely from both. While Schubert’s C-print blowup of Dash Snow in a tub of polaroids, cigarette at lips, eyes faded to a milky glaze, shows an equally enervate masculinity drained of any ability to nurture or protect. On the contrary, the image speaks of a type of male who offers little more of himself than documents of indulgence, and who will consume to near pathology until all else, though first himself, is gone.

By Christopher Hassett

The post Beware the Membrum Virile: Ascension Exhibition at Rox Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.