Rinzin employs traditional thangka painting techniques and materials to create contemporary work. He has taught and traveled in Germany and Japan, translated for monks on tour with the Grateful Dead, and spent time at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. His paintings are held in various public and private collections, including the Dalai Lama’s.

These pieces are simple, powerful, and abstract. The content is forms distilled to their essences, with the exception of the Auspicious Dreams series, which contains vastly detailed forms from all walks of the animal kingdom that surge in pleasant turmoil around a golden orb. Rinzin’s paintings appear both biological and intergalactic in a way that speaks to the enigmatic scale of daily life. Shapes within could be cells, spores, or immense bodies of matter floating in space. He uses ground mineral pigments as a medium—gold, as seen in the three Auspicious Dreams paintings, as well as green malachite, and lapis lazuli. All of these are of gem quality. The intensity of the colorants enhances the qualities of playfulness and surprise in his work.

I was able to ask Rinzin a few questions about his paintings, process, and hopes for this “Abstract Enlightenment.”

Maria Anderson: This is your second solo show at Joshua Liner Gallery. What is most important to you about this exhibition?
Pema Rinzin: Naturally, there is the hope that people like it. Not only this, but that these paintings will cause people to believe that today is not the only life we have. We have tomorrow. We have the next day, and the next. We don’t have to sell our paintings today. We don’t have to be successful today. What I want is to pause time.

MA: You’ve mentioned that you abstract impressionist is a description you would place, however loosely, on your work. Why the name Abstract Enlightenment?
PR: It has to do with the feeling of your mind opening up—everything spans out, like a sun. Bubble of Wishful Gems is like this, with the two concentric circles. It has a lot of movement, a lot of joy and expression. The inside looks like seeds, so it’s almost like a flower petal. In Tibet, this shade of blue is considered the highest color of emptiness and ascension. Nature yields a lot of energy, and I’m making use of this. Enlightenment is when you’re abstract in the composition and the subject. It’s about trying to represent the essence of all things in a simple way.

MA: Does meditation, or, to use a word with fewer associations, contemplation, play any role in your creative process? In other words, how do you reach a state of mind that allows for long hours of intuitive, focused painting?
PR: There is a principle on how to use meditation: the best meditation for me is not how people typically think of it. If you are a focused person, you might wake up in the morning and exercise—something like this is the best meditation. You meditate to purify yourself to do things right. If you’re a teacher, and if you teach and use your heart, then this is a great meditation. If you teach by example and not from the mouth or the book, this becomes like a meditation. It is more of a belief system.

After a while, when you paint more and more, it becomes automatic. You connect. It’s a natural meditation. You can close your eyes and sit quietly and meditate, but doing just this won’t help you paint. You have to use your hand, your mind, your body. Oh, if you focus in this way, you will be happy! You can’t separate it from your work.

MA: What else is crucial to your process?
PR: Intention and discipline. You have to know how to clean your house. If you are a good artist, you have to know how to cook. This makes other people happy, and then you are happy. Making yourself happy first is even more important than making others happy. If you do a very good painting today, then the next painting will be more challenging, and when you are challenged, you are better able to be good to others.

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It is with an eye toward reduction, scale, and color that Brennan has created these smaller, monochromatic pieces for MINUS SPACE, a gallery known for its attention to reductive, concept-based, site-specific art. Brennan moved to Gowanus seven years prior, and these paintings reflect the shift in his environment and his heady fascination with adaptive, first-strike deliberations of form and color.

Brennan has always been invested in economy over minimalism. “I am interested in drawing down to the bone, and my paintings at this point are literally made with two coats of paint, black and white,” he says. In an interview with MINUS SPACE, Brennan describes why he has veered toward monochrome. “I had to address questions of how far I wanted to go with color, and architectural forms. I really just wanted to put all of that aside and embrace some of the simpler qualities that had defined my works on paper already. It was a sorting out process that took some time.” He wanted to embrace a simpler process and to absorb new qualities into his work as a way of interacting with this new landscape. What emerged in this simplification was letting go of color in favor of honing subliminal imagery and creating an altar of sorts for contrasting values.

His razor paintings, however, are deceptively monochromatic: he has worked in a variety of greys, whites, and blacks, some of which are quietly tinted with other hues. As we’ve seen in his double-horizon paintings, color is critical to Brennan, and his paintings pay tribute not only to contemporary painting but also to historical print and film-making. Walter Bernstein, says the artist, would go to the movies, yet find himself disappointed as more and more came out in color. These seemed “paradoxically pallid” next to the black-and-white versions. “In fact,” said Bernstein, “they had no shadows. Color had diminished them; they had lost the quality of dream.” Brennan’s paintings gain this quality of lucid dreaming: the fact that they are nearly monochromatic does not lessen their impact. Brennan seeks to go simpler, more reductive, quieter. He is paying attention. He is reducing things to forms that allow the brain to settle, to sink, to mire itself in new textures that the viewers feel at their cores.

Apart from color, scale is another crucial element of Brennan’s work. The decision to go smaller was inspired, in part, by Myron Stout. He thinks about hands and face, parts of the body on a scale to which we are attuned. Stout’s work was typically 24 x 36”. Brennan’s paintings are 20 x 16 inches and 12 x 19 inches, yet, like Stout’s pieces, they have the feel of telescoped monstrosities, a kind of mountain-presence whose heft is large and deep. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what the scale of our time might be,” says Brennan. “We live in an era where an enormous amount of information is concentrated on small objects like smart phones or tablets.” What he found was that going smaller enabled him to reach a better object/painting correlation comparable to a flat screen TV or the “tricked-out tech things we are all surrounded by.” Another consideration was that many images of paintings are seen and shared online, which means the sense of scale is the first thing to go.

The writer Charles Baxter has often talked about how silence and stillness can act as intensifiers in fiction. Baxter posits that silence strengthens whatever stands on either side of it. It takes on a different emotion, a different color, for whatever it flows through or between. Brennan’s paintings can be examined along the same vein. How does this reductive stillness intensify the surrounding space, the borders, and the color? What does American culture, gadget-obsessed and screen-staring, accustomed to low-grade heroics, do when confronted with these colossal plays on scale and color? Can we look at the paintings like they are smart phone screens, altars, or butcher shops visited on night walks?

One of Brennan’s greatest qualities is his deep attention to reduction and abstraction, to pinching out aspects of scale and beauty in these variations. “I think most people think of abstraction as something striving to be apart from the world, like geometry, but nothing is entirely apart from the world. Euclid was of this world, and I often think of my own abstract painting as earthy.” Keep an eye out for what this incredible mid-career painter comes up with next, and for MINUS SPACE’s upcoming shows (next up: Michael Rouillard and Roberta Allen) as the gallery continues to grow and expand.

Maria Anderson was also able to contact Michael Brennan, engaging him in conversation about his recent work and the inspiration that fuels his creative process.

Michael Brennan, Poem Card For Noor Al-Fayez, 2013, Oil and wax on canvas, 12 x 9 in. Image courtesy of Minus Space.

Maria Anderson: You talk about abstract painting as a form of never-ending adjustment.  Can you talk more about what you mean exactly by adjustment? Is it mental, spiritual, environmental (i.e. becoming accustomed to and absorbing, in some sense, your neighborhood?)
Michael Brennan: I think “never-ending adjustment” stems from a kind of attitude adjustment—when one is working deeply with materials those materials are always revealing unknown properties, ones that an artist might want to exploit, or for a time even ignore, but alternate pathways always appear at every stage of the investigation. Even the most rigid artists often are seduced by the question “What if I tried…?” which may or may not lead them to their imagined goal. There’s just such an infinite amount of variables to painting. Even if I were to dogmatically insist, “I will now only ever paint black paintings” an artist could still spend a lifetime deciding between a chromatic black, a coarse carbon black, a copper derived black, etc. Each choice is substantially different and could potentially alter the content of the work. The paradox of working minimally is that every decision (assuming there are fewer) becomes paramount. And this of course is just the crude part, the material level. I believe, as many artists do, that everything we absorb has some residual effect. We may try to cling to some kind of cultural moment, but nothing is static.

MA: I love what you said in a Visual Discrepancies interview about lesser heroes: 

‘I walk around Brooklyn a lot, and sometimes I imagine the people I encounter are the lesser heroes of another epic, that they are the same type I’ve already discovered in Homer. I figure that in this age of avatars, compromised, and de-professionalized super-heroes that this is somehow appropriate, and that kind of thinking gives me fuel for images and titles.’

Can you say more about this? Is modern man some kind of low-grade (not in a bad way) hero? I feel this way walking around Brooklyn as well, that there is something mythical about the struggle and the gargantuan effort people put forth to pay rent, be successful, and enjoy themselves doing it.
MB: This may be very old fashioned of me, perhaps too romantic, but I think that artists are meant to poetize their environment, to mythologize the mundane. I don’t live in the south of France, so I can’t realistically paint like Matisse. I spend a lot of time walking around Myrtle Ave., Third Ave., and think “What can I do with this?” because this is what I have to work with. What can my imagination do with this? I want my work, abstract as it is, to be of my own time and place, to reflect the conditions that can and do only exist now, and that means paying attention to the world around me. I think the local is generally undervalued.

MA: You also mention Philip Roth. As a fiction writer, I’d be interested to know whether you have any other literary influences, or if any played a part in your mindset when you were creating these paintings.
MB: I’m very bookish. I have fantasies about teaching American Literature (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe), I worked in publishing for a time, and have worked in many bookstores over the years. I have eighth-grade English teacher taste in books. I’m currently re-reading The Centaur by John Updike mostly because I’m interested in how he localizes mythic content. He does so in a much less grand way than Joyce with Ulysses, but that clearly was the precedent. Basically all the townie figures are gods and goddesses and Alton (“All Town” or Reading, PA) becomes the scene of a minor epic, but an epic nonetheless. I guess I use literature as parallel inspiration. It’s never a direct link. I question the use of language, the examination of culture. Maybe this will help me make better minimal paintings of mythic standing that somehow still connect to Myrtle Ave.? That’s a desire of mine anyway. I learned a few things from this forgotten Updike book.

By Maria Anderson

The post Maria Anderson In Conversation with Michael Brennan appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

What’s unique about The String and the Mirror is its focus: unlike the survey of the field of sound currently on view at the MoMA, the 19 artists in this show are more interested in relationships than form, and in transmutations or tangents rather than technology. The artists were chosen by Justin Luke, director of Audio Visual Arts, and Lawrence Kumpf, who curates Issue Project Room.

The String and the Mirror is an exhibition that explores and purposefully tangles our relationships with sound. Lenticular prints, raw record vinyl piles, arranged bamboo, decibel meters, an audio cable diptych spelling out hey, and stones conversing are a few of the objects employed to accomplish this goal.

Artists pushed various aspects of sound into the tangible, creating what was largely a visual experience. How do you make the aural into a physical object? Data sonification is one way, seen here in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Conflicted Phonemes. In this project Hamdan creates a visual to complicate our notion of how languages in a country—particularly one with as troubled a background as Somalia’s—can change and torque over time. While many of the works in this show have a playful tone, Conflicting Phonemes hits a little harder. Here the artist creates a complex voice map that is at first difficult to fully comprehend. The goal: to work toward understanding the controversial use of language analysis employed by the government to determine the origin of asylum seekers. Hamdan’s voice maps act as offerings to the asylum seeker as “alternative and non-vocal mode of contestation.”

One example of how are relationships with noise are snarled is Two Stones Singing, a concise piece by Rolf Julias that used electronics to displace sounds found in nature—in a forest field, to be exact—and appropriated them to two stones. Rocks represent nature to us, yet it bends the mind to hear this information rather than to register it through thought.

Another piece makes suggestions for experiencing sound. Four proposals are printed on the wall below titles. Spencer Yeh, the artist, calls these Bad Ideas for a Sound Mind. To me these pieces are about reducing the irreducible—recording a noise and then reintroducing the noise to its origin, as in the idea below:

One Hundred Dollar Bills

One hundred $1 bills are buried under
a ceramic tile floor. Participants are
encouraged to treasure-hunt these with
contact mic’d dentist drills, but must wear
headphones playing the sound from the
drills while doing so.

Another striking piece was one hundred circles for the mind by Seth Cluett. This was framed as a repeatable experiment meant for propagation, with instructions and a list of materials. Sound here is a tangible object made to mimic the drawn circles. Cluett recorded himself drawing one hundred circles on separate pieces of paper and then listened to the recording. He removed the cassette tape from the tape housing, sliced it into 100 pieces, and carefully placed these pieces in a grid on the wall next to the circles on 100 pieces of paper. So, we have the sound of these circles’ conception mirroring the circles themselves.

At the back of the main gallery space there is a second room containing an ongoing interactive installation. This is Office Riddim, created by the New York-based duo Essex Olivares. Surprisingly, it’s an office with all the familiar objects in it that identify it to be so: paper, filing cabinets, a desk, plants, desk chairs, a water cooler. Other elements indicate that this is an office meant to destabilize the traditional, sterile office ambience, such as a bench with soft grey fur and a distorted ‘smile you’re on camera sign.’ A television records the room in real time.

“We have created a system,” a paper on the wall says. “A system that responds to you,” says another. “Release your mind, feel the present,” says a third. Other instructions, which you’re meant to do with a partner, urge you to “line the perimeter of your body with binder clips. Divide yourself in half.” It’s strangely relaxing being in someone else’s office. There’s a freedom in being asked to stuff your pockets with paper clips. Another suggestion reads, “lace an extension cord through the other user’s chair. Keeping both ends of the cord in hand, take a seat on the table.” The duo intended this work to examine how musical scores relate to start-up companies.

The overall effect of The String and the Mirror is the feeling of tension between aural stimuli and the way they are translated from oral to visual. There’s a kind of slippage that happens when your expectations are denied, and this slippage can often be the most pleasurable part of the experience. Altogether this show is an elegant and interrogative push for reexamining our experiential world through sound.

By Maria Anderson

The post The String and the Mirror at Lisa Cooley Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

O’Neill is bothered by the art writing norm, which she believes allows for little of the flexibility and creativity lauded in the art it describes. She cites the timing of exhibition catalogues as an example, many of which writers create in haste or without having seen the work as it is exhibited. O’Neill also takes issue with the fact that journals or newspapers rarely document the varied experiences inherent in viewing an exhibition. This book is O’Neill’s attempt to experiment with her own art writing and to incorporate and balance all elements found in displaying work. In O’Neill’s words, she tries to “convey the great pleasures to be had in making, exhibiting, and responding to art.”

Austral Avenue was a gallery from 2005 to 2007, during which time over 20 exhibitions were held. O’Neill believes that displaying art in a domestic setting and immersing artists and viewers in the work created enabled more incidental, surprising observations than crop up in the typical white box of a traditional gallery. The work includes extreme salon-style drawing displays, oil and acrylic paintings, Belgian linen and cedar stretchers, decals on porcelain, and altered vehicles. The main room of the Victorian home functioned as the gallery, but work on display often meandered out into the hallways, the lounge, and even the street.

One striking exhibit that lived in the street was Andreas Exner’s Angewandte Monochrome Malerei (Applied Monochrome Painting). Obsessed by empty space framed by man-made objects, Exner makes visual plugs for the gaps in these objects (which typically invite some type of interaction). Examples of gaps he’s plugged include arm and neck holes in clothing and the middles of toy train tracks. For Austral Avenue, he plugged a window in three cars with plywood panels painted in vibrant acrylic.

Cathy Blanchflower’s pieces, titled Astral, also involved windows. She painted the gallery windows with a special, heavily textured paint so that the trees and Geranium shrubs from outside were distorted yet visible. The effect was similar to stained glass. When light shone through the windows, the paint saturated the room in a gentle blue-green fog of color. O’Neill describes these as “sub-aqueous three-dimensional landscapes,” which she compares to Monet’s waterlilies.

Another artist who incorporated nature into her show was Mishka Borowski. The title of Borowski’s contribution stands out: With my lightnin’ bolts aglowin’ I can see where I am goin’.  Here she takes her hallmark fascination with the erotic and translates it into traditional oil painting. By linking the cyclic nature of plant regeneration with our bodies, she explores connections between decay, death, and the erotic. These three lurid paintings are of oriental lilies, and they represent the lush depths and pink folds of the human body. In one, a glans-like stamen with a globules of clear liquid calls back the “lightnin’ bolts aglowin” in the exhibition’s title—we can see where Borowski is going with this. Located in the living room of a traditional Victorian home, these paintings’ effect on the viewer are likely more intense than they would be in a typical gallery setting.

What was foggy in Austral Avenue: An experiment in living with art was how the artists interacted, and what their reactions to each others’ work were. Where is the dialogue O’Neill wanted to create? It doesn’t seem to appear in this book, though perhaps it was not her goal to document this aspect of the process. Overall, the writing is an interesting conglomeration of how the shows spawned from an atypical gallery space, and the energy in the artists’ work makes clear the excitement and vitality to be found in this new gallery model.

Reviewed by Maria Anderson

The post Jane O’Neill’s Austral Avenue appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The settings for these photos vary—there are hallways with lamps stuck onto ceilings like lit eggs, and subterranean venues whose strobes seem aquatic. There are rooftops, gas stations, and bar bathrooms. The cover image, a girl with a band of blue light coming from or shining down onto her head, gives the impression that light is an alien force, something foreign with the power to guide urges. The light in these images is indeed spectral, unearthly, and mesmerizing. It’s more than visual—it’s a feeling, a Martian atmosphere. The curly-haired woman climbing the fence in no clothes has a back so bright that her hair falling across it becomes another being altogether. The light will take her up and over the fence, you think—and you feel good about that and wherever this nude woman is heading.

After Into the Light you might find yourself lost in considering how light enters into the way you perceive a given moment. Your girlfriend may be telling you, “I think we need some time apart” or, “I’m leaving you,” and all you’ll notice is how the beam of light from the lamp is melting together the two cats lying on her desk into another creature entirely.

Reviewed by Maria Anderson

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