I have curated a show of painting at the Kimball Jenkins School of Art 266 Main St in Concord,NH(right off I 93). It includes
Susan Carr, Martin Mugar, Addison Parks, Paul Pollaro and Jason Travers. It will be up for the Months of March and April.The opening reception is 5-7 on Friday March 13th.There is also an article I wrote for the Concord Monitor that I wrote .
Link Here
ESSAY FOR THE SHOW
When the artists in this exhibit exchanged emails with ideas
for the show’s title, I had hoped to push a concept involving “topos”, the Greek
root of the word topology. I have always had affection for ancient Greek words
that embody concepts about the shape of existence such as “logos” or “aletheia”.
In taxonomy Latin is used to provide
distinct forms, for philosophy Greek provides distinct concepts. When thinking
about Paul Pollaro’s work some years ago the word Chthonic, which means “hidden
under the earth”, came to mind as a way to encapsulate what his work is about.
He liked it. It may be a fallacy in this post-modern world to fall back on words,
which evoke essences. But it provides a ground for our thinking; in short a
topology, a place to stand on (understanding). So be it. I am not post-modern.
%2BMound%2BPoint%2B-%2BArmor's%2BGrace%2BII%2C%2B76%22%2Bx%2B81%22%2C%2B2013%2C%2B%2Boil%2Band%2Btar%2Bon%2Bpanel.jpg) |
| Paul Pollaro "Mound Point Armor's Grace" 2014 |
 |
| Mugar |
“Topos” didn’t go far in discussion especially when I
suggested it should replace painting as the noun to underpin the show. No! We
are painters seemed to be the consensus and that was that. I wasn’t going to
force the issue. In any case I agree, we are painters first and come out of the
world of painting. In our search for a title, I recalled from my high school
days the line spoken by Huck Finn at the end of the “Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn” that he wanted to
“light out for
the Territory.” The context was that American Civilization as it was shaped and
defined by slavery pre-civil war was pretty murky and Huck thought he needed to
flee somewhere to try out new options. That phrase is embodied in American Westerns,
which are often set in the unincorporated territories of the West, where conflicting
interests were not easily adjudicated as laws were either non-existent or
unenforceable. It dawned on me I had injected the notion of “topos” through the
backdoor. Territory is derived from terra and is probably the latinate word for
“topos”. Artists are always nagged by a need to move out to some new terrain, to
not stay put. The “the” before territory got dropped along the way, but that
worked as well since artists are not moving out into a specific place but their
own psychic plot of ground. Huck’s words struck a chord and stuck.
There is a mixture of buoyancy and alacrity in the phrase. There
is also a sense of sneaking off, shirking one’s duties. Both aspects apply to
the artists in this show; impatience with the status quo of art, and a letting
go of the topics we were told in school were the only route for a serious
painter. The artists in this show are New Englanders by choice or by birth, a
part of the country known as being overly civilized and cerebral. Tell anybody west of the Mississippi that you
come from New England and they will call you an abolitionist or expect you to
wear a three-piece suit. I heard from a carpenter who works winters in Arkansas
that they like to hire Yankees down there as foremen. They are good
taskmasters. We are hard on ourselves too, our own taskmasters. The artists in
this show inhabit the same rugged inner psychological terrain as the New
England poets such as Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell. Or artists like
Hopper, Hartley, Marin.
The original impetus for this show came from a message on Facebook
informing me that my painting accepted for the annual “Off the Wall” show at
the Danforth Museum last June was hung side by side with Susan Carr’s work. The
message said it was a fortuitous paring as both of us work our paint heavily
off the surface. I recalled her name from a show curated by Addison Parks in
the late Nineties at Crieger-Dane in Boston called “Severed Ear. (the poetry of abstraction)” that brought together the work of New York artists such as Richard
Tuttle and Leon Polk Smith with Boston artists such as Tim Nichols, Addison
Parks and myself. I went on to Facebook to look up Susan’s work. I could see
immediately why we were put side by side. A love of paint but more than that an
impulsion of the paint to reach out as though pushed by some energy not
constrained by logic. Chthonic seemed to apply here, except it was more the
thrust of molten lava than the earth itself.
 |
| Susan Carr |
To select the rest of the participants was not difficult. We
are all painters, a distinction that makes a difference these days and moreover
we all are in our own way artists who want to put back together what was torn
asunder in painting over the last fifty years. We don’t ignore the ideas that
motivated that deconstruction but work with them. There is a paring down of art
to bare essences in the
Greenbergian ethos of painting. And it extends to the
point where artists start taking the very material and ground of the painting
apart. Where does it end? The work of
Kelly, Stella, Ryman, Tuttle and Richter, artists I’d like to label as artists of the ‘bare minimum’, informs
our painting.
They provide us with the
iconic shapes and notions of canvas as sculpture set free by their research
into the underpinnings of painting. But our plan is to do something different
to them.
So Huck Finn has to light out for new territory, out from the
concentration camps of the slave states. Among the artists in this show there
is a conviction that the terrain of Modernism that they grew up in, admired, studied
and accepted is not the endgame for painting and not to be rehashed ad nauseam.
All that was jettisoned from Minimalism:
earthiness,
anxiety,
passion, affection,
mystery, magic, surprise, place and space the so-called attributes of the real
which were somehow secondary to concepts and ideas come back to haunt the work
of these artists. I once seemed perplexed about how personal experience came to
inform artwork. You spend time in nature, you move in it, dig in it, touch it
smell it, but where and how does it feed into the painting. Addison said it
does unbeknownst to you. It is absorbed through your pores, the accumulation of
days and nights inhaling the smells of autumn and one day haptically without
forcing the issue it pops up in your work. You just let go and it does its
magic. The touch and feel of being in the world rejected by the bright lights
of logic come back to haunt these painter.
 |
| Jason Travers "Illusion" Corot's Field 40"x65" 2014 |
Jason Travers turns “the bare minimum” into a question: ”Is
that all there is?” Can this earlier generation of artists proclaim once and
for all that an aesthetic broken into parts should be the last statement of
painting? For Travers working inside this tradition on panels of pure color or
value, each panel becomes an event created patiently over time of endless
strokes and marks like someone scratching to escape their enclosure, or
insisting that the analytic event that takes apart is important but not more
than the abiding presence of the human touch. The multiple panels and the
foregrounding of texture are his acceptance and participation in the thinking
of the “bare minimum” but at the same time the 19
th century of
Turner or is it Ryder pops up in certain panels of Travers paintings in part as
nostalgia for a bygone world but hints with the slow time of the hand and touch
at new notions of time and terrain to light out for. But in the true spirit of
a Modernist he raises more questions than he answers.
 |
| Addison Parks"Wroots" 24"x18" oil on linen 2014 |
Addison Parks uses the tradition of abstraction literally as
a background for a foregrounded gestural event yet more recently he has
foregrounded the abstract pattern.
He
acknowledges its role in giving to pure colors an iconic force. However, he
learned personally from Tuttle’s evolution as an artist that breaking down has
to be followed by putting back together. Tuttle, himself, was as much a maker
as a deconstructionist: But what forces us to put things back together is life
itself. Parks’s
work asks in the end:
are we just scientists working isolated in our studio/laboratory? If we are
alive to nature, our family and those around us in the larger community, then our
art must reflect the constant merging and rearranging of our relationships. His
works are events, transitory moments of meaning where things fall into place.
But any arrangement no matter how ecstatic implies that true to life in the end
it can only be transitory.
 |
| Mugar |
In a recent blog post I discussed the possibility of painting
jumping out of the “enframent” of technology. The word was coined by Heidegger
to describe the domination of technology over our thinking about the world. If
one accepts the premise that much of modern art has been enframed by the
methodological notion of providing simple shapes that are easily recognizable, (Husserl’s
eidetic reductions) then the question could arise: how can you get back to the
garden where all the reductive parts find their whole again. I discussed this
issue in relation to my work and came up with the notion of waiting. Painting
not as a power play but as an opening up to possibility. When I began this body
of work now in its 15th year, I started not from reduction but
multiplicity, a field of colors. All that has initiated change in the work has
come about from questions such as: What happens when you use a frosting
applicator to create a gesture with volume and smooth surfaces? What happens
when you use letters instead of individual marks? The answer to this last
question has thrust my painting into the earth/world dichotomy, that Heidegger
established, moving it from the earth side of the equation to world side.
 |
| Paul Pollaro "A Light of Dark.Hyperbolic and Elliptical Graph "2015 |
Paul Pollaro’s work is in part about the dark light of
nature. Not the optical light that lights the world but the energy that radiates
from rocks and plants, something that you can pick up with infrared cameras. He
has succeeded in pushing the envelope of physicality but most recently the work
turned on him in a most unpredictable way. Like Travers and Parks the
self-awareness of the paintings presence and language comes from the artists of
the “bare minimum” and in particular Richter the master of paint as paint and
the canvas as sculptural presence.
In his latest work the dichotomy of nature and
culture meet in a way that has allowed him to engage the same earth/world
dichotomy found in my work. It asks the question: are the abstract constructs
of the mind also nature?
 |
| Addison Parks"Well Being" oil on linen, 16"x20", 2014 |
In a blog post I wrote about the French painter
Jean Helion,
I drew a parallel between his prison camp experience in Germany in WW11 that
reduced him to a raw unit of labor(arbeit macht frei) and the abstraction that
he rejected after the war. All he could think about besides trying to survive
during his confinement was the vibrancy of life in Paris. When he escaped and
came back to Paris, he abandoned abstraction and embraced figuration in the
form of paintings of people in urban settings. I thought of a parallel
evolution in style in the work of Stella and Held who abandoned the minimalist
trope of their early work to embark in their later years on multifaceted
paintings, where there was a complex relation between the parts and the whole. Jean
Helion was subjected to a physical and emotional “minimalism” by the Nazi’s.
Was the minimalism of abstract art a sort of scientific asceticism in some way
parallel to the emotional oppression of life in prison camp?
The essence of this show speaks to the
primacy of life in the creative process and the topography of time that does
not try to crush the spirit but opens up islands to the stream.
To borrow the title of Addison Parks’s novel:
”Love and Art, in that order”.
 |
| "Flotsam"Jason Travers |
%2BMound%2BPoint%2B-%2BArmor's%2BGrace%2BII%2C%2B76%22%2Bx%2B81%22%2C%2B2013%2C%2B%2Boil%2Band%2Btar%2Bon%2Bpanel.jpg)
