PERSONAL STATEMENT

The pitch of the Hilda af Klint solo show at the Guggenheim is that this early twentieth-century Swedish painter, a woman, mastered an uncompromisingly abstract style before all the men who are ordinarily credited with it (i.e. Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky) did, and that she has been tragically under-recognized. The former may be true, and the latter certainly is. But a better pitch would have focused on the extraordinary personal language she forged. I can’t think of another modern painter who’s syntax is so rich and remains so internally consistent. All the works here are of a piece; all were clearly crafted by one person.

Klint’s forms are simple and evocative. The graceful, non-representational globules, strips and swirls she employs have a rational bent. These marks have precise meanings for her, which she documented neatly with pencil in ledgers, which are also here on display. They are deployed unerringly, on door-sized vertical canvases, against dull blank backdrops, in bright, slightly acrid, fruit-colored hues. The compositions recall biology illustrations, geometry diagrams, foreign alphabets, religious talismans, and alchemical equations. They have intellectual authority and graphic ease.

The paintings command attention from viewers rushing down the crowded ramps, a perfect foil for the blank white curving walls behind them. Klint wrote with hope that her great late-in-life series of canvases The Paintings for the Temple would one day be shown in a spiral temple. Now they have been.

Hilda af Klint, Altarpieces, Group X, No.1, 1915

August 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

COMPUTER WORLD

Walking into the small skylit gallery at the Gagosian uptown where Urs Fischer’s new serial painting Sōtatsu is hung, I could only think, A computer has been here. The work consists of nine door-sized aluminum panels that have been printed digitally and rendered manually with epoxy paint. The initial panel shows a warm interior scene, with a sofa, bookshelf and a black cat, that’s gradually abstracted in the panels that follow and then, in the final panel, interpreted as a pretty cloudscape with two small black birds.

The panels have a remarkable soft, super-flat, burnished finish, like that on a gentleman’s metal watchband; they feel expensive. They make magnificent decorator art, and would look fantastic on the living room walls of a bare white postmodern beach house in Malibu or Southampton, where there is a very real possibility they will end up.

But these aren’t paintings. The structure of each image is digital, fundamentally two-dimensional, and that shows right through the skillful color renderings. These pictures offer no depth, imaginative or dimensional. They aren’t windows into new worlds; they’re fields of color on a printout.

Urs Fischer, Sōtatsu, 2018 (detail), aluminum, epoxy resin, double sided tape, and screen printing ink, 9 panels, each: 94 ½ × 71 inches (240 × 180.3 cm) © Urs Fischer.

May 21, 2018 by Nalina Moses

LA GOTHIC

I use to think of David Hockney as a decorative painter. His work has a strong graphic quality – all flat fields of sweet pastel color – that’s poster-ready. Reproduced in magazines, his paintings look like pretty pictures for pretty people to hang in their pretty houses. So seeing the current Hockney retrospective at The Met is eye-opening. His canvases are substantial, over six feet tall and as wide as twelve feet. And each one commands the space in front of it, luring visitors for closer consideration. Its surface holds together in tension.

Hockney most famous paintings, from the 1960′s and 1970′s, that depict the homes of his well-to-do Los Angeles friends and collectors, make their own cultural anthropology. Outside there are tiled patios, flat green lawns, whistling sprinklers, and palm trees. Inside there are overstuffed chairs, low glass-topped tables, shag carpets, and primitivist sculptures. This glossy, untroubled world is populated by regal white-haired ladies in caftans, and fashionable young men in flared trousers and tube socks. It’s a place of wealth and repose. Southern California sunlight – wistful, shimmering, white – washes objects and people evenly, and gives the scenes an awesome quiet.

The richest canvases incorporate one of more human figures, nearly life-size. Hockney renders them with particularity and vitality; we believe that they are real, and that the world they inhabit is too. In The American Collectors Fred Weisman appears officious and detached, and Marcia Weisman appears direct and critical. The scene is clear, but rendered without pure perspectival logic. The lines of the gridded tile floor lead to different points, so that space seems folded right up against the surface of the canvas. The sky is an even blue fill, the tiles are a dotted pattern, and shadows are puddles of color. Fred and Marcia seem unfixed, disconnected from their landscape and also each other. They stand close to one another but stare – unperturbedly, expressionlessly – in different directions. They are objects in a strangely elegant still-life, energized by movements that we don’t see.

Image courtesy of David Hockney. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 84″x120″.

December 24, 2017 by Nalina Moses

INNER LIFE

A friend of mine is recovering from a serious illness and was, through the most critical passage of it, connected to an EEG machine. The device linked electrodes on his skull to a large LED monitor with a built-in camera that washed his bed in cool blue light. On the screen twenty black lines ran right-to-left across a blank white field. A grainy stamp-sized live image of his face floated on the left side. And a list of clinical terms doctors could select from to classify his condition ran down the right: Eyes Open, Head Movement, Awake, Talking, Drowsy, Coughing, Crying, Lethargic.

Each line on an EEG maps a brain “wave,” and together they measure neurological climate. The lines are rational and intricate, relentless, peaking and crashing, and, sometimes, criss-crossing. When there’s a disruption in normal function, as in a seizure, the lines spike wildly, making a dark cloud. Yet there is no trace left of even the most dramatic event; within thirty seconds one record is gone, swept away by new data emerging from the right side.

The EEG is the most lyrical graphic notation I know, full of mystery. Its lines recall, in their detail and complexity: topography, music, calligraphy, embroidery, choreography. At any moment my friend’s EEG seemed to reveal more deeply who he was than his face and body, stilled as they were by illness. I thought I found, within the machine’s continual stream, his memories, his breath, his dreams, his tender broken spirit. Looking at the EEG monitor was like peering into his soul.

May 22, 2016 by Nalina Moses