THE PEN IS MIGHTIER

There’s an exhibit, Imalabra, at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan devoted to artist Antonio Martorell and his “amigos.” It’s really a tribute to the stamina and imagination of Martorell himself, whose ouevre spans five decades and a dazzling, almost comical, array of media: installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, printmaking, film, and set and costume design. Martorell’s work calls to mind that of his contemporary Lucas Samaras, whose lifelong project also seems less concerned with the expression of formal ideas than the act of producing things. Both men do so with such ferocity and velocity that these things, taken as a whole, furnish a kind of autobiography.

Almost all of Martorell’s works in the show, which is organized around large-scale installations, rely on his brilliance as a draftsman. His hand is energetic, authoritative, and playful, and his sensibility is dense, so that his drawings (ink on plastic, charcoal on paper, pen on board) have a powerful emotional charge. Compositionally, figures often collect on one side of the page, as if they are about to burst out of it. Characters are rendered taut with kinetic energy, in tension with one other and their settings.

Martell integrates words with images particularly skillfully. Text, rendered in a large langorous script, is often laid over figures, which are often drawn across pages torn from a book, adding pictorial depth. In other works drawings are rendered on lengths of fabric and draped across frames and furniture, complicating their legibility. The show includes life-size silhouettes of hip street characters stamped on canvas, framed portraits of political figures crafted with shards from aluminum cans, vinyl floor coverings printed with newspaper collages, and, towards the end, a series of simple (and stunning) charcoal drawings of a bookshelf. All of these pieces can be understood as drawings, as surfaces inscribed with story. If the show asks, broadly, How far can drawing take you?, the answer is, Very far indeed.

January 07, 2016 by Nalina Moses

Graphic artist Bishakh Som presented his work last week at the New School in conjunction with the New York Comics Symposium. Som’s drawing style is dreamy and lyrical and his stories are biting (sometimes literally) and contemporary. He was trained as an architect and his backdrops (spaceships, follies, cars, suburban subdivisions, apartments) are fully alive, rendered with the same detail and complexity that his characters are. His storytelling is gentle and elliptical, and he sometimes leaves frames empty – without action and dialogue – and these frames have surprising emotional force. This, the power of a place, is something that most architects don’t understand. They're typically too concerned with composition and joinery, perspective and procession, to recognize the primal, visceral force of a low ceiling, a high window, an empty stretch of road, or the light spilling across the kitchen floor early in the morning.

After discussing his comic influences (including TinTin, Archie, and Love and Rockets) and his technique (black ink brushwork, watercolors, and Photoshop) Som read a story called Come Back To Me, about a young married woman who lives in a secluded beach house. She’s not asking her husband, who frequently travels, to come back to her, but a young man she met during one of her husband’s absences who, unexpectedly, swept her away. To convey that movement, a falling, Som shows the lovers pulled into the ocean by violent undercurrents, clinging tightly to one another as if they are the same person, simultaneously fearful and thrilled. The water is rendered as a dense, grey field with knife-like folds. We see the woman in the midst of an experience that she will never, fully, come back from.

Artwork from Come Back to Me by Bishakh Som. Published in Blurred Books.

September 03, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Seeing the Antonio Lopez show at The Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo is like stepping back into the city in the early 80’s. More accurately, it’s like stepping into the fantasy of that place I had as a high school student in suburban Connecticut, one that I cobbled together from issues of Details and Interview. In this world, I believed, people hung out at CBGB’s and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, wore asymmetrical Japanese clothing, and survived on coke and champagne. One gallery wall at Geiss is covered with Polaroid portraits of the Lopez’ glamorous lady friends including Grace Jones, Paloma Picasso and Grace Coddington, women who weren’t natural beauties but brittle, self-styled divas. The gallery itself has been painted a dazzling white and decorated with lush potted plants and a neon light, like the interior of contemporary Richard Meier house.

I’d always thought of Lopez as a fashion world character, but this exhibit shows what a skilled and versatile illustrator he was. He handled a broad range of materials comfortably: watercolors, pencil, pastel, ink, photography and collage. And he rendered with a vivid, fluid hand, one that captured details of garments faithfully while also charging the entire image with a seductive, kinetic energy. His finest work is soaked in fantasy. There’s a lovely, lyrical pencil drawing of a naked woman sitting with her hands across her lap while antlers grow out of her head. Lopez’ imagination perfectly served the pulsating, eccentric energy of the time.

Illustration by Antonio Lopez from the New York Times Magazine, 1966

October 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At L&M Arts there’s a show of Andy Warhol’s illustrations titled, cheerfully, Who’s Who in Holiday Hats. Framed and hung, in a profusion that calls to mind Allan McCollum’s installations, are two folios of ink and watercolor illustrations: one of the aforementioned hats from a 1964 McCall’s spread, and another from 1955 called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu. The drawings of the hats, each one named after a historical or literary character, are witty, but the drawings of the shoes are super sweet. Rendered on large sheets of stiff, slightly bruised, yellowing paper, with wavering India ink outlines and translucent candy-colored washes, they feel a bit like pages torn from an illuminated manuscript, one all about shopping and dressing. And the drawings are brilliantly condensed, without a single errant gesture. Warhol the illustrator gives us only what we need to see each shoe.

The show proves to me once and for all that while Warhol had a prescient flair for self-promotion and not-ironic detachment, he was at heart a superb graphic designer. The shoe drawings will be familiar to many museum-goers because they’ve been reproduced on Warhol Foundation-licensed merchandise: a children’s book, tote bags and note cards. But I wish that you all could see them in person, framed, on the wall. The artist has rendered each shoe with tremendous precision and attention. These drawings are small, true gems.

February 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses