TALKING OF MICHELANGELO

The first half of The Two Popes, a movie about the friendship and rivalry between Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis, is screamingly beautiful, offering astounding views of Rome, Vatican City and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. Watching, one feels goddess-like, peering into a resplendent private world.

But then the overall formal beauty of the movie starts to oppress. In flashbacks we see Frances as a young priest in Buenos Aires forging a prudent and costly alliance with the fascist government, and then exiled in rural southern Spain. These scenes are shot in recognizable movie styles: the city in a romantic black-and-white, like Casblanca, and the country in flat acrid tones, like The French Connection. These palettes aren’t linked to any spirit, but serve as tinny pop cultural references.

When Benedict, the reigning Pope, calls Francis to the Sistine Chapel one morning, before public hours, to broach his voluntary retirement, the opulence of the surroundings feels slightly obscene. The room is empty and floodlit, the frescoes rendered in crisp candy colors like wallpaper. One marvels at the architectural spectacle rather than the anguish in the human figures stretched across the ceiling or sitting quietly below.

This scene made me remember my own experience at The Vatican. While waiting in line to enter an older man, dressed in a fine pinstriped grey wool suit that hung off his ravaged frame, threw himself from his wheelchair and crawled on elbows to the altar. There’s no expression of faith like that in this movie. Even Francis, a complex, articulate, and self-questioning priest, doesn’t emerge as a full-blooded person. He gets lost in the surroundings.

April 08, 2020 by Nalina Moses

IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS

Painter Noah Davis’ posthumous show at David Zwirner in Chelsea is drawing attention and crowds, deservedly. The canvases are substantial in size and subject, and the installation fills the two main galleries richly. I visited on a Saturday afternoon, when a bright mix of artists, collectors, fans and hipsters gathered in front of different works in contemplation and admiration.

Davis’ style is distinctive; he uses a palette of spoiled pastels and dulled greys, skimming fine lines over darker backgrounds. The paintings are strongly graphic and also strangely muted, pictorially flattened. His subject matter and format vary radically. The most-publicized works in the show are intimate family scenes, rendered in a loose hand that confers mystery and privacy. There are several other scenes in which staid bourgeois figures are rendered in surreal settings: a ballet troupe performing on a suburban lawn, a man in a suit crossing a desert, a family in Sunday finery at a summer barbecue. And there are fascinating one-offs: a moonlit cityscape of Los Angeles, the portrait of a man enmeshed in a painted grid, and the highly mannered view of a man and a deer confronting one another, in silhouette, on a mountaintop. What holds all together is Davis’ sense of composition, which is supreme. However strange or cluttered the scene, the images remains cool, balanced.

Davis died in 2015 when he was thirty-four. What’s here is the work of a young painter trying his hand and everything, moving freely and whole-heartedly between different genres (portrait, collage, graphics), narrative modes (biography, fantasy, myth), and manners (figuration and abstraction). And this is what is saddest, that he is right in the middle things.

Noah Davis, “The Last Barbeque,” 2008. Collection of Sam and Shanit Schwartz © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis.

March 30, 2020 by Nalina Moses

IT’S WHAT IT IS

The Vija Celmins show at The Met Breuer is an exemplary retrospective, guiding one logically through this artist’s rich career, which seems to shift, at each stage, more deeply into abstraction. She began in the 1960′s painting everyday objects and found media images, and then turned in following decades to subjects that could be understood more simply as fields: spiderwebs, moonscapes and seascapes.

Celmins’ iconic wave drawings from the 1970′s and 80′s fill the surface with an exquisitely rendered texture, like a tissue. They reproduce beautifully and, in print and on screen, capture majestic natural rhythms. When seen in person they are less obviously charismatic. They call one close to examine their marks and, the moment one takes that step, fall straight into abstraction. One finds only graphite on paper.

Perhaps it’s naive to to make a distinction, and certainly a judgment, between figuration and abstraction in painting. But I found something uniquely magnificent and dramatic in the small figural canvases Celmins completed in the early 1960′s, when she first arrived in Los Angeles after art school. She painted household objects against blank backdrops on small notebook-sized canvases, in black and white with faints patches of color. There are, in the show, in this genre, portraits of an electric skillet, a fan, a two-headed desk lamp, a pencil, and an airmail envelope. In addition to the exquisite craftsmanship that brightens all of Celmin’s work, these canvases offer the blunt pleasure of representation. This is an electric skillet with eggs, and this is a pair of shoes.

There’s one painting, larger and more complex, that caps this period. It’s the view of a freeway, painted from a snapshot Celmins took from the front seat one morning when driving to Irvine to teach. The view, somewhat off-center, of the straight, wide, open road ahead, framed by the car’s hood and wipers, blighted with billboards and blocked by an overpass, doesn’t romanticize the landscape. But the seamless brushwork – it basically disappears – and just-as-it-is rendering of powdery white Pacific light, give the scene a sweet illustionistic cast. One could look at this painting, and stay in this place, forever.

Vija Celmins, Freeway, 1966.

February 09, 2020 by Nalina Moses

OF TWO NATIONS

I walked into the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 - 1983 with questions. Was black power achieved in these years? Would all the artworks featured have a strident political focus? And would this art be good?

This art is great. The exhibit features a cadre of American artists executing museum-caliber work in styles conversant with the dominant aesthetics of the time: expressionism, conceptual art, and the new figuration. Yet almost all of the artists were unknown to me, as if they had been working in a parallel hidden universe.

Photographs by Roy DeCarava have spare compositions and a shadowy graphite-like finish. They render daily scenes with gravity, distance and mystery. Painted portraits by Barkley Hendricks honor their subjects, often himself, with particularizing details but without sentimentality. These life-size renderings possess awesome graphic authority, and bring the white-walled gallery to life. Canvases by Carolyn Mims Lawrence – packed with figures and words – carry the narrative force of epics, and call one closer.

Why haven’t these artists been featured in prominent group shows or individual retrospectives, as their art world peers have? Are they best considered when isolated culturally, as they are here? Certainly many of the artworks tackle political themes, but all can also be understood formally. These artists are producing work that complements or exceeds that of their peers. So why do most of them remain undersung?

Barkley Hendricks. Blood (Donald Formey), 1975. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

August 19, 2019 by Nalina Moses