The exhibit of work by Roberto Burle Marx, the legendary Brazilian landscape architect, at Rooster Gallery is called Tablecloth, after a large canvas one he painted in the 1960’s that’s been cleaned, stretched and given pride of place in the small gallery.  Burle Marx is best known for designing the park Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo and for his collaborations with architect Oscar Niemeyer and planner Lucio Costa, including the grounds of several civic buildings in Brasilia.  The tablecloth, along with the seven other paintings in the show, were gifts from Burle Marx to José Ramoa, a Portuguese art collector and close friend.  At the opening reception the tablecloth, rendered in dizzying, overlapping patterns, made a stylish backdrop for patrons strolling back and forth with capirinhas in hand.

When you look at a painting by an architect (like one by Le Corbusier, or Michael Graves, or Zaha Hadid), you’re likely to find the same forms they employ in their architecture, but lacking their dynamism.  Somehow these architects aren’t always able to capture the life of their architecture in their art; their two-dimensional works are unnaturally dulled.  So I was surprised to see Burle Marx’s smaller paintings, which have a dense, sculptural sensibility altogether different from his landscape designs.  You can spot similar amoeba-like geometries in both, to be sure, but the paintings boast a spatial complexity that’s different in character from his best-known garden designs, which seem to be primarily graphic.  Is there more life in this great landscape architect’s paintings than in his gardens?

In their smaller, ground-floor gallery FIT has mounted an exhibit of notable pieces from their own collection.  It opened with the title Great Designers but, after some controversy, was renamed, with less boldness and brevity, Fashion, A-Z: Highlights from the Collection of the Museum at FIT, Part One.  The garments are displayed alphabetically by designer name, so that the show kicks off with a crystal-studded white gown by Giorgio Armani, and ends with outfits by Gianni Versace, Vivienne Westwood and XULY.Bet.  In between there are pieces from all the usual suspects, including Fortuny, CocoChanel, Donna Karan and Alexander McQueen, as well as undersung heroes, like Lucien Lelong, and upstarts, like Gareth Pugh. Only John Galliano, riding out a scandal, is notably absent.

More than a comprehensive history of fashion, or a random sampling from FIT’s treasure trove, the show offers a convincing argument for the power of the dress.  Even the ladies pantsuits and jackets on display have a dress-like logic, emphasizing a unified, ladylike profile over the drama of contrasting pieces.  And all the pieces seem to emphasize the fall of fabric over a woman’s body rather than the architecture of the clothing itself.  (Although there is one remarkable exception, a green Charles James gown that seems to be standing up on its own.)  So Galliano is sorely missed.  Nothing would have centered the exhibit more than a bias-cut confection from this master of the fancy dress.  There was only one mens ensemble on display, an embellished, pimpish suit by Jean Paul Gaultier.  And that drew attention to another omission – the entire world of mens fashion.  Maybe FIT could have called this exhibit Dresses from the Collection at FIT and followed with another called Suits from the Collection at FIT.  They would have gone swiftly to the heart of both mens and womens fashion.

Last week interior designer Clodagh (like Cher and Madonna, there’s no last name required) concluded a presentation of her chic, contemporary bathroom designs with a heartfelt appeal for water conservation.  She showed images of happy, hydrated children around the world, and of a toilet/lavatory like this one, with a sink over the toilet tank that reuses handwashing water for flushing.  It seemed clever and obvious and, also, too weird to be true.  Will the skinny little faucet provide enough water to rinse your hands properly?  Will water splash up from the shallow basin onto the toilet seat?  And will it be awkward leaning over the toilet seat to brush your teeth?  While I see how this toilet would work well in small, retrofit powder rooms, I wouldn’t feel comfortable specifying it for a client.  There’s still, for me, a strangeness about seeing a toilet and a lavatory combined so seamlessly.

So many popular green construction strategies rely on advanced technologies like photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and geothermal wells.  While the systems are energy-saving, and becoming more and more affordable, it’s simpler, low-tech solutions that might be the most powerful.  There are sun movement studies, exterior plantings, and super-insulating construction methods architects can use to help heat and cool rooms more economically.  This toilet/lavatory has a similar low-tech vibe, which might limit its appeal to style-conscious clients and designers.  How can manufacturers make these types of products, that are so important to green design, positively alluring?  And how can designers overcome their biases?

Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving.  Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next.  In discussion and in reproduction the paintings are terribly banal but in person they have a fizzy charisma.  My favorite of all the ones in the three New York City galleries is a six-foot-tall square canvas with four-inch-diameter spots at the 24th Street gallery.  The proportions make for a special dynamism.  But the installation at the 21st Street gallery is spectacular.  Here the enormous single space is given over to the paintings.  They’re at crazily different scales, from tablet-sized canvases with millimeter-wide dots to TV-sized ones with single dots.  The gallery feels like a giant candy shop.

It’s easy to say that the work, and the Gagosian’s around-the-world installation, are gimmicks.  But the Spot Paintings are all about painting.  The fields are a dry, flat white and the the hand-stenciled spots are a luscious gloss, with the ones at the perimeter kissing the edge of the stretched surface of the canvas.  Conventional painterly subjects – depth, figuration, technique – have been brilliantly excised so that’s all that’s left is paint and canvas.  The format is so formulaic that even graphics and composition seem irrelevant.   When you look at a painting for more than one moment your eyes scan for figures, semi-automatically linking similar-colored spots that might make a larger shape.  But the spots are random and no figure emerges.  Your eye flickers excitedly from one color to the next (from almost-cupric-blues, to almost-crayon-reds, to almost chocolate-browns) with no success.  And then the eye settles, finally, on the figure of the white field.  Because this is the real subject of the paintings, and of painting.  Each one is an ecstatic field of possibility.

Image credit:

© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 

Photography Prudence Cuming Associates