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

BOOKISH, BLINKERED

Steven Holl’s Hunters Points Library is the jewel in the Queens Public Library System, an audacious starchitect-designed monument built to serve a growing community. When it opened in the fall of 2019 Michael Kimmelman raved in the Times, calling it “one of the finest public buildings New York has produced this century.” And it is extraordinary when seen from Manhattan, across the East River, and approached on foot from the local subway station. The five-story concrete volume, eroded by gigantic worm-shaped windows, resembles the mute, enigmatic structures in Holl’s iconic watercolors, that lure one through their shadowy passages.

But the magic ends as one steps inside the library. The worm-shaped windows are overscaled, and set with relation to the floors. The library’s trays, rising in a “V” from the ground floor entrance, are narrow, squeezed between stairs along its west and east facades that offer expansive river and city views. The circulation, in pinched paths along the railings and staircases, is contorted and cramped. When I wandered through one Saturday morning I came uncomfortably close to patrons perusing the stacks, reading the paper, and studying at tables, and starstruck architects taking pictures. We’re used to this kind of crowding in a city building, but not in a new building, or in a building this large, which frames so much empty space at its center. The library is currently facing ADA claims, which isn’t surprising. It seems to have been planned pictorially – to generate spectacular views within and without – rather than pragmatically.

As a working architect one’s vision is continually tempered by realities of program and budget, and a structure is typically shaped to enclose the minimum square footage required. To design a public building as Holl has, squeezing and scattering its program through narrow plates in an immense volume which could have provided much more, is extravagant. To design a library as Holl has, that offers no welcoming space for reading, studying or resting, is criminal. The building opens itself generously to the outside, but it doesn’t hold people inside.

Photograph by Paul Warchol. Courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.

March 09, 2020 by Nalina Moses

MEDIA SAVVY

Sculptor Rachel Feinstein’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Maiden, Mother, Crone, is less powerful as an examination of those female archetypes than as as study in various formal media. Feinstein uses different techniques to model the mostly life-size female figures here: painted wood, enameled aluminum, resin, mirror, nylon, foam, plaster, majolica, and plastic. Though they are shaped boldly, even sloppily, there is a balance and fineness to them. It doesn’t surprise that Feinstein first conceives them as drawings and small maquettes before building them to scale. They are more line and space than mass.

The exhibit is an elegant affair. In one light-filled gallery there are maidens, mothers, and one madonna. In another gallery, dim, with silvered wallcovering, there are crones. This dichotomy reinforces the misogyny built into the archetypes, but that seems beside the point. The depictions all feel remote, intellectualized, with no real women implicated. Only two figures – Angel (a Victoria’s Secret runway model) and Butterfly (a stripper) – flutter to life, perhaps because they are rendered in overtly sexual postures, and rather unkindly, with pads of crazily-colored flesh smeared along their slender figures. Although they are meant to be ugly they remain, in line and form, poised.

All the sculptures are undone, casually, by a series of small portraits hung on one wall in the maiden/mother gallery. The gentlewomen in them are rendered warmly, expressively, and particularly, with loose strokes of enamel on oval-shaped mirror panels, in the manner of eighteenth-century cameos. They move beyond caricature, getting at the character of the women depicted. These are not attractive women; they are rich, idle, haughty, bored, clueless and agitated. But they are real. And this undoes, casually, the archetypes in which women are everywhere elsewhere frozen here.

Photograph courtesy of The Jewish Museum.

February 12, 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