"Boston Cremes" (1962)

“Fools invent, genius steals” is a saying that applies to many artists. But finding one to whom it applies more fittingly than to Wayne Thiebaud is difficult. While California’s best-known painter has registered his fair share of inventions, it’s his melding of distant and diverse influences that set him apart in the ‘60s, and it continues to do so today.  While some of his contemporaries are starting to feel a bit shop-worn, Thiebaud, despite exposure in what feels like a continuous string of blockbuster exhibits over the past decade, retains a mystifying allure. 

Homecoming, his fourth solo exhibition at the Crocker since 1951, comes at a propitious time: it coincides with the museum’s 125^th anniversary, the opening of its quadrupled-in-size exhibition space and the artist’s 90^th birthday, which falls next month. 

Of the more than 50 works on view, some of which are located in a separate show of new and promised gifts, at least 20 were painted in the past decade.  Spanning the years 1961 to 2010, they capture Thiebaud at all the important junctures: decontextualized still lifes, portraits, surreal landscapes and vertiginous cityscapes.  They also show him evolving from pure Pop to abstraction, applying the methods he perfected in his confectionary paintings to landscapes.  These, like the cityscapes for which he is equally famous, employ radical distortions of perspective and an almost 19^th century, Post-Impressionist sense of light.  What’s different is the emphasis.  It is not on the much-vaunted confectionary paintings, but rather on everything else in Thiebaud’s oeuvre. 

"Pies, Pies, Pies"  (1961)

A realist to the core with an almost religious devotion to the formal intricacies of representation, Thiebaud learned more from the likes of Chardin, Sorolla and Bonnard than he did from any of his contemporaries, save Richard Diebenkorn whose color palette still echoes in current works.  Yet in 1962, the year of his New York debut at the Allan Stone Gallery, his lushly rendered paintings of pies, cakes and ice cream cones put him squarely in the middle of Pop.  It was a designation he initially disowned but later accepted after it brought him fame.  Like Warhol, Thiebaud began his career as a commercial artist, and like Warhol he achieved international acclaim by lionizing vernacular images that critics and ordinary folks just couldn’t (and still can’t) resist.  Why?  One theory floated in 2003 is that Thiebaud is something of a folk artist.  The idea seemed ludicrous since Thiebaud, at the time, had been teaching painting at UC Davis for nearly half a century.  But its proponent, Michael Zakian, director of Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, argued — persuasively — that Thiebaud, while no folkie, does employ a great many folk-art mannerisms.  The obsession with detail, the faithfulness to an object’s essence, the use of fixed, rigid forms in a diagrammatic style, the employment of distortions in perspective to achieve a kind of caricature, the reliance on repetition and sorting, and a devotion to painterly excess and vivid color — these are devices that folk artists have traditionally relied upon.

"Five Seated Figures", 1965, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches; "Two Kneeling Figures", 1966, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

True or false, it seems now like a plausible explanation for why Thiebaud’s veneration of simple things (pies, paint cans, cigars, neck ties, cheese wheels, cityscapes and landscapes) never falls out of style.  His art speaks to our longing for simple truths, for things we know. If I had to pick two paintings in this show that sum up Thiebaud’s bravura paint handling skills, Pies, Pies, Pies (1961) and Boston Cremes (1962) would rank near the top.  He doesn’t just render these edibles realistically – he aims a laser-guided dart at our senses, whipping the pigment into multi-colored froths that make us feel as if the works were pulled from an oven rather than an easel.  What rescues them from sentimentality is the fact that he eliminates illusionistic, spatial perspectives, preferring instead to separate objects from their surroundings like a studio photographer would. with plain backdrops and flood lights.  This isolation has a bifurcating effect: It magnifies the sterility of the fluorescent-lit, retail environment while issuing an icy, look-but-don’t-touch sensuality.

"Big Condominium", 2008, oil on canvas, 72 x 26"

Thiebaud takes a similar approach with figures.  He paints people as if they were pies and cakes.  The results, in pictures like Two Seated Figures (1962), Five Seated Figures (1965) and Two Kneeling Figures (1966) are inscrutable.  The figures occupy a nondescript space.  They wear vacant gazes and appear to be unaware of each other’s presence.  Socially and psychically, they are lost, autonomous beings.  These paintings are among the few in which Thiebaud allows overt content to seep into his work. 

The artist’s preference for realism, however, has never made him a slave to reality.  In his cityscapes, which he started in 1973 after purchasing a home in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill district, all notions of spatial truth are upended in the service of pure feeling.  He re-creates the giddy roller coaster sensation of the city’s streets by telescopically compressing distance and employing multiple perspectives in a single picture.  Night Streets Study (1998), Big Condominium (2008) and Dark City (1999), for example, are exercises in pure vertigo that make viewers feel as if they are plunging down one sheer cliff and up another.  They are outrageous concatenations of impossible angles that effectively capture the feeling of a city in which a grid was imposed over a series of peaks. 

This penchant for exaggeration, which hints at both Symbolism and Surrealism, extends to his Central Valley landscapes.  Bisected by rivers and heavily irrigated during the summer growing season, this region, when viewed from the air, is a patchwork of green and brown.  Not monochromatic, exactly, but close.  Thiebaud turns up the color volume, rendering it in loud, sometimes Day-Glo hues, exaggerating to a point to where if you saw images like this on TV you’d quickly reach for the color control.  Prime examples are Green River Lands (1998) and Flood Waters (2006) in which various aerial perspectives appear as contiguous tracts, looking like they were cut and pasted from pictures taken at different altitudes.

When Thiebaud started working like this in the ‘60s, his paintings stood out against the staid color conventions of Abstract Expressionism.  As it happened, Thiebaud, during his New York stay in the ‘50s, dabbled briefly in Ab Ex and spent significant time with its leading figures: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman – all of whom claimed abstraction would yield an art that was aesthetically richer and more truthful.  Thiebaud admired their skills and ideas but couldn’t let go of representation.

"Flood Waters", 1965, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Had he done so, he would have made a formidable practitioner, as several recent works, all employing his signature juicy impasto, attest.  Mountain Layers (2010) clings tenuously to representation, but is really more of an exercise in extreme modulations of color and tonal value.  In an oblong slab of horizontal brushstrokes that appears to have been cleaved with a palette knife and dotted with nubs of paint, it shows what could be farm plots climbing the side of a monolith.  The form is circled by contrasting rings of color: flesh tones on the left, shades of pale blue and gray on the right.  The sky is mauve. Abstraction and reality exist on equal footing.  

Even at 90, Thiebaud continues to push himself.  He paints every day and finds time to play tennis, even on 100-degree Sacramento days.  "He’s got the metabolism of a snake," one of the artist’s former tennis partners told me.  In the studio, he’s got the instincts of a mountain goat: he has no fear of scaling great heights. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

Wayne Thiebaud: Homecoming @ the Crocker Art Museum through Nov. 28, 2010.

Untitled #40, 6/3-4/2004, oil on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2"

In the 1995 movie Smoke Harvey Keitel, a Brooklyn tobacco shop owner and serial photographer, explains why he shoots the same picture from the same spot at the same time, everyday: “They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings and your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light… It’s just one little part of the world.  But things happen there…”

Fred Dalkey’s The Church Series operates on roughly the same principle.  It features 54 paintings of a pair of Chinese pots, completed on successive days over a six-month period in 2004. Assembled chronologically in the main gallery, the array of modestly scaled but luminous paintings gives physical form to time spent in limbo, when Dalkey, displaced from his studio, worked in an empty church that his dealer, the late Paul Thiebaud, had put up for sale. Unsure when he might be forced to leave, Dalkey undertook no large projects but focused instead on the table by a window on which two pots, one somewhat larger than its mate, embodied stability. Subject to arbitrary fate, yet reasonably secure from one day to the next, Dalkey affirmed his connection to the visual world in daily paintings of these objects – each rendered from the same vantage point. Numbered and labeled, they document the passage of time, while their mutating forms suggest a series of internal narratives, each a concentrated fragment of human cognition.

Untitled #35, 5/13-16/2004, oil on canvas, 17 3/4" x 14"; Untitled #20, 3/7/2004, oil on canvas, 14" x 11"

White and empty, the church interior imposed a monastic austerity; even the windows were covered with frosted plastic. What’s more, by placing himself against the light, Dalkey set himself the additional challenge of eliciting colors from shadows. As it often did for Matisse and Bonnard, however, this sensory deprivation generated an intensified experience of saturated hues. If painting Number 1 is relatively somber, by Number 2, Dalkey is engaged with acid greens and vivid reds. These variations in color orchestration sometimes create dramatic contrasts from one painting to the next, suggesting the artist’s shifting moods.

Untitled #48, 7/14-16/2004, oil on canvas, 15 3/4" x 12"

Such orchestration extends from the objects to the wall behind them, in subliminal landscapes that evoke the trees and changing seasons outside. The atmosphere itself becomes tangible, suggesting the overall space of the high-ceilinged room. But the drama here is more of Beckett than Shakespeare. Dalkey is anchored in his daily attention to the fullness of the pots and the continuously shifting atmospherics.

In this highly existential, Morandi-like exploration of a repeated theme, Dalkey shifts the focus away from the subject to the act of seeing. Thus, the paintings become physical evidence of an acutely observed interchange: between the raw sensations of the optical nerve and the uncertain mechanism by which the brain translates those sensations into recognizable forms. 

“If the paintings seem to us to be exercises of emotional expression, it may be that emotions can literally affect the way we see, writes Chris Daubert in an essay accompanying the show.  “The power of these paintings goes beyond the fact that they are an artist’s attempt to capture an almost impossibly fleeting occurrence.  They are able to elicit emotion through the resonance of shared experience. They may feel familiar because at one level we all live in the same visual world.”

–HEARNE PARDEE

Fred Dalkey The Church Series @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento through October 23, 2010.

“Magenta and Hooker’s Green Rings 1”, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on mylar, 96 x 96 inches

What would Robert Smithson have achieved if he’d used  brushes instead of boulders and earth?  For an approximate answer, check out Nellie King Solomon.  Solomon’s wall-sized acrylic-on-mylar paintings may lack the scale of Smithson’s pirouette in the Great Salt Lake, but her style of “flow painting” – developed over years of hard-won process experiments – achieves a similar impact: It transfixes us with simulations of things that appear natural and man-made – often all at once and in the same picture.

Solomon pours paint onto mylar and then lets it flow freely into puddles which she shapes and textures with custom-made hand tools, sweeping the liquid into circular arcs that are stained by rivulets that coalesce into retina-stinging plumes and dark shadows.  Into these she mixes other substances which, when congealed, assume the texture of barnacles or of briny mineral deposits imprinted with fossils. 

Rendered in magenta, mallard-duck green and obsidian black and tinged with iridescent glitter (whose hues shift anamorphically), Solomon’s paintings flip back and forth between allusions to toxic chemical spills and to naturally occurring phenomena, like volcanic eruptions, ocean currents and alluvial fans and to things you can see only through a microscope, like the division of cells.

“Magenta 2”, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on mylar, 48 x 48 inches

While the alleged tension between macrocosmic and microcosmic has become something of a cliché in abstract painting, Solomon’s marriage of opposites is a palpable fact: When you look at her work it’s impossible to say whether you’re seeing a magnified view of a molecular reaction or a vision of the Earth’s crust from outer space.  Both appear simultaneously and with equal force.

The historic antecedents for this kind of work are many: the free-form splatter of Jackson Pollock, the staining of Helen Frankenthaler, the gravity-based dripping of Pat Steir, the hybrid smearing techniques invented by Ed Moses and the gritty surfaces of early Sam Francis paintings are a few that come to mind.  Solomon incorporates all of these, but adds the innovative use of mylar, a substrate whose semi-translucent quality allows her painted forms to hover both on the surface and slightly above it.  This indeterminacy, of not knowing where, exactly, objects reside in space, makes viewers look even harder than they might do otherwise.  The exceptions are four paintings from the Black Ring series which are smaller, darker and sharper-edged.  These biomorphic shapes have a blunt, iconic stance.

“Black Ring Cut 2”, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on mylar, 24 x 24 inches

Throughout, Solomon uses circular forms repeatedly.   It’s an ancient practice with many contemporary adherents, most of whom lean toward “spiritual abstraction”.  Solomon’s interests appear to lay elsewhere.  She seems more closely aligned with Edward Burtynsky and David Maisel, two environmentally concerned photographers who depict ruined (but lovely ) landscapes shot from aerial or elevated perspectives.  Like Burtynsky and Maisel, Solomon cloaks virulent toxicity in eye-candy beauty.

As the artist explains in a written statement:  “Land marred and poisoned is disarmingly beautiful and dramatic in its tragedy…The paintings reflect my experiences of great western landscapes…The slick paint resembles oil spills and hot toxic color fields: beautiful pictures of terrible things.”

–DAVID M. ROTH 

Nellie King Solomon Diamond Rings @ Brian Gross Fine Art through October 30, 2010.

Cover detail: “Magenta and Hooker’s Green Rings 1”, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on mylar, 96 x 96” 

Learn more about Nellie King Solomon.

Arshile Gorky, “Betrothal”, 1947, oil on paper, 51 x 40 inches

For nearly a week we roamed: from Santa Monica to Hollywood, from Beverley Hills to downtown, and from Claremont to Pasadena. We reveled in the wackiness and tackiness of it all — and yes, got stuck in some epic traffic snarls. Our reward: a handful of worthy shows, some of them life-changing.    

Arshile Gorky’s (1904-1948) retrospective at MOCA ranks high among the latter.  It’s difficult to imagine any artist today attaining Gorky’s level of prominence after operating for so many years in the shadow of others. He spent his most of his adult life working through Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Miro, de Chirico and other modernist masters.  Thus, in two thirds of this show, we see him wrestling with those influences without ever really coming into his own.  Then, somewhere around 1940, eight years before he committed suicide after a series of physical and emotional blows, he broke free, retaining a penchant for Surrealism, the impulse that ultimately defined him. We talk about artists walking a line between abstraction and representation, but Gorky really walked that walk.  His biomorphic shapes allude to things we know – like bodies and sex organs – but they never allow us to settle on any specific associations.  His bulges, blobs and orbs, connected by spidery lines, float in a netherworld, issuing sensations that never rise to the level of facts.  His colors are similarly ambiguous.  He often used bright hues, but the colors in his strongest works, particularly those from the Betrothal series that came toward the end, are so murky they’re difficult to name without a string of hyphens.  That they glowed in the museum’s dim light like mystical visions attest to his skills as a colorist. It is often said that Gorky presaged Abstract Expressionism, and indeed, you can see plenty of evidence; but whether he would have actually gone there given his allegiance to Surrealism remains open to debate.

Alberto Burri: “Bianco XV”, 1956, collae of canvas, burlap and oil on canvas, 23 ¾ x 19; ¾

Alberto Burri (1915-1995), the Italian Arte Povera hero, not only went there – he did so presciently, foretelling things to come.  Like Gorky, who experienced the Turkish genocide firsthand in Armenia, Burri was traumatized by war.  He served as a doctor in the Italian army until he was captured by the British in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Texas.  He spent three years there before being shipped back to Italy.  He settled in Rome. There, disillusioned by the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield, he renounced medicine and reinvented himself as an artist, scavenging whatever materials he could from a ruined city.  His early pieces consisted of burlap sacks that were crudely stitched together and splattered with scorched, gangrenous looking paint.  Widely hailed as raw analogues of his war experience, the saccos catapulted him to international fame, setting the tone for a career defined by remarkable inventions that would later become (at least in the popular imagination) more closely associated with others, particularly Robert Rauschenberg. 

Rauschenberg, as it happened, acquired the ideas for his combines from Burri whose studio he visited in 1953.  Thus, if we look at Burri’s saccos and see echoes of Rauschenberg, it’s only because the emerging New York art establishment, from 1960 until quite recently, discounted everything not stamped “Made in U.S.A.”  Combustione: Alberto Burri and America at the Santa Monica Museum of Art sets the record straight.  It showcases not only Burri’s earliest work, but also what came after, when he began dividing his time between Europe and LA.

Steve Roden: “One Mountain of Found Breath”, 2005-06, oil and acrylic on linen, 46 x 38”

From LA, Burri made frequent trips to Death Valley, and he translated those experiences into memetic “equivalents”: displays of cracked paint on fiberboard that look like they were lifted whole from the valley floor.  (These predate Andy Goldsworthy’s clay wall works by decades.)  For me, Burri’s most electrifying works are his combustiones, accretions of plastic singed with a blowtorch.  The signature piece from this period, Nero Plastica L.A., looks like a chunk of molten obsidian that accrued and cooled inside a wooden frame.  I stared at it for a long, long time, wondering what led him to create such a thing.  Then I read a quote from the Italian critic, Giulio Carlo.  Writing in 1960, he called Burri’s practice “a sort of trompe l’oeil in reverse, in which it is not painting which simulates reality, but reality that simulates painting.”

I’d also place into the life-altering column Steve Roden’s retrospective In Between at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.  If you knew nothing of Roden, you’d probably peg him as a stoned-out hippie working in a remote cabin.  His combination of quavering lines, symbolist iconography, obscure smatterings of text, small expressionistic gestures, radical mash-ups of crazy perspective and alien topographies can only be categorized one way: visionary.

In point of fact, Roden is a highly educated, scientifically minded artist who lives in a neat, well-ordered designer house in Pasadena. Nevertheless it’s difficult not to think of him as something of a savant.  Howard N. Fox, the show’s curator, points to one organizing principle: the artist’s translation of musical scores and non-musical sounds into mathematical formulas that help generate the bare bones of each picture.  Out of that you might expect something neat, linear or symmetrical – or at the very least, something comprehensible.  What we get are free-form improvisations built layer-upon-layer that seem to be guided by an unfailing compositional instinct.  Problem is, when you view these iterative paintings close-up, they reveal some rather ham-fisted paint handling.  Oddly, this doesn’t seem to detract from the experience.  Instead, I found myself marveling at how Roden apportions the opposing impulses of logic and reason, intuition and happenstance – fashioning his synthesis into works that dangle the prospect of great meaning but yield none.

John Millei: “Maritime # 6” and “Maritime #4 (Ship’s Deck)”, both 2004; Installation view of “Maritime” series

By contrast, you’d be hard-pressed to find a painter of greater virtuosity and vision than John Millei.  He has two shows at Ace Gallery: one of his multi-part Maritime series in Los Angeles and another of pictures based on Picasso’s Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) at the gallery’s Beverly Hills branch.  The Maritime, White Squall and For Surfing paintings – 62 canvases in all – represent an astonishing reassertion of the vitality of the Abstract Expressionist impulse.  They include a monumentally scaled, realistically painted image of an 18^th century sailing vessel; highly abstract pictures of masts and rigging; and dark seascapes composed of electrically bright serpentine wave forms, painted in both color and black-and-white.  Millei uses still photographs and films as references, and the scale and impact of his works reflect both an art-historical and cinematic orientation.  While each series aspires to heroic status, his White Squall paintings most fully achieve it by capturing the blinding disorientation of a ship engulfed in a storm.

Ewerdt Hilgemann, “Imploded Cube”, 2009, Stainless Steel, 39” x 39” x 39′

Swatches of ropes, rigging, netting and cables are clearly visible, but the overall effect is of a complete white-out in which gravity and spatial relationships are suspended.  Viewing them makes feels like walking up to the edge of an abyss.  Less apocalyptic, but no less awe-inspiring, are the Maritime paintings that place us on deck and inside the hulls of these same vessels.  The views are of jagged lines and blindingly bright spaces and yawning expanses of darkness.  Millei paints them in swift, fluid strokes, some thin, some thick, alternating between glossy, dark, metallic sheens and matte-white and silvery finishes that roam from heavy impasto to nearly translucent .  The raw, unfinished quality of these lines and their visual complexity do more than just demonstrate Millei’s painterly skill.

As Donald Kuspit wrote in a recent 18,000-word essay on Artnet, Millei builds a new chapel in the religion of art from fragments of past art the way medieval cathedrals were built from the ruins of pagan temples…Turning known artistic territory into a terra incognita of abstraction, he restores art’s existential mystery.”

German sculptor Ewerdt Hilgemann’s solo U.S. debut, Panta Rhei, at Samuel Freeman creates frisson through an altogether different means: he converts the raw, inert mass of stainless steel forms into an experience of specular light by literally imploding them.  To demonstrate, Freeman shows me a video of the artist working in his studio.  With an impish twinkle in his eye, Hilgemann explains how he begins with basic forms: triangles, squares and oblong rectangles that he builds from sheet metal and buffs to a seamless, high gloss.  Some are small enough to fit on a pedestal; others approximate the size of human figures.  To these he welds a pneumatic valve which, when hooked to a generator, sucks the air out of each object with a loud boom.

Heather Gwen Martin, "Blind Spots," 2009, oil on linen, 48 x 67"; "Trigonometric Functions," 2009, oil on linen, 48 x 67"

Their kicked-in, hollowed-out look feels like a perceptual trick whose impact is compounded by the way they simultaneously reflect and refract light.  No, they don’t produce the giddy, hall-of-mirrors effect of say, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, but on a vastly smaller scale, they come proportionally close.  They evoke the glossy sheen of minimalism while simultaneously issuing a poke in the eye to its purist orthodoxies.  Donald Judd’s gleaming boxes: deflated!

Heather Gwen Martin’s super-saturated paintings at Luis De Jesus feel, at first, like an attack on the senses, but their ultimate destination is the psyche where surrealist-inspired images behave like visions in a fever dream.  Part biomorphic, part animated cartoon, Martin’s pictures recall Gorky’s in the way her forms play at being representational, but allude to nothing specific.  In his catalog essay for the show, painter Kim MacConnell cites many precedents for Martin’s work.  They include, in addition to Gorky, a host of other surrealists and abstractionists, including the late, great John Altoon, who, like Martin, threw cartooning into his mix.

Llyn Foulkes, “Lucky Adam”, 1985, mixed media, 50 x 35”

But there’s another aspect to this work that’s equally important: color.  Sometimes color is content, and in the case of Martin, whose day job involves coloring cartoons with computers, the use of preternaturally bright hues to background animated forms – or to simply define geometric volumes — dovetails with surrealist notions of how reality can be bent.  That, as MacConnell notes, may not be fashionable, but with deep roots in art history, both local and global, Martin’s work has enough weight and whimsy to open a line of inquiry that has been closed for too long.

I concluded my LA tour at the Hammer with a view of contemporary selections that included a lot of well-known suspects, the most memorable being Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, Llyn Foulkes and Nayland Blake.  Bradford, for me, was the main draw, but it was Walker who tore my head off.  The bait-switch text of her multi-panel installation, Every Painting Is a Dead Nigger Waiting to Be Born, shows how belief systems can be peeled back to reveal racism in disguise.  Ditto for Nayland Blake’s epic rant, Scum.  It does to the male gender what Walker does to race, piling up clichés with enough force to reveal the source of their power.  Llyn Foulkes’ painting, Lucky Adam, from 1985, drains the glory from war by drenching the subject’s head in a bloody red comb-over that is positively gruesome.  It’s not an atypical painting for Foulkes; but to categorize him would be a disservice.  To wit: If you haven’t seen “The Machine”, a collection of instruments that Foulkes operates as a one-man band, you haven’t lived.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Cover detail: John Millei, "For Surfing # 3", 2001-02, oil and gesso on canvas,138 x 80" 

Alberto Burri: Combustione: @ Santa Monica Museum of Art through December 18, 2010

 Ewerdt Hilgemann: Panta Rhei @ Samuel Freeman through October 16, 2010

John Millei: Maritime @ Ace Gallery Los Angeles through November 15, 2010

Steve Roden: In between, a 20-Year Survey, Armory Center for the Arts, through Jan. 9; 2011

Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, The Hammer Museum, through January 30, 2010.

Heather Gwen Martin, Recreational Systems @ Luis De Jesus Gallery through October 16, 2010

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective closed @ MOCA Grand Ave. September 20, 2010.

Pictures of Paper: "Fuji from the Sea of Satta, Gulf of Suruga, Number 23, after Hiroshige", 2009, digital c-print, 64 3/4 x 43 1/2 inches

So a critic walks into a gallery and looks at seven very large works ensconced in imposing frames. He sees multi-colored configurations of carefully cut fabric that in most cases looks like thin felt, and he notes that most of the configurations coalesce into simulations of familiar art historical images—one a Winslow Homer seascape, four others faithful to Ukiyo-e woodblock images by the likes of Hiroshige and Hokusai. Then he picks up the price list to read the titles of the works and realizes that all of the works in the exhibition are editioned digital C-prints executed on a stunningly grand scale.

He returns to the works and notes the subtle drop shadows around the shapes that he thought to be cut from colored cloth, and he still cannot see the digital artifice until he completes a prolonged close-range examination. Minutes earlier, he would have sworn upon a tall stack of holy books that the work was made of collaged fabric and colored paper, but now he worries that too many years of looking at art has taken a toll on his eyesight. But he still very much enjoyed looking at the work.

This short summary captures the experiential essence of Vik Muniz’s current exhibition at the Rena Bransten gallery. It offers a stunning demonstration that the difference between any real thing and its simulated cousin may indeed be a moot point, simply because the technics of simulation are now fully capable of outstripping the most inquisitive of human eyes, and perhaps the entire human sensorium as well. The only question that remains is how we might continue to go about enjoying esthetic experiences that we can no longer trust, with Plato’s stern admonishments on that subject suddenly seeming to be quaint exercises in an outmoded moralism.

The works in Muniz’s exhibition signal this in a number of ways. For example, his reworking of the Ukiyo-e images remind us that the term literally translates as “floating world,” and the world of images has never floated more than in our current regime of technological reproducibility. We are also reminded of the influence that such works had on the work of early modern masters such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, leading us to ponder the many ways that our brave new world of technologically assisted image phantoms may have been a latent ghost imbedded within the modernist project.

Pictures of paper: "Fudo Falls, Oji, after Hiroshige", 2009, digital c-print, 64 3/4 x 43 1/2 inches; Pictures of Paper: "Vase of Flowers with Pocket Watch, after Willen Van Aelst", 2010, digital c-print, 56 x 40 inches

But the exhibition contains another work that points us in a different direction. It is titled Pictures of Paper (color): Vase of Flowers with Pocket Watch after Willem Van Aelst (all of the works in the series are called “Pictures of Paper [color]”). Using the same technique as is evidenced in the other works, it is a reproduction of a reproduction of a Vanitas still-life by the famous 17^th century Dutch master, which is to say that it references a different kind of floating world, one where the bounty of life flourishes but for a fleeting moment before its runs out of the precious time allotted to it by fate. Despite the fact that, in visual terms, this is the richest of all the works in the exhibition, it is also the one that most clearly intimates an oblique and disquieting connection with the morality of mortality.

Pictures of Paper: "Northeaster, after Winslow Homer", 2010, digital c-print, 40 x 59 inches

With the single exception of the above-mentioned still-life image, the rest of Muniz’s new works suggest that it would be better if we would greet the circus of appearances with a smile of happy confidence in the brave new world’s capabilities for providing visual enjoyment-as-simple-enjoyment, because the world of original meaning has been lost to artistic hands. But maybe not to the literary mind. Two books come to mind. The first is a large catalog raisonné of Muniz’s works recently edited by Pedro Correa de Lago and published by Capivara Press, within which is chronicled every detail of the artist’s three decades of using unconventional materials to joust with various art historical assumptions, and another somewhat older book titled Reflex: a Vik Muniz Primer, that being a semi-autobiographical, semi-philosophical and fully humorous exercise in artistic self-explanation—possibly the best “artist’s statement” to have been written since the time of Benvenuto Cellini’s famous autobiography.

–MARK VAN PROYEN

Vik Muniz: Pictures on Paper (color) @ Rena Bransten Gallery through October 23, 2010.