The seven multi-panel monochromatic (black-against-grey) paintings on view range from small to medium-sized.  He builds them by stretching lengths of thread over painted panels, so that what we see are lines laid down on top of other lines — all of which appear to reside at indeterminate depths. They sow visual confusion about boundaries — between surface and background and about how the works themselves are made. The animating visual conundrum is how seemingly unmoored tendrils of thread can appear to lay on the surfaces of the pictures without falling away.  The artist creates this illusion by painting certain lengths the exact same color as the backgrounds. Those demarcations between light and dark colors create geometric shapes that are, at least from across a room, the ostensible subjects. But the more interesting aspect is the illusion of infinite depth that we experience while looking into these spaces.

 

 

The macro view of Tabatabai’s pictures suggests close ties to classic minimalists like Martin and John McLaughlin. The close-up view, which brings us face to face with their optical characteristics, suggests affinities with the Light and Space movement. Admittedly, light, by itself, is a bit player in these hermetic pictures, but the sensations of spatial dislocation that strike us right at the edge of perception are the same ones that occupy the imaginations of James Turrell and Robert Irwin.  If Tabatabai made his paintings ten times bigger they’d register the same kind of impact as Turrell’s and Irwin’s.  As is, they operate mostly in a liminal zone, their plastic activity taking place within a depth of an inch or less.  

It’s notable, and perhaps no surprise, that before he became an artist, Tabatabai studied construction engineering. At a vastly reduced scale, his work reflects the same concerns with bodily space that architects strive for when they design a building. 

 

You can see it in the precise lines of Thread Painting # 35 where, at the bottom, the strings are glued together to create a delicate web whose matrices recall suspension bridges. Those lines, which are precisely spaced and exactingly painted, also bring to mind both stringed instruments and the endlessly repeating rhythmic cycles of Philip Glass. Thread Painting 2011-11, by contrast, presents rhythmic chaos masked as order.  The largest piece in the show, at 54 x 50 inches, it consists of nine panels that display four squares. Each is divided across four panels which, in turn, subdivide those squares even further. The most obvious associations are to windows, doors, recesses and porticoes. But instead of looking at this geometry lesson from a point-blank position. stand back.  After a few seconds the relationships between “positive” and “negative” space start to dissolve and soon it becomes difficult distinguish between them.

 

For most artists, creating work like this would be a migraine-inducing cerebral process.  For this artist it’s an act of devotion, a meditation. 

 

As he told works & conversations editor Richard Whittaker in a 2008 interview: “When you look at something small…it brings you closer to yourself….Whereas most things just bring you out into the world. I think it’s much more important to come back to ourselves, to understand. I’m interested in the point of origin: where is it as human beings that we connect with each other.”

 

–DAVID M. ROTH

 

David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.

Shows pursues a vision of the Earth’s geologic past in cycles of creation and destruction viewed from some indefinite point in the future, one in which humankind’s destructive sashay across the planet is but a footnote, a trail of insignificant debris. Waterston paints lush, intricately rendered dreamscapes in a style that betrays the twin influences of the Hudson River School and the Edo Period (1603–1867) of Japanese painting. Where Shows takes a cosmological view of things, compressing eons into sprawling epics, Waterston, in his canvases, is all about seeing one’s own mortality in the face of nature, an essentially Neo-Romantic view to which he adds a postmodern spin.

 

Of the two artists, Shows, in this exhibition, has traveled the furthest since her last big splash, back in 2006, when she won the SECA award and knocked everyone out who saw the accompanying show at SFMOMA. This time, instead of depicting vast tracts of mine-ravaged land in wall-sized collages made of cut paper, she’s focused her attention more narrowly on the booty itself: minerals, a topic the SF artist knows well from having grown up in Alaska. In Split Array minerals aren’t just the artist’s subject, they are her source material and raw material. It’s a stunning bit of mimesis.

 

The eight large-scale pictures on view are based on scans of fist-size chunks of pyrite (aka “fool’s gold”) whose “faces” convincingly mimic the features of exotic landscapes. These she copies onto large sheets of aluminum using a mixture of paper, mylar, paint, mica, brass, plastic, ground rock, sand, ink, plexiglass crushed glass and other materials.  The resulting collages are as painterly as they are sculptural. At a distance their primordial features (chasms, fissures, glaciers, ridges, oceans, magma flows) jump out at you like topography in an aerial photograph. Close up they flatten out, like paintings. Don’t bother trying to visually disassemble them. The illusions produced by Shows’ seamless integration of materials is so complete you’d think she was working from a palette of molten ore. The resulting fictional universe, built of colliding geometric planes and quavering molten forms, flips back and forth between earthly and otherworldly. Reflective materials and scratchings on the aluminum substrate function as the equivalent of photographic highlights. They amplify the sci-fi aspect, pushing some pictures, like Face E, practically into Surrealism. Staring into its mirrored horizontal bands, you think you’re looking “through” the picture onto an infinite pool of light until you see your own reflection.

 

This piece of opacity serves as convenient metaphor for what has always been the slipperiest aspect of Shows’ work: her thinly veiled environmental agenda. Like the photographer Edward Burtynsky to whom she’s been compared, Shows is a master of wresting beauty from toxicity. Her work, which isn’t the least bit didactic, relies on a subtle presentation of evidence to guide viewers into recognizing their own complicity in the processes she pictures. She does it here with a pile of consumer waste strewn across the floor. The most significant aspect of this unsightly display of faux toys and electronic gadgets is that the objects are cast in sulfur.  Sulfur, it should be noted, has actual value, whereas the subject of the paintings, pyrite, does not. It’s within that contradiction — between beauty and ugliness, value and worthlessness – that we experience the essential frission of Shows’ art: a pitch-perfect integration of craft, concept and understated ideological purpose.  The seminal German collagist Kurt Schwitters (1997-1948) once boasted (correctly) that he could make “paintings” out of anything. In Split Array, Shows proves, once again, that she can too, using pure abstraction to serve the needs of representation.

 

Waterston, by contrast, sticks mostly to conventional materials: paint, paper, canvas and wood. While the scenes he paints shifts with each body of work, Waterston remains committed, in his bravura technique, to depicting environments that look as if they were conceived in a tropical hothouse and painted as if the artist were looking at the world through the window of a spacecraft or a submarine.  This produces a certain detached feeling, but it’s consistently overshadowed by a stronger sense of engagement telegraphed by hot colors, dense atmospherics and disorienting perspectives, often combined in single paintings. A veteran explorer of the Kantian notion of the sublime, Theosophy and Eastern traditions, Waterston, in Forest Eater, takes us to the volcanoes of Hawaii in 24 small-scale works that are intimately displayed in the gallery’s back room alongside a remarkable pedestal-mounted sculpture.

 

 

For Waterston, who for years has trained his eye on the infinite cycle of rebirth and death, the volcano is a perfect subject. Regurgitating the Earth’s very core, volcanoes remake the surface of the planet through violent, toxic eruptions that cloud the sky and spew rivers of molten rock. Waterston captures the primordial spectacle of it all: the fiery explosions, the steaming fissures and so forth. His depictions of it in watercolors, which fill one wall, reveal a mastery of Asian techniques: stains, ghostly impressions and misty skies and other signifiers of the ineffable.  In contrast, his oil paintings, on an opposing wall, are more specific. Flow and Schwarzwald No. 1, both heavily impastoed, describe molten lava in a texture that resembles wet tar. It drips off the canvases. 

A similar literalness operates in Pahoehoe (flow), a pedestal mounted sculpture made of paint, plastic, metal and wood that looks like a lava flow cast in styrofoam. The biomorophic/grotesque aesthetic of it provides humorous counterpoint to the studied lyricism of everything else, including Waterston’s now-trademark silhouettes, several of which poignantly capture the visual cacophony of unearthed trees. 

 

Waterston may look east for inspiration, but what I get out of his paintings is something akin to the existential dread that pervades Southern novels. I’m not saying there’s a telltale heart beating inside his canvases, only that the artist is exercising some serious mojo.  As Waterston told FAMSF curator Timothy Anglin Burgard: “Painting is the great accomplishment of alchemy.  Paint itself holds the possibility of meaning waiting to signify.” 

 

If that’s the case — and how could it not be? — Shows and Waterston are definitely performing some serious acts of signification, the likes of which are everywhere to be seen but too seldom realized at such a high level. 

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–DAVID M. ROTH

 

 

 

Photos: Monique Deschaines/Haines Gallery

 

David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.

But when painter Rex Slinkard at the age of 31 during the influenza epidemic of 1918, he left behind an actual body of work for our examination. That the former rancher was an artist has never been the issue. The question was, and still is, would he have become a great one?

 

The Legend of Rex Slinkard, through February 26, 2012, at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, does not definitively answer that question, despite the 60 paintings and works on paper on view. Culled from Stanford’s trove of 268 pieces by Slinkard, the show is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, with excellent essays by Charles C. Eldredge, who is a scholar of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mardsen Hartley, and Geneva Gano, whose research on Slinkard was a catalyst for Legend.

 

By all accounts, Slinkard did not hit his stride as an artist until 1914. Because he entered the Army in 1917, Slinkard’s “mature” period spans barely four years. As the Great War raged in Europe, Slinkard indulged his infatuation with self-portraiture, as well as his symbolist urgings, creating allegorical works that appear lifted from the exteriors of Greek amphora and urns. Numerous paintings here containing sections, anyway, that are quite handsome and polished, but if this is the best of what remains of Slinkard’s legend, as Mardsen Hartley coined the phrase, one is forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.

 

Indeed, after Slinkard died, his father thought so little of his son’s output that he used Slinkard’s early, life-size portraits to fence in his chickens. I wouldn’t have done that with the stiff self-portrait from 1910 that’s on view, but you can imagine how hard-working dad might have been impatient with the career choice of his son. In that painting, Slinkard faces himself, standing posed and formal in a white shirt and dark vest, wearing a bow tie that’s as prominent as his bushy eyebrows. To his father, Slinkard’s paintings must have been uncomfortable reminders that young Rex was a city-slicker intellectual.

 

Or, in papa Slinkard’s estimation, worse. As devoted as Slinkard may have been to his art, he also liked to have a good time, drinking and carousing during his days in New York, where he studied under Ashcan artist Robert Henri and shared a studio with George Bellows, who put Slinkard in the lower foreground of one of his most famous fight paintings, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909). Some years later, in 1915, Slinkard’s own depiction of boxers, Ring Idols, was even more obviously homoerotic than Stag, which may be one reason why Rex’s father thought his son’s art was literally for the birds, or why young Slinkard’s engagement to Gladys Williams never consummated in marriage.

 

By 1914, Slinkard’s facial features (he was a cross between James Dean and Leonardo DiCaprio) and wardrobe are disappearing from his canvases, as if even he’s not sure what to make of his primary subject. Rex (1914-1915) is all shades of brown and ochre, a ghost-like phantom staring through narrow eyes, which create a horizon line on which the tangerine-colored flower blooms faintly in the artist’s forehead. Acolyte-Self-Portrait, (1914-1916), is brighter for the white shirt and red collar against a brownish background, but is that a rose or a beating heart in the artist’s apparently clasped hands? Is it anything at all? For self-portraits, these pictures are stubbornly obtuse.

 

Nor are we on firmer ground when Slinkard leaves his studio to paint landscapes, which are peopled with young men and boys in embrace, lean Elie Nadelman-like horses, and allegorical scenes of floods and fountains that borrow heavily from Arthur Davies but suggest the sensibility of William Blake. This is the Slinkard that Eldredge describes as a “latter-day Transcendentalist with a brush.” It’s a good line, but whether it’s a compliment or acknowledgement of Slinkard’s ultimate failure as an artist is difficult to say. 

 

In the catalog, poet Marianne Moore is quoted, saying that Slinkard’s work was “so good and so hampered,” but by what, precisely? Though he apparently valued imagination over mere technique or convention, I think it was actually a lack of imagination that was Slinkard’s Achilles heel. After his death, his supportive mom, who saw to it that her son’s fiancée got the bulk of his work (Gladys died just a few years after Slinkard, leaving the legacy to her sister Florence, who then left it to her alma mater), tried to keep her son’s complicated legend simple. “He was fond of horses and dogs,” she said. In fact, Slinkard painted a lot of horses during his short career, but if his horse paintings had been consigned to the family chicken coop, would his mother’s words have caused us to bemoan the loss of a promising young large-animal vet? Perhaps. But the real question that remains unanswered by the evidence is whether Slinkard would have achieved greatness had his life not ended too soon.

 

-BEN MARKS

“The Legend of Rex Slinkard” @ the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, through February 26, 2012.

 

About the Author:

Ben Marks is the senior editor of CollectorsWeekly.com and a contributor to KQED.org.

 

 

The relationship between jazz and abstract painting is longstanding. The infatuation began in the ’20s, when European Modernists embraced New Orleans jazz and Swing and then blossomed at mid-century when Abstract Expressionists fell head-over-heels for Bebop. That the affair continues, unabated and global, testifies to the potency of cross-disciplinary influences. No other art form has had as strong an influence on painting as jazz. 

 

Which is why, when I learned about Peter Wayne Lewis, my antennae went up.  He, too, claims a connection between jazz and painting, and, at times, he comes credibly close to making it concrete. It happens in loose, wide-open gestural paintings whose form, substance and structure hew to the same principles that govern jazz: namely, elastic expression within set structures. For the chord progressions of jazz Lewis substitutes wavy geometric grids, some visible, others implied. These he creates with brush-painted lines whose squiggly contours recall Sumi ink painting, both in their gradations of luminosity and in their balance of spontaneity and precise control, the latter exemplified in the arabesques he spins with a wrist flick in the middle or at the end of long flowing lines. Using the same technique, he also peppers his canvases with small paint dabs that have the upturned-nipple shape of chocolate “kisses”. There are also in his works highly diluted stains like those seen in Asian watercolors.  In his modulation of these elements, Lewis proves himself a master of rhythm, a kind of off-kilter rhythm, achieved through bodily intuition, not careful plotting. Like the skittering grooves of Thelonius Monk which, by themselves, would have little context or impact without accompaniment, it’s the edges of the canvas that contain Lewis’ fluid compositions and give them coherence. In pictures ranging in size from 30 x 22 inches to 7 x 6 feet, he skirts representation almost entirely, a rare thing in abstract painting no matter what the method or intent.  

 

Beijing Booster 601, the boldest of the large paintings, has a gushing, roiling celebratory quality; it unfurls before the eye like a ticker-tape parade revealed in paint. Working at smaller scales, as in Beijing Booster 513, Lewis allows oozing biomorphic forms to stand almost naked.

 

 

 

A Jamaican-American who emigrated to Sacramento in 1962 and then moved to New York after earning an MA in art at San Jose State, Lewis, 58, leads a peripatetic existence that rivals that of any globe circumnavigating musician. He divides his time between a home in South Orange, N.J., a job in Boston teaching painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and a studio in Beijing. Contrary to what you might imagine, the latter has not darkened his sunny pallete or injected politics into his work. Lewis mostly remains tethered to his own history, and, more than anything else, to his own psycho-motor impulses, some of which may be genetically encoded: His father was an accomplished jazz pianist; his grandparents were missionaries. His friends include the jazz-influenced poet Amiri Baraka, as well as many New York-area musicians.

 

Like the jazz legends who recorded for Blue Note, Prestige and Impulse at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in nearby Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Lewis completes all of his works in a single take without revision.  He titles and numbers them sequentially. What you see is an exact record of how each painting was made.  Thus, any “holes” in a series correspond to paintings the artist rejected rather than rework. The downside to this “first-thought, best-thought” approach is that some paintings feel underdeveloped and, at times a bit glib, as if the artist tossed them off a little too quickly. The counterargument made by the exhibition is that the smaller paintings are designed to be seen in series, and it’s a valid point:  In trios, they generate a certain interactive spark.

 

Lewis is fond of citing Coltrane and Ellington as inspirations.  I see a more accurate (and far less dense analog) in guitarist Bill Frisell, a minimalist who says as much with “active” empty space as he does with actual played notes. Lewis does the same thing with well-aimed gestures and lots of white space. What we get in these light-drenched, tropically colored paintings are works that invite viewers “inside” without demanding a big down payment in visual literacy – or a large investment in decoding arcane iconographies. In jazz, they call it accessibility. In visual art it’s called Pop. Or, in Lewis’ case, you might call it a kind of Minimalist/Pop/Abstraction – one that reflects historical antecedents, but isn’t weighed down by them. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

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David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder. A veteran journalist, he is a former contributing editor at Artweek and a critic for Art Ltd.

 Do you ever get that feeling that the world of contemporary art is nothing more than an endless blizzard of pretense and triviality? If you don’t, then you are probably not paying attention, but if you do, then you might want to fortify yourself with a vivid reminder of better things made in a better place at a better time. The time and place is the Venetian Republic of the late 15^th and early-to-middle 16^th century, and the better things are the collection of 50 Venetian paintings from that period that are included in Masters of Venice: Renaissance Paintings of Passion and Power at the de Young Museum until February 12. All of the works are on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and most came into that collection from the holdings of the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold II (1747-1792), an avid and judicious collector of Venetian art.

 

 

 

 

There are 25 portraits in this exhibition, and their sitters comprise a remarkable cast of characters that seem much larger than life. For example, in Tintoretto’s 1571 picture titled Portrait of Sebastiano Vernier (and the Battle of Lepanto), we see a no-nonsense military commander posed against a battle scene commemorating the decisive defeat of the Turkish navy in that fateful year, while Titian gives us the telling image of the avaricious merchant in his Portrait of Jacopo Strada (1568). There are several paintings that portray dignified ladies wearing fine and elaborate garments, the most amazing of which is Titian’s Portrait of Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua (1536). As a display of virtuoso painting skill, this work is beyond stunning, especially in the areas where Titian lingers on the details of lace and fabric, making a seemingly impossible task of descriptive representation look easy and graceful. In his Portrait of of Johann Fredrich, Elector of Saxony (1551), we are given evidence of German-speaking political emissaries in elite Venetian social circles, this one a corpulent and suspicious looking character who actually did some hard time in the ducal dungeon. And, as a reminder that several works by Veronese are also included here, I’d recommend you look closely at his portrait of Lucretia (1582), a sumptuous feast of undulating surfaces that fold in and out of the garments worn by the legendary woman of suicidal virtue.