The Big Abstract Show, The Painting Center, 52 Greene Streetto June 21
by Joseph Walentini, from Abstract Art Online volume V / Number 10, June 17, 2003

This massive show, curated by Denise Gale, includes 26 artists - all non-members of the Painting Center who have submitted their work for exhibition there.Some of the names may be familiar to readers of these pages such as Lorna Ritz whose work was profiled in our May 2001 issue.Three others have been the subject of reviews or featured on ourNoteworthy page: Monica Tap, David Fratkin and Robert Straight.The remaining artist roster includes Kye Carbon, Sylvia Harnick, Suzanne Kammin, Jacqueline Ott, Andrew Baer, Ellen Kahn, Jordan Broadworth, Robert Aitchinson, Brice Brown, Stephen Maine, Walter Schran, Alexandra Rozeman, Irving Haynes, Barry Sparkman, Angel Leach, Robert Schatz, Cora Cluett, Betsy Weis, Joshua Breslow, Lindsay Brown, Fred Villanueva and Anne Russinof.

Taking a step or two back, a couple of broad observations can be made about this exhibition.The first thing is understanding what is meant by ‘Big’ as referenced from the show’s title.Given the diminutive proportions of the paintings, the large volume of work is clearly the overriding premise (34 pieces in all). Considering the physical limitations of The Painting Center’s exhibition space, big would have to mean one or the other. The other broad viewreveals how the work breaks out into two general categories of esthetic. One is defined by addressing the grid and/or repetitive pattern painting; eitherin support of or to confront adominant sense of order.The other comprises a messier, more organic, typically more painterly approach.In essence the different methodologies contrast an intellectual with an emotional sensibility. Some artists play both camps against each other; sometimes quite effectively within a single painting.

Among the best in the emotional camp are a couple of wonderful paintings by Walter Shran and Robert Aitchtson. Shran is an artist who typically works much larger and reportedly scaled down his painting for this show.This must have been quite a bit of a(unusual) challenge since normally artist’s try to scale their work much larger.But the effect is interesting in that a lot of grandiose visual energy is here compressed. You get an idea of how this work must typically be larger even as this smaller piece establishes a presence in its own right.Aitchison’s painting is simply an expression of the pure joy of gesture.The painting is wonderfully playful yet equally engaging.Aitchtson gets it just right with the color combinations, depth of space and wild gestural quality of the lines.Yet the latter quality maintains a solid sense of balance between expressive spontaneity and visual order.

Lorna Ritz, Andrew Baer, Lindsay Brown, Joshua Breslow and Brice Brown pick up on some of the same qualities.Ritz’s painting matches Aitchtson’s free-spirited treatment but does so with larger more solid forms bumping up against each other. Lines are defined here by where the forms meet each other. You get a strong sense of close-up, lyrical, landscape without it being explicitly stated. The color reinforces the sense of motion and is as important to the forms as the paint handling.Baer follows the same tact but pushes the color and structure toward being even

more substantial and solid. Still, he gets the same push and pull out of the space as Ritz. Although his title references human figures, the work feels more architectural as to subject matter.

Lindsay Brown goes in the other direction and strips out everything but the lines.Right away you may be reminded of Brice Marden or Willem De Kooning’s last body of work.But Brown is a lot more free-form in a manner that is more reminiscent of Serena Bocchino.Although the lines are highly gestural and organic they suggest logical structures that nevertheless require a non-logical viewing. In other words, Brown’s painting makes visual sense but in way that is subtle and not self-conscious. Something else is how much wonderful color is extracted and contained in these lines.Also look carefully at this piece to see how several lines are quietly ‘buried’ in the ground.Breslow stands at approximately the center of this group and employs just about everything everyone else doesexcept very intense color. His forms seem to be telling a story; or any number of stories in the way they suggest references to recognizable things. But it’s a teasing quality that never quite delivers and so plays magnificently to the content of the work. Finally Brice Brown’s paintings’ are very small but very intense.They read like fragments of dark and brooding emotions or pieces of dreams.

The grid is major factor among those dealing with order in their work and among the best are the paintings of Irving B. Haynes, Cora Cluett and Anne Rusinoff.Haynes does several things to counter the dominance of the grid; among them is having the whole right side of the picture plane seem to sag a bit.Also, the magnificent color and paint handling push and pull the forms while a number of triangles are employed to break up the rigid vertical and horizontals. Cluett just goes with grid; at least so it would appear.This very small piece defines a square intersected by columns and rows of dots. But the latter are not so precisely painted or evenly lined up. Then too, there is the exceedingly subtle mixture of soft color that creates an ‘essence’ of spatial depth. This painting clearly requires much more than a cursory glance to truly see and understand it. Rusinoff applies the grid in a very unique manner. As with Cluett the canvases are small and square, but she uses small‘doughnut’ forms to both define and, at the same time, subvert the grid.The color and the paint handling push this even further and despite the imposed sense of order, the paintings read as depicting organic life forms as you might be encountered at a microbiological level.

David Fratkin and Jordan Broadworth present some sense of pattern-painting in their work. Fratkin plays the patterning (which you see first) against a sense of depth, which becomes more

apparent after a longer look. The combination of the two creates a sensibility that suggests treated cloth such as is done with the batik process. There is an indefinable religious quality to this the work beyond what the title implies..Broadworth employs a mixture of patterned swirls, rectilinear forms and contrast to weave a combination of gesture and order.It is the latter that wins over and dominates the former, which is attributable, in part, to the monochromatic color. But the effect overall has something in common with Cora Cluett’s sensibility

Three artists that fall in between the two general types of approach are Monica Tap, Robert Schatz and Betsey Weis. Tap just barely qualifies as a pattern painter since the forms vary in size and color throughout the painting to render a strong gestural reading of the work. It is the flat graphic quality that overridesand evens out spatial depth and pushes a sense of patterning to the fore. There is pleasant organic sense to this piece that is curiously conceptualtoo. Schatz uses patterning in a rather uniquefashion. The broad swathes of patterns are rather organic and lead to a suggestion of landscape while also approaching the same thing Monica Tap achieves. Nevertheless, the largerpatterned forms seems just a bit forced and disconnected. Weis’s painting is, on one hand, veryorderly for the repeated series of horizontal lines that primarily define it. On the other hand, the lines vary like so many stratums and create a deep sense of atmospheric space.In this she and Cora Cluett have a great deal in common as well as with the somber emotional temperature of both pieces. This painting reads strongly as a landscape but happily never quite gets there

Overall this exhibition provides a great survey of contemporary abstract painting.There is enough work of enough variety to discover all sorts of mini-exhibitions within the larger context. Given the variety of style and approach the inclusion of each is quite even handed.An easy criticism might be that the format of the paintings is too small to truly garner some impact.The show might easily be called The Big Abstract Show of Small Paintings.But as indicated earlier it had to be a decision of larger size or greater quantity.In this Denise Gale made the correct choice of included more - even to going beyond the typical parameter of one painting per each artist.This indicates that more thought was given to the comprehensive impact of this show then just simple democracy.You see it too where, despite the volume of work, each piece is nevertheless given plenty of breathing space between it and its neighbor.

The best work in this show is that which is not given to absolute definitions or easily pigeon-holed.

Where various styles or aspects mix it up and cross-blend into different territories is where the work gets very interesting.Another success metric is how easily a painting reveals itself. Paintings that give themselves up too quickly and place less demands on the viewer also don’t hold up as well.Between the two general schools of approach mentioned earlier, orderliness versus gesture, the latter, more organic painting comes off as stronger in this show. Some of the more overtly patterned grid-driven work wanders too closely to pure design.

So, if this were a juried exhibition and we were the jury, the top 5 paintings in The Big Abstract Show would be Robert Aitchtson’s Untitled, Walter Shran’s Untitled, Lindsay Brown’s Untitled, Cora Cluett’s, As Yet UntitledFor NDB and Betsey Weis’s, Tide (all those Untitled titles are a mere coincidence by the way - our preference is to actually have titles).It’s not a juried show of course and this is but one opinion.But the magnificent thingis that every viewer is subtly invited to participate in the same exercise.Denise Gale has given each viewer the potential to become a personal curator of this exhibition.