Josiane Sode
Erica Snow
Reviews are composed according to a particular writer’s interest levels, biases, mood swings, and of course hubris on any given day. My experience with the abstract paintings of Josiane Soder was framed by the circumstance of a week of visual overload. The visual fatigue coupled with a text to pour over prompted me to ask the question: why should I attend to this?’
Soder’s work has already been commented upon and placed in the illustrious company of Richter, Lichtenstein, Mitchell, and Rodchenko. I see, however, a more elemental entry point into the works based on process, tool, ground and color. These combinations of ingredients Soder repeatedly researches. Her process seems physical and intuitive. The paintings contain the romantic notion of applying and removing paint with spontaneous motion and scatological glee fundamental to mid-twentieth century painting.
The artist’s tools are familiar ones. She takes the traditional tool of the palette knife and removes paint often to the bare ground. A feature of her images becomes the warp and weft of a heavily gessoed surface. I am reminded of eating a melon down to the tasteless rind. The extreme gestural scraping sustains the notion of painting not as an illusory space, but an object, a surface for expression and the front side of a three dimensional frame.
Color, as Diderot reminds us, gives life. It serves as the most obvious and appealing entry into Soder’s work. Hues are sometimes richly saturated and some are pale pastels. Some colors shock the viewer into guessing an origin while others come from the spectrum dictionary. Humans seem hardwired to respond to this language of color. Soder’s abstract paintings exist as a message of the energy, alchemy and enthusiasm from which art may stem. The works are, after all, objects to attend to and be seduced by Andreas Jaggi at 473 Broadway.
The works New York Zippers by artist Andreas Jaggi are a linear series of somber unstretched canvases linked by dark plastic lines of zippers. The series continues the artist’s impressionistic documentation of European and American urban centers, familiar landmarks. These paintings are tied together and have the conceptual link of recording a site: New York. The dark canvases with loosely applied paint reveal an "impression." Images such as the Village Cigar Store exist as painted tourist snapshots. Unlike the earlier work, New York Zippers has a more limited palette and successfully in captures a sense of urban existentialism. In New York, Jaggi’s imagination heightens our orange-alert city to an unnatural level. Perhaps that is an impression that can serve us well in times of uncertainty.
Despite a failure to convincingly unify, the zippers themselves add an element of interest. Their presence invites the imagination to compose a number of possible frame solutions between the sutures. Zippers themselves denote naughtiness more than function (think of Jong’s zipless fuck). Zippers can evoke a smile of familiarity. The promise of what they may reveal. Jaggi presents, therefore, a predictable style of painting bound with an erotic twist. The paintings are a reminder of our urban duties as perpetuators and monitors of multilayered culture.
