Art on the Line
Shane McAdams
Art on the Line
Currently showing at Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, a new-ish space in Greenpoint, is a modest but extremely compelling show curated by Scott Malbaurn. Art on the Line features five artists each working with aspects of a pedigreed artistic element that, despite its illustrious past, came to last century’s finish line hobbling.
The rise of conceptual, performance, and other extra-dimensional art as well as line’s unavoidable marriage, for better or for worse, to the exhausted formal discussions of the ‘gesture’ might have left it looking a bit passé. But this show, while only an abbreviation of what is possible, reevaluates line in contemporary terms, looking to its chances to be more than just a formal tool.
Each of the five artists in the show attacks the issue differently. Some venture further into conceptual waters than others. Mike Miga’s work splits the difference. El Protegido, one of his three small white paintings, greets with deceptive ease and manner. It’s easy to see, easy to read, and easy to like. Looked at from the street, the piece could be a Rapidograph pen drawing on enamel. It has a relaxed and reductive appeal; a crisp, universal simplicity looking to sidewalk cracks, bolts of lightening, or tree branches against the sky for reference. But, still, something is amiss in his forms. Miga isn’t making lines as much as he’s interrupting an immaculate surface. What might have been a tight organization of vein-like lines are really fissures in carnauba wax slab created by a blow from behind. The spiderweb of cracks begins as a random pattern, the harmony of which is disturbed by Miga’s choice to fill in and hide certain cracks. The networks left on his surfaces take on an unnatural and awkward beauty as they hover somewhere between being random and contrived.
Hanging next to Miga’s three white panels are three similarly sized works by Jon Cox. His abstract paintings are as dense and colorful as Miga’s white panels are lean and austere. His relationship to line, though, is similarly mediated through process. The rich color, depth, and regularity of his work belies the calculated procedures shaping it. Supply and Demand, a small panel, is banded in horizontals of saturated color–thin lime-green stripes on top giving way to thicker violet ribbons towards the bottom.
Within and behind these alluring, saturated fields of color are counterpoised streaks and hatches of combed acrylic paint. The marks are discernibly cool and mechanical. They reflect the synthetic beauty and impersonality of the electronic media. His work stands as a metaphor for the perversely seductive colors and improbable geometric beauty emanating from television screens and video monitors.
John Warren maintains the show’s conceptual inventiveness as well as its cool distance. He uses logarithmic instructions to generate intricately repetitive arrangements on paper. Of the three drawings in the show, Dowels is the most successful composition. The piece is anchored pictorially by a centralized cluster of vertical line segments and transected by horizontally oriented, skewed architectural lines. It works by itself, but would be better off without such a distinction because, as mesmerizing as his spyrographic constructions are on their own, they are more persuasive as experiments within a larger, perhaps endless, project. They are more complete, like vectors, in their implication than merely as a set of numbers and symbols–as a kind of imperfect, ephemeral analog of something absolute. Like parabolas, asymptotes, or Mandelbrot sets, Warren’s drawings aren’t so much about the sum of the formal details that possess them, but the phenomena and the immaterial concepts that they hope to profess.
Malbaurn’s curatorial emphasis leans, and appropriately so, towards analytical and indirect approaches to drawing. He has carefully mined the artistic landscape for artists who might help reevaluate notions of line and is conceptual contingencies.
As a tonic to the show’s headiness, Elia Bettaglio’s drawings are intelligent without depending on a rigorous conceptual alibi. Maybe they have one somewhere, but it isn’t necessary in order to enjoy them. If they are a bit more about drawing than the other pieces in the show, it is only because of the indication of the artist’s hand in the work. The result is an environment occupied by a population of either cosmic or microscopic life forms brought to life by the artist with a deft calligraphic touch.
Each of his three ink-on-paper compositions going untitled accommodates the same family of marks. Somewhat abstract, somewhat organic, nearly alive, the clusters of sinewy lines in each individual drawing sit in frozen action against a stark white paper surface like filaments of lint caught dancing on a backlit strip of celluloid. But even in their exuberance and energy, they bare the smooth controlled creation of a Chinese landscape painting more than the frenzy of rash gesture. As forms they are fast, but as marks, they are slow and contemplative.
Nick Knight’s work is the opposite; it looks slow and deliberate, but it’s actually created by a continual process determined only as the painting is in progress. To say that this work isn’t slow may be a bit unfair. Actually, it’s methodical but self-contained and continuous. Like a James Sienna painting, the end and the beginning are part of the same steadily unfolding thread. Knight’s two pieces are the only ones in the show that are separated from each other. It is easier to see them as individual pieces this way. Taxanome VIII is the sexier of the two, poising a tortuous network of green, blue, and red lines and their candy-colored intersecting points against the natural beauty of a prepared birch panel. The system of lines is somewhat lost against the ringed pattern of the wood, but the fight for prominence is worth watching.
Both Knight and Bettaglio’s pieces give you a lot to think about without having to think a lot. They keep the show airy and help substantiate and complement the other artists. The show finishes with balance and depth. If there is a criticism to levy here, it is that a show like this demands a more complete survey, but Malbaurn has demonstrated that he has the vision. Art on the Line will surely give you pause to think about line, and more, it will have you imagining the sequel.
