Gigantus Abstractosaurus Twilight of the Dogmas
by James Kalm
First, let’s state the positive. Gene Davis, the famous geometric stripe painter said, "The only way to go in art is too far." Al Held is arguably one of the greatest painters America has produced in the last fifty years. He made an important contribution that moved abstract painting beyond AbEx and Color Field. His reintroduction of hard-edged geometric forms, as well as his attention to surface, has been an ubiquitous influence for many of today’s ultra-cool young computer aided painters. This show at P.S.1 represents a summing up of his last twenty-five years of work.
The four huge paintings in the main gallery are at once awesome and frustrating. Their massive scale (at least fifteen feet high) is impressive for it’s sheer presence. Their horizontal orientation inclines the viewing of them as a kind of abstract landscape–the kind that we’ve become used to seeing through movie’s computer-generated special effects and video games. The foregrounds are filled with geometric shapes that are Held’s signature forms: isometrically viewed cylinders, disks, cubes, planes, and triangles. The surfaces of all the forms are obsessively filled with perspectival patterns. Much of this is painted in very closely valued tones. This could be the point where Held has pushed the endeavor beyond the visually acceptable to the visually imperceptible. Held’s paintings may have reached the state of overblown academic compositional machines that are as dead and cold as the mammoth genre scenes, the response to which produced the initial rebellion of abstraction about a hundred years ago. These pictures represent a carrying out of preconceived ideas beyond the point of good painting, as if robotic painters were simply following a programmed formula long after the last human hand held a brush. The concepts have transcended the artist and gone directly to industrial production. In a strange way, this is the painting’s strong point and this displays great courage and determination. You’ve got to respect a painter who can tempt failure on such a grand scale and with such an extraordinary investment of resources.
"What you see, is what you see." This is one of the dictums of abstraction that is flouted with these works. There are vast passages of tiny mosaic like forms that are so closely hued that it is nearly impossible in these lighting conditions to distinguish them. Thus, these very intensely worked passages seem wasted and instead function more as a conceptual phenomenon than as an observable one. Likewise, the relationship between the size of the canvases (gargantuan) and the size of the smallest elements (tiny) of the compositions are incoherent. A block of pigment a quarter of an inch square at the top of a fifteen foot tall painting is virtually invisible. This discordance of scale goads the viewer into a constant shifting of distance from the picture plane in an endeavor to observe all the detail. Interesting, but I’m going to need a hydraulic lift to hoist me to the upper levels, as well. Then there’s the attempt to eliminate all traces of the hand, first by the use of acrylic paint, wide brushes, and masking tape, and then the mechanical sanding of the pigments to further reduce any textural incident. Ironically, all these means of reducing the human manifestation simply reintroduce it in a new "post industrial" way. The rest of the show is made up of more conventionally sized canvases and large watercolors on board. I found the watercolors intriguing as an antithesis to the mural paintings. Though large for watercolor, they are looser, showing the underlying drawing, and have a color sense like glazed fresco.
If Al Held is one of the lumbering dinosaurs of modernist painting, then Andrew Masullo is the tiny marmoset, the nimble adaptable little mammal that might survive this ice age of postmodernist "new media." His current show at Washburn sings with pure high-keyed colors. The scale is small. The paintings have the intimacy of a book or something one might hold in their hands and contemplate. Masullo has a wonderful color sense, and though they may seem harsh at first, the delicacy of the harmonies and contrasts are unique and pleasing. I’ve written before about the artist’s vast repertoire of motifs and the constant shifting and recombining of compositional elements, with unexpected results. This group of paintings expands on the list of pictorial devices, tweaks and shuffles the deck with whimsy and humor. For all the constituents of handmade painting that Held tries to erase, Masullo seems instead to cultivate them. The layers of oil paint sometimes have a puckered and worked surface. Other times they cover an underlying build up of impasto that adds what may seem an inconsistent compositional effect, but somehow the quirky qualities all work together. In "3851" an orange form on top with scalloped edges kisses a mirror form of white that extends from the bottom edge. Behind this on the right side, brilliant thick stripes cut horizontally, while opposite there is a red field framed with various colors in the undulating scallops.
Another ironic contrast with Held are Musollo’s forms: although on a small scale, they are becoming larger compositionally, and his reliance on miniscule repeated configurations is giving way to expanded more painterly shapes. In these pictures, a quarter-inch square of paint has visible weight. I’m not placing any bets on the evolution of painting in this new millennium, but if these artists work are any indication, I’ll be watching intently. Ladies and gentlemen, start your painting.
