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Fade to Gray
Gillian Sneed
Greg Lindquist’s solo exhibition Industry is on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea through March 8.
Greg Lindquist, Ikea Site (Design for Consumer Choice, Parking over Preservation), 2008, Oil on stainless steel, 20 x 49 in.Greg Lindquist’s new body of work currently on view in an exhibition entitled Industry at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea follows on the trajectory of his last solo exhibition To Brooklyn last spring at McCaig-Welles Gallery in Brooklyn. Continuing his investigation of the industrial landscapes of the Williamsburg and Red Hook waterfronts, these cityscapes are painted as long horizontal panoramas that depict in a restrained palette of cool charcoals and muted browns the urban decay, crumbling and graffitied walls, abandoned warehouses, and desolate factories of Brooklyn’s industrial wastelands. Nonetheless, many of these scenes depict construction sites, and Lindquist’s recurring motif of the spindly crane silhouetted against his ever-present metallic gray sky, ominously forebodes another story—that of Brooklyn’s so-called “urban development and renewal” and the proliferation of new condos that are popping up all over the borough.
Even so, when looking at the images themselves, one gets the distinct feeling that Lindquist is less neighborhood activist than nostalgic romantic. The paintings evoke the same sensation one has when flipping through a photo album of sepia-tone photographs of sleepy, small-town Brooklyn circa 1908. In 2008, Lindquist suggests that same sense of the expectant stillness of an era on the cusp of monumental change, but he does so through the contemporary language of digital photography and manipulation. Unlike other modern urban landscape painters like Rackstraw Downes, who paint on-site, en plein air, Lindquist makes his sojourns to these sites toting only his digital camera. Operating like a documentary photographer, his images function like a visual archive of locations that are in a state of constant flux. What may be a demolished site one week, may already have several floors of a skeletal shell already emerging from the earth the next. Working in the studio from these digitally manipulated images, Lindquist capably balances a graphic sensibility with an agitated and painterly brushstroke.
The artist also adroitly straddles his dual formal interests in abstraction and representation. Inspired by construction materials, he has recently begun to use a range of metallic pigments, as well as painting on actual stainless steel panels, a technique that is more successful in some works than in others. One work of particular success is Ikea Site (Design for Consumer Choice, Parking over Preservation), 2008, an oil painting on stainless steel. The most visually satisfying component of the image is the temporary metallic wall constructed as a barrier around the Ikea construction site that spans the length of the composition. Reminiscent of the flattened and abstracted elements in the landscapes of Egon Schiele, the unstable structure functions as an eloquently elaborated abstract element in an image that only reveals itself as representational through the staccato punctuation of the delicately rendered cranes looming above it.
Brooklyn’s new Ikea is slated to open in the summer. Addressing our sense of collective memory, Lindquist’s images document what is happening around us with an acute awareness that the present is already fading to gray.
