In the Age of Excess Post-Haste
by Lee Klein
Traveling up to the CS White Gallery in Portland, Maine the weekend after September 11th last year, the ostensibly realistic watercolors of Jules Olitski painted at his lakeside residence in New Hampshire struck exactly the right chord. They were an all too needed celebration of the natural world at a time when lost was almost the very breath of life itself.
Now comes this fall’s rapturous exhibit at Ameninger-Yohe in the old Joseph Helman space on West 57th Street. These new large abstract works take Olitski’s realistic landscapes and seemingly abstract them into a thunderous charge of ebullience. Are these multi-layered canvases a series of embryonic proofs for a further cosmos in vision compounded and reanimated upon colored ground? The transitions in the works exhibited for Olitski’s eightieth birthday celebration are as New York Times scribe Grace Glueck qualified them "epic."
In relating these paintings to the wild chromatic antics of many of the newer New painters work it seems to this writer that these paintings segue in a smother manor then a great majority of those by the junior chromatic chain gangs. The new Olitski’s are in as has been discussed full symphonic dance. They blaze like Turner as this painterly suite carries off the grand tune.
The ovals which are as if seemingly zoomed up in mimicry of a computer enhancement programs contain in their fiery orbits for those in the know much of the formerly fully articulated detail from Olitski’s wild setting. The creation held within these works becomes the creation issued forth from the painter’s hand. Furthermore, luckily through the two series constituent pieces a miraculous progression can be observed.
As far as my own place in the cosmos goes a half year back deep into the age of excess post haste for the first time I had sensed that my own work might be obsolete. No longer, able to play court jester to non-stop largess should now this pen be retired? I asked. Of course not my body and mind responded!… So here I am ready to go train for a triathlon for the first time in a decade and a half.
Then as the art season once again ended my desperate hungering for visual experience subsided into Herman Melville’s observation that a melancholy comes over a man at thirty-five when he realizes perhaps for the first time that things are no longer new. While at the end of something one should find something else…What had I found that season? …That I no longer have need or reason to immerse myself in an orgy of continual ritualized art world abuse…
All that necessarily said striking my vision while passing through on an elevator where Jill Nathanson’s grids on Mylar at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery (an establishment known to specialize in abstract art) after returning to Stefan Stux to re-investigate Tom Frujin’s useless drug bag tapestries.
Next over the course of about eight months I had played Russian roulette with my good friend Roy Lerner’s good graces (and he in turn with mine). Lerner’s exhibit in Toronto in name curated by Karen Wilkin was an improved version of an earlier exhibition at the C.S White gallery in Portland Maine (and I may have the final word since I maybe the only person besides the artist and his wife who saw both).
