BY SCOTT INDRISEK
Installation view of Ruby Sky Stiler’s “Forms, Fragments, and Open Form” at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.
(Nicelle Beauchene Gallery)
Jeff Williams at Jack Hanley Gallery, and Ruby Sky Stiler at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, both through December 20 (327 Broome Street)
Downstairs, Williams presents a series of distinct sculptures that seem somehow keyed into each other, like a ramshackle Rube Goldberg machine threading through the space. Natural materials appear synthetic, and vice versa, as with a mass of extruded thermal plastic that resembles a skull or shell, and hunks of “central Texas fossil” that might have been hewn by the artist, rather than the passing of time. One work, imposing as a highway barricade and titled “Black Hole,” is described as a “fiberglass and resin physics chalkboard sanded down to reveal its cast surface and steel support.” This sense of strange artifacts uncovered continues with Ruby Sky Stiler’s show upstairs, which pairs elegant drawing-in-space sculptural frames (depicting the basic outlines of heads and bodies) with layered paintings of foam, acrylic resin, and thermal adhesive. The latter are jumbled puzzles composed of faux-ancient architectural shards; occasionally the patterns coalesce into recognizable subjects, as Stiler flirts with the bare minimum of what can constitute a figure.
“Not A Photo” at the Hole, through January 16, 2016 (312 Bowery)
Kathy Grayson has a knack for deftly curated thematic shows — previous ones have explored digital aesthetics in painting, as well as textiles and spray paint — and that continues with this survey of work that incorporates photography “not as a final product but rather as a tool or step in a multi-media process.” Certain key figures here have been in included in like-minded round-ups, such as Letha Wilson and Kate Steciw, both in last year’s excellent “Fixed Variable” at Hauser & Wirth. Rachel de Joode’s photographic cut-outs, perched on stools, resemble scans of gelato carved into wave-like shapes. Colored-pencil maestro Eric Yahnker has a large, quasi-photorealist drawing of a man attempting to light his cigarette using an iPhone app. And Mark Flood — whose provocations generally seem a bit punk-sophomoric, and leave me slightly cold — contributes a triptych of text and images sourced from the Internet that is genuinely discomfiting, mixing the hermetic speech of the art world with images of horrifying violence (as well as of a man pissing in a coffee pot. And some mimes loading a baguette into a cannon). Stare long enough and it might just ruin your day.
Sadamasa Motonaga at Fergus McCaffrey, through January 30, 2016 (514 West 26th Street)
A member of the Gutai group — and the subject of a two-person retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art earlier this year, alongside Kazuo Shiraga — Motonaga also made a large body of work utilizing airbrush techniques. These are the focus of this survey, which should be required viewing for a younger generation of artists — Josh Reames and Austin Lee come to mind — who will likely connect with the 93-year-old Japanese artist’s quirky vision. Included in the show are 16 paintings from a 1970s children’s book, “Moko Moko Moko,” as well as larger canvases that depict alien landscapes and fleshy shapes, busily contorting upon themselves.
Daniel Hesidence at CANADA, through January 6, 2016 (333 Broome Street)
Sometimes when people get really-really-damn-close to a painting you want to slap them for being so ostentatiously engaged. But you’d be crazy not to sidle up to Hesidence’s works until you’re close enough to breath in the residual oil stink, close enough to lick the furry, splotchy surfaces. (Please do not actually lick the furry, splotchy surfaces). The effect is both gloriously messy — like a bunch of well-trained birds ingested brilliant pigments and decided to balletically shit all over the surface — and masterfully controlled. From a distance, the paintings in “Summers Gun” look like images of crop circles, or the sort of GPS maps that runners or bikers can make to chart their progress over a landscape; caulk-like white lines cut arcane routes through expanses of sensual, purple-yellow-green prettiness.
Cynthia Daignault at Lisa Cooley, through December 20 (107 Norfolk Street)
Gleefully romantic and dare I say patriotic, Daignault’s show — composed of 360 small-scale paintings and a collaborative photographic work — is one of the most uplifting and inspiring things I’ve seen all year. Consciously working against the male-centric legacy of Kerouac et. al., the artist set out on a cross-country road trip, creating these tiny canvases along the way. They’re hung, flush against each other, with the horizon lines mostly connecting from one painting to the next. Daignault’s impressionistic lines shimmer; the way she depicts greenery, gas stations, the blur of rain put me in mind of Daniel Heidkamp, another young artist determined to make straightforward plein air chops cool again. The last canvas in the line, a homecoming, captures the Manhattan skyline. The mood is celebratory and smart; this is a conceptual painting project that’s also about painting as a craft and a skill. On one wall there’s the final page of “The Great Gatsby,” annotated and framed, which seems a step too far (but somehow isn’t). It’s all a blast, a nice earnest antidote to the chilly detachment of so much else, and enough to make you want to skip town yourself and just drive, drive, drive.
Keith Mayerson at Marlborough Chelsea, through December 23 (545 West 25th Street)
Speaking of earnest: I didn’t know how to take Mayerson when I saw his salon-style hanging in the Whitney Biennial, and I haven’t figured him out any better after seeing “My American Dream,” an even more extensive, chock-a-block explosion of paintings (landscapes, snowy mountaintops, Elvis, Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” a Tarzan figure stroking his erect penis, the list goes on, and on, and on…). If I’m honest about my thought process, upon walking into the crazily packed back gallery, I was wondering why anyone would ever do this. Also: How much time it took. “My American Dream” resembles Jim Shaw’s “Thrift Store Paintings” project, but whereas Shaw bought his kitsch, Mayerson has made his, canvas by canvas. The source imagery is disparate, but the works share enough of a palette to make them sing in the same register. But after a few minutes beneath the weight of all these competing images, something closer to raw admiration crept through for this seriously obsessive, borderline mad project, wherein Mayerson has basically turned himself into a human painting machine, an overproducing factory. A depiction of Captain Marvel hangs next to a just-off-enough-to-be-weird portrait of Barack Obama. Inspecting another piece, my gallery-hopping companion said, somewhat guiltily, “That’s the first painting of 9/11 that’s ever made me laugh.” Don’t judge until you’ve dipped into the strange leveling effect of Mayerson’s “American Dream,” where the country’s greatest 21st-century tragedy shares equal space with not one, but two, paintings of Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle.
sources : http://www.blouinartinfo.com
Art exists because life is not enough. 