Teresita Fernandez at Galerie Almine Rech

19 rue Saintonge, Paris, France
through December 18th


by Robert J. Hughes

How light plays upon the world, upon the landscape, how the weather plays upon our vision are all preoccupations for the painter. As Monet said to Sacha Guitry when the great painter was very old and the great playwright very young, "Without sun, there is no Monet."

Sculptors, too, consider the fall of light and shadow on forms in space. Teresita Fernàndez, an American artist known for her almost environmental sculptures, which use light and shapes – enclosed circles, open stairs – to promote a sense of looking at the world from different angles and perspectives, offers the environment of the darkened seaside in a series of new works.

In her first exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, Fernàndez combines the three-dimensional sculptural with the flat plane of the pictorial. Most of the works here are beautiful, shadowy depictions of water after dark. It is difficult to depict the shimmering evanescence of water at any time of day, but Fernàndez gives the viewer a view of the expansive horizon under a starlight sky, the stipples of rippling moonbeams creating a ghostly reverie of nighttime waters.

"Nocturnal (Horizon Line)," graphite on panel, shows the sweep of black sea stretching outward, invitingly. Moving closer in, a viewer can see the sculptural ridges of the graphite, the "pour" of the waves and reflected light. The graphite provides a real sense of water, even in the very near distance, and you can stand before even a small panel and get a sense of the wide eternal sea, with all of its unruly cinematic power.

Other works use small cut cubes of mirrored glass, arranged in sprays, to give a sense of energy in the very air – looking as an act of exultation. Fernàndez also uses polished precision-cut steel to similar effect, crafting representations of nature with machined metals, as in "Mirror – Terllis," which looks like an arbor frozen mid-growth, but still, because of its reflective surfaces, alive to the gleaming day.

What Fernàndez has done here is something new: she's created sculptural landscapes that broaden the canvas, the plane of the wall, into three-dimensional space. Others have done this before, of course, such as Frank Stella. But Fernàndez has created still-life sculptures of vegetation of cold steel and glass that are at once sculpture and painting; you don't feel fooled – these aren't the very representations of nature of a trompe l'oeil, but reflections of reality, a mirror of what our mind might remember about a moonlight ocean, a trellis of leaves, a spray of dappled leaves, a memory etched in graphite, steel or glass of what we believed we saw.

Samuel Richardot at Balice Hertling Gallery

47 rue Ramponeau, 75020 Paris, France
October 29 - December 10, 2010

by Robert J. Hughes

The act of looking at art involves not only concentration but release.

At a new show of paintings by Samuel Richardot at Balice Hertling in Paris, the squiggles, the abstract or the organic shapes on the canvases are like guideposts to perception as an act of meditative abandon.

In a large untitled painting that takes up almost an entire wall, the white canvas holds four sorts of reference points that are outlines of everyday objects – two circles in green that could be the ghost of a protractor, two red zygotes that could be the afterimage of calla lilies, a blackish sausage-like shape that suggests the twisted anthropomorphic shape of a balloon animal. But they're also mere shapes themselves. The point is that when you look at the painting, as you try to resolve the forms into something familiar, you begin to let go of the reality associated with that form and allow observing itself to take over; you are in the moment, rather than the interpretation of that moment.

Smaller paintings that ring the other walls of the space use those random elements of organic forms – triangles, circles, lines that could be everyday items or body parts – to draw you closer, then to push you back. The pleasure of Richardot's paintings isn't in their detail – though you do find yourself moving in to see how the paint saturates the canvas, or where a bit of something that seems extraneous, like a snippet of tape, adheres to the work – but in determining that details aren't essential to comprehension. And that comprehension isn't essential to understanding. That is, you don't ask, "what does it mean," but rather, "what am I not seeing," which is more about your own sense of reality rather than whatever real or unreal world a painting creates.

This is refreshing in an age of agitprop art, where once you get the point – usually a sarcasm or easy irony – the work itself holds little interest. Grand statements tend to dilute quickly in the swirling waters of contemporary communication. But with Richardot's paintings, you settle into a meditative calm. Several of the works have the contemplative allure of Agnes Martin paintings, with their repetition of soft pencil lines over a white background, like a visual koan that asks the viewer to understand through intuition. Others evoke, however glancingly, such different abstract artists as Kenneth Noland – whose paintings vibrated with brilliantly colored geometric forms – or even some of Piet Mondrian's quieter theosophical explorations of the meaning of life through his paintings' rectilinear distillation of the everyday.

Richardot's paintings give you the freedom to observe, to wonder, even. They hold back and beckon, they promise intimacy and calm, while so many other contemporary paintings are screaming "look at me."

Art, artifacts and excess collide in a combustible energy exhibit at Denver's MCA

by Kyle MacMillan

Denver Post

August 6, 2010

With words and phrases like "sustainability," "environmentally conscious" and "carbon-neutral" all the buzz these days, most exhibitions that have anything do with energy inevitably deal with the themes of conservation and new technologies.

But an intriguing, provocative and potentially controversial show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver takes a decidedly different tack — "Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts From the Landscape of Glorious Excess."

As its evocative title suggests, it explores and, in some ways, celebrates excess energy in an array of guises, from the enthusiasm of a rock-concert mosh pit to the destructive power in a nuclear bomb.

"For millennia, civilizations have been defined by their use of this excess, uses that span a spectrum from war to art," writes co-curator Paul Andersen.  "Our civilization also receives more energy than we need . . . and like those civilizations before us, our identity is more closely linked to how we choose to spend that energy than how we save it."

While probing these issues, "Energy Effects" also raises fascinating questions about the nature of contemporary art, the function of art exhibitions and the role of art museums in the 21st century.

Many of the objects in this exhibition are artworks by almost any conventional definition of the term, even if they stretch the boundaries of traditional forms.  A good example is "Reg," an imposing 6-by-9-by-8-foot block of knotted climbing rope by New York artist Orly Genger. Set at an angle so that it blocks a wide corridor, it challenges viewer perceptions of space and scale.

But what are we to make of "Chaussures" (1991-present), a display of more than 125 pairs of sandals crafted and worn by Denver artist Viviane Le Courtois over nearly two decades — the history of each carefully documented?

As unexpected as it is to see these shoes hung along the exterior walls of the museum's second floor, there is nothing especially aesthetic about them. This undertaking is as much anthropological as artistic.

And as the exhibit's title makes clear, several of the show's offerings are artifacts and not art, however visually compelling they might be. Most notable are a Titan IV Stage II rocket engine and two B61 thermonuclear bomb casings on loan from the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum.

Art-museum exhibitions of the past were artist-driven, focused primarily on movements, influences and styles. But in today's art world, concept trumps all, and that is certainly true at the MCA Denver.  Since becoming director of the institution in March 2009, Adam Lerner has made ideas — in this case, the notion of excess energy — the driving force of the museum's offerings, with artworks, artifacts and whatever else playing a supporting role. 

It's not surprising, then, that "Energy Effects" would not be at all out of place at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science or a similar organization.

An unvoiced but certainly evident theme of this exhibition is obsessive-compulsiveness, one of the extremes that drives many human pursuits, especially art. How else to explain the undersized and oversized work of Willard Wigan of London and Jim Sanborn of Washington, D.C.?

Wigan invests an enormous amount of energy to create his quirky micro-sculptures. His "Statue of Liberty in the Eye of a Needle" is so tiny that it has to be viewed through a microscope.

In "Terrestial Physics," Sanborn spent three years meticulously re-creating the first particle accelerator to split uranium atoms in 1939 — a room-size group of oddly old-fashioned machines that are at once alluring and disturbing.

Whatever else can be said about "Energy Effects," it is the most thematically and visually cohesive exhibition to be presented at the MCA Denver since the 2007 opening of its first permanent home in the Central Platte Valley.

The building was designed with five discrete main galleries that were intended to function essentially autonomously — a concept that never made much sense.  Lerner has urgently sought to make the building work as an integral whole, and this exhibition fulfills that goal for the first time, with pieces in the atrium and corridors that tie everything together and achieve a continuous flow.

You Can't Fall Off the Floor

Linda Warren Gallery

1052 W. Fulton Market St., Chicago, IL 60607

June 25, 2010 - August 21, 2010

by Mia DiMeo, August 16, 2010

“Sit down, this may take a while,” warns a small string of words on YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR, a 14-foot long installation work that lends its title to Lora Fosberg’s third solo show at the Linda Warren Gallery.

It can be difficult to “read” art in a gallery for more than few minutes, too many words with too much content can drown the visual impact of a piece of art. But Fosberg’s text-heavy collage pieces are an exception. More organized than chaotic, they maintain a powerful aesthetic effect that keeps me reading. True, it might take a while, but I can’t get enough of Fosberg’s collection of quips and musings, where the text is part of the visual impact. 

Laura Fosberg. YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR. 2010. Gouache and paper mounted directly on the wall.  Image used by permission of Linda Warren Gallery.

YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR takes the form of a monumental temple frieze of amassed phrases with a sprinkling of images, the lines plucked from life and deftly scripted in gouache on handmade paper. Fosberg individually applies each small strip of paper to the wall, changing the composition and adding new phrases with each installation. In fact, when she remakes the piece for Grand Rapid’s ARTPRIZE competition in September, it will double in size.

Cliché, proverbial, tongue-in-cheek, pessimistic, optimistic, matter-of-fact, ironic, romantic, broken-hearted; Fosberg regurgitates phrases from the omnipresent media, as well as notes from random life experiences. She told me when I spoke with her last year that her text works are a portrait “from the air of now… a snippet of time through the lens of me.”

Personal as that may sound, I think her work is attractive to a wide audience because of its emotional universality and reoccurring self-deprecating humor.  Like a nudge from a friend at a bar, I’m reminded of a simple truth in large blue letters, “Desperate is not a sexual preference.” Sure, it’s laughable, but realizations like this one, in a world of information overload, are what form the core of Fosberg’s work.

The freshest of Fosberg’s work are three collaborative pieces with Liza Berkoff; black and white photos of quiet urban landscapes that could be nowhere or anywhere, sharply interrupted by Fosberg’s paper and gouache bands of color. InYes Can Be Such a Surprise a rainbow searchlight seems to explode from the head of a slouched homeless man.DARE TO FAIL, is another altered city scene, where billboards are replaced with Fosberg’s painted slogans—what strikes me as campy inspirational phrases like “Believe in Believing,” that read as if they are pulled from posters in a high school guidance office.  Not that this is a bad thing—it’s good to see some sweet mixed in with all of Fosberg’s tartness.

In fact, the artist loves the environment as much as she loves phrases. The show includes a body of linocuts that are about destruction of nature, bulldozers mauling forests; destruction by nature, a giant cyclone full of cartoonish trees, furniture, and people; and a general celebration of nature, cutesy summer camp-like scenes in the woods, and a lone figure in a canoe. They have an activist bend with the irony that Fosberg excels at, but stay far away from becoming preachy hippy art.

Before I leave the gallery I stop in front of prints of tall tree trunks that dominate the wall, as close to life-sized as Fosberg can get in the space.  Charming with their individual knots and grain, each “tree” is printed and collaged on earthtoned canvas to create a small environment in the gallery, showing Fosberg’s skill as a printmaker and her knack for powerful presentation. The roots coming out of the ground look a bit like legs, and a certain melancholy falls over  me when I read the title, Right Before No More. Fosberg doesn’t do coy, not even with a simple image of a row of tree trunks, and it consistently works for her.

From a Whisper to a Scream: Following Yoko Ono’s Instructions

by Jason Persse,  INSIDE/OUT a MOMA/PS1 blog
July 14, 2010

I first heard about Yoko Ono’s so-called “instruction pieces” as a high school student, when a friend told me the (possibly apocryphal, certainly embellished) story of Ono’s first meeting with John Lennon. History according to the poorly fact-checked lunchtime ramblings of rock ‘n’ roll–obsessed seventeen-year-olds: During a visit to London’s Indica Gallery in 1966, Lennon encountered Ono’s Ceiling Painting. Climbing to the top of a tall, white ladder, he used a magnifying glass dangling from a thread to read a message printed in tiny letters on the ceiling: “YES.” Profoundly moved by the work’s unalloyed positivity, he demanded to meet the artist right away.

That story probably rates a 40% score on the Historical Accuracy Meter, but the (surprisingly spot-on) description of Ceiling Painting captured my imagination. I was captivated by Ono’s notional art—especially her “instruction pieces,” which she describes as “paintings to be constructed in your head”—because it placed the onus of creation squarely on the “spectator.” So when I heard that some of Ono’s participatory pieces would be included in MoMA’s Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition, I got ready to shoulder the spectator’s burden and help create some art.

I started in the Sculpture Garden with Wish Tree for MoMA. “Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of the wish tree. Ask your friend to do the same. Keep wishing.” No sweat! I added my wish to the hundreds of cards already hanging from the tree. (I would tell you what I wished for, but then I’d have to kill you.)

Next up was Whisper Piece, a series of sixteen instructions (like “Breathe heavily,” or “Smell the summer”) and affirmations (“You are beautiful,” for example) that Ono scrawled on the walls—and, in one case, the floor—of the second-floor Contemporary Galleries. (At one point a little girl asked me what I was doing squinting into a corner of the gallery, so I told her she had to find and follow the instructions, too. You can imagine my relief when I reached the exit without encountering instructions to steal a painting.) Following what few explicit instructions there were was no problem, and being told repeatedly that I was beautiful and loved did wonders for my self-esteem. The hard part was locating all sixteen tiny whispers.

Finally I returned to the Museum’s grand Marron Atrium, which currently contains Ono’s 1961 “instruction painting” Voice Piece for Soprano—”Scream. 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky”—along with a microphone and a pair of very loud speakers. I stared at the microphone for a while as a perfectly reasonable voice in my head informed me that I would not, under any circumstances, make a loud noise in a museum. Fifteen long minutes later, after watching several brave souls roar their hearts out in defiance of all propriety, I stepped up to the mic and let out a trio of wavering screams, each slightly less pathetic than the last.

And then it was over. Yoko and I had done it! Together we’d created a work of exhilarating, defiant, liberating art that turned heads, startled passersby, and covered me in a fine sheen of flop sweat. Besides, who hasn’t always wanted to let out a good scream at the office?

Almost Eden - David Hinske at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof, Memphis, TN

by Carol Knowles

by Carol Knowles

David Hinske is after something rarified almost ineffable in “transcendental vocabulary” at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof in this exhibition of nonsensically titled luminous abstractions.  Hinske asks us to let go of visual and verbal associations, to play in fields of free-flowing color shot through with light.

Barely visible thumb-sized smudges in several of the paintings conjure up the first bits of matter coalescing and the first artist making his/her signature mark with a chunk of charcoal in a Paleolithic cave.  The rest of Hinske's boundless and effervescent surfaces bring to mind cotton candy and Technicolor amoebas.  Like Beth Edwards' surprisingly powerful rubber duck portrait of bliss, Hinske's melted-popsicle pools of radiance are also a joy to behold.

RIP Dennis

Dennis and I had few words between us.  I hung parts of an exhibition he curated last year.  He accepted some of my suggestions and ignored others.  On the other hand, he loved women.  My lovely bride was no exception. RIP.

Christopher St. John at Harrington-Brown, Memphis, TN

(What follows is Carol Knowles review of Chris St. John's show in Memphis.  Chris is formerly of Taos and showed at the late, great Sagefarm Contemporary.)

Beautiful Creatures

Christopher St. John's passionately painted, endlessly inventive exhibition "Icarus Transformed" at Harrington Brown re-envisions the Greek myth in which a boy fails to heed his father's warning, flies too close to the sun, melts his wax-and-feather wings, falls into the sea, and drowns. Instead of being doomed by hubris, St. John's protagonists — feminine versions of Icarus — defy their limitations, spread their wings/arms/fins/paws, and attempt to soar again and again and again.

Many of St. John's creatures, as in A Strange Angel, survive the fall but have not quite worked out all the kinks. This bald, baby-faced angel with one white and one red wing, bright-pink genitalia, and a huge left arm (sprouting blue fur and industrial-grade fingernails) looks out at us with an ecstatic or perhaps maniacal smile.

In what looks like natural selection at warp speed, St. John's oils on panel and more than 300 drawings mix and match seemingly endless permutations of species that stretch like pulled taffy in Melt the Wax, swell to the point of bursting in Severing Point, and flow like founts of blood in The Filter.

Naked except for lush pubic hair and with heads that look like lampshades joined at the cheek, two Icaruses sing in unison in Paper Dolls Sing Your Praise. Their wings have morphed into multiple and very full teets. Their foreheads sprout horns like a unicorn, another mythic creature noted for its beauty, purity, and faithfulness. Unashamed, uncensored, unabashedly inventive and alive, Paper Dolls, like all St. John's creatures, suggest the most fatal flaw (and surest prescription for defeat), instead of hubris, is failure of the imagination.

- Carol Knowles, Memphis Flyer, April 29, 2010

Natalie Edgar: From Above

Woodward Gallery, 133 Eldridge Street, NYC

Natalie Edgar demonstrates the continuing vitality of the New York School of painting. The sensibilities of color, space and rhythm are her métier. About the current exhibition, Judd Tully observes in his catalog essay that the painting as a whole is a fusion of many sources, “There’s no correct way to read a painting. No matter how long you look, either abstract or figurative. You can imagine or believe you see a head emerging from that tangle of explosive marks, a veiled reference to a Picasso head or perhaps a Pisano apostle, or a summit of a mountain.” Space is the hidden black matter in the imagery. Gerard McCarthy had noticed, “Her images may or may not suggest figures, but effectively evoke a vertiginous sensation.” (Art in America) It is this odd feeling of altitude in her space that prompted the title “From Above” for the exhibition.

John Bonath blurs the edges at Camera Obscura, Denver, CO

Hal Gould just turned ninety, and not only is he by far the oldest gallery director around, but his photo gallery, Camera Obscura (1309 Bannock Street, 303-623-4059, www.cameraobscuragallery.com), which he runs with Loretta Young-Gautier, is one of the oldest in the country. That said, there's nothing old-fashioned about the place, as amply demonstrated by Blurring the Edges: John Bonath 1996 to 2010, a show of digital photo-based works that fills Camera Obscura to capacity with eye-popping images.

The solo — with an accompanying book — isn't quite a retrospective, since Bonath has been taking photos for nearly forty years; instead, it focuses on several bodies of work that use computer programs for their creation. There's a lot more to it than that, however, as Bonath's methods are very complex. He creates the settings, either landscapes or still-life scenes, using real materials that he finds and gathers up. He makes up his models and sometimes dresses them in costumes — or undresses them — before combining various shots of the background and the figures to create a single image. And, as if that wasn't enough, he also paints some of them after they've been printed.


The show has not been hung in chronological order, and none of the pieces have been dated, so viewers have no idea how they fit together. The reason Bonath decided to do it this way reflects how he works: All of the various series are open-ended, with one being done simultaneously as he works on others.

Though male and female figures are obviously favorite subjects for Bonath, as seen in the outrageous "The Whisper" (pictured), he's also interested in plants and insects. His compositions range from simple and straightforward to elaborate and obtuse; they are connected, he says, by the shared idea of the primordial.


I've long been a fan of Bonath's work, which is known for both its technical perfection and its intriguing pictorial quality. This show stays up through April 17 at Camera Obscura. Don't miss it.

- Michael Paglia, Denver Westworld