October 8, 2009

I went in to Chelsea last Thursday specifically to see Christopher Reiger's latest show, Some Species of Song, at Denise Bibro's Platform (until November 7, 2009). I just want to say up front, before I get into the show itself, that I consider Chris a friend. Well, not a friend, really. But more than an acquaintance. I actually can't think of the right word for what he is to me. We've never met, but we've exchanged friendly e-mail messages and commented on each other's blogs. I don't read him every day but he's on my list to check every so often. Obviously I'm on his mailing list. And we showed together in the Blogger Show although, actually, our works were never in the same gallery. Anyway. My point is, I like Chris and probably can't be unbiased about his work. Then again, if I didn't like his work, I probably wouldn't be friendly with him; I don't make a habit out of sending e-mail to artists whose work horrifies me.

Chris' show is, as always, worth seeing. With this batch of work he seems to have toned it down a bit; the last paintings of his I saw he'd thrown in the kitchen sink and some of the attached plumbing, but here he's cut back a bit and left some white space. In some cases he's left quite a bit of space around his subjects, and I like the extra room.

Chris bases his work on a firm foundation of nature. I know from his blog that he feels a strong connection to wild animals and spaces, and he brings that into his work by using animals as the centerpieces of his crazed compositions. I found myself thinking of Dalí as I went through the show, not so much because his work resembles Dalí's -- it's nowhere near as slick (whose is?) -- but because of the way Chris, like Salvador, repeats motifs across each work, or across multiple works; and also because of the obsession with scientific symbols and diagrams which the two painters share. A bird -- a crow perhaps -- mapped with a constellation I can't identify -- I was never very good at constellations -- is the main subject in one painting, then shows up reversed in the background of another. Penrose tilings make more than one appearance. Bird silhouettes abound. Some items are numbered with those lovely handwritten numerals found in 19th century scientific illustrations.

Another artist I thought of is James Joyce: Chris' set of symbols is hermetic and vast and beyond my ability to decipher; I imagine someone could spend a career unraveling his parallels, assonances, harmonies, and relations. Is he connecting frogs and tadpoles to spermatazoa or is that literally a cutaway diagram of a tadpole? I don't know for sure, but there's definitely plenty to think about.

The work doesn't get too hung up on the conceptual, intellectual side anyway. I'm not sure everything I see is strictly intended by Chris. I may be inventing my own complexity on top of his. Stepping back to the purely visual his work is lovely if somewhat cluttered. He's reduced the clutter from the work I saw last year but he's still trying to get across a lot of information. And it seems like he likes to throw every color he's got at every painting; again, he's cut back, but not quite as much as I might like. His very best work in this show is much more minimalist: I really liked Further Murmuration, which is nearly monochrome, mostly negative space, and positively beautiful in its tiny clockwork miniature perfection. His sensitivity in handling the watercolors here is nothing short of sublime. I've held a baby bird in my hand and this painting feels the same.

I should probably add that, in keeping with the nature theme and Chris' involvement with ecology and conservation and so forth -- he only eats meat if he's hunted and killed the critter himself -- some percentage of the price of each work he sells goes to the Wildlands Network. You can read more about his charitable sales model on his site.

After seeing Chris' show I went next door into Denise Bibro proper to see Gone to the Dogs. About this the less said the better. Really, anything I write about it is a bad idea. I can't quite write nothing, although that's what I want to do. Imagine a show that makes you long for Coolidge's A Friend in Need, take it down a notch or two, and you've got it.

Thus suitably stunned I staggered out into the lovely night air. I had nowhere else in mind; I was in Chelsea just for Chris. So I began to meander as my head cleared and soon I found myself in Jack Shainman's space on West 20th looking over Tim Bavington's Up in Suze's Room (through October 10, 2009). This is not the kind of show to clear an addled brain.

Tim appears to me to be the bastard child of Frank Stella and Stephen Westfall, with perhaps some Op Art DNA thrown in. Maybe not so much Stella since his canvases aren't shaped. But stripes always make me think of old Frank.

I suppose Tim's standout difference is that his lines aren't painted between taped-off areas. They're sprayed. This gives the edges a softness with a sideways overspray texture I kind of like. It reminds me of my airbrushing days. I'm not sure how Tim keeps his lines so straight -- I can think of a few possibilities, including an incredibly steady hand, but I can't figure it out by just looking at his paintings.

Tim's colors are all over the place; I can't divine a pattern for his choices. They kind of remind me of digital color pickers from programs like Photoshop. If you read his titles and some of his verbiage you find he's inspired by music and rock songs and so forth, but I went through the show entirely on visuals. Based on those alone I have no idea where his palette comes from; having read some I'm still not sure, but I can imagine there's some kind of system.

Most of these are just standard eye-bending fare, but in a few Tim breaks out of the stripes and starts allowing blurs, smears, and flares into his carefully ordered compositions. The signature image, Up in Suze's Room (apparently named after a Paul Weller song, whoever he is), is a fine example of Tim's letting loose. Amidst all the somewhat sterile stripes it really comes alive. With its large scale and concentrated color it stands with some of the better Color Field work I've seen.

From there I swung through ZieherSmith just because the door was open. Big mistake on my part because I got a look at Stéphane Calais' absolutely dreadful Flowers for America (through November 7, 2009). The conceit behind this show seems to be that Stéphane has sent a lovely bunch of plants and paintings to our shores. Or something. What he's really done is set up a bunch of truly dopey plastic vegetation-like fronds with macrame hangers and basketballs all around the room while ugly, uninspired, incompetent art gazes wanly from the walls. "It's better to be incomprehensible" Stéphane says in the gallery verbiage; he's silent on being indigestible.

Uncertain of where to go next I walked uptown to the usually dependable West 25th Street. There I found a large crowd massed outside Cheim & Read. I can't remember the last time they showed anything I wanted to see but tonight I bumped into James Kalm chatting with people in the crowd. I joined in and he introduced me to some people, then looked down at the contents of his hand with some surprise.

"Looks like I've stolen one of their price sheets," he said, and sure enough he was holding one of those plastic folders containing the list of works in the show and the prices almost no one actually pays. You're not supposed to remove those from the gallery, you're supposed to, at most, carry one around with you inside as you go from work to work while shaking your head in disgust or, possibly, approval. Of course Cheim & Read, being an awesomely hugely successful blue chip gallery, can most likely afford to have a few of those 55-cent folders wander off.

"Do I want to go inside?" I asked James.

He handed me the folder. "Yes, you want to return this for me."

So I gamely went in. Unfortunately the gallery staff had chosen the front desk to double as the bar from which free drinks were issuing, and the desk is right up near the front entrance, causing a big rugby-style scrum to form. It took a few minutes for me to work my way through and then I was free to squeeze around the rest of the gallery.

Much to my chagrin I found the show belonged to Jack Pierson (through November 14, 2009). Jack's been throwing together letters from "found" signage -- I assume he gets them on eBay or something, from stores closing down -- into new forms for some years now. It's a concept that's so unutterably lame Barney's stole it for its window displays; and if a department store can appropriate your style almost exactly for use as window dressing, that's a sure sign you suck. I went around once to confirm -- yes, he does indeed suck -- and then exited.

Outside again I saw that James was now talking to David Gibson. Considering the last review I gave to one of David's shows I decided I was better off sneaking away, so I scuttled down the street to Dillon Gallery where I saw Norihiko Saito's show (until November 7, 2009).

Norihiko -- I'm not sure which is his family name and in fact had to look up his gender -- paints paintings which are barely there. I got the sense that these are in the Japanese tradition of paper screen painting -- and in fact one of them was displayed as such -- but perhaps I'm too much of a barbarian to appreciate them. These looked to me like the backgrounds of screen paintings I've seen, as if Norihiko sort of forgot to add some bamboo in the foreground, or maybe a bird, or a geisha, or something. Anything. Instead there's just this large -- in some cases, vast -- amorphous undulating atmosphere of nearly nothing. These could be faux marble finishes, or maybe the foundation for a Natural History Museum display of Pleistocene cave painting recreations.

After that I walked over to 511 West 25th just to see if anything was happening at my favorite building; I found there that both George Billis and Robert Steele had vacated their ground floor fishbowl-like spaces (later I saw from their Websites that they just moved upstairs) and a Tesla Motors store had moved in. It's not really a Tesla dealership since they don't have a selection of cars for sale, but they do have one you can look at and plenty of shiny brochures and salespeople with bright white teeth and so forth. The car itself is lovely, low-slung, and in fact probably not something I could fold myself into, but I think we can all get behind an electric vehicle that's cool, and the Tesla certainly is that, so long as you're shorter than I am and a good deal thinner.