NYAB Event - "Reverie" Exhibition

"Reverie" Exhibition

Zürcher Gallery

This event has ended.

Thinking about this group show has been a little like launching a waking dream. The painters are all abstract artists who are working with hieratically presented planes of color. But the similarity between them seems to end right there. Some are brushy, even ecstatically gestural in their paint application, while others organize their compositions geometrically. There are hard edges and soft edges, younger painters and lifers, larger scaled compositions and compression, brilliant plumages of color and introspective tonalities. I don’t think any of these artists regard their work as cultural or aesthetic “production,” to use the deliberately lifeless term assigned by Frankfurt-schooled theorists. Rather, they celebrate the surprises their evolving languages of form-giving spring on them in the process of their unfolding. If anything, the cottage industry of the individual painter is a happily or grotesquely inefficient form of production. Sometimes both. These artists, like many others, will occasionally find in repetition an “accident,” or a surprise, that will attach and become another element of consciousness going forward. Thus, their imagery changes meaningfully over time, something like the slow forms described by George Kubler.

Seeing more than one work by each artist might leave a deeper impression of his or her individual sensibility while creating opportunities for felicitous constellations and across the room conversations akin to internal rhymes and alliterations in a poem. Eileen Myles once reminded me that “stanza” means “room” in Italian.
I have dreams of paintings installed in rooms. They are not paintings I recognize as mine upon waking, their image structures are invariably less defined, but the rooms themselves may jog a memory of other rooms I have been in: galleries, studios, museums, and raw spaces. Sometimes I think these are paintings I should be making, as if the dream was a directive from another plane. When I am struck by someone else’s paintings I experience a temporary and pleasurable sense of appropriation, for a moment I feel I made that painting. I mean I could have, if I had taken that path. Does anybody else feel like this? Or, doesn’t everybody?

So this is a collection of paintings, a glimpse of the sensibilities of the painters who made them, and an effort to see how they might hang together. A show like this is a structure that seeks to hold their differences together in order to form a coherent offering, a nostrum, a visual poem, if you will. Painting is dead, but the holly and ivy are twining together from out of the ground where it was buried. It’s spring, after all.

- Stephen Westfall