Bill Hochhausen "Landscape re. Form"
M55 Art
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Landscape Re. Form M55 Art Gallery presents Bill Hochhausen’s second New York show of landscape “constructions”, that now includes sculpture. Direct carving into large pine timbers brings landscape forcefully into Bill’s ongoing work in three dimensions. The paintings, more nuanced and complex, reflect back on themselves by way of multiple images, photographs, video and his (signature) idiosyncratic framing.
The multi-paneled works build upon a core of direct, painterly renderings of natural phenomena; landscapes of light, water, foliage, changing seasons. Immersed in the landscape one is supremely ‘retinal’, reactive, in the moment. But unfolding an easel, setting colors out, fixing panels in place and dealing with mosquitoes becomes an act of calculation and strategy. In the (faded) light of a degraded modern world the bucolic setting still feels good, but somewhat absurd.
Marcel Duchamp’s disdain for the ‘retinal’, including its unthinkingly craft-bound tradition, among other things, led him to the readymade. Rather than painterly expressiveness, this shift to the conceptual has proven to prescient and influential in modernist art since the 60’s.
For Hochhausen the retinal becomes the conceptual. Each panel painted in the landscape is, as it must be, a synthesis of optical reaction and calculated choice. Later, sometimes months later, in the studio, the panels are treated as if they were found objects, readymades; to be considered as elements of a new synthesis. Like his compatriots at Yale – Nacy Graves, Brice Marden and Rackstraw Downes among many other notables – Hochhausen fashions a unique, naturalist response to the conceptualist force exerted on modernist art.
The overall composition may combine three paintings of the same view, in a manner suited to the moment (painterly expressiveness) but different in size and proportion. A photograph (“Day Lilies with Dorothy” includes a video), manipulated framing and other evidence of process expand the retinal to confound the underlying naturalism.
“Day Lilies with Dorothy” a bucolic view of summer lilies in bloom, has a video monitor set into the upper right side of the painting. The eleven minute video, made in collaboration with video artist/performer Lisa Karrer, and composer John Morton uses his composition “Pandemonium”. The video eye scans and in other ways regards the painting into which it is set. The use of video and music as an integral part of a painting may be original with this work.
“Branch” and “Flooded Track” are held at top and bottom by framing sections cut from local red cedar (branch) and finished to emphasize grain pattern and natural color. Hochhausen’s framing strategy breaks with convention as it ‘breaks’ the frame. The sometimes jarring color, texture and shapes that the framing employs seeks to build an optical paradox to the smooth perspective of landscape naturalism.
Following the notion that every optical, as well as material, moment in the development of a work opens onto a new vista, Hochhausen challenges his own affinity to direct landscape painting by folding observation back upon itself. We are made to experience (observe?) our various modes of observation, now forced together by this new synthesis, reinforcing the primacy of perception.
Media
Schedule
from October 17, 2012 to November 03, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-10-17 from 18:00 to 20:00