On Friday December 12 I planned to go to the opening of John Bjerklie at Parkers Box in Williamsburg. Being a friend and a fan of his work I wouldn’t miss it. The opening began at 6. I left work at 3 with time to go to Chelsea(as I like to do on occasion).
I’d seen an ad for an exhibit of Al Held’s paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The paintings were done in the early 80’s. I was most impressed by the 2 largest: “Roberta’s Trip” and
“The First Circle”. They are geometric abstractions painted in very bright flat color, that become dimensional by the use of perspective and overlapping. The use of color generates a tremendous amount of light. The craftsmanship is so impeccable ! The vision they speak to is a crowded, complicated, layered world that lacks the mystery I
often see. I do feel a kinship and like them so much, I buy the catalog. I leave and go around to the annex to the Kasmin Gallery to see the Andy Warhol Polaroid’s. Deadpan images of objects on a white, flat background. Set up in grids, they are by turn saccharine and dangerous. It felt great to clearly see them as the building blocks for his larger pieces. When asked the young woman sitting at the desk said they were$11,000. a piece,unsigned but stamped by the Warhol Foundation. I quickly did the math and realized there was alot of money on those walls.
The next place I stopped in was the Nancy Hoffman Gallery to see the sculpture of Ilan Averbuch “Intimate Monuments”. They employ a combination of curved space, symbolism and mystery that I wish to employ in my own work. In the back room was a Don Eddy triptych, an airbrushed photo realist piece so flawless that I thought it was digitally printed. I do like the subject of nature as spiritual.
I walked further down 27th to Sundaram Tagore Gallery which is showing the paintings of Natvar Bhasar. They are big meditation inspired images. Painted with bright colored dry pigment in circular shapes they are too similar to Rothko for me to think they’re art historically important.They seem to have another function, in an interview he said ”I believe color is based on physical elements. It has a real physical entity and an impact on our psyches. I brought color with me from India. Our religion is imbued with color; it is a part of our daily lives. In America, color does not have the same significance... When I paint I am in a deeply meditative state. The viewer can also achieve a state of meditation.”
I walked around to 26th went into Mitchell-Innes & Nash, wasn’t with it so I went next door to Gallery LeLong(which I consistently like). They were showing Petah Coynes sculpture “Vermillion Fog”. Divided into black sections and white sections named “Dante’s Inferno” and “Unforgiven”. They are constructions of flowers,feathers,velvet and taxidermied birds (mallards on the black and doves on the white).They are so emotional, sickeningly beautiful. It brought to my mind a stanza
from a poem by Tennyson called “The Voyage of Maeldune”:
And we came to the Isle of Flowers; their breath met us out on the seas,
For the Spring and the middle Summer sat each on the lap of the breeze;
And the red passion-flower to the cliffs, and the dark blue clematis, clung,
And starr’d with a myriad blossom the long convulvulus hung;
And the topmost spire of the mountain was lilies in lieu of snow,
And the lilies like glaciers winded down, running out below
Thro’ the fire of the tulip and poppy, the blaze of gorse, and the blush;
And the whole isle-side flashing down from the peak without ever a tree
Swept like a torrent of gems from the sky to the blue of the sea;
And we rolled upon capes crocus vaunted our kith and kin,
And we wallowed in beds of lilies and chanted the triumph of Finn,
Till each like a golden image was pollened from head to feet
And each was as dry as a cricket, with thirst in the middle-day heat.
Blossom and blossom, and promise of blossom, but never a fruit!
And we hated the Flowering Isle like we hated the isle that was mute,
And we tore up the flowers by the million and flung them in bight and bay,
And we left but a naked rock, and in anger we sailed away.
I went a few buildings further to the Robert Miller Gallery to a show of small scale Ab Ex paintings called “Beyond the Canon”.It wasn’t much beyond the canon; Pollock,De Kooning, Kline,Krasner, Elaine Dekooning, Hoffman, Gorky; they were all there. I liked a Jimmy Ernst the best. The show is the stuff dreams are made of.
By now it’s getting dark out,I walked further east and could see the lights in Pace Editions 4 stories up. Like iron to a magnet, I crossed the street and up I went to see the Francesco Clemente show. I’m not a fan of his larger figurative pieces ,so I wandered to the back of the gallery where they had a print by Ryan McGinnis I had fun staring at. The print was of a grid of varying size mandalas. Each ring was made of losenge shapes. So when you focused on one mandala the ones in your peripheral vision started spinning. i was entertained for a while sorting out the relationship of which ones spun when you looked at which mandala. Eventually the spell broke and I went to leave but I noticed a small glass room with pages of a book displayed .It’s called “ Alcuni Telefonini” Each page is set up side by side a watercolor by Clemente and a poem by Vincent Katz. I was resistant at first but then they washed over me like a wave at the beach. From Katz’ website:
“Katz and Francesco Clemente have a book of poems and watercolors, entitled Alcuni Telefonini, just out from Granary Books. Katz has contributed translations and poems to two of Clemente's exhibition catalogues, and they have done a series of prints together.”
“Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots (1988, Hanuman Books), Understanding Objects (2000, Hard Press), and Rapid Departures (2005, Ateliê Editorial). He won the 2005 National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, for his book of translations from Latin, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004, Princeton University Press). He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Rome for 2001-2002. He had a one-month residency at the American Academy in Berlin in Spring, 2006. He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.”
Realiizing it was time I walked back to the A train, went down to Union Square; past the Tom Otterness funny bronzes and on to the L train to Williamsburg.
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