The Whitney Biennial 2019: Is it Safe?
“…elegant but safe portrait of right now.” Andrew Russeth, Art News “…why is this year’s show so safe?” Nadja Savej, The Guardian “…missing a radical spirit” and “Some artists in the show [...]
What Meets the Eye
Bel Fullana and the Rape of Isla Bonita
Does All inclusive look like a display of “playful sexual freedom” to you? This painting and the other two paintings in this essay are described that way in the gallery press release, which also employs forms of the words “ambiguity” and [...]
Bellinger Battles Elemental Forces, Sfraga Furthers Evolution
The two predominant modes of categorizing paintings are describing them as abstract or figurative, and pronouncing them to be more “realistic” if closer to a photographic image. Neither is of any use in considering Len Bellinger’s work (or [...]
Jasper Johns Talks to Me
Often in the last year upon awakening, but with my eyes still closed, I see myself sobbing. The death of a friend, white supremacists, climate change, I don’t even know. But more about that in a minute. I’m not getting critics who see painting [...]
Adam Simon and Object Constancy
After dropping my wife at the A train, it was too early for Harry’s* and I passed McDonalds, thinking about Simon’s show, the ultra-recognizability of the golden arches and stopping off for a sausage biscuit and how wrong that would be—my age! [...]
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the “Sweetness of Doing Nothing”*
As you know if you follow my remarks at all, I’m no fan of the hasty painters and the painting-a-day folks, in which camp Yiadom-Boakye squarely resides. But Holy Provocations is a wonderful surprise, a painting in which one person looks [...]
Dana Schutz and a World of Anxiety
After conversations with other painters about this show, the consensus seemed to be admiration for Schutz’s work as a whole, for the energy and ambition and the mad rush of it—and not so much about individual paintings, what they are about, [...]
Maya Brym, the Pleasures of Occultation* and Illusion
*“Occultation,” used primarily in astronomy to describe the passage of one celestial body in front of another, also means interposition, overlapping in laymen’s terms—one object blocks another. This is the main monocular clue to depth [...]
Wrestling, in the Dark, with Delacroix
Delacroix does not “do it for me.” Btw, have you heard “Lord, Do It For Me,” with its increasingly fervent request? The James Cleveland version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKpXBT6vyA However, he did it for Van Gogh and other [...]
Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Family Portraits
There is so much manipulated or copied photographic content in the galleries these days that I’ve begun to ignore it. I have even begun to wonder if artists are so happy in their studios sifting through the internet that Plato’s Allegory of the [...]
