{"id":1222,"date":"2016-09-25T11:43:49","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T11:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2016-09-25T11:43:50","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T11:43:50","slug":"pap-goes-the-easel-painting-after-postmodernism-belgium-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2016\/09\/pap-goes-the-easel-painting-after-postmodernism-belgium-usa.html","title":{"rendered":"Pap goes the easel: Painting After Postmodernism, Belgium-USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"pap-paul-manes-departure-2013-oil-on-canvas-264-1-x-396-2-cm\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Paul Manes, Departure, 2013, oil on canvas, 264.1 x 396.2 cm<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brussels<\/strong>\u2014It\u2019s being billed as a \u201cmanifesto exhibition,\u201d and the curator, my friend, the art historian and filmmaker Barbara Rose, is happy to say \u201cThis is a polemical show.\u201d Indeed, the first line of her catalogue essay reads:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This exhibition intends to prove that painting as an autonomous discipline can still make fresh, convincing statements as a living, evolving and significant art form that communicates humanistic values in an increasingly inhuman, technology driven globally networked world.<\/p>\n

The idea that an exhibition can \u201cprove\u201d anything strikes me as the most controversial part of this sentence; but when I thought about it a bit longer, I found myself happy to concede that this show of large works by eight Belgian and eight American painters, though of course of varying quality, amply demonstrates the truth of the argument that painting is not \u201cdead, dying or of diminishing importance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barbara Rose put the enormous, important show together with the painter, dealer, collector and art historian, Roberto Polo, when each sent the other material from exhibitions they\u2019d recently visited, and she said, \u201cTogether we have stumbled on the future.\u201d \u00a0Polo summarised the argument in a note to me: \u201cBarbara and I hope to prove that every time that painting is declared dead it returns stronger, in a grander manner, than ever before; and that there is a new painting, sourced in our Western artistic heritage, but which, contrary to Postmodernism, does not directly quote and recycle it.\u201d Barbara Rose has said that though it was \u201codd to find coincidences\u201d between the Belgian and American artists in the show, perhaps it\u2019s because most of them live \u201cfar beyond the madding crowd\u201d with respect to biennales and art fairs. It\u2019s apt that this show should happen in Belgium, where the first modern painter that springs to mind is the Surrealist Magritte, as there\u2019s a touch of the earlier movement even in many of the abstract paintings on show \u2013 the space they create is other-worldly, to say the least. \u201cMaybe,\u201d says Rose, \u201cit\u2019s a reflection of the times in which we live: no stability, all flux, uncertainty.\u201d (And is there any other way to regard Donald Trump\u2019s preposterous Presidential campaign? It would have delighted Dal\u00ed and perhaps Duchamp, irritated Max Ernst, and driven Bu\u00f1uel barmy.)<\/p>\n

\"Paul<\/a>

Paul Manes The Fifth Seal 2006 oil on canvas 264.2-x-198.1-cm<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

All the work on show at Vanderborght, a recovered and restored Modernist building, formerly a department store with an atrium, facing the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert (there is another part of the show at the Cin\u00e9ma Galeries), has sufficient vitality and vigour to challenge the simplistic notions that photography, or any of the \u2013isms, from Surrealism to Minimalism, or schools and movements from Pop Art to Postmodernism or Poststructuralism, have killed off painting, or made it impossible. Most of the paintings displayed in Brussels are abstract, but there are three striking exceptions by Paul Manes, the massive tree trunk in The Fifth Seal<\/em>, 2006, and the depiction of stacked bowls, as well as another of the bowls, both at rest and hurtling through the pictorial space of Departure<\/em> 2013. I was lucky enough also to see Manes\u2019 massive, three-panel, James Ensor-inspired, apocalyptical The Entry of Christ into New York, II,<\/em> 2006, which was on its way to be hung in Brussels Town Hall. This is not just figurative painting, but contains multiple portraits, used in a metaphorical mode that alludes to philosophical arguments, art history and even music, in a fashion that will be relished by those who also like the work, for example, of the late R.B. Kitaj.<\/p>\n

\"Jan-Vanriet-Horse-Frozen-2015-oil-on-canvas-200-x-280-cm\"<\/a>

Jan Vanriet Horse Frozen 2015 oil on canvas 200-x-280-cm<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

There are several impressive figurative paintings, or paintings that incorporate figurative elements here by one of the Belgians, Jan Vanriet. The Horse, Frozen<\/em>, 2015 is a haunting image of a man half bent-over with her head touching the mid-point of a standing woman, so that the shadow is equine.<\/p>\n

Lois Lane (don\u2019t bother telling her you can never forget her name \u2013 she\u2019s heard it a million times) also employs figuration, a female form, a cross, flowers, leaves, a suspended sheep (or beast of some sort). But she uses this imagery in the service of pattern-making that is near abstraction, with deep dark colours that are always verging on black. The intense indigo of Moon Shadow<\/em>, 2010, the picture I liked best, looks as though textile dye as been poured on a cloth that has been intricately folded or perhaps waxed to keep the pigment from staining portions of it. It is, in fact, oil on linen, with its porous tactility. Some of the artists have apparently been included because their work resonates with that of another painter in the show. Polo sees these affinities in the art of Paul Manes and the Belgian Werner Mannaers. I find a stronger bond between the patterning of the paintings of Mannaers and those on display by Ed Moses.<\/p>\n

\"pap-werner-mannaers-the-costello-series-chapter-4-2016-mixed-media-and-collage-on-canvas-193-5-x-162-5-cm\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Werner Mannaers The Costello Series Chapter 4 2016 mixed media and collage on canvas 193.5-x-162.5-cm<\/strong><\/p>\n

The exuberance of Paul Manes\u2019 work, though, is complemented by the tragedy of the sometimes almost empty canvases of the Belgian Marc Maet, whose brief dates, 1955-2000, apparently reflect his despairing mistaken belief that painting had died. It is difficult to assess the impact of his work from the splendid big catalogue of this show, because Maet\u2019s work is the most difficult to reproduce of any of the sixteen artists, so that his Catholicism, Black,<\/em> 1989 and Passion<\/em>, 1990 come out almost totally black, and EST<\/em>, 1989 more or less white.<\/p>\n

\"Marc<\/a>

Marc Maet EST 1989 acrylic on canvas 280-x-340cm<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

This makes Maet a key figure in Barbara Rose\u2019s show, which is intended particularly to challenge the contention of the American critic who dominated post-War thinking about art, Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), that painting\u2019s defining aspect was that it is addressed solely to the sense of sight. To comprehend Maet\u2019s work, the viewer has to appreciate the tactile qualities of the paintings \u2013 you have to want<\/em> to touch them \u2013 the impasto\u2019d white dots that spell EST <\/em>backwards on the 1989 near-white canvas. Of course, this is a public show in a public space and you\u2019re not allowed to touch them. Rose accommodates this by associating the tactile with the \u201chaptic\u201d \u2013 the vibrations \u2013 or whatever it is \u2013 \u00a0that the paintings give off that make you long to touch their surfaces.<\/p>\n

This demonstration by ostension that Greenberg was wrong reminds me of one of G.E. Moore\u2019s \u201cproofs\u201d of the existence of the external world:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, \u201cHere is one hand,\u201d and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, \u201cand here is another.\u201d And if, by doing this, I have proved\u00a0ipso facto<\/em>\u00a0the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples. [\u201cProof of an External World,\u201d\u00a0Proceedings of the British Academy 25<\/em>\u00a0(1939).]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rose and Polo could almost be accused of blunting Occam\u2019s Razor in this show, as they multiply examples over six floors of Vanderborght, most of them displaying the same tactile or haptic attraction. This, of course, is not the end of the story, or of their argument; they also counter Greenberg by claiming that many of these painters reorganise the space of the picture plane, or at least explore spatiality. This is obviously true, in the sense that few of them pay much attention to the \u201claws\u201d of perspective, vanishing points, crossed diagonals or any of the business that was so relevant before Greenberg\u2019s \u201cthe travesty that was Cubism\u201d subverted it definitively. But Rose means something more interesting than that. She is thinking of the pre-1950 Jackson Pollock\u2019s abandonment of the paintbrush, \u201cwhich emphasized the tactile stroke,\u201d and seemed to favour \u201cbrilliant color over physical gesture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walter Darby Bannard chucked out the paintbrush \u201cin favor of squeegees, rakes and brooms, which he used to apply mixed media and gels that thickened the surface to literal relief.\u201d His several works are among the most touch-me-demanding in this show, with ridges begging to be caressed in work dating from 1986, while the luscious colours of the two enormous paintings done this year (2016), come near to taunting the viewer to taste<\/em> them.<\/p>\n

\"Larry<\/a>

Larry Poons Glass Coach Louisville 2007 acrylic on canvas 172-x-225.4 cm<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Larry Poons\u2019 work occupies the entire ground floor of this show, which is apt, not only because he mastered the Pollock-point of \u201ccontrolled accident\u201d, but because, like many of the artists in this show, his paintings exemplify the painterly possibilities of rhythm. In the course of a few days in Brussels, I got to know some of the artists, and Poons and Manes told me they nearly all agreed in their appreciation of Country and Western music. Poons trained originally as a musician, and our first conversation (of several, extremely enjoyable ones) was about chord shifts in \u201cSalty Dog,\u201d though our next was about the cadenza of the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 (which we heard in an eccentric, but completely convincing performance by Alexander Melnikov). In 1999 Frank Stella said, in connection with Poons\u2019 work, \u201cTouch and its individualized and general aspects seem to be the gestures that best identify art for us.\u201d Stella went on to say that it has caused surprise that abstract art has actually extended \u201cthe expansive range of expression that\u2019s available to realistic painting\u201d and that no painter has \u201cextended and expanded the range of pictorial expression more than Larry Poons.\u201d I am particularly taken by Glass Coach Louisville<\/em>, 2007, in which there seems to me, along with the impasto and subtle use of a vast palette of colours, to be some distinct drawing. I availed myself of the privilege of having been born 90 miles away from Louisville to be cheeky enough to ask the painter to explain the title, which he did willingly, saying it was based on two subjects, Muhammed Ali (born Cassius Clay in Louisville, KY) and a poem by Wallace Stevens. This last is number eleven of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird<\/em>:<\/p>\n

He rode over Connecticut<\/p>\n

In a glass coach.<\/p>\n

Once, a fear pierced him,<\/p>\n

In that he mistook<\/p>\n

The shadow of his equipage<\/p>\n

For blackbirds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As I look at the catalogue reproduction of this painting, figures seem to emerge, but the reason Poons is fundamental to this show is clearly tactility, as shown in Southern Exposure<\/em>, 1986 and Grin (Francisco), <\/em>1991, which are done with acrylic and (as the catalogue says in its deadpan way) \u201cinert materials,\u201d three-dimensional objects attached to the canvas.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Karen<\/a>

Karen Gunderson Three Quarter Moon 2010-14 oil on linen 76-2-x-76-2-cm<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

The Belgian Mil Ceulemans has his attractive recent work described as \u201cmixed media on canvas.\u201d He\u2019s a controlled dripper, and looking at the plates in the catalogue, I detect a lot of perspectival depth \u2013 I was probably not far enough away from the pictures as they hung in the gallery. Karen Gunderson has found a way of using black oil paint alone to convey tones of silver and white and plenty of greys, while in paintings such as Three Quarter Moon, <\/em>2010-14, she uses the qualities of the linen support to make you yearn to touch the lunar craters. Martin Kline\u2019s recent work has taken a path that makes it doubly tactile. He works with encaustic, pigmented and heated wax, which makes, as he says, \u201ca sculpture in relief,\u201d automatically endowed with shadows, and movement from the fact that the medium was once liquid. This assures that when it becomes solid it alludes to \u201cdrips and pours, swirls, and pools.\u201d Kline made encaustic on linen behave something like honeycomb in Milk and Honey<\/em>, 2014, and I admire both Dream<\/em>, 2016 and Plus Minus (II)<\/em>, 2016 for the supple gorgeousness of their otherwise very different patterning. In works shown here dating from 2013 in his Not Art but Work<\/em> series, he doubles the tactile bang of some pictures by pouring and working the encaustic onto panel, and incorporating the rings and strings of \u201cnaval World War II canvas hammocks.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Melissa Kretschmer\u2019s work is \u201cat the crossroads of the sculptural and the painterly\u2026[they] exist both on a plane and in a space all at once,\u201d as she says in her catalogue entry. Her work is the most abstract, seemingly simple, but most complicated to describe, in this provocative exhibition. Sound<\/em>, made this year, is \u201cvellum, gesso, gouache, beeswax, graphite, and plywood.\u201d Since she has recently \u201cintroduced a new element of sawing and cutting\u201d it is difficult\/impossible to separate the media from the support.\u00a0 This metaphorical aesthetic syncretism is of maximum clout in this mighty show, as the point of most of the work is to show that the future of painting is in the hands of those artists who are engrossed and enchanted by what can be done with paint and support (and to whom it never occurs to think that the possibilities are exhausted).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Paul Manes, Departure, 2013, oil on canvas, 264.1 x 396.2 cm Brussels\u2014It\u2019s being billed as a \u201cmanifesto exhibition,\u201d and the curator, my friend, the art historian and filmmaker Barbara Rose, is happy to say \u201cThis is a polemical show.\u201d Indeed, the first line of her catalogue essay reads:   This exhibition intends to prove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1222","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-jI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}