WAYNE ARMSTRONG: BETWEEN HERE AND THERE
Manna Gallery
It is almost incomprehensible to us today, but landscape paintings a genre or subject idid not exist in European art until fairly recently—a few hundred years ago—until the Romantic era. Before then, the natural world was seen as a stage set for various holy or allegorical dramas, but gradually the backdrop came to the fore as scientific rationalism prevailed over religious mystery, and individualism superseded communitarianism, to the displeasure of the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who saw art’s role as fostering religious feeling, and the critic John Ruskin, who coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to attack the ‘falseness’ of aesthetic subjectivity.
The title of Wayne Armstrong’s landscape painting show, Between Here and There, may remind viewers of Tolkien’s subtitle for The Hobbit, or Paul Klee’s definition of a kine as a dot that went for a walk. It also defines the traditional esthetic view of art as an adventurous journey through obstacles an trials. Armstrong’s dozen-plus oils on canvas, all made in 2025, take the viewer on a journey into the California landscape that inspired them—note the blue and gold palette—and, the artist’s mind, perceiving and organizing the overwhelming and contradictory sensory data of real life into maps of painterly emotion. The Oakland artist, now retired after a long career teaching art, and impressively prolific, expresses what many Bay Areans feel about our famously scenic region: “How lucky am I to always find something in these e environments to inspire me.”
Armstrong’s commitment to inspiration and the painting process place him within the Abstract Expressionist tradition, but his interest in landscape allies him with the Bay Area Figuration artists who returned to examining and interpreting the external world; Richard Diebenkorn, for example, felt that pure attraction had become too easy: a trap for creative sterility. The medium-sized and large paintings presented here may have their roots in what some art viewers consider the “creed outworn”—to quote or misquote Wordsworth—of modernist painting, but Armstrong’s landscapes/mindscapes, with their almost geological slipping planes and metamorphic structures echoing Cézanne, de Kooning, Guston, and Thiebaud, belie the dictates of art fashion and marketing.
While some of the paintings are entitled to suggest specific locations (“Hidden Valley,” “White Bridges Road”), the majority of the titles. including “Between Here and There,” “That Lies Between,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” “Not San Andreas Fault,” “A Collection of Ethereal Thoughts,” and “Proverbial Setting” (or “They Promised Us Better Gods 5-8”)
playfully assert their independence from traditional realism with imaginatively extrapolated images striking in their aesthetic reality and rightness. The artist who created “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules” can only have done so by imbibing the rules so completely that violating them in order to pursue an internal vision without plunging into chaos became not only possible, but a kind of artistic mandate.
Armstrong’s ostensibly aerial views of the landscape, with the horizon lines and swaths of sky raised to the top of the paintings, render the ground planes composing most of the canvas a field—both literally and metaphorically—for improvisation; they suggest geologic cross-sections as well as quilts or magic lands of counterpane, or manuscripts and maps—or all of the above. There is the relative realism of the rocky cliffs in “A Collection of Ethereal Thoughts” and “What Lies Between” and the verdant foothills of “Not San Andreas Fault” loosens into the jumble of hillocks of “Hidden Valley.” More abstracted, ambiguous landscapes emerge in the virtuosic works, “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules,” “Between Here and There,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” and “White Bridges Road,” each one an aesthetic adventure. Wherever you go, there you are, as the folk wisdom of the 1970s intoned.
In Roger Corman’s 1963 sci-fi horror movie, “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” Ray Milland plays a scientist, Dr Xavier, who discovers a serum that gives him X-ray vision. At a cocktail party he is able to see through the clothing of gyrating dancers, but the vision intensifies alarmingly. His eyes go inky black and madness ensues. There are some things Man is meant not to see or know!
The Belgian artist David Deweerdt has happily evaded such punishment, exhibiting his penetrating figure paintings in Belgium and France for the past twenty-five years, and showing for the second time at Ryan Graff Contemporary. “Excessive Vision,” a collection of eighteen works executed on on Mylar, a plastic paper, presents solitary nudes partially fully denuded of flesh. While they recall the plaster flayed figures (écorchés) that academic painters used to learn anatomy, following the precedents of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Andreas Vesalius, or the contemporary plastinated cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens or the morgue-sourced art-historical pastiches of Joel-Peter Witkin, sensitive, triggerable viewers should be advised that the artist’s subcutaneous “body envelopes” of muscles, tendons, bones and viscera are not literal, but stylistic. Dew
eerdt’s knowledge of anatomy merges with painterly improvisations to evoke the feeling of the thing, bypassing the bother of literal illustration, to paraphrase the expressionist painter, Francis Bacon. Dew
eerdt:
My characters are mediums, … only pretexts... I try to produce a sensation, based on on what the character exudes and… something awakening in the viewer.. For many years, I have painted physical differences and deformities by questioning the aesthetic norms of … current Western societies. Today, my work questions Man in his paradoxes … [through] a new aestheticism, a new approach to the pictorial representation of the body.
Deweerdt’s untitled “excessive bodies” are painted in acrylic and ink glazes onto sheets of vertical-format 100x70-mm white mylar, and mounted to the walls, unframed, a few inches apart. There is no apparent sequence or narrative; we interpret each portrait individually, and interpret them as we can. At the same time, the works are so closely spaced , each on its clinical white backdrop, that we cannot forget the array, which exceeds the sum of its parts to form a sobering yet beautiful procession.
Several paintings clearly derive from figure studies. “Unitlted (02)” and “Untitlled (14)” depict a large-bellied man of middle age standing in profile and seen from the rear, respectively, cropped at the neck and knees, and thus headless. Rendered in a warm palette of siennas, earthy reds and oranges that suggest both muscle and fat, complemented by patches of icy, brilliant blue, we may be reminded of the temperature differentials revealed by infrared thermal imaging (à la Predator, to cite a nonmusical example) “(04)” and “(16)” present, respectively, hunched and slumping figures of a younger male adopting studio poses that express despair or remorse, and will be familiar to devotees of Rodin. “05” and “(13)” depict young females, respectively, kneeling and standing, but again cropped and incomplete, with fiery emanations that suggest ectoplasmic eruptions. “(07)” further challenges our notions of bodily image with a figure seen from the back, kneeling, legs crossed, and hands positioned as if bound, so that the limbs resemble flippers, and, with the head submerged behind the hill of his upper back, suggesting some flattened, fleahy sea turtle minus its shell.
Hybrid figures that are partly skeletal or partly animal animal suggest the medical specimen bottle and the carnival sideshow. The disembodied skulls and vertebrae in “(01), “(12),” and ”36)” remain mysteriously alive with painterly color and energy, as do the eviscerated female torso in “(03)” and the scapula-batwing form creature or specimen in “(10),” and the hung-beef carcasses of “(09),” reminiscent of slaughterhouse-pathos works by Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon (aptly named), a cheerful pessimist who was fond of reminding artistic London drinking pals like Lucian Freud, “You have only to consider the meat on your plate.”
Deweerdt’s gravitational dance of attraction-repulsion is perfectly calibrated to hold us in orbit around these strange bodies that are secular, unsentimental contemporary counterparts of Renaissance memento mori. paintings and medieval transi sculptures. They are bracing stuff—perhaps even medicine—to awaken us from our dogmatic slumber in these inhuman—and potentially post-human— times.
Alejandro Cartagena, “Ground Rules”
SFMOMA, San Francisco
“Ground Rules,” Alejandro Cartagena’s SFMOMA mid-career retrospective, covers twenty years’ work by the prolific Mexican photographer and book artist. Cartagena’s vast oeuvre of twenty-seven separate series belies his relative youth — he’s not yet fifty — and the variety of his work, exploring sociopolitical concerns and aesthetic impact. Not all of Cartagena’s projects are represented, even in this large selection; the well-illustrated catalogue is more comprehensive.
The exhibition’s title derives from baseball, as SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes notes in her catalogue essay. Cartagena’s boyhood baseball games in the Dominican Republic required agreements by the players on the irregular, ad-hoc playing fields available to them. Lopes sees Cartagena’s variegated practice as similar: choose a subject and an approach, and then obey the self-imposed rules and structure.
For “Identidad Nueva Léon” (2005-6), Cartagena and Rubén Marcos photographed hundreds of people whom they encountered at random in shopping malls, churches, and plazas. The subjects are casually posed, and presented life-sized and at three-quarters length, exuding the gravitas of formal portraits. The white backgrounds may borrow from the neutral backdrops of Richard Avedon’s portraits, especially those of the American West. The idea of using tents, with their gently diffused lighting, as portable photographic studios harks back to Irving Penn, although Cartagena and Marcos probably hit upon the tent idea on their own out of practical necessity. A frieze of ten nuevoleoneses of various types — eight singles flanked by two couples — greets viewers near the show’s entrance.
“Suburbia Mexicana” (2005-10) comprises several small series of twelve to sixteen photos each. “Fragmented Cities” depicts the construction of affordable suburban housing with rows of minimalist cubical dwellings laid out in rows, as if extruded, recalling the “ticky-tacky little boxes” of Malvina Reynolds’ folk song about postwar hillside housing developments south of San Francisco, contrasting with the scenic backdrop of the Monterrey’s Sierra Madre Oriental foothills. “Urban Holes” shows the vacant lots of downtown Monterrey, the neglected public spaces between private properties, contrasting with the bustling economy, seen with the eye of an abstract painter. “Lost Rivers” presents traditional nature-photography views of the Santa Catarina River. For “People of Suburbia,” Cartagena photographed his neighbors and their neighborhoods in unassuming slices of daily life.
In “Construcciones” (2014), the artist posed for what might be termed cosplay selfies exploring the idea of identity as social construct, an approach if not invented, then at least exemplified by the photographer Cindy Sherman. In these thirteen self-portraits, identically composed, the artist poses, variously costumed, between a blackboard inscribed with various sardonic titles — mentiroso (liar), papapitufo (Papa Smurf), pendejo (stupid), pinto (painted), pinche pelon (damned bald man), guero (blond) — and a construction helmet. If we interpret the series allegorically, the props symbolize the seemingly antithetical realms of mental and physical work.
The iconic“Carpoolers” series (201-12) catapulted Cartagena to the attention of the art world (with an assist from The New York Times). The forty-two identically-framed shots of pickup truck beds, laden with construction laborers sprawled or standing amid their equipment and materials, headed to the new suburbs of south Monterrey, were taken from a Highway 85 freeway pedestrian overpass on Mondays,. Wednesdays, and Fridays, over the course of a year. The term “Carpoolers” has no Spanish equivalent, and is probably meant ironically anyway; it merges a humanist view of economic reality with traffic engineering terminology. All they will call you will be ‘carpoolers, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie’s 1948 protest song, “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos).”
The empirical-evidence aspect of Cartagena’s early work has in recent years been superseded by abstraction, conceptualism, and the investigation of new technology. Initially self-taught, but later influenced by the photographer-publishers Gerardo Montiel Klint and Paul Graham, the artist used artifice (as previously discussed in his “Construcciones” self-portraits) to venture beyond the single-moment, decisive-image straight photography embraced by photo purists.
Abstraction becomes more prominent in the silhouette photos of two woman glimpsed through a checkpoint gate grid in the “Invisible Line” series (2010-17), one of several bodies of work examining the Mexican-American border both physically and psychologically: build/finish the pixelated wall! One image of the borderland landscape is even bisected by a wooden wall, seen perpendicularly, a thin line of demarcation which the artist clearly got around. In several collage works from his “Photographic Structures” series (2019), Cartagena cut his old photos into small squares and reassembled them into puzzle pieces held in place by small circular disks or magnets. In “Grupos Recortadas,” the artist, who discovered his lifelong interest in archives and found images at an early job scanning historical photographs, resurrects anonymous black and white photos, but carefully excises the people, leaving documents of long-ago events with the participants seemingly erased by time. One large circular photo collage towards the end of the exhibition may serve as the artist’s minimalist valediction to representation: dozens of overlapping photos of the polluted black night sky are arranged into six concentric rings around a circular aperture, like the pupil of an eye or a camera lens, forming a shell or shield that evokes the hemispherical night sky bereft of constellations, mapped but featureless.
Following Cartagena’s realist early work as it evolved toward abstraction and conceptualism, I was reminded of Walker Evans’ 2017 retrospective at SFMOMA, tracing his early career in social documentary photos of 1930s Depression America (published in James Agee’s book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”), moving in later years into unexpected directions, into experimentation with color and Polaroid photography, both unorthodox art media at the time; covert candid photography of passengers in subway cars (with the camera peeping out from Evans’ buttoned-up overcoat, tripped by a cable release); and even painting. Cartagena’s evolution from realism to examining the nature of seeing and art making seems to echo Evans’ earlier journey.
The photography world has radically changed since Evans’ era, with the development of digital media and the online publication of millions of images every day; the internet is a true “museum without walls” far beyond what the French writer André Malraux imagined back in the late 1940s. Cartagena characterizes this continual rain of images as “trillions and trillions of photographs, an endless pit of visual garbage that no human will ever be able to see in their lifetime.” Despite his sardonic take on image glut, Cartagena sees the emergence of AI through a hopeful lens, as a powerful tool for excavating meaning from the media midden. Time and photographic archaeologists will tell.
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW:
Barbara Boissevain and Charlotta Hauksdóttir
Chung 24 Gallery, San Francisco
July 22-Sept 13, 2025
“With rolling black sand beaches, mist-wreathed mountainscapes, cerulean glacier tongues and bubbling hot springs, Mother Nature has candidly outdone herself decorating this small Atlantic island.” An English writer described the wild beauty of Iceland, “ a cornucopia of natural splendor” so different from green and pleasant England, in gloriously romantic terms appropriate to touristic travel guides. To be sure, Iceland does a and-office business, so to speak attracting pilgrims in search of the unspoiled scenery, including fine-art photographers, and leaving behind some of the unfortunate by-products of commercial development—not just trash but also the commercial-consumption mentality relegating the experience of wildness to a kind of lifestyle trophy: see it now before the others spoil it. While Ireland has its preservationists, the small population iff islanders is by no means deep Green when it comes to consumption, ranking among the big spenders of global capitalism. In his 1948 novel, The Atomic Station, the novelist Halldor Laxness dramatized the perils of Cold War modernization, with his young heroine, Ugla, purportedly based on an early environmentalist, expostulating on the objectification and commercialization of the—for her, a spiritual descendant of the Norse pantheists of the pre-Christian era—sacred wilderness:
Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? … Nature is in front of us, and behind us; Nature is under and over us, yes and in us, but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same, and never in a rectangular frame.
As Above So Below presents two eminent Bay Area photographers—their monographs are available at the gallery— who are undoubtedly ethically in sync with Ugla (despite her dismissive opinion of rectangular art), if not aesthetically: the American-born Barbara Boissevain and the Icelander Charlotta Hauksdóttir. The phrase—in Latin, ut supra, ut infra—is used these days in legal documents to cite quotations elsewhere in the text, but it derives from earlier, pagan sources in medieval alchemical and mystical lore asserting that the earthly and heavenly worlds are united through sympathetic magic (esoterically prefiguringHegelian and Marxian dialectic). As it is in heaven, so it is on earth; the universal mirrors the personal; the external world reflects the internal world; the cosmos is reflected in the individual; and the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm. The title could be also said to refer to the imagery and construction of the works: more on the double/Doppelganger aspect, ut infra.
In 2015, Boissevain photographed Iceland’s stunning mountains, glaciers and icebergs, and years later returned to her images in her Endangered Ice series, mindful of the growing effects of global warming, and interested in moving beyond visual beauty to express her environmental concerns while not excluding eye appeal from her conceptual, subtly sociopolitical approach. Boissevain’s six new mixed-media pieces combine her earlier digital prints with watercolor and monoprint revived from from her grad-school painting years. The five photo hybrids from the 2024 Endangered Ice series depict blue icebergs shown in elevation, removed from the landscape ,and mounted on unpainted backgrounds like biological specimens. with their large submerged masses tapering into triangular roots, like jellyfish, mushrooms, thunderclouds dripping precipitation, or extracted teeth. The suggestive ambiguity of the forms contrasts well with the visual power of Boissevan’s rhythmic brushwork, creating heavy sculptural-looking masses that hover mysteriously, mid-air. Clouds also some to mind. The fifth piece, “Endangered Ice Shadow Installation,” from 2025, contains similar iceberg-clouds, but here, the painted shapes are mounted on plexiglass pieces cut to fit, and mounted on plexiglas dowels a few inches out from the wall upon which they cast shadows, suggesting islands or continents, seen from above, floating in a crystal clear sea.
Hauksdóttir takes a s different direction in her four 2D “photography collage” works, which depict rugged mountainscapes in a traditional
pictorial slice-of-life manner but subvert (or enrich) that style (which
Laxness’s Ugly might have disliked, as executed by postcard-scenic
painters, by scissors-cut excavations into the earth, seams or
sinkholes. Through these apertures in “Erosion XII” and “Erosion XIV”
(both 2024) we perceive a surprising subterranean layer of text aligned
with the surface geomorphology —an underworld of words describing the
past and future of the geology that “exists in time, always changing
and always passing, never the same,” though presented here within the
dreaded rectangular frame. In “resurgence IV” and “Resurgence XIV” (both
2024), Hauksdóttir imagines the land recovering, with new plant life
emerging below the surface, even reaching beyond the current topography
into the sky. A trio of “Reclamation” sculptures made between 2023 and
2025 and “Into Deep” (2025)—in too deep?—show the artist taking a more
conceptual approach, fabricating geometric shapes from branches on which
her photos are rolled that are sewn together, simulating indigenous
artifacts of some vanished tribe that possessed photographs and wished
to commemorate or magically contain, protect or regenerate the natural
world.
If culture has too often historically given nature short
shrift, following the reductive rationalism of toxic capitalism (and
all-too-human slash-and-burn human nature), there is no need to keep on
fatally fouling our nests. No one is coming to rescue us; we're not off
to some Martian billionaire bunker utopia to hatch a new race of moral
derelicts. Art is not politics, but it can be part of the solution, one
small epiphany after another.
Recent developments in digital photography have made possible (and absurdly easy) what was once impossible and unthinkable: dozens of shots per second, shooting in near-darkness, and even video, captured before the shutter is actually pressed. Such superpowers may speed up a professional’s “work flow” (as if cameras were an assembly line)), but what tech giveth, it also taketh away. Pressing the button and letting the machine do the rest (as early Kodak ads boasted) destroys the mystique of great photographs, reducing hard-won aesthetic achievement to choosing the best of hundreds of ‘spray-and-pray” random slices of the spatiotemporal pie. Artificial Intelligence, with its slick rendering of imaginary scenarios created with verbal prompts, completely ignores the dedication, skill, and experience required for capturing the decisive moment with light and film.
There is a reaction against the mechanization of vision, however. Younger photographers are choosing relatively low-tech older cameras that yield a recognizably ‘imperfect’ filmic look, less sharply focused, and otherwise violating digital dogma. It reflects as well a desire to escape the relentlessness of online life. Photography, slowed down to a walk, restores the experience of observing reality, not glowing pixels.
The intimate, poetic photographs of Kayhan Jafar-Shaghaghi, an Iranian scholar with degrees in in history, business, and economics, now living in Edinburgh, epitomize this rejection of the move-fast-and-shoot-things FOMO (fear of missing out) photographic ethos. Kayhan’s large-format still life photos are made with an 8x10 view camera of the kind preferred by his idols Ansel Adams—whose work galvanized the young artist—and Irving Penn, recently shown at the de Young Museum. The exquisitely rendered tone and color, considered by photographers both painterly and cinematic, suggest Kayhan’s roots in modernist photography, but their resonances go even further back into art history to the symbolic, allegorical still-life painting of the 17th century. The Dutch Masters rendered their still-life subjects immaculately, celebrating the brief, glorious beauty of flowers, but also propagating the then-dominant Christian faith in memento mori: visual sermons. We viewers are just passing through time, as the flowers and foodstuffs are. The inner life that we discern in Kayhan’s mysterious objects echoes our own subjective experience as sentient transients.
The gallery’s press release states, “Each image [in Poise] captures a state of suspended animation—a delicate tension before movement, transformation, or dissolution. Crafted through slow, intuitive methods, these photographs… bear witness to the uncertain equilibrium of our collective condition, speaking to the fragility and strength of that which endures.” Kayhan’s fascination with the intricacies of film and paper, including a decade of experimentation with the extremely difficult process of printing black and white Cibachrome on IMAGO paper, testifies to his interest in historyy; his fidelity to the medium, with its aesthetic and technical strengths and weaknesses (by today’s standards); and his commitment to his subjects, household objects of scant intrinsic interest that gain force and presence from the artist’s vivifying focus.
“Poise” (2022), for which the show takes its name, suggests liminality, or a threshold state combining both the opposites of balance and positional readiness. One of a series of works, including “Yield,” “Suspend” “Displace,” “Release,” and “Rest,” this image, which has an archaic, early-photography look, assembles wooden blocks borrowed from a neighbor into various stacked configurations that suggest a human figure, simplified through Cubist eyes—an unmade work of art history interpolated into the present. Kayhan, by the way, favors the local, citing in a recent gallery interview (available on the gallery website) the assemblage sculptor Joseph Cornell, whose rambles around his Utopia Parkway home in Queens yielded all the materials to populate his dream universe. Speaking of dreams, Kayhan’s color print, “Vessel” (2023), leans toward surrealism, with its depiction of a blue ceramic pot into which a bird, perhaps a chicken, appears to be burrowing, fleeing predators, but perhaps ending up as chicken-in-every-pot human fodder: soup id good food, Another color print, “Balance (2024),” presents a floral arrangement in which the red, yellow, pink and white roses incline in all directions, suggesting both wilting and the daily heliotropic struggle for light and life. The most memorably strange work is “Adrift Also (Octopus on Plinth) (2022),” with its tentacled cephalopod protagonist, probably another neighborly borrowing (like the frozen snake in another photo not shown here), decorously draped over a sculpture pedestal as if posing for its portrait.
Years ago, the art historian Suzi Gablik, championed what she termed a “re-enchantment of art” from what she saw as meaningless formal experimentation— the aesthetic dogma of the day. Kayhan, whose cultural roots date from the ancient Persian art he saw in museums as a child, has a longer historical view than that prevalent in our algorithm-driven Anthropocene age. Kayhan: “I’m more of a scavenger….. I respond to what I find. I try to be not that selective about whether I reject something or not.”
