ArtOpticon.us

TIM WILLIAMS: 21st Century Sucks
Heron Arts

In 1971, the Kinks released “Twentieth Century Man,” a rollicking indictment of the contemporaneous 

age of machinery
A mechanical nightmare
The wonderful world of technology
Napalm, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare
This is the twentieth century
…too much aggravation
It's the age of insanity

In 2026, many of us might find ourselves in rueful agreement with 21st Century Sucks, the bluntly humorous  title of Tim Williams’ painting exhibition at Heron Arts. A rejection of the present along with nostalgia for a real or imagined past and dreams of utopian future is nothing new in art. Classical painters depicted a bygone Golden [i.e, pre-industrial] Age, blending pagan and Christian myths; the Futurist painters of a century ago, conversely, loathed the industrial backwardness and conservative culture of Italy at the time, adapting the revolutionary style of Cubism to promulgate an aggressive future regime free of deadening museums, moonlight and pasta: (Unfortunately for them, and for Italy, they fell victim to the malignant spell of fascism).

Art, however, comforts and heals, as well as occasionally critiquing the nightmare of history, to paraphrase Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Tim Williams’ semi-abstract mixed-media paintings on wood panel, employing the fractured planes of Cubism and the borrowed mass-media imagery of Pop, are engaging collage-puzzles of colliding, contradictory elements culled from the chaos of our ‘sucky’ times, organize and transformed. Williams embraces “…images shaped by excess, speed, contradiction, and collapse. Using collaged imagery from my own photographs, planes, trains, automobiles, and the debris of modern life, I build dense compositions that reflect a world already coming apart. Within that chaos, there are still moments of beauty.” 

WIlliams’ image scavenging impulse is balanced by his compositional mastery, so that the cutout elements never seem random, but held in a gravitational dance, with centripetal and centrifugal forces perfectly balanced. Along with the artist’s ability to mix and match disparate and discordant elements is a compositional device that was discovered only a few years ago, the Einstein tile, a irregularly shaped polygon or polyhedron resembling a fractured hexagon that, rotated variously, covers a flat surface not only completely, interlocking, without gaps, but also without forming a predictable repeating pattern. Wikipedia defines it as “a single prototile that by itself forms an aperiodic set of prototiles; that is, a shape that can tessellate [cover with tiles] space but only in a nonperiodic way. Such a shape is called an einstein, a word play on ein Stein, German for "one stone”.

Devotees of M.C. Escher’s prints will remember his works employing tesselation patterns of ‘opposite elements, like, say birds and fish, and flat 2D shapes alternating with rounded 3D shapes, like the crocodlians in “Reptiles”  (1943) that crawl out of a book illustration into the ‘real’ space of the artist’s desktop, and back into surface flatness, an infinite cycle of metamorphosis— the ancient tetrapod invasion of the land.

Williams’ heady mixture of illusionism (in his commercial imagery, deconstructed and recontextualized) and pure abstraction (from his predilection for bright colors and strong; graphic patterns) may suggest Pop and proto-pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Stuart Davis, and even at times, Fernand Léger, who enjoyed the brash modernity of postwar American culture. Williams’ wryly humorous titles —e.g., “Chaos has a way of finding you,” Quietly yearning for what you don’t have while dreading losing what you do,” “Short con, long odds,”  “Objectively better, subjectively worse,”  and Bendzamine” (a jokey version of the name of an oral anesthetic)—poke fun at artistic pretentiousness while the extraordinary craftsmanship of the paintings proves that the artist takes the game and the work seriously. While the large works deftly interweave their representative and abstract elements, the smaller paintings are more abstract and intimate, and because of their smaller scale—think of Paul Klee— and more subdued palettes, seem addressed to the solo viewer, presenting surfaces that seem solidly packed, but threaten to disintegrate, like ice floes: “structure, but never symmetry. Order, but never resolution…. something that keeps shifting, something that doesn’t resolve.” Don’t miss these playful small treasures amid the other riches of this large show: “All work and no plagiarism,” The gates of perception,” “Thinking of you,” “Fate, and the “Einstein Tiles” series with their archaeological layers of tile floors or walls, partially exposing art and artifacts as bright as if freshly created.

HENNA VAINIO: OPPOSITE KNOTS
Casemore Gallery, San Francisco

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” 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.