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I wrote about Charney’s work several months ago.

CAROL INEZ CHARNEY: After Painting

 In 2013, I first saw Carol Inez Charney’s striking semi-abstract photographs depicting details of modernist architecture partially obscured by and refracted by water. These large photographs, printed on aluminum, and unframed, were photographic, naturally, but also painterly, with the streams of water that seemingly flowed down an invisible, interposed glass pane both breaking up the image and reassembling it into painterly abstractions reminiscent of the works by Pollock, Still, Rauschenberg, Johns and others that had fascinated Charney as a student, launching her art career.

 In her latest body of work, After Painting, from 2016, Charney focuses completely on culture, i.e., universally beloved paintings by Leonardo, Van Eyck, Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Chagall and Picasso, all made before 1923, and now in the public domain. Using high-quality downloaded internet images, posters and reproductions from art books or posters, Charney rephotographs details from the works and groups them in twos and threes—into diptychs or triptychs, to employ the art-historical term used for multi-panel paintings. The ‘After’ designation refers to the art-historian’s way of labeling copies of old artworks made by admiring younger artists, a common practice before the advent of photography, and a way of paying homage to and learning from the past: Van Gogh copied Rubens, and Rubens copied Leonardo, and so on. Sometimes this hands-on method of assimilation resulted in creative variations, like Picasso’s innumerable Velasquez variations, or Manet’s quotations (or parodies) of Giorgione and Titian.

 Charney’s gradual shift of interest from the natural world to the world of visual culture is not unique in our postmodernist age, which looks at and to  cultural production in the way that past artists looked at and to nature. If collage was the core of modernist art, appropriation, the quotation or sampling of previous art, could be said to be postmodernism’s. Sherrie Levine in her 1980s After Walker Evans photographs rephotographed the great social documentarian’s photos of the 1930s. Cindy Sherman’s faux movie stills, with the photographer costumed and made up to resemble archetypal movie heroines, but from movies never made, are another example of art deriving from other art.

 Charney’s creative reuse of master paintings, however, reflects none of the postmodernist questioning of originality cited above. With degrees in both painting and photography, Charney is an admitted “frustrated painter” who found photography more congenial than painting, but still seeks the complex ‘conversation,’ or moment’ provided by the slower, handmade medium. In Charney’s carefully assembled diptychs and triptychs, we see iconic modernist paintings anew, through the artist’s curtain of rivulets, enriched by water’s metaphorical associations with time, change, metamorphosis and the unconscious. A century ago, Marcel Duchamp mocked what he considered at the time the connoisseur’s fetishistic  interest in the painter’s hand and touch; Charney’s photographic studies, which “reinterpret classical painting,” let us revel in that handiwork, made invisible to us through familiarity, perhaps, through her sharp eye and lens

 Framed like paintings, within floater frames, Charney’s photographs “look at art in a new way and reinterpret it in a new way”— combining two media, photography and painting, and merging two aesthetic sensibilities, hers and that of, say, Picasso— separated by decades and centuries. If you have seen Werner Herzog’s 2010 film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, you may remember that one of the prehistoric wall paintings lovingly documented in that films was a collaboration of two artists who lived and worked in that Chauvet cave five thousand years apart. —DeWitt Cheng

Photos from the show, below: 

This engagingly titled show, “Knocked Kneed and Bow Legged,” pairs Matt Kleeberg’s paintings and Woody De Othello’s ceramic sculptures. Both examine the cultural moment’s unsettling instabilities — the gallery press release’s “curious alternate realities within unsettling social climates” — with beauty and humor.

   

Kleeberg’s large oil and paintstick canvases have the bright palette of 1960s hard-edge abstraction, but none of its dogmatic insistence on flatness, materiality and literal interpretation. Indeed, they play with the old metaphor of painted space as a virtual world framed by the painting’s edges, with their arched doorways, arcades, and doorlike niches, all walled up, so to speak, without exterior views. They are framed here and there by colored stripes and faux swatches of deckle-edged torn paper. Two of the paintings ("Sanctionary Sanctuary" and "Bike Sock Shock Jock") cheerfully take the isometric perspective used in architectural rendering and squeeze it almost flat. Notice also Kleeberg’s humorous titles, including the likes of "Dancin’ Dave Dickel (Bad Hombre)" and "Fire and Brownstone."

/eE.l.os/

or Threads, a creative partnership between Bay Area painters

Andreina Davila and Ytaelena Lopez

We in the art world are accustomed to consider artmaking primarily a solitary activity, and artwork as reflecting a single sensibility. In general, that is the case, so we normally scant the idea of artistic collaborations. In the Renaissance, painters learned their craft in workshops headed by master artists. Remember, for example, Andrea del Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (1470-5 or so), with its radiant angel, the contribution of a young Leonardo da Vinci. The creative marriage —or mountain-climbing expedition, depending on which metaphor you find more striking—of Picasso and Georges Braque during the early years of Analytic Cubism is another creative collaboration, producing paintings that, although painted separately, were indistinguishable even to their creators. Picasso also maintained a serious rivalry with Matisse, each painter challenging the other—as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael had, five centuries earlier: collaboration as parallel evolution. 

The Venezuelan painters Andreina Davila and Ytaelena Lopez, who met in the Bay Area, entered, in February, 2015, into an artistic partnership, entitled /eE.l.os/. The word, a typographical variation of hilos, threads in Spanish, reflects their interest in the question of identity and its malleable relationship to place, natural concerns to immigrants in this multicultural time in this diverse place. The threads also serve, according to the artists’ joint statement, as connectors between people and nature, bridging realms usually considered separate; in visual terms, they connect and unify Lopez’s portraits and animals and Davila’s painterly abstractions, synthesizing drawing and color, opposing aesthetic camps in the early nineteenth century painting, but now, in the twenty-first century, partners. While the paintings, which the artists pass back and forth, sometimes over long periods, have resemblances to their individual works, it’s clear that the partnership creates, in effect, a third artist, and that this tertiary work feeds their solo works as much as they in turn nourish /eE.l.os/. 

The product of a long discussion between friends during a long drive, and subsequent brainstorming, the artists’ FAUNA series examines animals’ ability to adapt to changes in their environment, a lesson in flexibility and realism easily extrapolated to humans now facing environmental challenges. /eE.l..os/’s artist statement:

The subject of this series is the process of transformation where the individual, depicted as an animal, becomes one with the place. The animal becomes the place and the place becomes the animal. For the artists, as native Spanish speakers, the verb “TO BE” can have two meanings: the state of being in a place (‘estar’) and a definition of who we are (“ser”). This duality is central to the dialog that takes place between the environment and the animal. They interact with each other, developing a joint identity, much as it happens in life, where our actions help define and shape us and the environment around us…. Each painting starts with the abstraction of a place. Andreina gives, color, texture and form to the idea of an open, yet inviting environment. Then, Ytaelena imagines who could inhabit here, and, line by line, an animal form comes to life. Last, we weave this interaction between the two different forms: fauna and place become one… In a time when our relation to what we call “home” is questioned by issues like climate change, immigration and gentrification, Fauna represents a break, a moment to breathe and imagine what would be possible. (From website, http://eelos.com/About-eE-Io-s)

The mixed-media works on panel depict wild animals in natural environments, but they are far from naturalistic, or, at least, merely naturalistic. Ytaelena Lopez’s freely but incisively sketched animals are recognizable, but her meandering black line (which recalls Egon Schiele’s)—complemented by white lines and shades of ink wash—follows realism only loosely, even playfully, carving the picture space into animal form, or perhaps spirit-animal form: the animals are often left white, suggesting absences, or rendered as semi-transparent, with the background coming through. Deer, coyotes, foxes, lions, capybaras, chimpanzees, chameleons, whales — each species is memorialized and commemorated, the living individual being transformed into a representative of its species, perhaps endangered or already extinct. A century ago, the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc depicted animals—spiritual blue horses and yellow cows, famously—as embodiments of purity and instinct, sometimes in harmony with their surroundings, sometimes threatened by invisible forces. (Marc was killed at the Somme, in 1916.) Frederick S. Levine, in his study of Marc, described expressionism as

…a socially involved art, an art that sought to communicate the depths of its involvement with and concern for mankind….Expressionism sought to reach out beyond the confines of the individual selk and to establish contact with the broad mass of humanity. Indeed, Expressionism reflected an anguished longing for community which, when carried to its extreme, represented an attempt to establish a unified and harmonious relationship between the mortal isolated individual and the eternity and universality of the cosmos.¹

I see the innocent animals of /eE.l.os/ as performing a similar service for our endangered and not-so-innocent anthropogenic era. If this sounds overly serious to viewers who resist what George Grosz called Tendenzkunst, tendentious art, or sociopolitical art, the works, like Marc’s and unlike Grosz’s, are visually complex and surprising, and quite beautiful.  Ytaelena Lopez’s stylized, semi-abstract backgrounds—large patches of pure color modulated by tones and organic textures to suggest natural habitats, phenomena and processes—offer aesthetic delight and even mystical transport that transcend the current realities of politics and business. The abstract and the figurative merge, just as the artists’ individual personalities merge into the creative partnership, creating a visionary, spiritualized world reminiscent of the peaceable kingdom paintings of the nineteenth-century Quaker artist, Edward Hicks.

The supposed conflict between beauty and seriousness in art that we take for granted nowadays is incorrect: art need not choose between being either eye candy, superficial or sublime, or politically correct propaganda, bitter, but good for you, or, that egregious synthesis of vapidity harnessed to pretentiousness. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto wrote, about what he calls our kalliphobia, our fear and hatred of beauty, as inherited from the Dadaists, disgusted by the hypocrisy and waste of the Great War. Unfortunately, the desire to shock and disgust, “to make people scream,”² in Max Ernst’s words, has now become the established practice taught in art schools; it has been co-opted by the market.

Davila and Lopez cite in their artist statement the ancient Greek term kalokagathos, or kalo k’agathos, “beautiful on the outside and noble on the inside.”³ Carried to extremes, it is a dubious equation, of course; the execution of the homely seventy-year-old gadfly, Socrates, by gym-toned Athenians (considered middle-aged at thirty) ought to make us wary of superficial judgments based on appearance. However, given the current enslavement of contemporary art to market forces, perhaps it is time to acknowledge again, with Keats, that truth can be beauty, and vice versa, and reconsider artworks like those created by that third person, /eE.l.os/, that function as beautiful and wise kaloi k’agathoi.

¹ Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism, p.5

² Arthur Danto, “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art; Or, What Ever Happened to Beauty?” reprinted in Unnattural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (2005), p. 323

³ Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, p. 234