Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
Hybridity, changing demographics and scandal are back in the news. A purportedly racially insensitive or even racist painting was shown at the Whitney Biennial to some liberal consternation; statues of Confederate generals were assailed by liberals and defended by conservatives in the wake of the shameful neo-nazi march in Charlotte NC; and sexual hanky-panky on a colossal scale has emerged, seemingly everywhere—including
the hushed precincts of influential art magazines. Some artworlders may have now come to believe, given the political correctness inculcated in colleges in recent years, that shouts and alarums are the goals of good art. They can be, especially in our tumultuous times, but we also need to consider, for aesthetic balance, the beauty and complexity afforded by art without sociopolitical overt agendas, art made because the artists were inner-driven and self-directed.
The dual solo shows by Bay Area artists Connie Goldman and Mikey Kelly—her second and his first at this Oakland gallery—make a compelling argument for the best kind of formalist practice: work of museum quality—both artists have been collected at that level—that explores pure painting creatively and, indeed, notwithstanding the crisp, immaculate facture—no painterly blobs and drips here—passionately. The dogma of 1960s hard-edge formalism deserved its ridicule by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word, with critics supposedly squinting slantwise across the canvas surface looking for suspicious painterly bumps, but the geometric abstraction tradition was always bigger than even Clement Greenberg; and the best reductivist or minimalist work—Mondrian, Reinhardt, Rothko, Newman, Stella et al.—was always about more than paint on canvas stretched over wood.
Goldman’s show takes its title Genea, from the Greek word for becoming or emerging, as in ‘genealogy’ or ‘generate.’ The artist cites her interest in the “tenuous equilibrium” in which people and the world exist (always, and not just post-Trump). Goldman: “Life is constant change. From one nanosecond to the next, from a minute to a decade, from a millimeter to a mile, there’s no chance of escaping the push and pull of time, nature, and volition.” Connie Goldman’s eight painted MDF (a fine-grained pressed wood) relief sculptures, with their irregular polygonal shapes, ‘split-level’ planes, and vibrant color palettes, are meticulously constructed puzzles, with double meanings and perceptual ambiguities. Some planes seem folded over, like origami, or read as the shadows of other planes; some planes in these reliefs are elevated or recessed, suggesting geological or architectural models. The multiple perspectives, overlapping forms, illusory folds, painted edges, and contradictory color and form make works like “Genea VI,” “Genea X” and “Genea XI,” my favorite pieces, vibrate with contradiction; distillations of imagination and experimentation that defy logic, but achieve a hard-won but effortless-seeming perfection.
Speaking of vibration and vibrancy, Mikey Kelly’s six overlapping-stripe acrylic paintings in Vibrate marry Op Art—Bridget Riley and Jesus Rafael Soto come to mind— with a compositional process involving algorithms, with the goal of what he calls ‘spirituality hacking.’ I am not clear on how the words that Kelly picks as titles are transformed or encoded by algorithms into these dazzling yet delicate ‘woven’ arrays of stripes—made with an automobile paint striper and straightedge, by the way—which seem to change from afar with the viewer’s movements, and, close up, suggest complex crystalline or architectural structures. Be Love Now V1.0 and Be Love Now V2.0, sixty-inch-diameter tondos, suggest both the yarn-string projects that many of us made as children, and the scanned images of planets, simplified by pixelation. Affirmations, a series of five twenty-four-inch square panels, carries a similar hidden spiritual message in its title, with the colored lines changing color according to the viewer’s angle of view and distance, as with the pointillist Divisionism of Seurat and Signac. Seven Names of God Prayer V2.0 with its vertical adjoining panels suggests (incorrectly) a prismatic version of the ROYGBIV rainbow color chart—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—or an abstract, meditative, New Age version, perhaps, of Monet’s sun-kissed Rouen Cathedral. The sun is god, as Turner said.—DeWitt Cheng
