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Minimalism on the Surface
John Haberin New York City
Richard Rezac, Jan Tichy, and Gedi Sibony
If anything goes, can that include Minimalism? In a hyperactive art world, it takes a certain restraint. In an art world also rich in surfaces, do not be surprised if much of that restraint is on the surface.
Richard Rezac and Jan Tichy sure sound minimal. Rezac works in plain or even plane geometry, give or take some odd lumps and unsettling colors. Tichy buys his light fixtures on the Bowery, not so far from where Dan Flavin must have shopped more than fifty years ago. Their modesty extends, too, to a work's scale and placement, whether in objects that hang neatly on a wall and nestle on a pedestal or in lights that nestle into a corner of the room. Gedi Sibony plays with daylight and darkness, too, between broken walls and fragmented assemblies. If that takes each of them closer after all to painting and sculpture, they also have some subtexts that Minimalism might never abide. It also earns them a closer look to ask why. 
A little of that
A little of this, a little of that, and before you know it you have everything. Richard Rezac collects fragments of art and life the way others collect comic books or cherished memories. They might be panels from paintings that never came to be. They might be sections of low, thick fencing, like police barricades at a parade or demonstration, pressed against each other so that they could no longer conceivably fence anyone in. They all look familiar enough, only he has made them all himself and labored over them to the point of perfection. Nothing here seems to stand alone, and yet nothing is left to chance.
Rezac relishes a fine finish and a precarious balance. He paints on cherry wood or aluminum so that it glistens, but thick and matte enough that it cannot reflect its surroundings or the viewer. He places half cylinders of brass beside white squares the way that Robert Ryman treats the bolts holding a painting to the wall as essential elements. Neither the brass nor the square, though, is the primary or supporting element, no more than for Ana Tiscornia before him, not when either may top the picture plane and neither may lie straight. Flat-bottomed yellow lumps rest on a tilted plane overhead, like eggs about to slide off, perhaps onto you. And yet they never will.
Even when metal has coarse outlines and a coarser finish, rusted beyond repair, it is going nowhere fast. Rezac draws readily on both household objects and abstraction the way art of the 1970s lay between Minimalism, readymades, and conceptual art. Balancing the yellow ovoids, striped fabric hangs from the other end of the titled plane like a scrap of cloth from the same kitchen table. A diamond pattern looks like bathroom tiling, in his signature orange and lime green, but with grouting so white that no amount of cleaning in your apartment would suffice. It recalls wall coverings by Richard Artschwager for elevators at the new Whitney Museum, much as the fencing recalls a playpen for Robert Gober. Rezac, though, seems incapable of function or irony, not when there is much left to do.
Art like this can feel stifling, trapped in its private allusions and public perfection, so give it time. The overhead piece turns out to allude to a prominent Baroque family crest, with those lumps (which also help hold up the playpen) the hills of Rome. Rezac, though, has only four, not seven, because everything remains unfinished—in concept if not in composition. If it seems so precarious an unfinish, he knows what it is like to be accomplished but marginal himself. A successful Chicago artist, he will be new to many in New York. His cross between abstraction and furniture may come closest to Donald Judd, but without emptying or taking over a room.
California, too, treated Minimalism as wrapped up in itself. Planks by John McCracken leaning against the wall became gallery fixtures difficult to tell apart. Sound and light installations by Doug Wheeler invite one to participate, but also to relax. An entire wall of light, glowing at the edges, becomes enveloping wherever in the room one chooses to stand, to dance, or to sit. Was art in New York in your face, no matter how distant? Count on the West Coast to make it a spa.
Of the "Light and Space" artists, none was as translucent but predictable as Larry Bell. His familiar glass cubes put light and space literally on a pedestal. Who knew that he was also moving mountains? Large works all but unknown here amount to entire mountain ranges, more angular and more colorful the more one walks around them. Accompanying smaller works embrace diffraction, for prismatic colors, although his prism is again a cube. They make the case for a more varied and impressive artist, but look to Rezac for a more perfect last word.
Letting in the light
Had any of us bought something on the Bowery in the last five years? Jan Tichy had just finished taking questions when his dealer turned one on the audience. Its members could hardly have missed the lighting stores up the block on the way to the gallery, but had they ever once gone in? They knew the stores well, it turned out, and shared a concern that a rough and tumble neighborhood had all but given way to something sleek and new thanks to galleries like this one, though only two raised their hands. And Tichy shares their concern when he calls a show "Light Stop." He is selling actual lighting fixtures, recalling their history, and letting in the light.
I raised my hand, but I was cheating, I have to admit. I last replaced my bedroom lamp nearly ten years ago, although I still see these stores as a true New York resource, like so much in an ever-changing city. I am less likely to set foot in one of the nearby restaurant supply stores than in a Lower East Side restaurant, but Tichy is cooking with gas. Literally so, for it ripples through a slim fluorescent tube along with the light. He treats them both, the gas and the light, as parts of his work—along with the black mounting, the wiring, the walls, and the gallery's electrical outlets. What, though, does that have to do with gentrification?
More than you might think for an artist born in Prague and educated in Israel rather than downtown New York. He depends on stores like these for his materials, and he gives them a visual and material presence in his work. He takes a direct impression of what they sell in photograms, where they look like department store windows at Christmas or entire city streets at night. (Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler aim for a similar effect with glass bulbs in the latest Cooper Hewitt design triennial.) Broader circles of light stand out with eerie precision amid the blur. If that were not enough, slow-motion slide shows capture nearby buildings directly.
Like a gallery, the Bowery shops are destinations, for unmatched prices and variety. And the threats to retail pretty much boil down to four words, rising rents and the Internet. Then, too, lighting as art has been around since Flavin, François Morellet, and James Turell in the 1960s—and light as the subject and means of art far longer, as in oil paints for Jan van Eyck. Slimmer fixtures become art for Lucas Michael, Carol Salmanson, Banks Violette, while Hans Haacke, Glenn Ligon, and Bruce Nauman use neon signs for text. They stand, too, for the American landscape for such photographers as Joel Meyerowitz. Tichy gives his, though, more literal twists.
They lie half hidden in corners. They become geometric patterns in an imagined carpet, side by side or crossing one another on the floor. Others rest on tables, while a slide show plays out on adjacent walls, depicting the city after dark. They are once again part of the neighborhood. In a second slide show, the night gives way to broad daylight. Color and light triumph at last, unless they were there all along. One may just need to wait for dawn.
Do the show's twin agendas, then, come together? Can something so abstract address practical concerns, much like a light shop? Tichy, whose video I first encountered at the 2013 New York art fairs, takes his and the viewer's time to get it right. One can access the daytime slide show only through the one at night. The night slides also include large bright circles. They could be the moon—or just another ghostly gathering of the light.
A vision of art class
Gedi Sibony is reaching for the light. One can see it, if anything, more strongly in the show's announcement online. Not that you should stop there, but what could be more fitting than a mere invitation for a visual artist whose work always feels in the process of assembly? He literally rolled out the industrial carpet to a previous show. It built on Minimalism toward the "unmonumental," while expanding outward. Now it barrels right through a gallery wall toward the light, but you may still find yourself lost inside.
Sibony came to attention among emerging artists in "Greater New York" and, a year later, the 2006 Biennial. He recalled the creative destruction of Richard Tuttle decades earlier, but for less earth-shattering times. Could he be aspiring to something more? One may not associate his eighth-floor gallery with light, and online the entry looks longer and dimmer than it ever could in life. At the end, though, lies art in a pool of light. An interview in Border Crossings magazine, on the exhibition Web site, compares it to an Annunciation.
Your bs meter may be ticking, but Sibony deals in visions and the spaces to hold them. The gallery's central room has typically fragmentary work, including a small black object in the corner. It might be the remains of anything from architecture to a human skull. The drive toward dismemberment appears as well in a still life in the next room, its outlines cut out from latex and foam core, in color. Sibony has a debt to Lucio Fontana, but the Italian seems more interested in the cut through canvas than in what it might have removed. The New Yorker deals in fragmentation, but also construction.
He is teaching something, too, even art, but you have to know where to look. Two metal easels face off, as Signs of Encounter, each with a stiff, rectilinear base. I thought of a similarly framed standing figure with a void between its hands by Alberto Giacometti in the expanded MoMA, but here the space is exclusively for work. The easels hold not a trace of a painting, but they frame an entire art class—or a potential one. One can see its desks through a rectangular hole in the wall, in a larger room with natural light. It supplies the light for the show's online photo as well.
The windowed room could pass for an extension of the office. Maybe the gallery sets aside workspace, like James Cohan in Tribeca, and where should vision be at issue if not in art class? The cheap-wood desks look unfinished, too, but their desktops might serve as subjects for a student's still life. They might almost spell out something as well, in an alphabet somewhere between Roman and Greek. Is that a delta for difference? One can enter the room to check it out.
Not so a dark room with a single desk and the same cryptic message. It appears through a facing opening in the central room. So does a wire sculpture much like Tuttle's and fabric like a monk's robe. I mistook the dark opening for a mirror and looked behind me, I had had my vision. Is this Annunciation all theater, in a show called "The Terrace Theater?" Is it even a terrace, and if its spaces are, as Sibony says, "intersecting spheres," should they be round? I was piecing them together well after I thought that I had given up in frustration.
Richard Rezac ran at Luhring Augustine through August 21, 2020, Doug Wheeler at David Zwirner through July 17, Larry Bell at Hauser & Wirth through July 31, Jan Tichy at Fridman through February 23, and Gedi Sibony at Greene Naftali through October 31. A related review looks at Gedi Sibony in 2008.