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Rigor After Geometry
John Haberin New York City
Altoon Sultan and Juan Uslé
Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey
Is this what abstraction's rigor looks like today? Could be, but rigor in art can mean all sorts of things, and people and their material traces keep slipping in. So how many artists are on view? It depends, as Groucho Marx put it, on who you are going to believe, me or your own eyes. Three shows could make anyone lose count.
Altoon Sultan knows geometric abstraction inside-out—which for her means turning its geometry and materials inside-out as well. One can shift from fields of color to hooks and gaps, the second from canvas to porcelain and wool. Juan Uslé belongs to a storied tradition in late modern art—where technique is inseparable from gesture and gesture from sensation. While the gesture is the artist's, the sensation can be yours, too. 
Last, Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey occupy an increasingly common space, between realism and abstraction. Together, they make clear the eclecticism of painting now and the burdens of the past.
Crotchety abstraction
Altoon Sultan opens with a series so richly textured that it amounts to low relief. Hooked wool on unstretched linen generates its own rhythms, between the fibers running every which way and their accidental variation in color. They seem to thicken that much more as they fray at the edge of a composition, while producing fields of color within. Their shadows at the edge become part of the show, too. Even in reproduction, they can tempt one to reach out and touch. n person, they can oblige you to stake a step back.
Just do not sell short a series on the facing wall, only there the low relief is an illusion. It may not "pop" quite so much. It may look at first like geometric abstraction whose design has got just a little out of hand or cuts in wood for Roland Gebhardt. Soon enough, though, the shapes sort out as fragments of physical objects in shallow depth. They may overlap or leave shadowy gaps between them, in tempera on parchment. Sultan bases them on industrial or agricultural parts, but they remain somewhere between pure abstraction and a mystery.
Not that the fields of hooked wool lack for shading, no more than for Yvonne Wells. Painting today often moves between abstraction and representation, and so it is here. A circle becomes a sphere, and the orange stripe beneath it will have to do as a shelf. A rectangle appears to cast its shadow. Think of how a square for Kazimir Malevich can seem in flight, but then early Soviet art often imagines an industrial future. Sultan's industry, though, lies still.
Her 2017 show had three approaches to abstract art—in rug-hooked and hand-dyed wool, porcelain bas reliefs, and tempera. As I noted then, the tapestries had the nested geometry of Minimalism and older women in abstract art, while the paintings borrowed from both industrial machinery and Renaissance sculpture. She titled one work Convergence. This show, too, calls attention both to distinct series and their convergence. One painting depicts two strands of white thread hanging down over the rest and casting its shadow. She could almost have cut it into bits for the hooked wool.
The actual reliefs, in porcelain, are gone—and with them some of the most intense colors. Wool runs more to matte shades even in deep purple, and designs can grow fussy. Sultan makes up for the loss, at least in part, with works on paper, where contrasting ink brings out the color in gouache. A fourth new series strips back the fields of wool to their outlines, leaving bare the dyed linen. That adds to the sense of a relief, as longer threads or clusters of threads stand out as akin to drawing or sign systems in themselves. Tapestry as painting is fashionable enough these days, in design and folk art, and here it comes that much closer to crocheting.
The convergence also brings out the connections between abstract painting and drawing. Sultan acknowledges the influence of illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library and a drapery study by Albrecht Dürer. Traditionally, too, trompe l'oeil painting often depicted objects on shelves to heighten the illusion. Linen cut in arbitrary shapes, may recall shaped canvas and Ellsworth Kelly, but with a difference. Where his panels remain altogether separate fields of color, here the interlocked wool allows two overlapping fields to interpenetrate. It has me now at home looking at the shadow of a table on the floor.
Gesture and sensation
You need not buy into the idea that art is all about the artist to appreciate Juan Uslé, although he sure takes up space. That idea might even get on your nerves. Who needs to hear yet again that painting is all about personal expression—or that a white male artist is larger than life? But then some of the worst culprits would agree more than you might think. With his drips, Jackson Pollock can make you feel paint itself on more than equal terms with the artist or the image. You can feel spots of paint as if they had only just begun to catch the light.
Instead of Abstract Expressionism, I might equally well have cited color-field painting a decade later. Where Pollock asks you to imagine him circling the canvas as you watch, Morris Louis asks you to imagine him pouring paint fresh out of the can. And where Pollock uses oil and enamel to reflect light, Louis uses oil for its greater translucency. Where Pollock is up front about everything, Louis has his Veils. Either way, Uslé is a throwback and proud of it. Once again, gesture points to sensation, and the sensation is of light.
Not that his "Horizontal Light" just picks up where they left off. Born in 1954, he could only look back when it comes to those artists—and to Pop Art or Minimalism as well. Maybe it is because he is from Spain, where change came slowly, but he seems almost desperate to claim a deeper past as his own. His scale alone outdoes Pollock's drips, typically nine feet tall and close to six feet wide. His broad horizontal stripes cannot touch Pollock's weave, but he adds smaller work as his way of bringing the viewer closer. He cannot touch Louis with his colors, but he can use layering to modulate them.
Pollock's house paint is not raw enough for him either. He uses a dispersion of vinyl and pigment because nothing out of a can will do. Short strokes of white run up and down within colored stripes—or along the edges between stripes. Every now and then he enlarges the wiggles to gentle curves, like Virginia Jaramillo. They also take on the ghostly glare of an x-ray. Uslé is conducting an experiment, on paint and on himself.
If the wiggles suggest an electrocardiogram, he "works in tandem with his heartbeat," the gallery says, whatever that means. Again he is putting himself in the picture much like "action painting," but with a scientist's claim to objectivity. He also invokes the old identification of abstract art with landscape. Most often a central stripe darkens, like a horizon line. It may bear traces of a landscape as well. When the stripes are instead all white and blue, on that same enormous scale, the entire painting shines like the sky.
So many moves out of a textbook can feel pretentious, big time. So does his calling his ongoing series Soñe que Revelabas (SQR for short), or "I Dreamt That You Revealed." (I leave to you what "you" revealed and to whom.) Uslé's limits raise the question of how anyone can judge any longer, now that painting is back with so many retreads and so many twists. Maybe collectors just want something they recognize. He does, though, give abstract art its histories and its light.
Me or your own eyes
I count two artists at the New York Studio School, but you might take Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey for aspects of a single person. In a time more accepting of fluid genders, it seems only right. It seems righter still now that painting is back and anything goes. Artists everywhere pack everything they have into their work, including abstraction and representation—and these two artists dare you to say which is which. Just two rooms hold a good hundred works on paper. That is more than twice as many works as in past shows here of Roger Tibbetts, Merrill Wagner, and Dorothea Rockburne, but it should keep you guessing.
For those who would rather check online before deciding whether to go, the exhibition's Web page offers a tempting challenge. It helps that the works set side by side in the image here are roughly the same size. To the left, Humphrey has the silhouettes of two intertwined figures. One, likely male, grips the other from behind in an act of violence or an anything but stately dance. Their arms flail out in an act of aggression or in desperation, only to meet each other's hands in a tighter grip. To the right, MacPhee has an abstract collage—or does she?
Both artists rely on big curves and flat fields of colors, ending abruptly or running up against the edge. And both set those fields against a background of uncertain depth. Humphrey leaves most of the sheet empty, apart from a crowd of small, watery silhouettes at top, for whatever is happening out front is not an isolated incident. MacPhee fills every inch with somber but nuanced colors, taking on epic proportions in a show at her own gallery. She mixes in sand or rubber for patches of rougher and bolder texture—or still greater nuance. Here the patch comes close to the blue of Humphrey's protagonists.
For all that, both images are elusive. His seems on the verge of abstraction, like the figures in Alberto Giacometti or Henri Matisse. And MacPhee, who has her own debt to early modern sculpture in some of her shapes, must know that late Matisse had his cutouts, too. Her most prominent field of color, in black, seems on the verge, too—but on the verge of realism. It takes the shape of a rounded thigh and leg, ending in a club foot much like Humphrey's four legs. A smaller blob seems about to collide with it, much as a brown patch for Humphrey makes its incursion from the right.
The curator, Karen Wilkin, sees another similarity as well. Humphrey, she notes, takes his images from mass media, while MacPhee has her own descent into the vernacular. She shops for materials at 99 cents stores, and her collage has room for tape to hold it together and for buttons that never do button up. Somehow, though, her comparison does more to distinguish the two than to draw them together. Humphrey's ink and acrylic reflects on events, while her taped collage reflects on the art itself. Their divergence is all the more obvious in person.
One wall of each room pairs the two, while other walls display a single artist, floor to ceiling. Paradoxically, MacPhee's denser compositions settle quickly into a mood of quiet contemplation, while Humphrey's simplicity bursts into anger. Figures close to a child's crayon drawings lie face down on the ground or stare in open-mouthed confusion. The struggles resolve into images of police violence, with the actors, even when out of uniform, in police blue. If their victims can be bright green rather than black, put it down not to the artist's racism or blindness, but to a redeeming sense of humor. Today's mix of abstraction and representation need not mean one bland stew.
Altoon Sultan ran at McKenzie through February 14, 2021, Juan Uslé at Galerie Lelong through July 2, Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey at the New York Studio School through February 28, and MacPhee alone at Tibor de Nagy through March 18.