Celeste Rapone at Corbett Vs Dempsey

Controlled Burn

Fifty-five years after the first Hairy Who exhibition, Imagism is still alive and well in Chicago - mostly thanks to talented young artists like Celeste Rapone ( b. 1985) who continue to apply strong design and evident precision to cartoonish figuration with a fresh, youthful attitude. Maybe it’s just the most accessible way for artists in their early career to assert themselves into a geriatric world that is as powerful and efficient as it is dysfunctional and corrupt.

Rapone’s gentle floating bodies recall the tubular figures of Gladys Nilsson. Throughout, there is the evident craft and charm of Barbara Rossi, though Rapone’s paintings, like a mural, command a room instead of just decorate a wall. There’s nothing caustic, threatening, or ironic here as one might find with the male Imagists. There’s just gentle, zany humor - with the urban sophistication that one associates with the life-style magazines that target young women. All of Rapone’s solitary figures are young women  (self portraits ?) and they have apparently just furnished their first apartment on the north side after growing up in DuPage County.

The apparent narrative is as shallow as check-out counter journalism, but as the artist has stated, these pieces began as non-figurative designs - and that is how they really stand out. They’re as bold, upbeat, eye catching, and inventive as the modernist posters commissioned for the London Underground (remember that cheerful show at the Art Institute in 2019?). Like those posters, these paintings promote life in the big city. Unlike those posters, however, these pieces have the exquisite close-up aesthetic that can distinguish paintings from prints. Every square inch is energized and alive with precision.

And perhaps the narrative is not all that upbeat after all. Rapone’s angular designs reach out to demand attention - but they also strongly pull inward - sucking the viewer into a sense of claustrophobia. Considering the year in which these pieces were made, we might call it cabin fever during the great Covid epidemic shutdown. The figures appear to trapped by the edges of the painting. They’re all bored - even when the boyfriend stops by. After sex - then what? Daydream about sailing an imaginary boat on an imaginary stream? 

  Spring Couple

Carmen Chami at National Museum of Mexican Art

 

 

 

If “Adlateres and the Unexpected Visit’’ ( The title piece of this exhibition - shown above ) is even slightly autobiographical, Carmen Chami is not especially happy about leaving Mexico. Immersed in iconic Mexican art, from the Baroque spirituality of Cristóbal de Villalpando (17th Century) to the surreal self dramatization of Frida Kahlo, she has neither the prankish humor nor the righteous social justice favored in Chicago.. And her work is visceral - the very opposite of the conceptual art still trending in university art departments. She paints, and presumably lives, entirely in a world of the spirit - a dark world illuminated by revelation rather than the sun. 

Zapata's Widows, as an Excuse

If her “intention is to make art that is completely universal" (as she asserts), then she is a spectacular failure - at least so far as this viewer is concerned. I have no idea, for example, what “Zapata’s widows as an excuse” is about - and there is no gallery text to explain it. What are those two, spread-eagled, interlocking young women doing? Is there some obscure legend about the wives of Emilio and his brother ? What about their behavior might serve as an excuse for anything? It hardly feels like a sexual interaction - It’s more like they are floating around in a dream - possibly their own. This painting is far more personal than universal.


Sadness, confusion, frustration, and anger seem to permeate the narratives in the show - but the vehicles that carry them are extraordinarily well made. Like the old masters, Chami composes figurative gesture simultaneous with graphic energy. So even when the subject is incomprehensible, the painting still feels so profound that the viewer is compelled to figure it out.

 

The Bad News

Her portraits, however,require no explanation, and there are several good ones - especially the self portrait titled “The Bad News”. Wow! What a painting! Possibly, for this artist, people do not exist except within intense moments of living. It’s the very opposite of treating the human body as still-life or clothes horse. Like Frida, she sees herself as suffering - inviting the viewer to share her most intimate moments. In her other great self portrait, the artist imagines herself as “Judith”, the Biblical heroine, who decapitates the enemy general who has taken her to bed. Grabbing her by the ankles, he is just about to drive home his point when - ooops - she cuts off his head with a handy sword. Our attention is drawn to the wild, cross eyed look that flashes across Chami’s (Judith’s) face. There are several great 17th century depictions of this gruesome scene - and Chami’s could hang right beside them.

Judith

As with Artemesia Gentileschi (a victim of rape) the exemplary story of Judith has served this artist well as a conflation of the deeply personal with the stridently political. Most of the other pieces, however, just have me admiring the artist’s virtuosity. “Incredulidad” (disbelief), presents a blind-folded woman touching the sternum of a reclining half naked man. It echoes Doubting Thomas when he touched the wounded chest of the resurrected Christ. The woman resembles the artist herself just as the man resembles the Holofernes mentioned above. But does this puzzling and apparently personal story really deserve such a luminous and complex pictorial space as well as the reference to sacred narrative? Where Frida’s self obsessions feel quirky - Chami’s feel ponderous.

Disbelief

The visual language of the 17th Century masters implies a universe of grand design and profound purpose. As applied in many of these paintings, that purpose is apparently to make humans miserable and there is certainly plenty of evidence from around the world to support such a belief.

 

 But you would have to be more depressed and fatalistic than I to accept it.

 

 

 

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Postscript:

 

My friend Misha Livshlultz has pointed out that there's no blood in Chami's version of Judith and Holofernes.  Not on the sword, not dripping from the head, not staining the sheets.  

One might conclude that the relationship here depicted is no more violent and abusive than the heterosexual act itself - which for some women might well be violent enough.

Pooja Pittie at Thomas Mccormick Gallery

 

 

 

Wanted to be elsewhere, but saw no way to get there

 

 

 

 

 Pooja Pittie is an outsider artist - not because she lives on the margins of society - far from it - but because her art is so much closer to herself than to the Artworld. Being self taught, her work appears untethered to any theory of art other than her own. She does not engage art history, she engages her viewers whom she treats like guests to her psychic home. As hostess, she wants us to enjoy ourselves. But she also wants us to experience the full force and drama of her life - a life that is slowly but surely ebbing away with a degenerative disorder.

These two intentions are not especially compatible as she begins to apply paint to canvas. Each piece represents a unique conflation and the contrasts have intensified since her last exhibit. The gay, floating, perforated ribbons of 2019 have been replaced by maudlin smears, much like tears streaking down a face caked with makeup. Her paintings are now weeping. Her challenge is to combine intensities of joy and sorrow.

Just in case the paintings don’t communicate what’s on her mind, she’s given them succinct and unambiguous titles like “I Wanted to be elsewhere but saw no way to get there”. Tragic as both title and image, it is the most lyrical and moving piece in the show. Long sweeping gestures break with sorrow as they approach the bottom of the canvas. Yet the graphic design of the piece remains strong - much like the cursive style of Chinese calligraphy. Pittie has that wonderful ability to see the whole with every mark she makes.

Often the pieces have too much frustration and despair to be redeemed by high spirits. Battle lost. Expressions of despair were, however, not uncommon among the heroes of the New York School. Every such cry is unique. With Jackson Pollock it was a mind racing through uncontrollable anxieties. With Milton Resnick it was an unshakably grim, depressing view of the world. With Pooja Pittie, it’s a cry of frustrated exhaustion. The artist, like a juggler, has thrown dozens of colorful balls into the air and there’s no way she’s going to catch all or even any of them. All of her crisp intentions seem to be melting simultaneously.

In one of her recent pieces, however, “Fields of Consciousness”, there’s no struggle at all - just a joyous eruption of reds, blues, and greens - like a Mid-Summer garden in full bloom. We might note, however, that this piece is not included in “Nothing Gold can Stay”, the foreboding title given to the current exhibition. I am hoping that eventually she will have enough of this kind of work for a show that would fit a title like “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

 

 Fields of Consciousness

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These Dreams are already Spoken For (2019)

(a piece from her previous show)

Modernisms: Abby Weed Grey Collection at the Block Museum

Bedri Eyüboğlu , “Full Moon” (detail)

Sixty years ago, Abby Weed Grey began travelling to Iran, Turkey, and northern India to collect art. A childless, recently widowed St. Paul housewife, she used her late husband’s small fortune to establish a foundation for “the encouragement of art through the assembling of international collections of art for cultural exchange programs” Such programs may have been inspired by the tours of “New American Paintings” throughout Europe, sponsored by the C.I.A. in the late 1950’s. She focused on those Middle-Eastern artists who were “breaking with the past to cope with the present” - much like modern artists in Europe and America had been doing for half a century. It does not appear that she had any aesthetic or ideological requirements - except that, like the mainstream artworld of her day and ours, she must have considered beauty, naturalism, and idealism to be outdated relics from another era You will not find representations of places you would like to visit, people you would like to know, or many feelings you would like to share. In the work selected for this exhibition, contemporary life is more like a problem than an opportunity.

The title of her comprehensive 1972 exhibition, “One World Through Art”, suggests that she was more interested in national similarities  than differences among the artworks she collected. It’s not surprising that the wife of a professional army officer throughout the Second World War would advocate for international mutuality.  It’s not difficult for us, however, fifty years later, to identify national differences -- as suggested by the plurality in the title of this exhibition, “Modernisms”.

The Iranian artists tend to be the most conceptual. For many of them, especially Parviz Tanavoli, the artist whom Mrs. Grey brought back with her to Minnesota, painting appears to have been a species of writing. Ernst Gombrich would have approved. Mostly in their twenties, these young Iranians, echoed the then-ruling monarchy that sought to connect itself to ancient Persia and the middle-eastern cradle of civilization. Not many years later, after the 1979 revolution, both the Shah-of-Shahs and most of these artists, had to flee the country. The Armenian, Marcos Grigorian, became one of the most celebrated of these refugees. You might not guess it from his modest pieces in this show, but he was a pioneer in land art, so his work is in the permanent collections of both MOMA and the Met.

Self discovery and spirituality are the  soft-focus of the Indian artists in this exhibit. Among my favorites is the printmaker, Krishna Reddy (1925-2018). His “Seed Pushing” has that seed-germ energy that Louis Sullivan exemplified in architectural ornamentation - yet it also presents a human torso - inviting the viewer to look inward. Perhaps because Islam is not dominant in India, it’s only among Indian artists that explicit religious images can be found. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) was born to a Christian family in Goa - yet his depiction of three Hindu deities in “Trimurti”makes me wish that earlier Hindu artists might also have been just as familiar with Abstract Expression.

There are two kinds of Turkish artists in this exhibit - the well-born and those with a politically conscious, blue-collar background.  Neither show much interest in either the spiritual or intellectual concerns that engaged the artists mentioned above.  The woodcuts of Nevzat Akoral (b. 1928) exemplify a gruff, unsentimental strain of social realism. Much different are the works of the painter/poet Bedri Eyüboğlu (1911- 1975), the son of a provincial governor. Like so many other young modern artists from around the world, he went to Paris and studied with Andre Lhote ( as did the Chicagoans, Leon and Sadie Garland. ) There’s a cheerfully immanent violence in his “Full Moon” that sets it apart from the Color Field paintings of his American contemporaries. Other favorites in the show are the lithographs of Princess Fahrenissa Zeid (1901-1991). The daughter of an Ottoman pasha, and the wife of an Iraqi prince, her work has a riveting formal intensity and sensuality.

The exhibition catalog argues “for the importance of nonwestern art as a component of modernity—and defies the long-held belief that other forms of modernism can only be second-rate.” Very little of the work in this collection, however, would substantiate such an assertion.  The collector’s self-stated motivation was geo-political, not aesthetic. Most of the artists were associated with some local group of progressive artists, like Saqqakhana in Iran, Group D in Turkey or Delhi Silpi Chakra in India. Most pieces, however, feel as tired, ordinary, and hygienic as a faculty show at a community college. Indeed, many of the artists were teachers at the art schools visited by Mrs. Grey.

Which is not to say that all of the artists involved should be called second-rate. Much more promising examples of their work can often be found online, and a few have become quite collectible for public museums as well as individuals. Unlike a major museum, Mrs. Grey had neither the experience, inclination, or possibly even the funds, to acquire the best examples.

Over the past decade, the Art Institute of Chicago has shown two Twentieth Century artists from India, Rabindranath Tagore and M.F. Hussain (who also has a piece in this show). Modern art from Iran and Turkey has yet to appear. Perhaps this show is a step in that direction. All it really takes is the enthusiasm of one museum trustee  - like Thomas J. Pritzker who recently sponsored an exhibition of the contemporary Chinese painter, Xu Longsen.

Mary Porterfield at Hofheimer Gallery

Mary Porterfield at Hofheimer Gallery

Mortality is a subject which most of us would prefer to ignore. In our time more effort goes towards delaying the inevitable rather than imagining an afterlife above or below. Eventually technology will probably halt the process of aging - but until then, we can expect the relentless physical and mental deterioration of ourselves and everyone we love. It’s a friggin nightmare. Professional caretakers and those with aging parents, however, have to face it every day. Mary Porterfield is both and she can effectively share her feelings since she is also a well trained figurative artist.

Most of the pieces in this exhibit feature a very old woman who seems off-balance, both physically and mentally. When she's not falling, she’s crawling across the floor. When she stares back at us, or at herself in the mirror, she appears to have difficulty with comprehension and recognition. She’s not really sure who she is or where she’s going.

The drama is enhanced by the severity of Porterfield’s figure drawing. Volumes are often built with intersecting planes, as if they were carved with a sharp chisel. She makes it even more grim and urgent by restricting herself to just one grayish color. Unlike the Charles White monochromes seen last year at the Art Institute of Chicago, however, Porterfield does not give us dark areas that feel rich or light areas that feel brilliant. She wants to share pain and despair, not pleasure. And to increase a sense of disorientation, she paints on translucent layers of glassine where one ghost-like picture plane dissolves into another. Which is real and which is a dream ? The viewer is just as puzzled as the senescent subject.

It’s her strong, overall shapes that sometimes keep these pieces from being totally depressing. They recall the large, powerful volumes seen in monochromatic reproductions of a late Medieval painter like Giotto. The only pieces that maintain formal strength throughout are Porterfield’s depictions of hands. They may be boney and arthritic, but they still express ability and strength of purpose.

By contrast, the largest piece in the exhibit, the eight-foot long “Act 1- the Indecision”, is mostly just confusing.. The narrative of devoted caregiving is explained by signage posted to the right — but it still leaves me puzzled. Why are there so many skeletons of gigantic birds walking about? It feels more absurd than tragic. The artist is apparently ambivalent about the self sacrifice of those who care for the hopeless - just as I am ambivalent about her art in this show. It addresses something fundamental to the human condition with monochromatic graphics similar to the art of German expressionists like Käthe Kollwitz. Unlike their pieces, however, I’m not left feeling thrilled and uplifted by the experience of human dignity under duress, I’m just left feeling dismayed. And I can read the daily news if I want that.

Manet and Modern Beauty : Art Institute of Chicago

Spring

As Gloria Groom, chair of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently told New City Art : “Toward the end of his life, when Manet was contemplating where his major works might be seen together, he said to his friend [French journalist] Antonin Proust, ‘I must be seen whole.’

And who would not want to see a retrospective of Manet’s major works, going all the way back to the “Absinthe Drinker” (1859) . According to one leading professor of modern art theory, Thierry de Duve: “Manet is where the adventure of modern art takes off”

Regretfully, this exhibition is nothing like that -- not even for the major works of Manet’s last ten years. It includes three pieces that were submitted to the salon: “Boating” (1874) , “The Conservatory” (1879), and “Spring”(1882). Mostly, however, it includes sketches, ephemera, and unfinished projects - many found in his studio at the time of his death. There are a few charming portraits and many pleasant florals. These are, however, the kind of things that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sensitive, well-trained, observational artists have been producing ever since the Renaissance, right up through today. Do they really reveal anything of importance about this artist or his contribution to art history?

The most glaring absence is “The Bar at the Folies-Bergere”, the artist’s final salute to the thrilling demi-monde that had been so important to his life (and brought about his early death). Submitted to the 1882 salon along with “Spring”, its presence might have made that portrait of a young actress feel more like a meditation on mortality rather than a celebration of modern life and beauty. It’s not just the somber expression on the woman’s face that might lead us in that direction - it’s also the tight triangular compositional elements that box the lady in, and the long jagged slash of thick black paint that stretches across her throat. (to experience that thick blackness, the painting must be seen in person). The final painting in the exhibition, “House at Rueil”, done the same year, is also foreboding, as a heavy, great tree splits the canvas in two and obliterates the charming sunlit portico behind it with a chilling sense of finality.

“Boating” and “The Conservatory” are the pieces in this show that are really worth the price of admission.  Many artists can make quick, charming, mimetic sketches - and many such pieces in this show really aren’t that good - which is only to be expected with an artist who dares to experiment. But to give large figurative paintings such as these a sense of thrill, immediacy, luminosity, and social reality —- as if they had captured all the life in a moment in time — that is truly remarkable. There’s nothing uniquely  modern about that - but it remains quite an achievement.

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Though not as important as the painting,  it's hard to totally ignore exhibition signage, both online and attached to gallery walls. Apparently as an encore to a successful 2013 exhibition, "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”, curatorial staff has suggested that the paintings in this show offer a “radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity.” Perhaps that might apply to the choice of garment as in the “Young woman in riding costume” (1882). But in that painting, as elsewhere, the fashionable details have been ignored by the loose technique. The signage also tells us: “he simultaneously approached smaller works more fluidly and spontaneously, taking up pastel and watercolor “- as if all his earlier work felt less spontaneous and never involved watercolors --  "unapologetically embracing beauty and visual pleasure” — though many of these smaller works, especially the still lifes of fruit, feel as uncomfortable as the ailing artist must have often felt himself.

The Art Institute is apparently  mostly concerned with building Manet as a brand ("The painter of modernity") to attract more visitors.   One should listen carefully to a good teacher - but might well ignore good pitchmen. They are not pursuing the truth.

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It's been a few years since the Chicago dailies had anything like a dedicated art critic (when was Alan Artner fired ?) --  so what passes for art journalism in the Chicago Tribune today is Steve Johnson's interview with Gloria Groom

In that interview she doubles down on "Spring" as an embodiment of Modern Beauty - then and now. "It was beautifully painted. It was like a fashion plate. Everything about it was understandable, legible, done.”

She goes even further to assert that "toward the end of a shortened life, Manet  was speaking eloquently in a new language. It took feminist art historians working in universities in the last couple of decades to start the reconsideration and their work informs this exhibition."

"The oils, pastels and watercolors gathered here seem, tantalizingly, to articulate a never fully realized alternative vision for the future of modern painting -- Fresh, intimate, and unapologetically pretty, Manet’s late works demonstrate his fierce embrace of beauty and pleasure in the teeth of acute physical suffering.”

I would like to read what a feminist art historian has to say about a male artist who painted women as well as buying their sexual services -- but that's probably not relevant to the general public  to whom this show was targeted.

As we are later told, "Groom gave a long look, then a smile. When you’re in the European painting business, apparently, public confusion between Claude-with-an-O and Edouard-with-an-A is like an oft-told joke."

Perhaps attendance statistics will ultimately prove that this art-business event was a success.

But as an art-culture event, it seems like a poor use of the museum's cultural authority, gallery space and curatorial time.  It's greatest contributions  were bringing over "The Conservatory" from Germany and the consequent substitution of Caillbotte's "Floor Scrapers" for his "Rainy Day in Paris".

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This show was also reviewed by Jason Farago in the New York Times.

I felt the absence of "Bar at the Follies Bergere" - while Farago added two  more:

The glaring absences in this exhibition — even more than the “Bar” — are Manet’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Communard Henri Rochefort, as well as his two late great seascapes, both titled “Rochefort’s Escape” and painted in 1880-81. As Mr. Allan writes in the catalog, Manet’s last years coincided with “an epochal political shift leftward” in France, and these maritime paintings with a political prisoner form the last act in Manet’s long interweaving of historical painterly styles and current events.


We were both disappointed by the shows centerpiece, "Jeanne (Spring)".

I  thought it was more about death than beauty  -- while Farago wrote:

" May the gods of French painting forgive me, but “Jeanne” is a banal and overly refined picture, and its marriage of fashion and foliage tips exhibits a vulgarity wholly unlike the cool, careful “In the Conservatory.” "


But then - thanks to feminist scholarship - he walks it back:


Why do I value this early Manet so much more? It is only because I think art has a higher vocation than delivering joy? Or is it because, poor modern boy that I am, I have been trained by more than a century of artists and writers to be suspicious of beauty — that ruse, that luxury, that feminine thing? The received history of modern Western painting, over which Manet looms like our great bourgeois Allfather, can feel like a succession of attacks on beauty by generations of arrogant men, each more certain than the last that their art would at last redeem an ugly society. But Manet knew that there is as much rebellion and insight in a dress, a bouquet or even a pile of strawberries if he could see past their surfaces to the richness within. That is another path to modernity, grounded in what his dear friend Baudelaire, in “The Painting of Modern Life,” called “beauty, fashion and happiness.”


So now he no longer finds "Jeanne" to be "banal", "overly refined", and "vulgar -- just because some feminist scholars disagree?

Perhaps he needs to grow a new pair!

More seriously, we might realize that he is still offering that first opinion along with his second, and that neither is really his own  response to what he saw.  They are more like his idea of what sophisticated responses should be -- from the twentieth and then the twenty-first centuries.

In our time, art critics are not expected to make their own aesthetic judgments.

Finally, we have Stephen Eisenman in 'Art in America' querying whether Manet should be considered Modern at all - and offering the following by way of comparison with "Jeanne":

Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Jules Bastien-LePage, 1879

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Jeanne (Spring), from 1882, acclaimed by one critic at that year’s Salon as “an absolute masterpiece, the Mona Lisa of the master.” Like In the Conservatory, it is painstakingly rendered and pays great attention to the subject’s face, figure, and fashionable accoutrements. Critics inventoried the “pompadour dress,” “cabriolet hat,” “twenty-five button suede gloves,” and “café-au-lait parasol.” But unlike its Salon companion, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (notably absent here), it provides no visual ambiguities, no frisson of degeneracy, and no challenge to the masculine, spectatorial gaze. It is every bit a salon picture, the equal of works by Alfred Stevens, James Tissot, and Jules Bastien-Lepage. (This last artist’s Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, for example, shown in the Salon of 1879,


I would agree that  "Jeanne" offers  no visual ambiguities, no frisson of degeneracy, and no challenge to the masculine, spectatorial gaze  --- but it does seem much more committed to form than the inventory of distinctive costume and facial features compiled by Bastien-LePage.

Were Modern painters more committed to form than their contemporaries in the Salon ?  I would say so --- but it's problematic to identify them  as "modern" since so many of their predecessors were no less committed to form than they were -- going all the way back to early cave painting, and all the way up to Ingres and Delacroix.

It's only since the late 19th century that sensitivity and commitment  to form became the topic of a conversation that needed the term "formalism".  It has been marginalized by the ascendance of  conceptual art and a university based art history based on ideas rather than visual experience.  Eisenman's concluding paragraph  serves well as an example:



Was Manet ever truly modern? Judging from the current exhibition, the answer is no. Or he was modern only when he was the least modern in the Greenbergian sense—when he embraced challenging, and even rebarbative, contemporary or historical subjects: ragpickers, prostitutes, drunks, female bartenders, and debauched picnics. Without that content, the result is a shallow formalism that is indistinguishable from fashion. 

Amy Sillman at Arts Club of Chicago

S1

Amy Sillman through August 3 - Arts Club of Chicago

As the title might suggest, “The Nervous System”  is an exhibition of art for those who think of human consciousness as biochemical rather than spiritual. It  reflects the trends, attitudes, and rigor of the contemporary university community. Mostly, the exhibit consists of  variations on a few simple shapes or patterns that have been applied to paper by silkscreen and then enhanced with brushed ink or acrylic paint. There are too many of these large pieces ( up to 60” on a side) to fit on the walls of the gallery, so dozens have been pinned together like laundry on a clothesline that’s been strung diagonally across the main gallery. The arrangement suggests the fresh data and prolific notes of a serious research project

Human heads, arms, legs, and genitals are identifiable among the jumbles of shapes -- not as the eye might see them in pictorial space, but as the mind/body might sense them sprawling out from the abdomen. There is a sameness about them, but a few pieces stand apart. In one, we are shown a network of thin, sinuous, interconnecting lines that resembles a diagram of a nervous system. In another, the page is empty except for what appears to be a crudely drawn human face staring at itself in a mirror. This might suggest that self awareness, no matter how clumsy and fragmentary, is indispensable to human cogitation.   Possibly, every other piece is equally significant- but like most notes from a research project, they may be intelligible only to other specialists in the field.

The exhibit also contains five large bluish/grayish oil paintings that seem to view American society from the bottom - suggesting the negative consequences rather than the prosperity and technology associated with Late Capitalism. This is also an ideology likely to be taught in universities. The piece titled “In Illinois” is its most explicit statement as it presents what appears to be homeless people lying in a gutter  (in a decade that has seen exponential growth in high-rise luxury apartments in Chicago)

Finally, there is one piece, titled simply “S1” that appears to be nothing more or less than a very good abstract painting based on portraiture and recalling the dynamics of an early Modernist like Picasso. It feels like a tough, gritty, hard fought triumph over adversity and despair. That’s not much different from several of the works on paper mentioned above, but rather than just suggesting a mental process, it appears to exemplify a mentality that is positive, cogent, resourceful, and effective. It does what all good work does - whether it’s painting or auto repair.

It’s doubtful whether these paintings will be advancing neuroscience or social justice other than to give some encouragement to those who actually are. But as paintings, they are a welcome conflation of visual intensity with emotions associated with dismay, confusion, struggle, resilience, and honesty. They expand the territory between nihilism and ecstasy with neither irony nor nostalgia — and with no specific references to current events however timely the exhibition feels.

Perhaps you could call it a refinement of that new American classicism that began to emerge in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Less personal and less heroic than the New York school, it  also seems less accessible and more elitist as well - something like the free form calligraphy practiced in the last millennium by Mandarin scholars in the Chinese tradition. It’s a nice way to contemplate the intractable difficulties of human existence from a safe, comfortable distance -  which is not to say that the artist ever really feels safe or comfortable.