Charles Pollock Armando Reverón

View of “James
Turrell,” 2007.
From left: Color
Within, 2006; As
Imagined, 2006.
Watching the morphing tones of Turrell’s lambent voids—in one
space, a pool of white, peach, and beige being gently overtaken by a
welling green fog; in another, a Rothkoesque miasma of lavender,
magenta, and cocoa cycling to a solid sheet of scarlet—did act to
dramatically slow the pace of viewing, successfully forging the link
Turrell has always sought between altered perceptual states and modes
of psychic mindfulness. Yet if this suite of gracefully contemplative
pieces made a persuasive case for the continuing effectiveness of Turrell’s
macro-scale phenomenological experimentation—one that finds its
fullest expression in his legendary magnum opus at Roden Crater—
the dozen other works that accompanied them, descended from the
artist’s more literal, object-oriented projection projects of the last three
decades, were less convincing.
The nine small, wall-mounted “reflection” light works and another
three larger installation pieces from what Turrell calls his “transmission” sequence, all untitled, are technologically updated descendants
of the projected works he also began producing in the mid-1960s.
They are designed to create slightly different versions of the same
apparition—namely, ghostly holographic forms (typically planes or
very acute wedges) that seem to either recede into or thrust out from
their two-dimensional surrounds. While there’s no denying the initial
gee-whiz factor of such illusions, the effect here of one hologram after
another (even when well executed, as these are) creates an air of formal
aloofness and technical coldness rather strikingly at odds with the
more expansive theoretical and poetic concerns at the core of Turrell’s
conceptual program, proving that, even in the hands of a master,
luminous doesn’t necessarily equal numinous.
—Jeffrey Kastner
Charles Pollock
JASON MCCOY, INC.
Visiting Charles Pollock’s exhibition at Jason McCoy, Inc. one felt
strangely intimidated in the presence of works that seemed to return
us to a not-so-distant past that now feels completely foreign. Or
maybe it is the other way around: Maybe it is the works themselves
that are in exile today. They seem to belong to an art world that had
not yet been swept up in concepts like the “art star,” to a time when
grandstanding and networking were not yet mandatory for the making of an artist’s career. But maybe the modesty of these works, their
reserve, was the artist’s reluctant response to the first signs of the heroism that was beginning to take hold of American art. Pollock had
good reason to retreat: He had seen the agony caused by the demands
of the emerging art world on his little brother Jackson. Yet retreat was
still possible then; it was still possible to want to produce an antiheroic art, an art that one would call “minor” if not for the word’s
necessarily negative connotations. Indeed, such was the program of,
say, Ad Reinhardt in those years, just as it had been, a generation earlier, for Sophie Taeuber-Arp or even Paul Klee. This is an art whose
foremost honor lies in the patient delight of its exquisite craftsmanship.
The show included five paintings and seven drawings, all from the
1955–56 “Chapala” series, which was realized during the artist’s solitary sojourn in a small village on the banks of a Mexican lake of that
name. All are somewhat calligraphic in nature, but without any pathos
or any tribute paid to “spontaneity.” Nothing alla prima here. To the
contrary, each canvas is constructed as a superposition of independent
and interdependent layers. Independent, because in most of the paintings each layer, which forms a loose but distinct pattern contrasting
curvilinear and blocky elements, is assigned only one color; interdependent, because these superimposed layers interact like the successive printing of the various
colored inks of a lithograph. In his sensitive
monograph devoted to Pollock, Terence Maloon
calls these works polyphonous: Each color, each
layer, acts as a different voice, and the result is a
strangely unified and democratic field in which
no element gets more attention than any other.
Most striking is their matteness (Pollock was
using a mix of tempera and oil), which recalls
Vuillard’s early pochades of the 1890s—a quality
akin to blotting paper for the eye, an invitation to
slow down, to come close. Unlike Vuillard’s
works, however, whose flatness was a deliberate
violence against representation, these paintings
allow some illusion, some play of transparency
(in itself a counterintuitive feat of technique when
working with tempera).
The drawings enhance the print metaphor, pitting shady areas of fine hatchings similar to those
one would find in an old-master etching against broad gestures traced
with a wide brush. Again, the gesturality is restrained; nothing sweeping. Pollock’s art is not about spilling one’s guts. Unlike the paintings,
though, some of the drawings are patently figurative, erotic even (the
symmetry that emerged as if naturally from the pattern of strokes
alludes to the female body). But here, too, passion is kept at bay, if
not sensuousness.
—Yve-Alain Bois
Charles Pollock,
Chapala 1, 1956,
oil and tempera on
canvas, 48 x 36".
Armando Reverón
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Although influenced by Impressionism and Symbolism, the work of
Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón (1889–1954) defies stylistic labeling. It is for this reason that, despite its current moma-orchestrated
introduction to North American audiences, Reverón’s work speaks
only to those capable of looking beyond the modernist canon. That
John Elderfield, the exhibition’s curator, was capable of achieving precisely this mode of thinking outside the cube merits much recognition.
The chronologically organized show maps the ways in which
Reverón manipulated pigment and support to achieve an aesthetic
characterized by minimal inflection and maximum affect. Early, heavily textured nocturnal paintings—that is, depictions of figures in dark
surroundings, or plein air scenes washed by moonlight—are made
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REVIEWS
Armando Reverón,
Autorretrato con
muñecas (Self-Portrait
with Dolls), 1949,
pastel, charcoal, and
chalk on paper on
board, 25 3⁄8 x 32 7⁄8".
with small, thick brushstrokes and represent the
artist’s first attempts to
build his subjects using a
restricted palette. The same
is true of the landscapes
that he produced between
1926 and 1934, although
here, the dark bluish tones
of the previous period are
discarded in an effort to
represent the blinding
Caribbean light. The results
are flickering, sun-bleached
scenes composed of blurry
patches, soft washes, and
stains of white, light blue,
and sepia, applied with brushes made by the artist from bamboo twigs.
Some of these pictures are painted on burlap, a coarse surface that
asserts itself through the vaporous and fractured application of pigment. This use of the support to suggest form recurs in works such as
The Tree, 1931, where the shapes of trunks and branches are constructed using passages of blank canvas edged by both vaporous and
more substantial applications of paint. The radical tension between
the materiality of support and medium, and the evasive presence of
these landscapes, delivers an attack on straightforward representation
that also finds embodiment in White Landscape, 1940, Reverón’s
most abstracted rendering of his beloved country’s coastline.
In his figurative work of the ’30s, Reverón continued to problematize the pictorial solidity of his subjects. This exhibition’s pairing of
The White Face, 1932, and Juanita, 1927, is particularly insightful in
drawing attention to this emphasis. The former picture is a spectral
image achieved through an almost self-obliterating combination of
impasto and thickly woven support. The latter, a portrait of the artist’s
lifelong companion asleep, is a ghostly image achieved by the opposite
means. Here, the image is unified with the canvas thanks to the delicate demarcation of the figure through the softest imaginable brushstrokes. Reverón’s enterprise speaks of a visuality pushed to its limits.
Sometime in the late ’30s, Reverón started painting large dolls. At
El Castillete (The Little Castle), his rustic headquarters in the coastal
town of Macuto, he posed these alone or next to live models. Some of
the dolls, and the objects created for them (a telephone, a bottle, a
book of sheet music) are featured in the exhibition, but their role in
Reverón’s art remains obscure. The artist’s most forceful statement on
the breakdown of boundaries between reality and representation is a
series of self-portrait drawings with the dolls in which painter, props,
and space become enmeshed through colorful hatching and sketching.
The complex dynamics of the gaze staged in these works are deflated
by one of the last paintings in the exhibition, a self-portrait of an aging
Reverón in whose dissolving contours the melancholic features (an
expressive excess rarely seen in his faces) of this painter of phantasmagoria linger on.
—Monica Amor
Carl Andre
ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
“First poem in the third grade,” Carl Andre recalled in 1963. “After
the age of twelve a steady production”: so steady, in fact, that his
poetic corpus exceeds one thousand sheets of paper. Many of these are
494
owned by the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and by the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam, making the opportunity to see forty-three of
Andre’s poems and works on paper in the back room of Andrea Rosen
Gallery worth the trip alone. But this museum-caliber show of work
made between 1958 and 1966 had much else to recommend it. First
was the decision to forego the usual practice of exhibiting Andre’s
two-dimensional output in conjunction with his three-dimensional
work. The artist has both dismissed and acknowledged their connection. “All I can say is that the same person does both,” he remarked
in a 1975 interview, but then continued: “My interest in elements or
particles in sculpture is paralleled by my interest in words as particles
of language.”
The case is an easy enough one to make. In Essay on Photography
for Hollis Frampton, 1965, for example, the sawtooth pattern
formed by four staggered columns of typewritten words evokes
Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column and several early Andre
sculptures, such as Pyramid, 1959, and Cock, 1963, which took the
Brancusi as their lodestar. But exhibiting his works on paper in isolation preempted the assumption of an illustrative or compensatory
role vis-à-vis his sculpture (and vice versa) and allowed for an extensive demonstration of the breadth of Andre’s poetic abilities. Three
rigorously gridded, printed board collages were likely included to
add visual interest and serve as ties between the similarly nonhierarchical sculptures and the other work on view. Yet while colorful, they
were unnecessary here: This exhibition showed his verse to be less a
complement to his three-dimensional work than evidence that Andre
is an accomplished concrete poet in the vein of Jackson Mac Low
and Dick Higgins.
The fixed parameters of the letter-size and slightly larger sheets of
white paper, twelve-point Courier type, and de facto grid created by
the even letter spacing of the manual typewriter funded a startlingly
varied set of experiments with language. If Andre’s sculptural work
bedevils the conventional verticality of the medium, his poems frustrate the horizontality of left-to-right reading, with letters, words,
and punctuation marks arrayed in stacks, fields, lists, bars, and
abstract shapes. Columns of letters must be scanned vertically and
diagonally to discern words, and lines of several words typed end-toend without spaces between them require concentrated parsing. As in
his sculpture, parataxis is the governing compositional logic. These
are noun-heavy poems, without the connective
syntactic tissue provided by verbs, conjunctions,
and articles; one untitled work from 1963 features
only the words if, no, and or, dramatizing their
absence elsewhere.
In some works, language is used as pure material. Words function as modular units in the way
that a piece of timber or metal would: The different lengths of the words time, bell, and ear,
typed repeatedly in one untitled work dated ca.
1958–63, form wavy patterns in a solid block of
text. In many poems the initial letter, length, or
appearance of a word, rather than its meaning
or semantic function, seem to have guided
its selection (the alphabet is the ordering structure of the ten-page Autobiography, 1958–59).
Thematic threads emerge in other works, complicating Robert Smithson’s assertion that
Andre’s method “smothers any reference to anything other than the words.” Here are reflections
on American history (Charles Lindbergh is the
subject of one poem, Harper’s Ferry of another),
sustained meditations on colors, and oblique
Carl Andre, Poem for
Three Voices (detail),
1963, typewriter
carbon on paper,
11 x 8 3⁄8".
ARTFORUM
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