JUDITH BELZER - George Lawson Gallery

Transcription

JUDITH BELZER
Judith Belzer
area of concentration:
recent painting and drawing
a publication of George Lawson Gallery
ISBN 978-1-4507-9117-553400
images © 2008–2011 Judith Belzer
text © 2011 rfprfp LLC; George Lawson Gallery
design and layout: Rafael Cuevas, Rema Ghuloum
photo credit pg 58: Michael Pollan
images pp. 22, 23, 24 courtesy Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago
image pg. 32 courtesy Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York
Books are printed at Ben Zlotkin’s Edition One Studios, Berkeley
GEORGE L AWSON GALLERY | LOS ANGELES
8564 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232
www.georgelawsongallery.com
[email protected]
tel +1.310.837.6900
JUDITH BELZER
area of concentration:
recent painting and drawing
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2006–2007
The Trunk Series and Among the Eucalypts
2010
Order of Things
2007–2008
The Inner Life of Trees
2010
Order of Magnitude
2008–2009
Trees Inside Out: The Dosa 818 Installation
2010–2011
Through Lines
2009
Cracks and Fissures
2011
Area of Concentration
Areas of Concentration
I first met Judith Belzer early in 2008, at a party hosted by the writer and journalist Sandy Tolan. A studio visit ensued,
and I was immediately taken with her work. This was months before had I even thought of opening a gallery, but once
that project got underway, Belzer was my first thought. At the time, she was well into a radical shift in her painting, in its
theme and manner, a period of growth that would take her from what had been essentially a landscape mode, into an
area of exploration perhaps unprecedented and certainly much more difficult to categorize. This release of energy seems
to have been catalyzed by her move to the West Coast. Germinal ideas she incubated as closely scrutinized constructions
of the bark of Western trees, in particular Eucalyptus (Belzer prefers the alternate spelling Eucalypts), have developed
almost virally over the last few years into an exploration of the very nature of structure itself, an ambitious undertaking.
Through selected paintings and excerpts from the artist’s own statements, I hope in this catalog to chart the arc of her
focus over the last five or six years. To this end I have grouped the chronological evolution of her work in a series of
thematic clusters drawn from the titles of the paintings. We have shown selections from three of these series previously
in the San Francisco gallery, The Inner Life of Trees inaugurating our program in October of 2008, and The Order of Things
along with The Order of Magnitude, shown in September of 2010.
Through each individual painting and the view of her trajectory that hindsight affords us, it is apparent that Belzer has
not only found a story to tell, a working narrative that provides a threshold for her particular entry into the visual world,
but that she has also hit upon a metaphor for the life of painting: a surface discipline that gets at the depths. She has
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Judith Belzer’s Berkeley studio, October 2011
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found a way to act on painting, to do the deed. Paul Valery’s pronouncement, “What is most deep is the skin,” is apt here,
as Belzer’s work is nothing if not real, profoundly layered and remarkable in the depth of its parallel investigation of both
nature and painting. The more time I spend with her work, the more convinced I am of how successfully she has tapped
into the potential of the medium of paint, achieving an abeyance of contradiction, at once producing images and objects,
interpreting outside reference and generating primary experience with each stroke. In her own words:
“Over the last few years my studio explorations have led from an up-close examination of wood and its grain patterning to
some broader considerations of pattern, scale and perspective. Images based on the configurations in a random piece of
wood could evoke, I found, not just woodiness or trees but also designs and structures observed elsewhere in the natural
world at close range (water droplets, sand grooves, minerals, feathers, DNA strands), or at a longer range (mountain
ranges, canyons, river valleys), as well as, and perhaps more surprisingly, patterns emerging from our cultural creations
(the urban grid, parceled agricultural lands, maps, architectural constructions). ”
The Trunk Series and the Eucalypts Series, paintings from 2006 and 2007, depict the surface of trees realistically enough,
but these paintings oblige us to reconsider the term realism. While they are accurate and revealing renderings of their
motif, the cracking, open bark at once surface and core, they also stand firmly rooted in the reality of the room in which
they are viewed; for all their descriptive detail, they achieve a level of clarity in their execution that is as concrete, and as
intimately present, as the trees that inspired their making.
In the Trunk Series, Belzer introduces extended horizontal formats, sometimes butting two panels to form a diptych, thus
pulling the viewer into a landscape-like envelope. In the next series, The Inner Life of Trees, this strategy of envelopment
spawns a string of extended polyptychs, multi-panel works with as many as six canvases hung together in a prescribed
order on the horizontal. Belzer’s scrutiny has become even more close at this stage, seeming to sharpen just below the
surface, and the polyptych format serves formally as ballast to this subdural effect, ratcheting the painting’s color and
light, its energy, back out into the room. The viewer’s scan across the individual canvases, with the staccato rhythm set up
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by the breaks between panels, tips the weight of perception to the thing on the wall, to the physical facts, a shift away
from the external references that a single, contained picture tends to promote. With The Inner Life of Trees, Belzer’s drawing,
her line, begins to take on a life of its own, as if following the invisible currents of magnetic energy generated by the life
blood of her subjects, as much as the reflected light off their surfaces. This tendency towards abstraction in the form of
an emancipated line is presaged in Belzer’s pencil drawings and works on paper. The mode gets full rein in the series
to follow, the energy first released in The Order of Magnitude and The Order of Things, but before giving over to it, Belzer
delves even more obdurately into the concrete with a site-specific installation incorporating freestanding plywood
structures and embedded paintings that functioned almost like fresco in architecture. Trees Inside Out, installed in 2009 in
the Los Angeles warehouse loft of design-and-eco visionary Christina Kim’s Dosa 818, actualizes the philosophy behind
Belzer’s ensemble cast of natural motifs. She states:
“My installation employs architecture, drawing and painting to explore our relationship with nature. The painted images of
tree bark, set into the hand-drawn plywood walls of two, small structures—one squat and stump-like, the other shooting
upward—might clue you in to what you can expect to see once you step up and inside. Entering the intimate, protected
space within, you are invited to take an imaginative leap into the center of a tree. And in fact, there inside, you’ll find
several painted images on canvas that are about wood: tree rings, wood grain, and other patterning that might or might
not be recognizable as specifically tree-like.”
Again, Belzer plays with the ambiguity between what is abstracted and what remains concrete since arguably it doesn’t
take a leap of the viewer’s imagination at all, as sitting inside a plywood box, one is in essence in the middle of a tree.
One of the lasting appeals of painting as a medium in an age of technological imagery is its anthropomorphic resonance.
Paintings have bones and skin and blush. They are physically vulnerable, and frontal in their aspect. They are like us.
Belzer has taken this anthro-centrism and integrated it with the natural world, where nothing lives in isolation but always
within a wider system. Thinking serially, she underscores this interdependency. The imagery in the Order of Things and
the Order of Magnitude hints at the inevitable merger or incorporation of natural and man-made systems.
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This interlacing is more elaborately embroidered in the series, Through Lines, along with a further stretching of the ambiguity of
scale, already well developed in the Order series. The cellular structures encountered at the micro and macro levels flip back and
forth, readily exchangeable while mirroring one another.
Convergence reaches a peak in the series Belzer has titled, Area of Concentration. While she is actually referring to trees in the
following pull quotes, I imagine her describing painting in these same words as, “…benevolent timekeepers and witnesses of our
personal and natural history… the planet’s great respirators as well as emblems of social and ecological stability… virtual maps
of time, their intricate patterning reflecting the vagaries of the local environment over time… reaching into unclaimed spatial
territory… projecting endurance and beauty, but also a menace and, increasingly, our worries about the future.”
In the introductory remarks to the catalog for our first exhibition, I wrote, “When Judith Belzer agreed to open the inaugural show
in the room for painting, I had the sense that everything else in the gallery would just come together. Her painting epitomizes the
approach and the values I hope to bring to the program.” Much has indeed come together in the ensuing three years, and if anything, I feel more strongly than ever how Belzer’s laser focus, her commitment, as she deepens and broadens her practice has contributed to anchoring the gallery’s mission. She is very articulate in describing her process. The remarks that lead off the following
sections are her own. Belzer seems to understand in her painter’s bones what a swinging gate nature is, and she gets our integral
part in it. Her paintings serve to affirm our place in that continuum, where the very cellular structure of our inner life is shared with
trees, and rocks and even our errant constructed environments, through surfaces that run deeper than we can imagine.
George Lawson, Los Angeles, October 2011
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The Trunk Series and Among the Eucalypts, 2006–2007
I am focusing my gaze on large western trees, because they are, for me, the figures in the landscape from which we
can glean some of the most important information about a place and its natural history. Their very girth reminds us
of nature’s force and how inconsequential our attempts to exert control over it can be. These paintings explore the
eucalypts, a strange and beautiful species that carries a contradictory set of associations here in northern California,
where the beauty of its peeling bark and elephantine forms is inflected by the knowledge that the species is invasive
and highly flammable. Trees have always served as important symbols of our shifting cultural values and concerns,
embodying views of nature that range all the way from the romantic and sublime to the apocalyptic.
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(opposite)
Trunk #3 (diptych), 2006
oil on canvas, 40 x108 in. overall
(above)
Eucalypts Series #2 (diptych), 2007
oil on canvas, 38 x 76 in. overall
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The Inner Life of Trees, 2007–2008
The giant or the ant or both ~ Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of crawling along the bark of a tree and then, somehow penetrating to the tree’s interior is enticing, even thrilling. I would find myself exploring an alternate landscape,
completely strange and yet in some respects peculiarly familiar. Would I be a tiny ant-sized being gazing upon
monumentally scaled ridges, peaks and valleys busily pushing their way through space, or would I be a giant looking, as if through a microscope, at pulsing veins of energy in constant motion? I imagine it might be an unlikely
combination of the two perspectives.
My tree fantasy returns me to elementary school science class and to words like cambium, xylem (up) and phloem
(down), and then pitches me forward into a horror movie in which the heroic trees are striving madly to suck carbon
from the atmosphere as fast as the humans and their infernal machines can spew it out. Standing stick with stuff on
top—it’s us and them. The international symbols for “tree” and the one for “man” are easy to confuse.
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(opposite)
The Inner Life of Trees, series #8 (4 panel polyptych), 2008
(above)
The Inner Life of Trees, series #4 (triptych), 2007
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The Inner Life of Trees, series #9 (6 panel polyptych), 2008
oil on canvas, each panel 9 x 12 in.; 9 x approx. 97 in. overall
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Trees Inside Out: The Dosa 818 Installation, 2009
As you look at the paintings, housed within these structures made from thin slices of tree glued together (plywood),
you are invited to think about trees and wood from the inside out, in its most natural, pristine form as well as its
most mundane industrial application. Trees Inside Out brings painted images of natural forms, as well as elements
of unreconstructed nature, into a constructed urban setting and asks us to consider just how entwined nature and
culture are in our everyday lives.
(left, opposite and overleaf)
Trees Inside Out, 2009
installation views at Dosa 818, Los Angeles
oil on canvas, plywood
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Cracks and Fissures, 2009
No one view of nature prevails because nature itself- not just the observer- is constantly changing. Living species are
engaged in a continuous process of metabolizing and reproduction, doing what it takes to keep going. The minerals
and gases are changing too. While we humans might think everything revolves around our own life cycles, we are
just one player in nature going about its business. The patterns found in nature –whether wood grain or ripples in
sand or striated rock formations-- dramatize this constant activity, a pushing and pulling that occurs at every scale
of time— with the tides in the ripples on the beach, with the earth’s unpredictable jolts to it’s crust, with the years in
the grain of wood.
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Cracks and Fissures #5 (6 panel polyptych), 2009
oil on canvas, each panel 6 x 12 in.; 6 x 77 in. overall
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Cracks and Fissures #12, 2009
oil on canvas, 38 x 70 in.
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Cracks and Fissures #14, 2009
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Order of Things and Order of Magnitude, 2010
I find all kinds of patterns or forms I’ve observed elsewhere in the natural world. I am reminded of things like stone
outcroppings, sand dunes, shells, water, human body parts, and feathers. And then there are the echoing graphic
patterns found in our various depictions of natural phenomena, such as the isobars on weather maps, topographical
elevations and ocean floor charts. I’m not sure why there are all these repetitions, but it’s interesting to locate them
and consider the reasons why evolutionary forces seem to share common patterns across the spectrum of nature.
Shuttling between a micro and a macro scale while using a shifting perspective, the work has shed a literal context
in order to explore certain ambiguities in the way we experience the world.
(left)
Order of Things #5, 2010
(opposite)
Order of Things #4, 2010
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Order of Magnitude #3, 2010
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Order of Magnitude #12, 2010
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Through Lines, 2010–2011
Is what I’m looking at animal, vegetable or mineral? Am I looking through the lens of a microscope, from the
windshield of an airplane cockpit, at a computer-generated landscape or an object in the palm of my hand? The
paintings employ the language of drawing to delve into the visual continuities between such disparate things as a
chunk of rotting oak tree, a bacteria cell division, a massive granite outcropping, and a freeway interchange. What
emerges from this inquiry is a through line linking the organizing principles of both the natural and built environment.
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(above)
Through Lines #22 (diptych), 2011
(opposite)
Through Lines #20, 2011
oil on canvas, 34.5 x 74 in.
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(above)
Through Lines #32 (diptych), 2011
(opposite)
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Area of Concentration, 2011
These paintings seek to dramatize the relationship, sometimes clashing, other times soothing, between elements
that our culture usually likes to keep apart: the beauty of nature over here, the creations of civilization over there.
Areas of Concentration #2, 2011
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oil on canvas,42 x 38 in.
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Works on Paper, 2009—2011
It might not look that way but this new work originates inside a tree...
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untitled, jb63wp, 2010
ink on paper, 5.625 x 8.5 in.
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clockwise from upper left: untitled, jb36wp, jb37wp, jb38wp, jb39wp, all 2009
watercolor on Fabriano buff paper, each 4.5 x 6.75 in.
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clockwise from upper left: untitled, jb40wp, jb41wp, jb42wp, jb43wp, all 2009
watercolor on Fabriano buff paper, each 4.5 x 6.75 in.
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watercolor on Fabriano buff paper, 6 x 8 in.
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untitled, jb84wp, jb85wp, both 2011
watercolor on Fabriano buff paper, 4.5 x 6.75 in.
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Afterword
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I wonder if the fact that I moved up onto a hillside in a city a few years ago is responsible for the paintings I’ve been making recently.
These days I live in a house that commands an unfurling, aerie-like view of a big west coast landscape, spreading out onto what
looks like a stage set. What I see out my window is a residential neighborhood dotted with giant elms sprawling down toward a
bee-hive of industrial activity, freeways, train sidings, warehouse districts, factories, a landfill, a racetrack, ten-story-tall cranes loading
freighters bound for China, bridges crossing the bay, two cities (one on each side of the bay) and finally, the hills of a national
park. It’s a great stage for the meeting of man and nature.
For years now in the studio, my focus has been very different: the intense close up view of common elements of the natural world—
the bark of a tree, leaves, wood grain—in order to press an engagement with nature in everyday life. Now my mind’s eye has started
to move up and out, to explore the long views afforded by my new prospect. Here, I see not just an idea about how we might
engage as individuals with nature on the micro scale, but how the larger culture plays out its relationship with the natural world in
our time. The picture is both exuberant and terrifying.
Formally, I see lots of interesting parallels and continuities between the built and the natural landscape. Patterns and configurations
echo and rhyme. Traffic arteries and rail lines suggest water courses; striated cliff faces intimate blocks of city buildings; the cellular
honeycomb structure of a rotted tree trunk resonates with the open lattice-work of a building under construction; the urban grid
from above could be the motherboard of a computer or plant tissue as seen through a microscope—the list goes on and works at
a variety of scales. Motion also suggests lines of connection between these two supposedly warring realms: our pulsing movement
through the landscape (by car, train, boat, fiberoptic cable) mirrors the lines of force in rushing water, the flow of sap through the
vascular system of plants, even colonies of bacteria on the move.
My last series of paintings, Through Lines, explored these echoing patterns of cultural and natural form at scales left deliberately
ambiguous. The current series, Area of Concentration, seeks to dramatize the relationship, sometimes clashing, other times soothing,
between these elements, elements that our culture usually likes to keep apart: the beauty of nature over here, the creations of
civilization over there. Yet, there is beauty, as well as tension, when the two come together, and energy in the friction that meeting
produces. From my vertiginous perch up on a hill—in an earthquake slide zone—I look out at an area of intensely concentrated life,
and can’t overlook the potential for chaos and destruction that can come (perhaps has already come) from having thrust ourselves,
so industriously and so cavalierly, into the natural world.
Judith Belzer, Berkeley, October 2011
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Selected Solo Exhibitions
Biography
2012
Area of Concentration, George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles (October)
2010
Order of Magnitude, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
Order of Things, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago
2009
Trees Inside Out, Installation, dosa818, Los Angeles
2008 The Inner Life of Trees, room for painting room for paper, San Francisco
The Inner Life of Trees, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York
2007 Among The Eucalypts: Paintings by Judith Belzer, Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA
Judith Belzer: Recent Work, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago
2005 New Paintings, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York
2003 Between The Leaves, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York 2002 Judith Belzer, Pepper Gallery, Boston 2001 Seasons/Spaces, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York 2000 Recent Work, Richardson-Clarke Gallery, Boston 1999 New Paintings, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York 1998 Recent Work, Richardson-Clarke Gallery, Boston 1996 New Work, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York Recent Work, Richardson-Clarke Gallery, Boston 1995 Judith Belzer, Mongerson-Wunderlich, Chicago 1994 Judith Belzer: Recent Landscape Paintings, Julie Saul Gallery, New York
Selected Group Exhibitions
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2011 Judith Belzer, Susanna Coffey, Laura Latinsky, and Jim Lutes, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago
Drawings: Belzer, Brooks, Dehner, Hesse, Lutes, Tworkov, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago
2010 California Summer, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
40 Years at Pelham Art Center, Pelham Art Center, Pelham, NY
2009 Evergreen, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
B&Wx5, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
Artists of RFPRFP, Shasta College Art Gallery, Redding, CA
Outside In, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY
2008 Implant, UBS Art Gallery, New York 2007 Judith Belzer, Joe Goodwin and Kit White, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Lakeville, CT
2005 Landscape, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago
Representing Representation VII, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY Natural Form, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York 2004 Representing Representation, John Pence Gallery, San Francisco 2003
Group Show, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Lakeville, CT
2002
Contemporary Landscape, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Lakeville, CT
2001
Patterns & Paths, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York
1998
Nature & Form, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York
1997
Representing Representation, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY
1994
Visions of Nature, Richardson-Clarke Gallery, Boston
Awards
2007 Yaddo residency
1982 Yale University School of Art, Norfolk Fellowship
Education
1980-82 N.Y. Studio School
1977-79 Barnard College, B.A.
1974-76 Bennington College
Selected Bibliography
The Northwest’s Top Ten Exhibition Picks for 2010, Dewitt Cheng, Huffington Post, December 31, 2010
Visual Art Source, Judith Belzer at George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, California, Review by Dewitt Cheng
Judith Belzer/Valerie Carberry Gallery, Newcity Art, May 17, 2010
Judith Belzer gets to the root of Trees Inside Out, Sachi Cunningham, Los Angeles Times Arts, June 2009
Judith Belzer Paintings, Freeze, A Blog About Art, Jan 5, 2009
Judith Belzer has a feel for the natural world, Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer, Oct 13, 2008
Judith Belzer, review, Hilarie M. Sheets, Art News, Sep 2008
Reproduction in Readings, Harper’s Magazine, Sep 2003
Seeing As Believing, Peter Stiglin, Portfolio of Judith Belzer Paintings, Orion Magazine, Jul/Aug 2003
The Infinity of Foliage, Cate McQuaid, The Boton Globe, November 2002
Gallery Round-up, Karen Wilkin, Partisan Review, January 2002
Judith Belzer, review, Ann Landi, Art News, October 2001
Judith Belzer, review, Deidre Stein Greben, Art News, January 2000
Cate McQuaid, review, The Boston Globe, May 1998
Judith Belzer, Jack Stephens, BOMB, Spring 1997
Artistic Visions Make a Case for a Troubled Environment, Vivien Raynor, The New York Times, Jun 1992
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GEORGE LAWSON GALLERY | LOS ANGELES | 8564 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232 | www.georgelawsongallery.com

JUDITH BELZER - George Lawson Gallery

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