An Artistic Termite Finds Hard-Won Elegance in Abstraction

The painter and film critic Manny Farber wrote a seminal essay in the Winter 1962 issue of Film Culture titled “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” Predicating these distinctions on the painting culture of the time, Farber was exasperated with “a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition.” Forget Willem de Kooning or Andy Warhol, he told us, they’re not worth your time. Attention should be paid to figures whose integrity marked them as giants of 20th-century art — that is to say, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.Farber also had kind words for John Wayne in John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), a TV adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” and “the TV debating of William Buckley.” Unlike White Elephant Art, these endeavors embodied a termite aesthetic, “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” Elephants take up a lot of creative oxygen while termites niggle their way into the heart of the matter.Which is a roundabout way of arriving at the paintings of Steve Greene, whose recent body of work is on display at Frosch & Co. Whatever you might think of Farber’s bully-boy digressions, there’s one thing for certain: Mr. Greene has to be considered a termite. Look at the exhibition’s title: “New Paintings.” To the point, don’t you think? No highflown terminology or poetic allusions; no post-structuralist pretensions. Instead, just the facts, ma’am. Here’s the work I’ve done in recent years. Take it or leave it.The paintings are, I think, eminently worth taking: Persistent, not to say obsessive, abstractions that tread a line between the exploration of familiar territory and discovering that familiarity is hard won. An advertising tagline from the 1950s told us that “getting there is half the fun.” A viewer has to assume that, for Mr. Greene, “getting there” is fun, but it’s also a challenge. The paintings at Frosch & Co., though varying in temper and quality, are never frivolous. They’re playful, sometimes cloddish and often graced by elegance. The best of them, contrary to a canvas dubbed “Almost Life-like,” are brimming with the stuff.‘Eyes of the Ocarina,’ by Steve Greene, 2026. Detail. Via Frosch & Co.Mr. Greene’s compositions are populated by biomorphic forms and diagrammatic structures that make a point of hewing to the boundaries of the canvas. The shapes are invariably lumpish; the linear networks with which they interact and sometimes intersect are similarly rough-and-tumble. Pigment is applied in an unapologetic fashion–among Mr. Greene’s tools of choice are oil sticks — and the surfaces are gratifyingly tactile. Previous states of an image are sometimes allowed to remain. At other moments, they’re swept under a pasty rug of color. Either way, the process is self-evident, bringing weight to its final realization.A strain of Cubism can be divined in these hieratic images; less so, Surrealism, though the constellations of Joan Miró are evident in the bravura play of red and black that is “Eyes of the Ocarina” (2026). Paul Klee and his notion of drawing as “taking a line for a walk” is also applicable. A colleague is put in mind of Terry Winters’ sludgy allusions to microscopic life forms and cybernetics, but Mr. Greene is a more accommodating intellect and less prone to bluster. The aptly titled “All-golden Image-memory Encyclopedia” (2026) is Byzantine in its tonalities and maze-like intricacies, being an emblematic image that seems deeper and larger than its modest 24 x 20″ format.‘Out-of-Body in the Parking Lot,’ by Steve Greene, 2026. Detail. Via Frosch & CoSome of the pictures are raggedier than is good for them and the color yellow, perhaps due to its inherent translucency, tends to encourage Mr. Greene to congest his surfaces and stifle his rhythms. But when the mark is hit — say, in the ethereal traceries of red in “Out of Body in the Parking Lot” or the graffiti-like vectors in “All Channels Open” (both 2026) — the results are vivifying, being counterintuitive marriages of the klutzy and the balletic. Necessity is the lodestar of any art object worthy of consideration. It is currently the order of the day at Frosch & Co where New Yorkers can test out just how ornery, stubborn, and go-for-broke Mr. Greene might be. Manny Farber would surely agree.

An Artistic Termite Finds Hard-Won Elegance in Abstraction

An Artistic Termite Finds Hard-Won Elegance in Abstraction

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