Brand Boosters

Creative maturation is a tricky business. While no one talks about “developing a style” anymore, many artists do look to refine their approach to core material and intellectual concerns, to take possession of and fully occupy a distinctive zone of operations, without lapsing into formulaic solutions. John Zinsser and Ruth Root are established, mid-career painters who have both arrived at just such a juncture of experimentation and branding. In current exhibitions, at Andrew Kreps and James Graham & Sons, respectively, these bold and brainy formalists demonstrate heavy investment in the visual mechanics of pictorial experience, with quite different takes on such fundamentals as color, surface, drawing, and the presence of the painting as an object. Both augment their arthistorical influences with allusions to popular culture. In different ways, they find a balance between brashness and polish, hedonism and austerity.The Chicago-born Ms. Root’s fifth New York solo outing includes eight untitled paintings in enamel on eccentrically-shaped sheets of aluminum, mounted tightly to the wall. In each, there is a visual antagonism between the interior, with its blocky regions of juicy color (purplish grays, coral pinks, mint green, and the occasional, strident primary or secondary hue) trying to elbow each other aside, and the rounded corners and protruding tabs that loll along the periphery. Other commentators on this work have cited their illusionistic space, as if seen through oddly shaped windows onto another dimension, but to me they read as enormous, dead-flat decals. The spatial play is in Ms. Root’s ability to heighten and subsequently dash the viewer’s expectation that color will function as transparency, as in a certain deep blue-green shape in one painting that shifts to hot magenta where it overlaps a neighboring black.Ms. Root’s palette is exuberant, but her touch never deviates from a steady, workmanlike coating, so flat-footed it makes Sean Scully look like Franz Kline. That disconnect, however, is part of the work’s wacky charm. A larger problem is that the new work is ironed-out and pulled-together, resolved in a manner that drains a bit of the artist’s erstwhile snottiness. For a time, Ms. Root’s paintings featured dangling cigarettes or bedroom eyes, or contained overtly arbitrary design decisions, or were hung unconventionally high or low. These new pieces are larger, simpler, and far more elegant than we have seen from her before. And therein lies a paradox: We want this artist to throw us another curve ball, take us by surprise, but maybe she has done just that by straightening her dress and wiping her nose.Mr. Zinsser has been a thoughtful, articulate presence on the scene for two decades. For his first show at Graham, he does not significantly retool his work but, as he has for years, skeptically embraces the autographic mark. He juggles tactility and opticality. Chromatically monastic, the exhibition comprises 15 canvases in which a single hue in alkyd enamel underlies a second in oil. Figure slams into ground with a thud; whether scraped or blotted, the paint is undeniable; it is actual. Still more interesting are its echoes.“Legend Electric” is the smallest painting, less than 2 feet high — a twittering pool of manganese blue underlying a smoldering skimcoat of vermilion. The chance occurrences that this technique engenders have become something of a trademark for the artist, yet in works like the 8-foot-tall, blue-over-black “Evening Signs,” the subtle shifts in saturation along the top edge of the paint membrane, and their relation to the slithering surface, are innocent of guile and indescribably beautiful.Eight of the paintings are on grounds of shiny aluminum, a quizzical semi-color that dematerializes its canvas support and brings the ambient light of the gallery directly into play. The loose-limbed, dusty-rose calligraphy of “Specimen Cabinet,” apparently imprinted from a sheet of plastic, becomes confounded within silvery field or leaps out from it, depending on the angle of view. Here Mr. Zinsser riffs on the “snakes in a box” paradigm of gestural abstraction familiar from Jackson Pollock and Brice Marden — optically, these snakes escape the box. And in the spectacular “Victorian Fantasy,” a blotchy filigree of matte purple scuttles across an expanse of glossy, metallic green-black, draining off in topographical rivulets.This bracing show is installed so that the 4-foot-square “American Painting” is the last work the viewer is likely to encounter. Its stuttering slathering of five clunky bars of confectionery white over a straight-faced yellow underpainting evokes the utility of street signs, crosswalks, and taxicabs as much as any art of the past. Mr. Zinsser taps into the dialectic of sensuality and asceticism that has informed so much American art of the last century, from William Carlos Williams to John McLaughlin to Morton Feldman to Stanley Kubrick. Central to this tradition is the art object’s conscious address of its means. Mr. Zinsser brings the viewer into intimate, unrelenting contact with the visual fact of the painted surface, its ongoing reconsideration of itself.Zinsser until March 8 (32 E. 67th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-535-5767);Root until March 16 (525 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-741-8849).

Brand Boosters

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