Gallery-Going
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Once upon a dime, I kept myself company with Dell Comics. I copied frames from “Little Lulu,” filling notebooks with my own renditions of Irving Tripp’s artwork. But what keeps 11-year-olds out of trouble can make trouble for grown-ups.
Alexi Worth’s cartoon paintings and drawings at DC Moore invoke the knockout panels of Jack Kirby, king of Marvel Comics. Balding executives brawl like NBA fans. Scenes are solidly drawn and elegantly “inked in” with flat oil colors. Mr. Worth creates attractive surfaces; he captures the graphic counterpoint of spare color harmonies and the madcap perspective of action comics.
His cartoon mannerism is deft and amusing. But something fizzles. The nub of it lies in the artist’s own self-interview, a faux-hip apologia that mirrors the tone of his work.
Why are his characters middle-aged? Because “painting is a middle-aged medium.” Too cute. Painting is ancient and perduring, something quite different. Why is conflict on his mind? Because an evenly divided electorate haunts him: “Indecisiveness is a kind of violence.” But in the 2004 election, both sides were firmly decided. One side won (POW! OOF!), and without violence to anything but the artist’s preferences. So why are these guys fighting? “There’s no story, only posture.”
The language of comics is a symbiosis of words and pictures, a fulcrum for narrative. Mr. Worth’s indifference to narrative seems a lapse of literacy by the standard of the strip cartoons he imitates. The vigor of comics lies in their story-telling legerdemain: the play between what is depicted and what disappears into gutters between frames. Here are only repetitive fragments, more reductive than their prototypes.
Mr. Worth has one eye on Roy Lichtenstein and another on Warhol, who appropriated Dick Tracy’s famous punch. A thunderclap in American newspaper comics 70 years ago, the slug of Chester Gould’s tough cop has lost its slam. Besides, Pop was yesterday. The jag is over, and we have debts to pay. How long can we offer the carcass of the 1960s and 1970s as collateral?
Art does not have to be serious; it can just be fun or strike poses. But then it forfeits its claim to the attention reserved for activities inhabiting a moral and intellectual dimension. Either we can make adult demands on art or we cannot. This work tries to have it both ways.
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The emotional register rises dramatically in the work of Stuart Shils, an artist of great refinement. The paintings currently at Tibor de Nagy were done in Ballycastle, on the wild northern coast of County Mayo, under the auspices of The Ballinglen Arts Foundation. He has painted there every summer for the last 10 years, each time returning with a hauntingly beautiful body of work.
Mr. Shils’s landscapes dwell on the uncertain border between representation and abstraction; increasingly, they cross into pure suggestion. Landscape is inseparable from scenery, yet scenes all but dissolve, Turnerlike, in these modestly scaled oils. In their place is something more elusive, harder to evoke: the mood of a locale and the temper of its weather. With each successive show, Mr. Shils shows himself a poet of atmosphere.
Paintings are small, never more than 12-by-14 inches. In part, the size accommodates the demands of travel. At the same time, it is absolutely right for the intimacy of Mr. Shils’s response to fugitive conditions of light and mist. As he admits in the catalog: “In a moment it’s all over anyway because the clouds are moving like stage sets in front of the sun and now it’s gone flat.”
The coast of Mayo, drenched in fogs surging in from the North Atlantic, is kissed by a cool artic light so distinctive that it has its own name: the Blue Charm. Mr. Shils pays homage to that light, refracted through moisture and seized with plein-air veracity. His titles have the ring of notes to himself jotted down on site. A literary touch, they confirm the sense of sheer immediacy passionately conveyed by each work.
“Gentle Morning, Drifting Sun, Toward the Stella Maris” (2004), a radiant panorama of Bunatrahir Bay from the high coastal road, comes closest to description. Yet even here, no definitive contours slow the movement of the painting. The Stella Maris, once a fortress, is a blurred rectangle of subdued white cresting, an expanse of modulated greens and cobalts that evaporate into cloud. Truth to nature is in his color; delineation is needless.
The simplicity of his painting belies the mastery, but ensures the luminous delicacy of Mr. Shils’s results.
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Nature keeps its head down in “Nature Abstracted,” a group exhibition curated by Emily Berger. The natural world is invoked rhetorically but largely abandoned on canvas. Emphasis is on the thing least helpful in the quest for form: that old deceiver, the artist’s “inner world.”
No matter. Any excuse is welcome to see Farrell Brickhouse’s small gouaches, astonishing in their transparency. Optical complexity and punch is greater here than in his recent larger oils. The kinetic illusions of Margaret Neill’s dynamic ovoid planes keep growing richer, more painterly. And Julian Jackson’s moody color and silken surfaces, like reflecting pools lit from within, left me wanting to see more. Lois Ellison’s “Table Grave” (2000), a small oil of singular, uncluttered charm, illustrates the autonomous satisfactions of tone and proportion.
Worth until December 30 (724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-247-2111). Prices: $500-$9,000.
Shils until January 8 (724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Street, 212-262-5050). Prices: $1,800-$7,000.
“Nature Abstracted” until December 23 (52 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-343-1060). Prices: $450-$4,800.