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.

The New York Sun

David Reed and Garth Evans are improvisers at the top of their form. Where Mr. Evans is like a laidback pianist tinkering away at a set of variations in a warm, quiet bar, Mr. Reed is the last of the big bandsmen, high in style, decibels, and spirits.


Mr. Reed is showing new paintings at Max Protetch; Mr. Evans a set of watercolors in the project room at Lori Bookstein. In their different ways, they both make us rethink one of the most cherished dichotomies of the painting phenomenon: transparency versus opacity. Each is fascinated by the spatial depths and related emotional resonances of color and materiality. Each uses technique at a high pitch to play depth against surface. But the differences between them come down to more than mere mood or means.


Mr. Evans is the more old-fashioned of the two. You can tell right off that he is primarily a sculptor. It is not just because there is always a figure set against a ground (in his case, geometric shapes rather than anything anthropomorphic). There is also an awareness of the expressive value of roughness, and the page is saturated by watercolor used counter intuitively, with almost chalky, pigment-rich earthiness.


There’s little instance of the watercolorist’s traditional love of the naked whiteness of the paper, yet the support has presence: Its physicality is played off against the illusion of receding space, and achieved with billowing, brooding, pulsating color. The geometric forms, tucking themselves back and forth within competing picture planes, have a complexity that subverts the space around them.


Mr. Evans is consummate in his skillful use of the medium and profound in his play with depth and surface, but there is something strong and honest about the use of material: We see through it to form. Mr. Reed, by contrast, is a wizard, a pyrotechnician with paint. He wows and disconcerts with his layering techniques. Where an Evans is spatial, a Reed is spacey. With Mr. Reed, the retina feels like it’s being seduced by a jellyfish.


Mr. Reed’s complexities of temperature and speed throw the eye about with a trickiness of baroque proportions. His squiggles recall at once Medieval drapery and Bronx graffiti: Martin Schongauer meets Kenny Sharf. Actually, at his best, he recalls Sargent in his painterly panache.


Mr. Evans carves out strong, solid, albeit spatially ambiguous forms. Mr. Reed’s highly energetic, slippery, ethereal squiggles are much more about sensation as an end in itself, more about perception than that perceived. Observers have often remarked how his paint looks photographic. Like a photograph, we see right through the paint to the image it evokes. Yet his image is the paint – philosophically, he is as slippery as his squiggles, which is just the way we like it.


***


Lisa Hoke has seemed in the past an amusing decorator whose trademark motif would soon exhaust itself. Her installation at Elizabeth Harris puts paid to that: It is good, true, and beautiful.


Like Mr. Evans and Mr. Reed, she has an affection for serpentine forms and rich chroma. But she, too, has found a way to saturate the gaze without teasing the mind, and she builds effective, rich patterns from banal yet gorgeous means. She recalls Antonio Gaudi in this regard. His walls are encrusted with shards of gaudy, glistening ceramic; hers “postmodernize” the found object while preserving its juissance.


Ms. Hoke’s vocabulary consists, primarily, of two elements: found paper coffee or soda cups and plastic beakers quarter-filled with paint. These are massed to form blocks of color. The cups protrude sculpturally; the beakers swirl into swathes of pure surface. These elements bring to mind the pioneers of painterly digitalism, Seurat and Klimt.


Ms. Hoke isn’t just about technique and its semiotic implications, however. There is a genuine exploration of color sensations – not just chroma but hue. It is a major work that demands return visits to penetrate its depths, and to revel in its surfaces.


***


When it comes to the shock of reassembled early work conflicting with the style for which an artist is now best known, no one competes with Alfred Leslie. Allan Stone has gathered a stunning selection of the 1950s Abstract Expressionist work by this artist, reckoned one of the pioneers of the new perceptual realism of the 1960s.


There was a clue about his impatience with abstraction in the experimental movies he directed, two of which are being screened by Mr. Stone in a special projection room (including “Pull My Daisy” with a script by Jack Kerouac, who narrates). Mr. Leslie’s allegiance was to the avant-garde in its broad manifestation, not toward a specific style or technique. But his abstraction is the stuff of legend; it is often told how Mr. Leslie turned his back on an accomplished early style.


Mr. Stone’s cache is thus like finding a vintage Cadillac on the floor of a garage: These works are as fresh as the day they were painted and roaring to go. They have extraordinary energy and panache. There are undoubtedly strong influences from the better-known painters in the way emphatic brushstrokes define structure; chance effects are given full play. But he is his own man, and should probably be counted as an influence, in turn, on others: early Al Held, for instance.


As his show opened, I spoke with Mr. Leslie about the distance he must feel from his early artistic self. On the contrary, he said, he sees absolute continuity between his charged, loose, gutsy bravura painting and collage of the 1950s and the hermetically tight realism of subsequent decades, with its bid to create a contemporary history painting – such as his Caravaggio-esque series devoted to the death of Frank O’Hara, or the monumental series of full-frontal male and female nudes. He stresses frontality, confrontation, and alloverness as the underlying formal continuum.



Reed at Max Protetch until December 23 (511 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-633-6999). Prices: $79,000-$85,000.


Evans at Lori Bookstein Fine Art until January 7 (37 W. 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-750-0949). Prices: $1,500-$2,800.


Hoke at Elizabeth Harris until December 23 (529 W. 20th Street, between Tenth Avenue and West Street, 212-463-9666). Prices: $3,000-$35,000.



Leslie at Allan Stone Gallery until December 22 (113 E. 90th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, 212-987-4997). Prices: The gallery did not disclose its prices.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use