Reframing the Landscape
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Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s tree portraits are deceptive. The first impression you have in this light, cheery installation of 18 oil paintings and watercolors is of plainness and serenity. Puritan virtues abound in the singlemindedness of Ms. Plimack Mangold’s choice of subject, the wholesome sense of close attention to a pared-down cast of characters (a maple, a pink oak, and several pines), and in her due diligence over time.
But for all the initial calming and charming, these works soon turn out to be much more complex in the way they are put together, and in the variety of approaches that emerge from picture to picture, despite the formal unity of the show.
The first canvases that greet the visitor depict bare, wintry maples set against expanses of sky with evergreens in the distance. “The Maple Tree with Pine” (2005) has a somewhat ominous pinkish-gray glow in the sky, unlike the bright, clear blue of “Winter Maple” (2007). The pairing signals Ms. Plimack Mangold’s fidelity to her trees, which have been her exclusive motif since the early 1980s.
The next, and largest, gallery includes an exquisite set of grisaille watercolors of a pin oak tree, mostly made in 2005, as well as three more wintry canvases. The back gallery is effulgent with foliage, with summer paintings of her maple in 2006 and 2007, and a pin oak from 2004.
It is more than the seasons that turn in these paintings, as differences of approach abound. And it is not simply that dense foliage brings out greater variety of brushstroke and mixing of color than bare branches against a steady sky; it is almost as if a different pictorial language, or at least a dialect, is spoken with the changes of medium and season.
There is a coolness and remoteness in the winter tree pictures that gives them a photographic stillness — their crystalline exactitude recalls Ansel Adams. The summer trees elicit more visceral involvement with materials; a scramble to capture light on leaves produces scraping and impasto that in turn triggers increased empathy (invariably — if illogically — busy paintwork triggers in many viewers a sense of added emotion). The watercolors are in yet another pictorial-emotional space: They have a gorgeous busyness, but at the same time possess a playful, musical sense of notation as an end in itself. The watercolors are Ms. Plimack Mangold’s most loveable works. Despite their freshness, they recall old masters like Claude Lorrain, Gainsborough, and Corot.
It is freshness rather than familiarity that puts these works in the company of such artists. Ms. Plimack Mangold occupies an odd position vis à vis tradition. The fact that she depicts landscape in what seems like a straightforward, accessible style can make her seem old-fashioned, and certainly ensures some affection for her endeavors in the traditionalist camp. But there is an obstinate plainness about her treatment of trees, an anti-romanticism that resists all the symbolist baggage of trees. Instead she offers a literal interpretation of the visual facts as they present themselves to close but dispassionate observation. These suggest a different generational and aesthetic allegiance.
Ms. Plimack Mangold was a student at Yale in the late 1950s: a remarkable time for that school. Her classmates included future postminimalist artist Richard Serra, Brice Marden, and her husband Robert Mangold. Her perceptual bluntness was, therefore, both of and against her time: Of, in the bluntness; against in its perceptualism.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Ms. Plimack Mangold worked on interiors in a hyperrealist style: She would paint parquet floors with fantastic exactitude, seemingly faithful to every grain. In addition to starting a love affair with wood, and developing an affection for the overlooked subjects that were close at hand, she addressed in these early works the problem of truthfulness in depictive painting. Mirrors and rulers would be included in the composition to highlight a sense of empirical inquiry counting for more than making an image. Another series of paintings depicted her sketches taped to a board, replete with studio splatter, as if a post-minimal update of John Frederick Peto.
The turn of her gaze from interiors to wide open spaces — from the closest thing at hand, her own easel, to the furthest (though still viewable and promixate) vista on her property in Washingtonville, New York — seemed to be accompanied by a freeing up of the hand and eye. The distance and density of trees simply don’t allow for the kind of nutty detail that preoccupied her in the floorboard paintings, especially as her intention had manifestly shifted in the direction of a compelling image. But the lessons of almost fanatical homing in were evidently learned well.
As Cézanne had discovered before her, making credible sense of things observed at very different distances within the tight, flat space of a painted surface calls for an equivalence of nature rather than an exact replication of it. The moral purity of Ms. Plimack Mangold’s obsession is her refusal of received shorthand for “doing” trees or leaves. But by this stage in art history, being free and fast with paint is as much a convention as any tried and tested realist pictorial devices. This is what generates the diversity, quirkiness, and tension within what look at first like such well-behaved paintings. In Ms. Plimack Mangold’s work, an oxymoronically slow spontaneity mortgages painterly intuition to optical truth.
Until October 13 (132 Tenth Ave., between 18th and 19th streets, 212-367-7474).