Alice Neel, Frank Gentile, 1965, oil
on canvas, 48 x 32 1/8”. Courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel.
Art
history’s view of women artists, on the one hand, and the more recent
phenomenon of digital technology, on the other, have proven to be
double-edged swords for Alice Neel.
As the well-worn story goes, she was a figurative painter and a woman
at a time when neither was fashionable for an artist; but today, for the
most part, the fact of an artist’s gender (or ethnicity) no longer
defines her work in critical dialogue and reception.
This intimate
exhibition, running concurrently with a traveling retrospective that
opens this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, offers the chance
to see sixteen of Neel’s paintings in person, rather than shrunk to fit
a book or screen, and the results are wittier and more vibrant than
digital reproductions—or her famously anxiety-ridden biography—would
suggest. Though Neel achieved success later in life, it was small
relative to her peers; this show is only her second exhibition on the
West Coast.
In this contemporary context, Neel’s work stands out
as brash, alive, and refreshingly blunt. Powerful brushstrokes animate
sinuous lines that in turn define posture and personality. The sense
that the internal states of both sitter and artist merge into a kind of
hybrid persona jumps from each canvas. Backgrounds blur casually into
obscurity, as if afterthoughts, and color leaps and seeps in paintings
suffused with equal parts humor, anxiety, and a love of the whole
process—sitting and talking and painting.
Michael Dopp, Untitled, 2010, acrylic,
oil, and graphite on canvas, 64 x 48”. From the series "Variations on a
Room.”
The
thirteen monochromatic paintings in Michael
Dopp’s first solo exhibition, "Dilate,” form an intelligent and
poetic meditation on archetypal dialogues of abstraction, with a
self-conscious playfulness that inserts elements of language and
corporeality within retinal formalism. The works recall psychologist George
Henry Lewes’s definition of emergence, wherein "every resultant is
either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces.” Here, Dopp
frames his "forces” in categories that correspond to four deliberate
series––"Kites,” "Vanishing Points,” "Anemic Paintings,” and "Variations
on a Room.”
Taking cues from Duchamp’s 1926 film Anemic Cinema,
these paintings are visually anagrammatic, engaging a deceptively
simple formalism that pushes and pulls between states of generality (the
universal, fundamental elements of painting) and intimate specificity
(the indexical, the somatic, the imperfect). Elements from each piece
are carried into the others, akin to a perpetually looping, psychedelic
cross-dissolve. The painted "walls” within the "Variations on a Room”
works morph into trapezoidal forms in the "Kite” paintings, and the
receding loci of the "Vanishing Point” series move forward in the
pictorial plane to become the oculi of the "Anemic” paintings, which in
turn mimic the chromatic circles in the "Vanishing Point” pieces, and so
on.
In the process of dilation, the eye and mind take in
increasing amounts of information until the aperture is too
great––overexposure obscures the image and a silhouetted afterimage
echoes in the mind’s eye. Dopp elicits the same effect with this body of
work. Through meticulous arrangement of complementary and antagonistic
elements, he activates the pictorial space of the picture plane and
cites both body and architecture as core elements of the exploration of
abstraction.
Robin Rhode, Promenade, 2008, still
from a digital animation, 5 minutes.
The
South African–born, Berlin-based artist Robin Rhode
is best known for performances in which he interacts with hand-drawn
street art, but his first exhibition in Los Angeles places a stronger
emphasis on exploring the regimes of photographic vision. In this spare
but evocative show, drawings and bodies occupy the same flat optical
space in photos that are at once sites of control and possibility.
A
sequence of fifteen black-and-white images titled Pan’s Opticon,
2008, depicts a dark-skinned man, anachronistically dressed in
pin-striped suit and boater hat, facing away from the viewer. Extending
from his eyes, the arms of a drawing compass seem to trace a
proliferation of black, bubblelike arcs onto a white wall. In the final
image, they stop dead, affixed at their tips to two solid, ominously
dripping stains. With a nod to the stuttering frames of early cinema,
the work suggests that mechanically enhanced vision is a means of both
whimsical creation and violent restriction, delimiting what is seen and
how.
Promenade, 2008, is more hopeful. In this digital
animation of stills, a man strides along a wall that is quickly covered
in a mysterious hailstorm of hand-drawn white diamonds. The shapes turn
sinister, hemming him in on all sides. Pressing and pulling, he
eventually reduces the mass to a single diamond held gingerly between
thumb and forefinger. With a haunting piano sound track by Arenor
Meyer, the work is a poignant encouragement to take matters into
one’s own hands. By uniting imagined and corporeal realities in the
liminal space of photography, Rhode suggests a fluidity between the two
that is not only generative but potentially liberating.
