Every new generation of artists, curators and critics seems to feel the need to defend painting. It makes sense: Paint on canvas, good for little else, is basically synonymous with big-A Art. Painting represents the angels and demons of art, its optimism and attention, its arrogance and solipsism.
“The Painter’s New Tools” at Nahmad Contemporary in Manhattan shows how far contemporary artists have pushed new media without abandoning the security of what is legible as art. Collecting 57 works by 31 creators, curators Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick argue that new technologies have irrevocably redefined what it means to paint, while painting is defined by the pursuit of beautiful things. The show tries to hold onto both ideas at once and embodies the cryptic, ambivalent embrace of tradition, from peasant life to Catholicism, practiced by a subset of mostly young, highly online culturati. Painting is at stake – and so is a conservative longing for the old avant-garde.
It is true that painting is technology and always has been. Just as the invention of oil paint, which dries slower than tempera, gave artists a revolutionary array of new effects, the lens and the transistor — photography, video, and computer graphics — brought about profound, irreversible changes in the way artists, and the rest of us. , see the world.
The floating brushstrokes and dazzling layering of an emerald green Laura Owens canvas glorify Photoshop techniques. Nearby is Ei Arakawa’s tribute to Owens: an image of one of her paintings on a low-res tapestry of LEDs. In a cutting-edge anatomical study by video artist Kate Cooper, the camera skims through a digital model of a human body, piece by piece, just as Leonardo plays with an MRI machine.
Cayre and Kissick take stock of painting’s ongoing identity crisis, whether or not the artists themselves feel they are painting. The show is conceptually tied on the one hand by artists who leave conventional painting into digital territory, and on the other by artists who create animations and unpainted objects, who are rolled into the painter’s company as they go on the wall. .
The painter Julien Nguyen represents those who try new tools, who has a reputation for applying Renaissance methods to contemporary idioms. His digital portrait of an engaging young man smoking in the tub combines brush and palette for an iPad. The strokes Nguyen put on the screen appear on a monitor, installed front and center, like a flurry of oily, paint-like smudges.
For the latter, there’s Jordan Wolfson’s pixelated print of Dorothy and her companions in Oz. The outer-vaulted frame is aggressively styled with hearts, crosses and a Star of David pendant, as well as devotional blurb like “Surrender to God.” The words “GOD IS GOD IS GOD IS GOD IS…” creep across the border. Despite using no paint, the self-titled piece combines several conventional themes of the medium: Christian hagiography; tribute to predecessors (namely Ashley Bickerton, a leading assemblage artist of the 1980s); and enough logorrheic confidence to make an abstract expressionist blush.
Kissick is a New York critic whose regular column in Spike Art Magazine jumps like a stone between the classic and the ultra-modern – from contemplating a Fragonard, for example, to musing on NFTs (non-fungible tokens), all without ever leaving the Frick Madison. . Cayre is an independent art consultant specializing from the 1950s to the present. Both have a share in the contemporary – what it means to be alive nownot then.
Novelty is not always progress. “Image” (2022) by Ezra Miller – an artist, art director and web developer – is a blurry abstraction evolving in real time on a grid of four monitors that looks like you’re driving into a rainy Monet with the windshield wipers off. A distracting black cross runs through the center of the image where the screens meet. Up close, no brushstrokes emerge, but the black tape covering the seams. Give me a dusty Rothko on a new media experiment whose physical presence seems beat up and coy.
Speaking of Rothko: “Disc Buddie #4448”, an NFT from Tojiba CPU Corp, manifests itself on a square screen: a crude, digital cartoon of a thick floppy disk with white hands and doves for shoes, the words “Rothko Maker 2” on his face. NFT projects like this one, which generate thousands of unique photos by combining sequences of properties, promote the idea that art should be simple and repeatable. Let the old guard whine about bad taste. This is “the new painting” in the sense that even ugly paintings can be good investments.
Beauty is still possible, of course – the exhibition features intoxicating, wall-winning abstractions by Seth Price, wringing painterly gestures out of industrial processes; Wade Guyton, who paints by misusing inkjet printers; or delicate mottled surfaces by Jacqueline Humphries or Anicka Yi. These are some of the smartest updates to painting’s tendency to talk to itself and ignore the wider world. The tone here is dedicated, not iconoclastic.
The strange urgency of the era condenses in a 2022 photo by Jessica Wilson, “Perfectly Clear” – an almost photorealistic 3D rendering of a hand pulling a squeegee through a foaming window pane. It’s a flat UV print on Dibond and one of the least painterly objects in the show. But the sharp composition, our view from the outside, the sparkling tactility of the knife scraping the soap, remind us that the medium doesn’t matter. What matters is the fundamental urge of art to transcend the chore of life.
The painter’s new tools
Until Sept 24. Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Ave., Manhattan, nahmadcontemporary.com.
