The Stubborn Influence of Painting

The Stubborn Influence of Painting

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

1750 13th Street, Boulder, Colorado, 80302

June 10-September 6, 2021

Admission: $2

Review by Jillian Blackwell

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s The Stubborn Influence of Painting contains no actual paintings whatsoever. But the concept of painting is evident throughout the exhibition, which “examines how the history of painting acts as a silent collaborator in the work of artists who create in other mediums.” [1] The idea for the show has been percolating for many years in the mind of curator Kate Petley, who has been fascinated with “understanding the overarching tendency to categorize work based on medium.” [2]

A view of The Stubborn Influence of Painting at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In the foreground: works by Naomi Cohn; on the back wall: a work by Steven Frost titled After Dorothea Rockburne. Image by DARIA.

The concepts through which the works connect to painting vary across the exhibition. [3] Some of the pieces engage with the history of painting, others show evidence of approaching sculpture through the lens of drawing, or use materials that behave in a manner similar to paint. Still others find and transpose painting and mark-making.

Some of the artists engage with the concepts articulated by the critic Clement Greenberg in his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg asserted that Modernist painters chose to highlight those characteristics that were specific to the medium of painting: the flatness of painting, the rectilinear shape as dictated by stretcher bars, and the common placement of paintings on the wall. [4]

A few of the artists from this exhibition engage with these ideas that are specific to painting, and yet they employ not a single brushstroke of paint. Other artists apply a painterly eye with their attention to composition, rhythm, and spatial relationships. The attraction of The Stubborn Influence of Painting is the honest exploration of ideas that are ostensibly unique to painting by artists who have taken the side doors of photography, textiles, ceramics, sculpture, and video.

Ceramic works by Naomi Cohn on display at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Image by DARIA.

Immediately upon entering BMoCA’s space, the viewer is confronted by the work of Naomi Cohn. Her multiple ceramic vessels congregate on two large wooden tables. Each vessel is a collection of marks that were made both through the molding of the clay itself and in the colorful glazed exterior. These works are an investigation into a medium that toes the line between craft and art. Cohn pulls her ceramics into the world of painting through her highly expressive and colorful surface treatment, which follows the mode of Abstract Expressionism.

The Abstract Expressionists fully accepted the flatness of the painting surface by centering all their activity within that surface. For artists like Lee Krasner or Jackson Pollock, there was no longer depth or illusion of space. Instead, in their works the paint dances across the canvas with no focal point. The action is everywhere, rhythm reigns over the placement of paint, and pattern—whether intentional or organic—abounds. The surfaces of Naomi Cohn’s ceramics pieces follow in this canon.

Naomi Cohn, Big Red (detail), 2020, glazed ceramic, 29 x 15 x 15 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

In Big Red, circles of white, black, and pink bloom periodically across the contours of the vessels. The drips of these colors are a history of the action of mark-making, and call attention to the surface. Black lines are scribbled underneath and are covered with a clear, shiny glaze. This shine contrasts with the matte-ness of the circles—a tension that again keeps the activity within the surface of the piece.

Naomi Cohn, Toon 2 (detail), 2019, glazed ceramic, 13 x 15 x 10 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

In Toon 2, even the three-dimensional elements of the sculpture become part of the two-dimensional patterning. The surface pulls up into yellow nodules that erupt regularly across the surface and become compositional elements. The patterning that lines the interior of the vessel spills out of the seams and over the edges, blending the division between interior and exterior and further supports the importance of the two-dimensional surface decoration. As described by curator Kate Petley, “her playful approach to making ceramics underscores her interest in physicality. Both paint and clay are similar in their plastic response to touch, but clay offers more resistance.” [5] Cohn deals with the push and pull of balancing a composition, both literally and figuratively.

Gelah Penn, Stele #6, 2019, lenticular plastic, polyester mesh, vinyl, plastic garbage bags, mylar, velcro, staples, eyelets, and t-pins, 86 x 46 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

All the artists presented in the front room of the exhibition share Cohn’s propensity for tacility. By arranging and overlapping, Gelah Penn manipulates lowly materials in such a way that shows off their inherent beauty. Penn’s Stele #6 is a collage of many types of plastics, and is a composition that begins on the wall and trails down onto the floor. Material becomes line and shape. The intrinsic qualities of the materials are the textures, the opacities, and transparencies that Penn uses and arranges, without further manipulation. Instead of mixing paints, Penn layers various transparent and semi-transparent plastics, vinyls and other media to achieve color mixing. Colorful staples dot across the right hand panel, at times attaching shredded black plastic to the back of the transparent top layer. Her collaging is thus an act of drawing. As Penn explains, “My aim is to choreograph events of perceptual incident”. [6] These incidents feel beautifully balanced while remaining natural and unforced.

Garry Noland, Scatter, 2018, polystyrene and marbles, 30 x 20 x 4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Nearby, Garry Noland further investigates found materials, which are born anew under his hand. Scatter uses polystyrene as the ground upon which a mass of marbles gather, piling on top of each other and pressing into the soft surface of the polystyrene. Noland shows a sensitivity to materiality. The found polystyrene, which glitters under the museum lights, also bears the marks of its previous life before it was part of an artwork. Dirt and grime mar the surface and relay its history. By collecting these objects together, Noland shows great care for mark-making, though he does not wield a brush. In addition, Noland imbues a tenderness into these everyday materials by celebrating their dirtiness and mundanity and holding them up as significant objects.

Alexandra Hedison, Found Painting #9, archival pigment print, 2017, 54 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery Los Angeles.

As Noland’s everyday components bear a history of marks, Alexandra Hedison seeks out marks that already exist in the world. The photographs included in this exhibition are part of her series The In Between, in which Hedison photographed shop windows in Paris that had been painted over while the spaces were transitioning. [7] Hedison thus connects herself to the idea of the found object as conceptualized by Marcel Duchamp, but turns it on its head.

Duchamp’s readymades were commonplace objects whose function had nothing to do with art. They became art simply when Duchamp’s pronounced that they were such and placed them in an art context. In Hedison’s case, she has found paintings in the everyday world and pulled them into the realm of art, but it is not her pronouncement that makes the images art. Instead, she considers them organic, “unintentional abstract compositions”. [8] The paintings were art all along, she simply found and captured them

Most of the photographs are a wash of color—white, black, copper green—à la color field painting. In Found Painting #9, little corners of paper—the remnants of signs that had once been posted—cling to the window, creating dots of bright color across the black and white surface. In the same way that a candid photo might capture a subject’s inner beauty, the brush marks that Hedison captures are beautiful, made casually and confidently, never to know they would become an artist’s subject.

Altoon Sultan, Two Folds, Green and Orange, 2019, hand dyed wool on linen, 14 x 31 inches overall. Courtesy of the artist.

Hedison’s muted palette flows seamlessly into Altoon Sultan’s collection of small rug-hooked works, all modest in size but punchy in presence. Her piece Two Folds, Green and Orange is made up of two small compositions in which shapes in lightening shades of green or orange create the illusion of a square being folded over onto itself from the corners.

There is much interplay between two-dimensional and three-dimensional in this work. First, it was created by rug hooking, and so is composed of a field of small loops of wool, which Sultan hand-dyes. This method is, by its nature, three-dimensional. The squares that are depicted pictorially are flat geometric shapes, but the action implied—of folding in the corners—takes the squares from flat plane to three-dimensionality as the corners imaginarily move through space and back to flattened as the folds are completed.

An installation view of works by Altoon Sultan on display at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Image by DARIA.

Sultan playfully asserts and then questions the picture plane traditionally used by painting. The rectilinear nature of painting is also called into question. The edges of Sultan’s work conform to the pictorial depiction that has no background around the main object, in the same manner as Ellsworth Kelly’s shapes or Frank Stella’s shaped canvases. She breaks from the square/rectangle, and yet the rectilinear is also the main subject of the work. Her use of textiles and geometric shapes harken back to such artists as Sonia Delauney or Anni Albers, who also teetered on the edge between textiles—traditionally considered a craft—and painting, a.k.a. high art.

The ties that bind these artworks together are cerebral, and require some contemplation on the part of the viewer to uncover. The stubborn influence of painting is simultaneously covert and pervasive. It crops up in how the artists utilize materials, in how they compose and arrange parts, in how these compositions relate to the history of art, and in the relation of the compositions to their environments. The viewer may then contemplate how the decision-making of the artists resulted in beautiful attention to materiality and surface, in well-balanced and mysterious arrangements, and in richly contextualized artworks. These artworks are thoughtful and thought-provoking, as is the exhibition that gathers them together.

Jillian Blackwell is a Denver-based artist and art educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics from the University of Pennsylvania.

[1] https://bmoca.org/exhibitions/2021/summer/the-stubborn-influence-of-painting

[2] Quoted from my email interview with Kate Petley.

[3] The artists included in the exhibition are Philip V. Augustin, peter campus, Naomi Cohn, Steven Frost, Alexandra Hedison, Nikolai Ishchuk, Garry Noland, Gelah Penn, and Altoon Sultan.

[4] https://www.yorku.ca/yamlau/readings/greenberg_modernistPainting.pdf

[5] Quoted from my email interview with Kate Petley.

[6] https://www.gelahpenn.com/bio-cv-statement-press

[7] https://www.alexandrahedison.com/found-paintings

[8] Ibid.