Westfall, Zox, Wixted, Gallagher

Installation view: Stephen Westfall at Lennon Weinberg. The work on the far wall is painted directly onto the wall

I’m mixing all kinds of geometry here. The hard edge is the uniting factor in the work of Stephen Westfall at Lennon Weinberg, Kevin Wixted at Lohin Geduld, and a wonderful small painting by a master of hard-edge abstraction, Larry Zox, at Stephen Haller. And then there’s a circular element in Wixted’s work that moves us effortlessly into the to the other-worldly stripes of Chris Gallagher at McKenzie Fine Art.

Another installation view: Stephen Westfall at Lennon Weinberg

Westfall’s work, including a marvelous composition painted onto the far back wall, contains resonant references to quilts and textiles. Most of the works are concentric diamonds or squares within a square format, so that angularity is the predominant element in each work. The compositions are “pieced” together from stripes or triangles. My favorite is a four-tiered square in which pennant-like triangles, limned in a contrasting or complementary color, create an elegantly kinetic formalism, completely beautiful to my eye—but then, dum, dum, dum, dum, a shark-like menace asserts itself. Beauty with bite. The show is up through December 20.

Stephen Westfall, no info available on the gallery website, but the work appears to be oil on canvas, about 48 x48 inches

Zox, whose work softened with looping gestures and prettier colors toward the end of his career, is represented at Stephen Haller with an earlier, small work of serape-like stripes. Into this composition he placed an acute angle along each edge so that the entire composition loses its absolute rectangularity and appears to be set slightly askew.

Larry Zox at Stephen Haller. Beach, 1964, acrylic on ragboard, 16 x 19 inches

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Wixted hasn’t given up his architectural references, but fluid elements in his geometry suggest a botanical reference—bushes or trees—and some feature intersected circles. In the "botanical" group, I particularly like Flowering Tree-Yucutan, in which a fluid mass of triangles, barely contained within its perimeter, balances precariously on the points of two triangles. Visually, the whole composition threatens to fall apart before your eyes. It doesn't of course, but the tension is exquisite.

In the latter group, circles of different diameters appear strung like beads on a flat coral ground. The placement of the intersection within the circles is different in each one, so they appear to be spinning, some pushing up against the picture plane while others recede into the distance. It’s playful and kind of cosmic.

Kevin Wixted at Lohin Geduld (now down). On the facing wall, above: Flowering Tree-Yucutan, 2008, oil on linen, 44 x 60 inches

Below: no information available on the gallery website, but the painting is about 18 x 28 inches

For the truly cosmic, you won’t do better than the prismatic paintings of Chris Gallagher, which seem less like paintings than windows or portholes into a vast and hyper-chromatic universe. Differences in vastness are suggested by stripes with a greater or lesser degree of curve. The edges of the stripes themselves have a bit of a bleed, but they hint at a much more immense geometry. And those tondos are neat slices of shape on their own. The show is down, but the gallery website offers a page of all the works, which can be clicked and shown larger.

Chris Gallagher at McKenzie Fine Art: Tondo 16-08, 2008, oil on canvas, 48 inches in diameter; Detail 12-08, 2008, oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches

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On the Geometric Trail: Part Seven

On the Geometric Trail, in Chelsea

On the Geometric Trail, Part Two: SoHo

On the Geometric Trail, Part Three: Isensee

On the Geometric Trail, Part Four: Two of a Kind

On the Geometric Trail, Part Five: McKenzie

On the Geometric Trail, Part Six: Zox and Martin

Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg

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Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

Harriet Korman at Lennon, Weinberg: Installation view looking toward the back of the gallery

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Harriet Korman’s solo show is no longer up at Lennon, Weinberg, but that doesn’t mean I can’t show you a few pictures. Her painting, with its hard edges, shifting planes and saturated hues, is geometric abstraction in a modernist vein. There’s a bit of the cubist composition in her work, with its loopy intersections and Matissean shapes, but her seemingly straight-from-the-tube color and strong graphic quality give the work a signature that is unmistakably her own: joyous but rigorous.

As an artist who works serially, I like to see how other artists explore or attenuate an idea. Here, two paintings with a similar composition-- and even some similar color passages--allow

you to eavesdrop on their conversation

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Is it me, or is there a suggestion of landscape in these paintings?

New for me is the painting, above, in which patches of color are painted with roughly equidistant parallel lines. I like this rectilinear order. I want to say that I’ve seen this composition, or something like it, while flying over the country’s midsection at 30,000 feet, but that’s not quite right, for while I perceive something of a landscape in this work—in both paintings shown above, in fact—I’m not at all sure it was intended. I don't think Korman is making paintings that are about anything but painting.

Despite their almost playful color and composition, these paintings establish boundaries between themselves and the viewer. Maybe it's their mid-range size or relatively uninflected color. Or maybe it's that intellectual rigor. You step back to see these painting, and each painting seems to say, "You stand there." That's fine. I can dig them from a few feet away.

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Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

Juan Usle at Cheim & Read: Installation view taken from the gallery's website

Juan Usle’s paintings, on the other hand seem to whisper, "Come closer, mi amor." Maybe it’s their small size—his show, "Brezales," at Cheim & Read consists of fewer than a dozen small canvases (and two large ones)—but they exude something that just pulls you in. While there’s a new fluid line in some of the paintings, I’m fonder of the rectilinear compositions, patchworks of color and visual texture that are marvels of painterliness. The gallery’s press release describes the work as "organic geometry." That’s a good term, because the grid has been constructed block by block within the composition rather than imposed onto it; moreover, the color is fluid and the mark of the brush very much in evidence. (Usle uses pigment in a vinyl dispersion medium to get the streaked, almost textile-like surfaces of his color, and from the looks of the linearity of the application, I'd say he uses something like a squeegee as well as a brush. )

Juan Usle: La Camara Oculta, 2007, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 18 x 12 inches.

Above: installation view of the small front gallery, from the gallery's website

Below: Miron, 2006-07, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 12 x 18 inches.The gallery press release calls his work "organic geometry," and you can really see that here--the way the artist has dragged and pushed his pigment, creating lines that waver and vibrate

Juan Usle: Installation view of Cada Vez Mas Cerca, 2006-07, 24 x 18 inches, left; and Sone Que Revelabas (Tigris), 2007, 108 x 80 inches; both vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas. Installation shot from the gallery's website

"Brezales" is up through this weekend. If you’re reading this blog before March 15 and you’re in New York, log off and go see it.