Bram Bogart: Hunks of Color

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Bram Bogart at Jacobson Howard Gallery in October. Here, Rode Rouge, 2008, mixed media, 66.25 x 55.25 inches

I've been viewing a new crop of exhibitions this month, but I want to close out October's offerings with a look at two shows: in this post, the material paintings of Bram Bogart in New York; in the next, the ethereal paintings of Rose Olson in Boston.
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I had not heard of Bram Bogart until I walked into Jacobson Howard, a white-walled, white-floored gallery on the Upper East Side. Wow! These are the monster trucks of painting. And I mean that in a good way.
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Color is not just on the surface, it is the surface. Indeed, the color, the surface and the painting are one. And it's as much sculpture as painting (some of the works are a good 12 inches deep) Bogart is coy about his medium, but it would seem to be pigment mixed directly into something like plaster, marble dust, and probably resin to hold the mix together. The stuff is troweled on. Looking at each work, you really get the physicality of the process, the plop, pile and smear of it. Viewing the work is a visceral experience; you almost feel every one of the hundreds of pounds that these paintings weigh. To be honest, I find the colors a bit too uh, how-you-say, unsubtle, but then finesse is not what these paintings are about.

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Here, take a look at the muscle and heft:

An approximately 8x10"detail of Rode Rouge, the work at the top of this post

Hans Hoffman on steroids? Sorry, my notes don't tell me the title, but you can see the palette and scale of the work

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Up-close viewing yields some interesting passages. The chromatic topography below is a tiny section from the right edge

Bogart also showed a number of all-white paintings, which in their monochrome strike me as even more sculptural than the chromatic works. You can see one, Het Wit, on the gallery website.

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Just in case you aren't familiar with Bram Bogart, he's a Netherlands-born octogenerian who lives and works in Belgium. As if you can't tell, he's been at it for years. .

Paintings and Process--Thirty Years Apart

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard: Festinniog, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 69.5 inches

If you read this blog regularly, you know that while geometry is a recurring theme, I'm just as interested in material and process. It is those two latter issues we'll consider in this post via a couple of New York shows--one still up, the other now closed--both with references to nature.

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard Gallery through March 1

"Throw, Pour, Drip, Spill and Splash" offers a fine selection of Poons’s paintings from the Seventies and Eighties. True to the title of the show, these are paintings at their most process intensive. Layers of paint in frozen rivulets and and richly encrusted surfaces still resonate with the energy of their making, an effect heightened by their large size in relation to the two small rooms of the Upper East Side gallery in which they’re shown.

There was nothing in the gallery information that made reference to landscape, yet the paintings themselves recall all manner of nature and of the payssage: mossy earth, flowered fields, waterfalls. Perhaps I'm reading them too literally, but I see what I see. lllglg

Tantrum 2, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 165 inches

Detail below

Carolanna Parlato at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, through Feb. 2

Downtown, in "Nature Games," a show that closed on February 2, Carolanna Parlato showed work in the same vein. While her m.o. would seem to cover the same territory as Poons, her process is much more controlled; the enamel-like paint flowed and dripped but only, it seems, until she said, "Stop." The paintings are worked in saturated, uninflected colors, yet the topographical quality of the pentimenti and the substantiveness of the drips show you just how much dimension "flat" can have. (Both painters work in acrylic, by the way.)

Parlato makes a direct reference to landscape in her statement, but I see her elements more as land mass. It's the process here that engages me, and the pleasure of materiality that is just under--and essential to--that glossy surface.

Installation view: Carolanna Parlato at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, "Nature Games"

Below: The Kiss, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 80 inches; image from the gallery website

What Goes Up, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches; image from the gallery website

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Detail below:

The edge gives you some sense of the push/pull Parlato has managed so well

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I’m not one to ascribe gender to painting, but I feel comfortable saying that the Poons paintings are genuinely beautiful—in part because of the lovely pink and lavender-tinted palette—while Parlato’s are muscular and handsome. Either show would have been satisfying to me on its own, but seeing them in the same period was more than doubly rewarding as the experience challenged ideas of time (they were painted almost 30 years apart), landscape , gender and materiality.