Coincidentally: Ramsay and Mann

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By now you know my visual guidestick: Two's a coincidence, three's a trend. Here we have a coincidence, all the more striking because the galleries are around the corner from one another in the same building and on the same floor.

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In several key pieces in their shows, Debra Ramsay at Blank Space and David Mann at McKenzie Fine Art (both at 511 W. 25th) are working with similar elements: a symmetrical composition with an "exploded" vertical core, built up through repeated elements, and executed with modulated color and a strong sense of materiality and process. Transparent or translucent color allows you to view each work through a chromatic scrim.

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Each exhibition satisfies on its own, but the visual reciprocity enhances the experience. There are differences, of course. Scale is the most obvious; Mann works larger. Color is another; Ramsay has the more neutral palette. And the materials--acrylic, encaustic--refract the light differently. See for yourself.

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Both shows are up now: Ramsay's through October 31, Mann's through November 14..

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Debra Ramsay: Measuring Parallels 33, 2008, encaustic and eggshell on birch panel, 12 x 24 inches

Detail below

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David Mann: Phantasm, 2009, acrylic and oil on canvas over board, 58 1/8 x 68 1/8 inches

Detail below

Installation views: Ramsay at Blank Space, left, and Mann at McKenzie Fine Art

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Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art

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The view to your left as you enter the gallery: Parisian Heiress, 2008, 32 x 32 inches; Veer, 2008, 32 x 60 inches; High Time, 2008, 44 x 44 inches, all oil on wood

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Aside from Marketing Mondays, which I'm committed to producing every week, I've been a bit preoccupied with a commission. Now I'm back! I'm also late; the exhibitions I'm going to show you this week are over. But the work is still fresh and fabulous, and if you need to see something in person, I'll bet the galleries have a few works in the back room.

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Let's start with Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art. A few words come to mind: abstract, geometric, reductive, taut, tense, spatial, flat, constructivist, compressed.

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Main gallery with Inauguration, center, and Veer, 2008, right

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Below: Inauguration, 2009, oil on wood, 60 x 60 inches. The band colors were inspired by the color of the dress Michelle Obama wore on Inauguration Day. This image from the gallery's website
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Compressed is the big one for me. Bands of color typically push into a large black "x" shape from top and bottom. Thus contained, the compositions seem perfectly poised at the moment before something happens, a sensation that's heightened by subtleties in the color/surface of the paint. A rectangle of shiny in a field of matte, for instance, suggests barely perceptible internal shifts, while one forceful diagonal laid crosswise atop another suggests the possibility of much greater tectonic movement.

Against this perimeter compression, the hard-edge X pushes back, so the entire field is active with positive and negative space, push and pull. An X is always riveting--it's the nature of the shape--but while you're glued to your viewing spot, your eyes are constantly moving. That play of matte and gloss is especially activating, underscored by tiny chromatic variations in the black. So there you are in a visual tug of war with the floor, the wall, the physical presence of the painting and the space within it. That's quite a workout for such "minimal" work.
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The corner straight ahead of you when you enter the gallery. Specifics below

Above: Radiant Rhythm, 2009, 24 x 24 inches; below: Weave, 2009, 16 x 26 inches, both oil on wood

More reading:

. Brooklyn Rail interview of the artist by Ben La Rocco and Craig Olson
. Steven Alexander's insightful review of Voisine's show, here (I didn't realize he also talked about compression, but the work does evoke that sensation--and compatible minds arrived at the same conclusion)

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 Five

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

"Geometric Abstraction" at McKenzie Fine Art

Through February 9

Don Voisine: Poised, 2007, oil on wood, 20 x 20 inches

Valerie McKenzie always puts on a good show. This group exhibition brings together gallery and invited artists to examine the multiplicity of sources and expressions of geometric art. Artists in the show are Chris Gallagher, whose gently curving stripes suggest the celestial, like rings around Saturn; Kim MacConnell, with saturated abstractions reminiscent of Matisse and Picasso; and Shari Mendelson, whose chandelier-like sculptures play with light and shadow. You can see their work on the gallery website.

Here I'm homing in on the three whose geometry resonated most strongly for me: Don Voisine, whose work opens this post; Jennifer Riley, whose paintings have been turning up everywhere lately (including at McKenzie Fine Art's booth at Art Miami and OH&T's booth at Aqua Wynwood); and Ann Pibal, whose small-scale paintings are surprisingly poetic for their stark linearity.

Jennifer Riley: This installation shot looks into the office from the gallery. Foreground, Remedy for Blunt Footing, 2007, oil on canvas, 54 x 40 inches; office: Into the Maelstrom, 2007, oil on canvas, 44 x 60 inches

Riley's work suggests landscapes and topographies--mountains, rolling hills--but in a geometric style that references computerized maps. The deep space offered to the viewer is all the more compelling for the flatness of the surface. The push/pull of these elements, with the addition of gorgeous color, makes the work irresistible.

Don Voisine's geometry is much more austere: reductive and smack up against the picture plane. But up close his austerity is softened by surprisingly gentle surfaces--one soft, velvety black; another not quite shiny but not quite matte; yet another with the light shimmer of unexpected brushstrokes. Indeed, the picture plane opens more deeply than a first look would suggest. You need to spend time with this work. I'd call it "tender constructivism."

Don Voisine: Above, an installation in the office looking into the gallery at the painting shown below. Below, Delayed Green, 2007, oil on wood, 32 x 63 inches

Ann Pibal: Above, TRPSH, 2007, acrylic on aluminum, 12 3/4 x 18 1/2 inches; below, B-Line (v.2), 2007, acrylic on aluminum, 13 x 19 1/4 inches

Pibal's paintings, unique in their small scale and lovely color, nevertheless allow me to make some visual connections within geometric abstraction: to Miriam Schapiro's famous Ox painting, currently part of the "Wack" show (opening February 17 at PS 1) to Frank Stella's early geometries, and to Warren Isensee's Body and Soul, which I posted recently. You'd think there's only so much you can do with the same shapes and angles, but the connections, the variations, the subtleties, all filtered through the eye and hand of the artist, are endlessly new. Pibal's work reminds me of all that.