Author: Ashley Cook

Robert Longo: “The Acceleration of History” Milwaukee Art Museum, October 25, 2024–February 23, 2025 by Andrew Hart Benson Robert Longo’s large and bleak 8-foot-tall charcoal drawings of American iconography and tragedy fill the halls of the Baker/Rowland Galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In the gallery there are distant sounds of war and a somber silence among its visitors. These drawings depict striking images of protest, war, and beautiful dresses. It’s almost as if I’m at a funeral. There is a collective sadness at the historical depictions of the world that fill the gallery. With glass covering the drawings, we are forced to see our own reflection in these scenes as well. The glass acts as a sad mirror into violent acts that haunt our world.         Longo reflects on this violence through reimaginings of historical acts in “The Acceleration of History.” Consisting of videos, large charcoal drawings, and sculptures, the exhibition spans nearly 10 years of his creative effort. An important part of Longo’s history is a photo captured at a Kent State University protest. The photo by John Filo depicts a woman mourning over the body of an unarmed student, Jeffrey Miller.1 The protest was in response to the U.S. and its growing involvement in the Vietnam war. The protest escalated and saw the Ohio National Guard shooting and killing four unarmed students, including Miller, who was a classmate of Longo. The impact of the photo on him can be directly tied to the nature of his work.         As I walk past the dark, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings of things like Rams player Kenny Britt and the Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, there are sounds of destruction bouncing through the corners of the gallery. It’s hard to tell where they are from. Are they from the drawings themselves? Have the portraits of protest suddenly come to life? Is this part of the installation? Have I lost it? Then, when I turn a corner, I realize where these sounds are coming from. Playing in a private screening room is Icarus Rising, one of two video pieces Longo selected for the exhibition. What I expected to see were clips from a protest or war. But as I pull the curtain of the screening room back, I see what the noise was: paper. The video shows various media images being ripped apart. I have been duped. My brain had naturally associated the sound of ripping paper to match what I had been seeing. But what is presented to me in Icarus Rising are images of various political figures, moments, and iconography being shredded in different ways.         The images in the video are all black and white. The camera is very close to them. The sound is loud enough to echo through a gallery. The sounds scare me at times, however as I sit for longer, I became accustomed to them. They appear to me as a reflection of the news cycle—as we are blasted with information, we become complacent. The news becomes less important or captivating, much like the sounds of paper ripping in Icarus Rising. The video also reflects on the turnover rate of the media cycle. Hot stories become a focal point until the media can fixate on another. There’s no time to digest the news in full. There’s only enough time to become worried about the story—and then again at the next one. Every day we are getting news of orders by the current administration. Whether it is using only birth-assigned sex as a basis for a person’s identity and eliminating transgender identites2 or withdrawing from the World Health Organization,3 there are daily “images” in the news that buy our attention, only to be ripped apart within seconds. The only problem with these orders is that, unlike the pictures in Longo’s video, many don’t get thrown in the trash.         Robert Longo’s charcoal drawings take photographic images and redefine them instead of ripping them apart. In Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine), three gowns from a storefront in Donetsk, Ukraine, stand after an attack by the Russian army. While not an exact copy, Longo’s drawings also depict the harsh reality of war. The beautiful gowns are presented almost as if they are beautiful sculptures, begging to be admired. The tragedy is that they cannot be admired for their beauty because the glass covering them is punctured with bullet holes.             There’s an illusion that I am looking at these dresses shortly after they were destroyed. I can see myself in the glass covering the drawings. I can nearly stick my fingers through the bullet holes. The illusion makes it nearly impossible to detach yourself from the scene and to realize the pain of violence. So often we use war as an excuse for nationalism, but there’s a sad side to it as well. The Three Graces shows the destruction of what comes from beautiful communities that are put in harm’s way.         In Untitled (Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Removal: Memphis) the removal of a memorial statue for Nathan Bedford Forrest is depicted. Forrest is regarded by some as an important historical figure, but there has also been grave opposition to celebrating him as he was a slave trader and founding member of the Ku Klux Klan.4 In this piece, Longo criticizes the blindness of American history—when there is a celebration of nationalism, war, and honoring prominent figures without acknowledging the harm and repercussions of our country’s choices. The removal of Forrest’s statue directly acknowledges the horror of the American past.           Across from this drawing is The Rock (The Supreme Court of the United States–Split). Separated into two panels, the piece shows this justice building standing tall underneath a cloudy sky. Though the piece can symbolize the division of political ideology in our governmental system, its position across from the “Statue Removal”

Nicolas Bermeo: “Playing in Reality” King’s Leap, NY February 12–March 15, 2025 by Paul Moreno In 1953, Mark Rothko completed an untitled painting which would some 33 years later be gifted to The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. by the artist’s estate. At the end of the last century this painting would become the iconic cover of the catalogue for the National Gallery’s Rothko exhibition that would travel to New York and Paris. I still frequently notice this elegant book on the shelves of art lovers. It in fact pulls my attention every time I see it as an item in the living room set of the TV show, Frazier. The painting itself was one of the earliest paintings to use the vivid fuchsia that would recur in his later work. It also represents an increasingly forceful reduction of compositional elements in Rothko’s work and his simultaneous deepening of color complexity and manipulation of actual light. The New York painter Nicolas Bermeo has decided to add his own chapter to the legacy of Rothko’s Untitled, 1953. Bermeo’s Untitled, 2024 is a sort of remix of the Rothko. It turns the composition on its side, the colors are re-ordered enough to be new but not so much as to lose Rothko’s tune. It adds a couple of new references such as Barnett Newman and Callum Innes. The floating quality of the original is a bit more four-on-the-floor in the Bermeo painting. The ethereal orange line in the Rothko becomes acidic, the original’s glowing light becomes unctuous, glossy.           Bermeo’s Untitled was, to my eye, the star of his debut exhibition, “Nicolas Bermeo’s “Playing in Reality” at King’s Leap in New York. The exhibition seems to be a brief examination of, maybe a quick homage to, painting from Ab-Ex to the turn of the millennium abstraction. Besides Rothko, Bermeo also conjures Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Jonathan Lasker, Wade Guyton, the Support/Surfaces movement, and The Washington Color School. These allusions are made as casually as I just alluded to them now, and I assume that the artist is very aware that the references are being made.           I think the artist is maybe making a little intellectual joke about abstraction vs. non-objective painting. The joke is this: Rothko takes representation and reduces it down to a pure abstraction, down to formal elements that can exist on their own independent of subject. An artist like Robert Ryman takes the tools of Rothko and makes pure paintings that forego the “represented subject” altogether to create a non-objective work of art. Then, and this is the funny part, Bermeo makes an abstract painting wherein the “represent subject” is Ryman’s non-objective work. Such is the case in two of Bermeo’s paintings. They are both called Untitled. One is an 8” x 8” white canvas with a few large light brush marks of translucent aqua paint. One is an 8” x 8” white canvas outlined with an occasionally frosting-like gray paint and then a few more gray marks crossing it. These appear to be attempting to point to the occasional bits of color or the incidental shadows one finds in Ryman’s rich, largely white, paintings. Bermeo’s canvases, also quite rich in white, without a viewer’s heavy lifting of contextualization, lack much other content.           The other best effort in the show is a large canvas also called Untitled. This work consists of seven horizontal bands of color, the uppermost and the fourth from the top are washes of pale pink and the other five are pale peach. The bands of color are separated by lines of black. The bottommost is a thin elegant line. The others are rougher and thicker, made up of two loose and thin parallel borders with the space in between mostly filled in using multiple small gestures, some of which appear to be made by spraying. Left to right the painting, if folded in half, would be an approximate mirror of itself, but it would not be a mirror of itself if folded top to bottom. This compositional device is frequently found in the paintings of Agnes Martin, and Bermeo’s painting cannot help but be seen as a take on her iconic work. How Bermeo steps away from this reference is that he does not employ the purity of color, the patient layering of paint, or the meticulous commitment to mark making that referencing Martin makes me crave. Where Martin’s canvases contain a quality of deceptive effortlessness, Bermeo’s just seems to be a little lacking in effort.         The exhibition is accompanied by a rather opaque press release that traces some musings of the artist, but it nonetheless demonstrates something about the show. Nicolas Bermeo seems to have many points of reference, and he also seems to have aesthetic ideas and the ability to make interesting connections in his mind. Paintings, however, are more than ideas; paintings exist outside the mind. They are sent out into the world on their own and, when placed in a commercial gallery, are thrust into the conversation about art making. They are only imbued with what their creator has put into them. In a press package for the show the gallery provides a more useful explanation of the show. I quote it here: “Bermeo speaks of the potential to ‘catch a vibe,’ arriving at novel solutions through minimal and quick means.” My response is that I do see a vibe or, more accurately, an attitude. But I see nothing novel here. I see responses but not solutions. I see that what the artist attempts to imbue into these pictures is handled too minimally and too quickly. I see pictures that are instantly “Instagrammable” but that lose their luster in person. Where these pictures might aspire to pay homage, they simply mock. Still, the directors of King’s Leap see something in the work and my heart is warmed by knowing there

“The Prime Numbers” Five paintings by Bob Hooper February 28–April 5, 2025, 65Grand, Chicago by Michel Ségard 65Grand is one of those out-of-the-way galleries that is better known to artists than to art viewers. It is in a time worn storefront in a not so nice part of Chicago called Humbolt Park. But it is known among emerging and/or somewhat unknown artists as a great place to show. This current exhibition of five abstract paintings by Bob Hooper fits into 65Grand’s approach. Titled “The Prime Numbers,” the paintings are all shaped canvas geometric abstractions, based on the geometric relationship between a circle and a square. Strangely, no reference to prime numbers is made in any of the text connected to the show. Still, Hooper’s work contains no inherent or underlying social imperative or political message—it exists to engage intellectual curiosity and highlight the aesthetic pleasure of these geometric forms.         A springboard shape for much of this work is the quatrefoil, a grouping of semicircles around a square that is used a great deal in Gothic stained-glass windows. Fragments of this form are to be found in several of the paintings. Second, the other shape that is repeatedly used is the joining of a square and a circle to form a waterdrop. Third, two of the paintings are in the shape of a quarter of a donut, making them look a little like a fan. The overall feeling on confronting these figures is of joy in determining what the geometric relationships are; it is a mathematical puzzle-solving exercise.           The most striking piece is Interstice, executed in stark black and white. It is fan-shaped with a pattern of squares flanked by black scalloped fields (it looks a little like a skirt). The interplay between the squares and the scalloped edges gives this piece a certain liveliness. The other fan-shaped work, Am abend, da es kühle war (In the evening, since it was cool),. consists of three circles in white and gray interlocked in the center of a black field. They feel like holes in the in the middle of this deep black surface. Both of these pieces have a sense of depth that contradicts the primacy of the surface so prevalent in twentieth-century abstraction—then, illusionary depth was largely forbidden in some circles.           The other three paintings in the show have the form of a waterdrop. In Cirque, the pointed part of the shape is at the top, and the piece contains the same combination of small circles seen in Am abend, da es kühle war. But here, they are in blue, red, and white—a subtle nod to Mondrian. Filament is a bright yellow with fragments of a barbed quatrefoil rendered in white. A dark green circle centers the composition. It is interesting to note that the top and bottom quatrefoil fragments do not line up; had they, they would have read as a single form. This dislocation brings life to the composition and, along with its bright yellow background, makes it the most engaging of the three teardrops. The third of this series is peach colored with two white barbed quatrefoil segments joined by thick white lines located in an upper corner. For me, this was the least engaging piece in the show; the background color is an unalluring peach, and the quatrefoil segments are statically positioned directly opposite the pointed end of the teardrop. The absolute symmetry of this arrangement deadens the composition.           It is part of 65Grand’s role to remind us of artists like Bob Hooper who has been making and showing art for more than 40 years. His work does not contain the currently popular—and often contrived—strategy of including some kind of social or political message. Not assaulting the viewer with often manufactured moral imperatives but, instead, focusing on the contemplation and appreciation of pure aesthetics is Hooper’s way of reminding us of the timelessness of art. Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.

Imagination in the Age of Reason Saturday, September 28, 2024–Sunday, March 2, 2025 Cleveland Museum of Art “Picasso and Paper” Sunday, December 8, 2024–Sunday, March 23, 2025 by Sean Bieri First of all: the Cleveland Museum of Art’s “Picasso and Paper” exhibition was excellent—of course it was. A life-spanning survey of works on paper and cardboard, punctuated with occasional canvasses and bronzes, by this most innovative, prolific, and driven of Modernists could hardly fail to be anything short of engrossing, and sometimes astonishing. The show was packed with works, several from the CMA’s own collection. From his shockingly accomplished academic drawings done when he was a teenager, to the initial doodles for his bombshell Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; from his Cubist collages to a cardboard costume designed for a Jean Cocteau ballet; from a post-war obsession with Delacroix and Manet to the final room where a scene from Clouzot’s documentary-of-sorts The Mystery of Picasso was looping: this exhibition was an embarrassment of riches. (Afterwards, anyone feeling pangs about praising this notorious misogynist could find copies of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma—a book-length essay on the “art vs. the artist” problem with a cover photo of the man himself, bare-chested and wearing a papier-mâché minotaur mask—on sale in the gift shop, not far from the novelty coffee mugs and fridge magnets.)         But Picasso wasn’t what brought me to the CMA. It was a smaller, more nuanced exhibition that inspired me to commit the (some would say irrational) act of driving nearly three hours each way from Detroit to Cleveland and back, all in one cold February day. The timing of “Imagination in the Age of Reason” is… interesting. With the rise of authoritarianism on one side of the political spectrum, the interrogation of systemic injustices on the other, and cynicism and skepticism about science and democracy across the board, it would seem that the Age of Reason hasn’t aged well. Announcing on social media that you mean to, in the words of the Enlightenment’s hype man Immanuel Kant, “use (your) own understanding without the guidance of another” will likely mark you out as a troll or a nut rather than the heroic freethinker you think you are. To be fair, the Enlightenment has been getting pushback since its inception; in fact, it was my recent (late to the party) interest in William Blake, a visionary whose emphasis on human imagination was at odds with the rationalist thinkers of his day, that made spending six hours on the road to see this show seem reasonable to me. But in many of the forty-some prints and drawings in Imagination in the Age of Reason, all taken from the CMA’s own impressive collection, the fanciful and the factual often work together, to critique, entertain, or just move merchandise.           The show is divided into four sections. In the first, on “Optics and Illusion,” physical vision and creative vision dovetail to produce images that are innovative, amusing—and salable. Louis-Marin Bonnet’s quaint (if somewhat neotenic and anime-ish) etchings of women, such as The Milk Woman, utilized techniques made possible by advances in optical science to emulate the pastel drawings that were popular among collectors. Renowned British animal painter George Stubbs used the then-new technique of soft-ground etching to bring drawing-like textures to his print of A Sleeping Leopard (the beast sweetly grasps its tail in its front paws in a way that will charm cat lovers). Maria Catharina Prestel’s aquatints mimicked the qualities of ink wash drawings, while Henry Fuseli (famous for The Nightmare) turned to lithography to preserve the energy of his pen-and-ink work. Of course, there’s a trompe l’oeil image included, a meticulously rendered still life complete with handbills and a drawing-within-a-drawing that invites viewers to pore over its details and unravel its secrets.           The most impressive image in this section, and one of the anchors of the show, is Jean-Étienne Liotard’s masterfully rendered pastel portrait of François Tronchin, a Swiss art collector who hobnobbed with such Enlightenment luminaries as Voltaire and Diderot. Seated at a small table covered in sheet music, diagrams, precision instruments, and a book, Tronchin invites us to inspect the pride of his collection, Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed. Liotard has brightened up the Dutch master’s painting, making it more a part of Tronchin’s enlightened world than Rembrandt’s earthier one. There’s a humorous disconnect between the intellectual accoutrements of Tronchin’s study and the image of a smiling, scantily clad woman on the lookout for her lover in the painting, but somehow Tronchin looks like he’d appreciate the irony.              The section on “Imagined Landscapes” includes images that demonstrate eighteenth-century Europe’s fascination with natural phenomena in far-off lands—volcanic eruptions, exotic flora and fauna—as well as its attitude of racial superiority over the “savages” populating those lands. Joseph Constantine Stadler’s illustrations of newly discovered plant life, for instance, are meticulously rendered and scientifically accurate, but they’re presented sprouting in environments that suit the fancies of his botanist patron more than they would the plants themselves. On a wallpaper-like sheet of printed cotton cloth entitled The Four Continents, the peoples of the non-European world are depicted with less accuracy and respect than the closely observed foliage and animals surrounding them.           A suite of engravings describing The Most Notable Things Seen by John Wilkins Erudite English Bishop during His Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon imagines an excursion into space complete with alien humanoids who, while clever in their ability to tame flying serpents, fashion outlandish contraptions, and make their homes in giant pumpkins, are also depicted as “primitives,” amalgams of racist tropes associated with Native Americans and Asians. (This is a problem faced still by modern science fiction, such as the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises: how to present a species of “others” without leaning on hoary stereotypes of actual human peoples. The Avatar films, for

Boys of a Feather Martin Weinstein at Lichtundfire, NYC, and Christopher Hart Chambers at Crossing Art, NYC by D. Dominick Lombardi “Continuum: A History of Impermanence” and “Passages” are two very different New York City solo exhibitions with one pivotal link. Beginning with totally unrelated approaches, aesthetics, and styles, Martin Weinstein and Christopher Hart Chambers share a similar focus on nature. Triggered by natural elements that lead to two unique takes on belonging, both interpret, filter, and forge a new way of thinking. Each in their own way uncover the mysteries and magnificence of the outside world well beyond a typical bucolic scene.         “Continuum: A History of Impermanence,” is an important survey of the paintings of Martin Weinstein. It reveals a surprising and long-standing focus regarding the artist’s premise of inside/outside. The two works best representing this concern over a period of decades are Fribourg in Grand Street (1996) and Stormy Afternoons, July, Outside Under Inside (2023). In Fribourg, we see a picturesque Swiss country town unexpectedly transplanted inside an interior space in downtown Manhattan. Subjected to the sunlight and surrounding skyline that breaks through the large industrial-type windows, the effect is quietly surreal and clearly magical. Fribourg shares its magical beauty for all to savor, conjuring thoughts of a big budget, mid-century Hollywood film set designed for a dreamscape. The much more recent Stormy Afternoons is a continuation of the “transience of space” theme, only this time with more of a focus on creating a landscape than recording any clear architectural elements. Here, Weinstein brings the outside in with all the glory of a stormy summer afternoon that powerfully sweeps through the picture plane that is quietly interrupted by a few reflective interior surfaces barely able to hold their own against the power and beauty of looming skies.           Conversely, in works like Blossoming Plum, Inside Over Outside (2023), Weinstein solidifies the interior space by making it the top layer of three overlapping painted surfaces. Near the center of the composition, Weistein paints white, early spring plumbush flowers shooting up and out of a vase, a detail quietly contrasted by the months-later outside plants in full bloom as they range across the middle panel. This evolving narrative is a potent nod to time, the human construct that the artist acutely commands with continuous flair and finesse. There is a similar use of this concept of marking time with nature’s bounty in Lilies, One Year Over Another, Inside Over Outside (2024), where bursts of proud red petals invade an interior space barely anchored by a row of shiny colored glass and two attentive guitars. One gem of an older work is Apartment in Vienna (1999), an early version of the layering of three clear acrylic sheets that create an alluring depth. In a strange way, this method reminds me of Rembrandt’s use of multiple glazes, where the paint comes alive in minute rippling surfaces.           The second solo exhibition is “Passages” at Crossing Art gallery in Chelsea featuring the mesmerizing paintings of Christopher Hart Chambers—a collection of works that makes me wonder “What if the Impressionists had taken LSD?” However, labeling these works as simply psychedelic would be missing the mark as they have greater weight and more substance than something merely trippy. Chocolate Forest (2024), the first work encountered in the gallery, features a subtle, layered cascading background dominated by a foreground of large black leafy stalks partially covered with vines of tiny leaves and flowers. This combination of varying degrees of opacity and color from foreground to background pulls the viewer into an animated space where unknown consequences are countered by hints of something new and different.           Sparkle Wood (2024) has a very different mood. Here, a lighter foreground and a more clearly sinuous background read as more calming and inviting. Clover-shaped leaves that cut across the center of the composition add a bit of caution to the narrative. This and the fact that in all of Chambers’ paintings we never see the ground, may cause this feeling. The missing ground non-element gives everything the sense of being somewhere above the ground, like a bird or climbing animal. Or are we looking out of a window during a waking dream state? Moving through the gallery to Fertile Circus (2024), we are faced with a composition that exemplifies the artist’s methodology. Order in disorder, the essence of a landscape is left to its own stunning devices where unhindered sights, sounds, and smells coalesce into one fantastical field of dreams.            Two accomplished painters, Martin Weinstein and Christopher Hart Chambers, offer outstanding paintings at a point in their careers where it is time to take notice and celebrate. It’s all about dexterity, dedication, and vision, plus an understanding that beauty can be many different things—from the never-ending cycle of nature’s changing seasons to the aesthetics of its timeless designs–as long as it causes a palpable chill in the viewer. There is a past, present, and future in these works: links to an endless stream of thought and conjecture that we all can connect with, despite their uniqueness. D. Dominick Lombardi is a visual artist, art writer, and curator. A 45-year retrospective of his art recently traveled to galleries at Murray State University, Kentucky in 2019; to University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 2021; and the State University of New York at Cortland in 2022.

“The Ryleans”: An Art Exhibition or a Course in Twentieth-Century Philosophy? Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago, February 15–March 29, 2025 by Michel Ségard “The Ryleans” is an exhibition of four graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC): Noelle Africh, Ellis & Parker von Sternberg, Jonathan Worcester and Ziyi Zhang. The concept behind the show rests with the philosophy of Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) and his ideas about perception. This is a show that I would have expected more from University of Chicago graduates–SAIC is more known for socially motivated conceptual art these days, not for an intellectual foray into philosophy. A summary of Ryle’s world view:         Ryle analogizes philosophy to cartography. Competent speakers of a language, Ryle believes, are to a philosopher what ordinary villagers are to a mapmaker: the ordinary villager has a competent grasp of his village and is familiar with its inhabitants and geography. But when asked to interpret a map of that knowledge, the villager will have difficulty until he is able to translate his practical knowledge into universal cartographic terms. The villager thinks of the village in personal and practical terms, while the mapmaker thinks of the village in neutral, public, cartographic terms. (Ryle, Gilbert. 1971. “Abstractions.” In Collected Papers 2. London: Hutchinson.)           On entering the gallery, the west wall is the most prominent. Ziyi Zhang’s 06/25/2024 is the first piece you see on that wall. Her modestly sized work (23 x 22 inches) is deceptively layered. The background is a digital image of an oil painting; the foreground is an image of a rectangular metal mesh with missing sections and two bronze-colored medallions with embossed floral motifs. This foreground is produced by a 3-D digital printer on top of the background image. The effect is so subtle that I had to look closely several times to see the 3-D effect of the mesh. This piece closely parallels Ryle’s cartography metaphor. Zhang is the villager and knows everything about the work; the viewer is the mapmaker and sees only what is immediately visible.           Next to Zang’s piece is Noelle Africh’s Hindsight. Another small work (only 20 x 16 inches), it is made from a not often used material in contemporary art. Distemper was a paint widely employed in the early Renaissance instead of tempera or early oils. It is difficult to work with because when wet the colors are significantly different than when dry. Its surface is also rather fragile. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distemper_(paint) for a detailed description.) Hindsight is a soft brown and rose abstract image that vaguely resembles an elephant’s trunk with figures alongside it. Or maybe the image is a portion of a spine? The contemporary eye would never know that this was done with distemper paint, and its fuzziness creates an uneasy sense of ambiguity. Is this more villager-cartographer interplay?           The next piece poses other problems. Ellis and Parker von Sternberg are collaborating brothers. Ellis is the artist and Parker is an attorney. It is unclear what Parker’s role is in creating the artwork. Untitled 19 is a modest sized wall sculpture (24.5 x 7 x 5 inches). The enigma here is what is the piece made of. The gallery checklist details PVC heat shrink, assorted remains, enamel, and zip ties. Just what are the assorted remains? The shape of the work suggest that they may be bones, even ribs—but of what? Is this where Parker plays a role in safeguarding against an illegality? On initial viewing, the piece is a pleasant sculpture. But, on reflecting on what it might be made of, it becomes very disturbing, even creepy. Only the villager knows.           On a narrow wall by itself is Jonathan Worcester’s Untitled (JW003). This is the largest piece in the show, measuring 54 x 21 inches, and the one with the most traditional medium: acrylic on canvas. It is an image of a fairly regular grid resembling a loose tapestry The warp is a series of thin vertical lines of thick black paint seemingly extruded from a tube, and the horizontal wefts are overlaid thicker impasto—all applied over a red background. The background is barely visible except for a spot near the lower right where it is allowed to show through. It is a satisfying abstraction that plays with the conceptual regularity of a pattern against the irregularity of its execution. In this sense, it could allude to some traditions of hand weaving.           So, what does this art have to do with Ryle’s philosophy? It seems to be mostly about the viewer’s perception in contrast to what the artist knows or wishes to reveal. None of this is particularly new or novel, especially in the world of contemporary art. It just gives the act of viewing a philosophical framework for those who think they need one. There is one footnote to the exhibition. It is persistently gloomy. These artists don’t seem to have a very optimistic view of our time or the future. Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.

Local Neon 2025 Ken Saunders Gallery, Chicago, IL February 1 through May 5, 2025 by Michel Ségard Periodically, Ken Saunders Gallery mounts a show of artists working in neon—glass benders as they prefer to be called. This year’s show, “Local Neon 2025,” includes works by John E. Bannon, Jacob Fishman, Zoelle Nagib, Carolina Pereira de Almeida, and Michael Young. Ken Saunders Gallery is in a modestly renovated, light manufacturing building that houses artist studios, design practices, exhibition spaces, and a variety of other small businesses. This is a small show of eight works in a small space. The gallery’s atmosphere is somewhat makeshift and very unpretentious—dramatically different than its upscale and enormous across-the-street neighbor Grey Gallery. But this modesty allows one to get comfortably familiar with the work.         The first work to catch your eye upon entering the gallery is Colors by Jacob Fishman. This large wall piece consists of the word “colors” rendered in neon in 11 different hues. It is noticeably sculptural with segments protruding out into space. It is what would have been known in the nineteenth century as a masterwork—a work showing off the technical expertise of the maker. It is lyrical as well as colorful and makes onlookers forget that it is neon glass. The overall effect feels like writing with pure color and light. There is also a small, sculptural piece by Fishman called Earth Map. Its four segments are separated by textured but transparent glass beads—again a demonstration of technical expertise. Fishman is known for being the fabricator of Bruce Nauman’s replica neon pieces for museum exhibitions. (Large neon pieces do not travel well and are highly subject to breakage, therefore works are replicated on site, destroyed at the end of an exhibition, and rebuilt at the next showing.)             Next to Colors is a small sculpture that incorporates neon.  Next to Fishman’s work, The Spells We Cast by Zoelle Nagib offers a different take on the medium. Nagib’s piece is a basket of perforated metal which props up an oval mirror that is framed by a thin white neon tube. In the center hangs a fuzzy ball with an “eye” facing the mirror. The neon is part of its charm. Nagib’s work is consistently playful; her other piece in this show is a spiral in white neon that spells out “Where would we be if not right here?” She comes from the Fishman glass bending family, being Fishman’s daughter and now heads Lightwriters Neon, the family company that has been in business for more than 40 years. While not as exuberant as her father’s, her work is more playful.           In the corner behind Nagib’s basket piece is Michael Young’s winged piece, Bank—a large pair of metal wings with purple and red neon illuminating them from the inside. Young is noted for sculptures that incorporate neon as part of their formal composition. In this sense, he is not a true glass bender like Fishman (or Nagib). He uses neon like pigment, depending on its colored lights to complement his sculptures.           On a wall by themselves are two pieces by John E. Bannon. Each titled Life Is In Between, they are a pair of identical rectangular shapes with a water drop shape at the top and a splash form rising from the bottom. The left one is red; the right is blue. The artist describes the identical composition of both pieces as a “graphic neon drop of water symbolizing birth, life, and death.” Both are flat wall pieces with no technical embellishments—the most abstract works in the show. In 2021, Bannon caused a bit of a sensation by showing a large three-dimensional neon piece at Saunders’s Neon and Light Museum called Live and Breathe. When viewed from one direction it appeared to be the top of a head, but when seen from one another angle, it appeared as a female nude. That work physically took up more space than is available in Saunders’s present gallery, and its tour de force was not as a piece of glass bending, but as a piece of exquisite three-dimensional geometry. Nothing as exuberant happens in the two works in this show.           The last piece in the show was a tapestry embellished with a single oval of neon by Carolina Pereira de Almeida. Her Disguised Wish is an abstract tufted rug in blue, black, and red that is accented by an oval of red neon that glows so brightly that it photographs as white with a red halo. In this piece, neon functions as part of the abstract composition, much like how the neon element works in Young’s wings. This is a strategy Pereira has used in other works—always employing a simple minimal stroke of neon to enliven the composition. Does that make her a glass bender or a multimedia artist—or both?           We once saw neon signs in nearly every small shop, declaring what was for sale or whether it was open for business. Now, those devices have been replaced by LED signs, often with animation. Neon now has largely become an art medium. It often carries a certain amount of nostalgia, but it can be as conceptually up to date as the glass bender desires. This casual and comfortable show of eight works gives us a snapshot of what is going on in the glass bending world today—at least in Chicago. Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.

Pushing Boundaries Janice Charach Gallery, January 19–March 5, 2025 Artists: Jeanne Bieri, Boisali Biswas, Terry Lee Dill, Nanci LeBret Einstein, David Velez Felix, Jay Knapp, Meighen Jackson by K. A. Letts What does it mean for an artist to ‘push boundaries’? Seven established and emerging regional artists from the Detroit metro area have been invited to answer the question in an ambitiously scaled collection of individual installations at Janice Charach Gallery. The result is an extended visual conversation among different but complementary sensibilities.         “Pushing Boundaries” was conceived and developed by well-known multimedia artist Nanci LeBret Einstein in cooperation with the gallery’s director Natalie Balazovitch. The seven artists have interpreted the theme of the exhibition according to the boundaries they perceive their work to be moving beyond. Unsurprisingly, each has come up with their own idiosyncratic response amplified by individual methods, mediums, and preoccupations.           Meighen Jackson’s four abstract wall pieces appear near the gallery’s entrance. At first glance they seem to be traditional, though accomplished, abstract paintings. But the lines, shapes, and colors of these twisting and turning “paper paintings,” as she calls them, are made from the materials of which they are composed—papier-mâché, wire, cardboard, India inks, and decorative papers. Figure and ground have been fused and the artwork on the wall is both image and object. Breaking out from the confines of the wall, Jackson has leveraged the expertise of partner Jim Mumbly and his son Brandon to create a fully three-dimensional version of the wall pieces. With Celebrate, made of wire and tomato cages welded into a multicolored tornado of movement, Jackson pushes beyond the boundaries of two dimensions to three.           No matter how far an artist departs from their roots, some part of their life’s story remains, a fact evident in the mixed media constructs of Terry Lee Dill. As a young native of Hutchinson, Kansas, Dill became an assistant to the head structural engineer for the first nuclear reactor in Blair, Nebraska. Though he subsequently went on to art school and a successful creative career, the preoccupations that characterize Dill’s early life persist. The elaborately crafted sculptures in the exhibition provide a sampling of his sculpture practice. His fantasy architectural forms recall early Constructivist sculptures by Vladimir Tatlin but add hints of space age technology and defy easy categorization. Dill explains, “I want them to feel like art, but I don’t want them to be art, if that makes any sense,” he says. “You don’t get a sense of reality, why they exist. You want to know why they exist, but you’ll never know why they exist—there’s no reason for them to exist.”           Nanci LeBret Einstein has interpreted the theme of pushing boundaries in a variety of ways that interlock and amplify each other. Dominating the main floor of the gallery and ascending through the oculus in the center, she has created a large, weightless seeming trapezoidal mesh installation called Fruition that builds conceptually upon her more modestly scaled artworks. Einstein’s many wall-mounted assemblages represent taxonomies of small, found, and upcycled industrial objects in orderly arrays. She has also amplified her personal themes by creating, with photographer Allen Einstein, some mysteriously compelling photo collages that combine floral forms with blobby textures suggestive of industrial waste.           Trained originally as a photographer, David Velez Felix departed that highly technical discipline and moved into the more emotionally expressive medium of ceramics when he moved to Michigan from New York in 1999. His colorful group of wall-mounted and free-standing figurative caricatures show figures moving, mixing and melting into each other, their facial expressions ambiguous. He says of his gesticulating, bug-eyed bodies that “Silent screams and distorted expressions echo the harsh reality that even with such diversity lending an air of unity, these characters stand painfully alone.”         The three artists who occupy the second floor of the gallery in “Pushing Boundaries” are distinct—and distinctive—but in visual dialog. Beginning from the starting point of fiber art, each departs from the medium’s arts-and-crafts roots in a different way.           Jay Knapp’s full body of work encompasses painting, constructed, and carved wood sculpture and photography. For purposes of this exhibition he has focused on a recent collection of fiber pieces that involve the deconstruction of everyday objects—paper money, books, natural materials and the like. He transforms them into handmade string which becomes the basis for his fiber artworks. The particularly beautiful Still Life is created from dried iris stems woven into string and hung on a found wooden plank. Through a process of loops and dips an elaborate tapestry emerges. In another series made from deconstructed baseballs, their insides now exposed, Knapp seems to be commenting on performative masculinity as a suspect construct.           Across the gallery, Indiana-born Jeanne Bieri’s elaborately pieced, hand-embroidered and intuitively appliqued quilt hangings bring together improbable fabric components to tell an intriguing visual story. Army blankets referencing her father’s military career are juxtaposed with vintage quilts recalling the farm wives of her childhood. The combination honors her family’s resourceful and creative American past, weaving the masculine and feminine together into an unorthodox collage of personal history.           Boisali Biswas was born in India but has lived in the U.S. for 30 years. Traversing the boundaries of her birthplace to settle into another culture has provided the animating impulse for her art practice. She explains, “As an immigrant artist, my work is constantly informed by my existence between the two cultures. Most often I find myself drawn to my roots, and I strive to explore and express the complexity of cultural identity and belonging in my work.” In her formally ambitious installation work, Diaphanous Illusions, she has woven a forest of light and warmth. The narrow vertical bands of found fibers, wires, and up-cycled produce bags press into service

Jeff Way Then & Now: 1970–2024 Storage, NYC, September 6–November 2, 2024 by Paul Moreno Having visited “Then & Now: 1970–2024”, a selection of paintings by the artist Jeff Way, I was struck by the physicality present in the art and the exhibition. First, there is a palpable sense of history in the space. The gallery, Storage, sits a few stories above the crowd of cars and pedestrians that populate busy Walker Street in TriBeCa—which has experienced a renaissance as a hot spot in the New York art scene. Accessed by a tiny elevator, the loft space, is furnished with craftsman-like furniture, and creaking floors. It eschews the veneer of a white cube and provides an atmosphere that reminds a visitor that there was an important moment in art, pre-Chelsea, when this then moribund part of Manhattan became the gritty home to artists who would define the end of the twentieth century. The atmosphere of Storage is an authentic and physical reminder of this history, while Jeff Way is a direct artistic link to that past.         Among today’s luxury shopping, elegant hotels, and, yes, the nearby, newly white-cubed galleries, Way still works and resides decades later. He builds his paintings, for the most part, on the grid. In his most recent work, his process made visible. Way starts with a colored pencil drawing of a grid that has been built up in sections. Each section is created by repetitious small strokes that are diagonal to the overall grid. And each consists of twin bars of color with an unfilled space between them. This empty space then contains a tidy line in the same color as the bars. The bars are joined at each end in a soft ovular point. These composed sections abut each other to form two square compositions, one vertical and one horizontal, which are overlaid to form the grid. Each grid is made of a collection of colors in an arbitrary arrangement. The overlay creates an undulating display of color variations. The unfilled areas of each section also intersect to create their own dot grid that almost appears to twinkle. Eccentric Squares Study 3/30/2020 is a beautiful example of this.           These drawings are used to plot out larger scale paintings. The essential compositional elements remain intact as the paintings replicate the mark making from the drawing. The artist uses paper tape to mask the canvas and create a guide to maintain the integrity of the grid. The acrylic paint has an out-of-the-tube purity of color but as the paint varies from slight dab to smooth layer to slightest whisper, and as one color overlays another, rich new visual effects are created in a style that almost evokes Seurat. The mood of each painting is dependent on the combination of colors the artist chooses. Eccentric Squares 27 evoked the scent and crackle of a fireside chat in the deep of winter—vibrant red, cerulean, plum. Eccentric Squares 42 (Diamond) which as the name suggests, is tilted a quirky 45º, reminds me of Easter–bulbs sending up tulips, suddenly warm rays of sunlight on lengthening days, spring green, lemon yellow, lilac.           In another interesting maneuver, Way preserves the strips of tape that are used to make the paintings and then weaves them together into new works on paper. Waste Not 8/2/2021.is one of these. These pieces feel less regimented and more whimsical than the paintings. They also reveal something quite interesting about the paintings and initial drawings. The tape is not laid down in an ordinal fashion; rather Way makes thoughtful decisions about where one strip will overlay another. He avoids patterns. He almost scatters the intersections of lines. The choices being made in the process humanize the grid. One may then realize that this same process is always active in Way’s paintings. When you look closely you see that the segments of color in the painting could not have been made in one fell swoop. Instead, they appear to have been made bit by bit–as a single segment of color will randomly move from the top layer to the bottom layer, as if woven in the same way the strips of tape are. This realization evokes a respect for the labor, thought, and thoroughness of the artist’s process.                   This process, starting with the colored pencil drawing, then making the painting, then making the tape on paper piece, very much covers the “now” part of the show. The “then” part of the show is represented by a selection of paintings all made around 1970. This was an important time for Way. He was included in the 1971 Whitney Biennial, and his painting Ivy’s Gas was acquired by the Whitney. A sister painting to Ivy’s Gas, Untitled is a major part of the exhibition at Storage. In this painting, the grid, as it were, is reduced to its horizontal marks, which recede and emerge throughout the large picture. The surface of the painting is consistent, somewhere between a sand drawing and a citrus rind. The painting was made with the canvas flat on the floor, and the compositional elements have the feeling of blossoms falling from a tree, or one scattering salt on the sidewalk. The pigment appears to be tossed or sprinkled across the plain and fixed in place by the acrylic medium. The rich yellowy green is speckled with constellations of violet, rust, blue, and gold. It has a mood that is dancerly. The painting suggests an air of remembrance of a sacred moment.           An interesting jump further into the grid is apparent in his 1973 painting, Primary Variations VIII. In this painting, the grid is boldly laid out in an orderly blue, red, and yellow pattern. The lines have plenty of space around them and appear to glow like neon. In the spaces between the lines there are accumulations of

Two Views of the LGBTQ+ World with Caribbean Influences David Antonio Cruz: Come Close, Like Before Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, September 13–October 26, 2024 Leasho Johnson: Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago, August 30–October 26, 2024 by Michel Ségard An unusual thing happened on a Saturday afternoon in October 2024 while doing the rounds of galleries in Chicago. Two neighboring galleries were showing work that addressed the same topic but in entirely different ways. Monique Meloche featured the work of David Antonio Cruz, and next door, Mariane Ibrahim showed the works of Leasho Johnson. Both are Latino; Cruz, born in 1974 in Philadelphia, is of Puerto Rican descent; Johnson, born in 1984, is originally from Jamaica. And both address what it means to be LGBTQ+ in their individual subculture.           Cruz’s show, “David Antonio Cruz: Come Close Like Before,” contained nine works divided into two categories. There were four large drawings rendered in shades of taupe, blue-grey, and black. They depict overlaying and intertwined branches of olive trees and ceiba trees (native to Central America, the Caribbean, and West Africa). The images were inspired by Cruz’s memories from a recent visit to his grandparents’ land in Puerto Rico. They open the door to the main topic of his show as the intermingling of the different tree branches suggest the creation of a “hybrid” environment, one not strictly biologically related.           His five much larger paintings, concentrate on the familial relationships LGBTQ+ people have with others who are not blood relatives. Their operating principle is: “We look out for and support each other.” This is brought home in iknowyou’vebeenwonderingwherei’vebeen:adrift,adraft,astare,atilt,asigh,exhale.but,mebacktoletyouknow,gotathingforyou,andican’tletitgo the raft. In this massive diptych, six individuals recline on and around a couch. They are clearly very comfortable with each other and stare out to the viewer as if to say “you gotta problem with us?” Rendered realistically and in bright colors and patterns, they contrast dramatically with the tree branch drawings. Cruz uses several methods to bring extra tension to this work. First, the images in the two panels that make up the piece do not quite line up. This creates an unsettled sense when viewing. In a compositional way, it suggests that the members of this group, although close, are quite diverse. The central figure is a woman, and she is surrounded by five men of varying colors and ages. Second, there are shapes in the canvas that lack any shading and appear unfinished, like the blue and the chartreuse socks on the lower part of the left panel. Cruz is said to claim that these areas are included to bring attention to the abstractness of the composition. Third, and most jarring, is the presence of blue hands on several of the subjects. The compositions are so complex that, at first, you don’t notice them, but once you do, their presence tends to dominate. This stratagem seems to have some kind of symbolic meaning. Blue is associated with depth, stability, wisdom, faith and truth. Is Cruz associating these traits to the subjects with the blue hands?           In his other dyptich icamebackthefollowingnightandwalkedthegroundslookingforyou,wegotturnedawayonthesecondnight,buticamebackagainandagain,andagain the mound., we see all three of these methods used again. But here, there are four women and two men on the same sofa—there are only two blue hands and the background is a version of the tree branch drawings. Again, the subjects stare out at the viewer with confrontational gazes. But, this painting is quieter; its palette is more subdued. Overall, it is not as provacative as the other diptych.           The painting that struck me the most was not one of the group paintings, but a portrait of a bearded man in white, very open, fishnet stockings in an odalisque pose and wearing a white shirt and a ballcap. Scattered in front of him are a feather boa and strings of beads. comeclose,likebefore,sowecansitinsilenceandcloseoureyestothosewants, andmaybe,maybe,wecangetlostintheplacewherethebirdssleep,lostinthesummerheat. is not about beefcake or drag; it is an unapologetic painting of someone who seems truly nonbinary. Which brings me to another major point of this show. There is no beefcake in this show; there is no over-the-top drag queen. There are only ordinary LGBTQ+ people who have developed a love for each other. How refreshing!         Leasho Johnson’s “Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning” at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery has a completely different aesthetic from Cruz’s. But he addresses the same topic—being LGBTQ+ in a Latino subculture—this time, a Jamaican one. Most obviously, the pieces appear to all be loosely rendered abstractions with biomorphic shapes in very muted tones of beiges and with lots of black. It turns out that this style purposefully disguises content. In nearly every painting, there is a couple hidden among the loosely rendered vegetation, just waiting to be discovered. In a few, such as Like a Deep Breath Held and Held, the presence of the couple is easily discerned and occupies the center of the image. But gender is ambiguous. The taller one is probably male, judging from its height and slimness, but the gender of the smaller figure is not clear. The couple seem to be embracing next to the sea in the dark. This piece, which is placed early in the exhibition, for me, sets the tone for the show. It reminds me of the lyrics from Rogers and Hammerstein’s The King and I: “We kiss in a shadow, We hide from the moon, Our meetings are few, And over too soon.”           There are two paintings in the show which are nearly mural sized: The Centipede under Two Skies (Anansi # 27) and The Man Disguised as Night (Anansi #29). Both of these paintings’ titles refer to Anansi, “a Ghana Akan folktale character associated with stories, wisdom, knowledge, and trickery, most commonly depicted as a spider,” according to Wikipedia. In The Centipede under Two Skies (Anansi # 27), there is a row of chairs with protruding human