Seductive non-objectives at Mother
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I’ve always thought of non-objective art as an especially challenging type of abstraction that doesn’t rely on a visual relationship to the world for meaning. Rather, it conveys meaning through metaphor, material choices, and processes. Sometimes text is incorporated, and, in painting, color and compositional selections play important roles. But the underlying ideas are equally important. Non-objective artists like to mull and ruminate, creating work that gives the viewer something to not only experience but also to think about. In “I am the Passenger” a two-part group show at Mother Gallery in Beacon, NY, artist-curators Paola Oxoa, Trudy Benson, and Russell Tyler articulate two key aspects of non-objective approaches. One is the relationship that non-objective art has with the body – sight, touch, and proximity. The second is the mysterious ability of materials – through texture, shape, and color – to “stir something” that is both personal and universal, as the stars and the sky do in the passenger of Iggy Pop’s eponymous song. The work in the second part of the project, now on view, focuses on this uncanny allure.
Russell Tyler is known for his limited-palette abstractions that riff on earlier artists like Josef Albers and Mark Rothko. His composition, which looks like an enlarged section of an Illustrator object or a detail from a larger piece, perhaps by an admired master. Unlike the thick, all-over brushwork of Mariah Dekkenga’s piece, Tyler’s paint application varies by shape. Some areas feature strokes made with a wide, fully loaded brush, stressing a range of material choices that seem to urge viewers to touch the surface. On top of the texture, Dekkenga, long interested in computer-generated imagery and digital processes, paints a design that conjures a Cubist-Dada object-space, with abundant illusions of light and shadow. The painted shape playfully echoes the edges of the shaped support.
Seth Cameron’s work relies on time, proximity, and vision. If at first you don’t see anything but a deep purple monochrome, move closer and keep looking. Interesting details emerge.
Susan Weil’s “Yellow Soft Circle,” from 1990, is a paradox. The playfully shaped yellow canvas appears soft and floppy like a crumpled, oversize sun hat, but in reality it’s crafted from a stiffened circle of canvas. This is one of many pieces Weil has made over the years that explore the plasticity of time and space through shaped and folded compositions.
Lisa Beck also has an enduring fascination with things so infinitely big and faraway, or vanishingly small, that we can’t fully comprehend them. The circular form – subsuming atoms, dots, spheres, voids, cells, stars – is her motif, from the smallest to the largest entity, and especially those that raise knotty questions. Her piece in “I am the Passenger” has a loose overlay of burlap, adding a physical grid – something materially concrete and yet also achingly provisional.
Paola Oxoa‘s tiny canvas seems like a visualization of energy rays as they expand — over time and through space. I wonder what Weil, Beck, and Oxoa will make of news reports that gravitational waves, possibly the result of black holes, detected ten billion light-years away, are generating ripples in space-time?
For many years, Stacy Fisher was known for making lovable, wonky painted sculptures. Then, during the pandemic, she began making diminutive paintings. The result has been an ongoing body of small-panel pieces that present geometric forms and organic shape with evocative color. Her work, which often incorporates small wooden pieces fastened to the surface, is a prime example of non-objective art that we don’t quite understand but for some reason find irresistible.
Rico Gatson is all about polyrhythmic geometric patterns that seem to pulsate with energy like music. His work has a pronounced and immediate galvanic effect, but it remains difficult to ascertain exactly why.
Tracy Benson’s paintings have always been a lot of fun, using a visual vocabulary she developed from working with early painting software. As she moves playfully between the screen and the surface of the canvas, she nurtures tactile sensations that are only possible with paint.
As the curators propose, non-objective painters intuitively understand that abstract paintings have ineffable capacities to stimulate the senses. It could be characterized as an ability to seduce. In his 2001 book The Art of Seduction, business writer Robert Greene broke the quality into nine somewhat corny but purposefully evocative types: the Siren, the Rake, the Ideal Lover, the Dandy, the Natural, the Coquette, the Charmer, the Charismatic, the Star, and the anti-seducer. As I was considering the work in “I am the Passenger,” I realized that paintings, with a little imagination, fall into similar categories. Representational painters can rely on subject matter and overt narrative to seduce, but non-objective painters must reach viewers first through their bodies, and later through their intellect. In Greene’s analysis, the viewer might be the quarry. Iggy, of course, would simply rejoice.
“I AM THE PASSENGER, Part II,” curated by Paola Oxoa, Trudy Benson, and Russell Tyler. Artists include Lisa Beck, Trudy Benson, Seth Cameron, Mariah Dekkenga, Stacy Fisher, Rico Gatson, Paola Oxoa, Russell Tyler, Susan Weil. Mother Gallery 1154 North Avenue, Beacon, NY. Through July 29, 2023.
NOTE: This piece originally appeared in Two Coats of Paint. I’m not sure where the content of this Substack will go from here, but if you’re curious, please subscribe and see what happens.