Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for March 2017

Vija Celmins’ Splendor Of Stars

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Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC  
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

A confusion about media is at the heart of Vija Celmins‘ artmaking. In her new show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, are paintings, prints and sculptures, but we soon learn that things are seldom what they seem in Celmins’ art. The paintings and prints are based on photographs made by her, and some of the sculptures are ‘real’ found objects, e.g. stones, writing tablets, that are juxtaposed to mind-boggling “doubles” crafted by the artist. [Read more…]

Frank Romero’s Enchanting Dreamland

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The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream” 
Edgar Allan Poe

“Dreamland,” Frank Romero’s sprawling (like Los Angeles itself), exuberant retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art, is jam-packed with over 200 paintings, monotypes, mixed-media low-relief wall pieces and jazzy neon sculptures. Romero, a founding member of Los Four in 1974 with Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan and Roberto “Berto” de la Roche, came of age artistically in that heady time when identity politics was being shaped. Groups underrepresented in the art world at that time -women, gays and lesbians, Chicanos – all separated into their respective tribes to develop and nurture art that both described and celebrated their unique experience. [Read more…]

The Haunting Of One’s Self: Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1

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Reviewed by John Biscello

“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all of possibilities of time.” — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

One could imagine Borges, who declared that the basic devices of fantastic literature are four-fold—the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double—as personal timekeeper and Virgil-visioned guide to Paul Auster, who for the past half a century has trafficked in existential loops and slipknots, identity crises and vanishing acts. Auster, whether writing fiction or non-fiction, writing in the first person or third person, has always haunted his own writings, sort of as the negative imprint of a splitting point. [Read more…]

When Punk Grows Up: Raymond Pettibon At The New Museum

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A Pen of All Work, at New Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Martin Woessner

I still find it strange that there is a contemporary art museum on the Bowery, but the Bowery is no longer the Bowery. The New Museum is located a block and a half down from a Whole Foods and about three blocks down from where CBGB’s used to be. There’s a John Varvatos boutique there now, selling designer button-downs, vintage vinyl and even—if you have the cash—vintage turntables on which to play said vintage vinyl. I’m sure the framed photographs of the Ramones I spied through the window can be had for the right price as well.

It is impossible to ignore these things when you visit the current, career-spanning exhibition of Raymond Pettibon’s work at The New Museum, A Pen of All Work.  [Read more…]

Belkis Ayón’s Nkame, A Remarkable Retrospective

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Fowler Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman

The recent show at The Fowler Museum, Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, was the first major retrospective of Ayón’s powerful and emotional work in the United States and inarguably one of the most significant exhibitions that opened in Los Angeles last year. Nkame, meaning “greeting” or “praise” in the language of Abakuá, was a welcome homage to Ayón’s signature black and white prints and featured a comprehensive selection of her work never-before shown together outside of Cuba. [Read more…]

Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Gypsy Camp

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at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Robin Scher

“When we think we know art, what is it that we know?”

This is a question posed by the Cuban-born artist Enrique Martínez Celaya in his book, On Art and Mindfulness: Notes from the Anderson Ranch. It is just one of the many philosophical provocations Martínez Celaya delivered to his classes during summer workshops held at the Colorado-based art center over the past few years. Walking around Martínez Celaya’s solo exhibition of recent oil and wax paintings, currently on at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery through April 22, it’s also a thought that rhetorically resonates through much of his work. [Read more…]

Dan Herschlein’s Safe As Houses

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JTT Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Michael Hilsman

Dan Herschlein’s current exhibition, “Safe as Houses,” at JTT Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, consists of wall works, sculptures, and works on paper. Situated in the center of the gallery floor is a work titled The Tenant, which, like much of the sculptural work in the exhibition, is made from pigmented wood, plaster, and pigmented joint compound painted in thin washes of milk paint, a type of paint similar to casein and used by early American furniture makers.  [Read more…]

Painting The Elephant In The Room: A Conversation With Justin Lyons

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Justin Lyons is a mixed media artist living in the Florida panhandle. We spoke with him on the eve of his solo exhibition at the Bruce Lurie Gallery in Los Angeles.

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: Before addressing your most recent work, I wanted to briefly touch on a few signature elements in what is considered to be pivotal career pieces, elements which not only define but help flesh out your global visual language. This language, by the way, initially and superficially registers as being quite primitive, even crude, but upon spending time with these pieces it becomes apparent that something more thoughtful and sophisticated is taking place. [Read more…]

When The Imaginary Reader Gets Real

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by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Exploring the writer-reader relationship, whether real or imaginary

“I know it’s happenin’, but who is it happenin’ to? I know it’s happenin’, but who is it happenin’ to? What am I gonna do to wake up? ” cries Kate Tempest, the UK wunderkind, into an imaginary cellphone.  On the largest stage of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017, she is performing her work Let Them Eat Chaos, part one- woman play, part rap, part poetry. Gutsy, gusty, genuine, she paints with brilliance and poignancy the world of anguished young Brits: “He can’t tell, he can’t dream, he can’t feel, he can’t scream … And he thinks, Is this really what it means to be alive?” But the packed audience of young Indian people knows without the shadow of a doubt who it is happening to and what it means to be alive: they feel only too urgently their desire for a better life, a better India. Still, they clearly appreciate the passionate lament, and with open minds try to understand the strange, frumpy woman plodding the stage. [Read more…]

From Shangri-La to Hell: Elliott Green’s Human Nature

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Pierogi, New York City
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Elliott Green’s show at Pierogi is an eye-opener. The dozen ambitious canvases exude enormous confidence and verve, and more than most contemporary abstract painting, bring the once-radical genre of abstract-expressionism back to its original roots. While essentially abstract, these works are nothing if not expressive on a purely visceral level, a painted barometer of a roiling subconscious encountering disorienting change. [Read more…]