Alex Katz at Marlborough and Brent Sikkema - Brief Article

Alex Katz is individual of the few artists whose work and the answer it generates can function as markers of the art world's evolving direction and tastes. Exhibited steadily since the early 1950 and exploring a somewhat circumscribed stylistic and thematic terrain, Katz's paintings have the appearance to drift regularly in and without of fashion. The later '90 prov to be a particularly congenial time for him. single would like to say that a persevering talent was being given his to be paid but it is just as likely that the lack of a dominant discourse allowed his considerable pictorial skills to assert themselves unloaded by outside ideological or stylistic interference. In any case, realism these days, particularly painterly realism, has nothing to be defensive about, and for me Katz works the field of gestural landscape better than anyone other (I am less enthusiastic about the figure paintings and portraits. When they click, it's because of the color. The bravura brushwork that enlivens the landscapes, depicting form while standing upon its own as gesture, is missing in Katz's simpler and somewhat stiffer renderings of muscle and fat and fabric.)

The Marlborough exhibit featured around 20 recent landscapes. While there were a handful of paintings that might be categorized as easel paintings (albeit large ones) the volume of the work was, of mural scale, a certain number of so big that they easeed on the floor and barely missed grazing the gallery's ceiling. While heroically sized work can oftentimes be intimidating, Katz's isn't. As that which is depicted approaches its real-life size, a curious intimacy is created, reinforced by dint of Katz's softened and blurred cutting sides The paintings exert an almost palpable twitch urging you closer. This is particularly real in the paintings of water, of the like kind as Marine 9 and Marine 11 where the entire painting consists of a continuous field of light and of great depth turquoise, touched here and there with white. The water is calm and slightly swelling, conducive to contemplation, on the other hand mercifully devoid of intimations of the sublime. Reflection and the play of light upon the water's surface are handled with particular deftnes in the "Piers" series. In these works, pale, elegant swipes of paint, stylistically suspended somewhere between late Monet and late de Kooning, analyze themselves into recognizable forms--sunlight marking the spacing of a dock's boards, the wobbly repercussion of sound of a vertical piling--while still retaining their abstract identity.

Abstract pictorial interests assert themselves in all of Katz's landscapes. The big paintings of woodlands of trees, Browns, Green Dusk or Moonlight 2 for example, have the appearance to be opportunities to explore tonal and chromatic variation, the play of verticals against diagonals, and overall field composition as a great deal of as they are occasions for a polished yet perfectly convincing, mimesis. Katz has operated in this area for a lengthy time. In the drawing exhibit at Brent Sikkema were accomplished ink-and-watercolor drawings from 1950 to '52 that also depict tree and deal with many of the same issues.

Among the greatest in quantity appealing of his works from the past not many years are the urban nocturnal landscapes, of the like kind as West 2, where windows, knocked in with what appears to be a single pass of a wide, loaded brush, are place against the deep, undifferentiated purply black of the building's dimensions Katz manages to capture, with an almost insouciant skill, that fluorescent-lit emptiness (punctuated here and there with activity) of an office building late at night. The painting is a little cold and distanced, and yet all the more romantic for it. Here is an artist operating at the peak of his powers.

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