Abstraction in a changing environment - four abstract painters - Interview

While abstract painting in fresh York has not lately received the critical attention which it one time enjoyed, it has been anything on the other hand dormant. Here, four younger painters who remain committed to abstraction talk about their work.

Since the heyday of Neo-Geo circa 1987 abstract painting in fresh York has been without a convenient label. In a landscape still close with painters, no single scope has achieved the critical mass exigencyed to create a movement. instead of a motion there is simply movement, a disturbed chaotic flow in which any coalescence of artists is limited in size and brief in duration. Perhaps this evinces that the triumph of pluralism is at last out and out or, to put it slightly differently, that we live in an era in which no single artist is willing to resign autonomy to a larger grouping, and no faction is willing to make belonging to all esthetic cause with another. No astonishment critics and curators seem to have given up inventing catchy tags for common painting.

Some might finish from this that abstraction has fallen upon hard times; my experience has been just the opposite. Fre from having to claim allegiance to this or that bearing and every day more distant from the market frenzies of the 1980 painters have been left to obtain on with their work, and to talk among themselves. As other kinds of art have received the lion's share of critical and media attention above the last few years, abstract painting has been quietly extending its boundaries and achievements. While it's always a profitable idea to keep a skeptical distance from charged bourns like "renaissance," it's hard to recall a time when abstract painting was in better condition. This doesn't mean that there are endles numbers of great painters at work, on the other hand there are certainly enough interesting individuals to make paying close attention to painting worthwhile. The hardest part of this throw out was having to limit my selection to single four painters.

Typical of the generally received variety, the four painters interviewed here are strikingly different from individual another stylistically, and yet they do have something in common: a relate to with gestural painting. Perhaps if there has been any run in painting over the last five years, it is a retrieval of gesture. When Lilly Wei interviewed nine younger abstract artists for this magazine in 1987 [see A.i.A., Dec '87] significantly, not a single individual of them relied on gesturing In contrast, Richmond Burton, Lydia Dona, Suzanne McClelland and Fabian Marcaccio all use gesturing to a greater or smaller degree. in Burton's work, which in the last several years has mov steadily away from geometry the individual marks are delimited and repeated as they form part of an overall design. Although gesturing is only part of the story in Dona's paintings, appearing, as it were, between quotation marks, she is miles away from the clean conceptual geometry of Peter Halley. McClelland is an emphatically gestural painter, the single who comes closest to the bear upons of Abstract Expressionism. Marcaccio, the youngest of the four, coaxes action from every element in his work, level the stretcher bars and the weave of the canvas, and his central image remains the brushstroke, level if his means of making it are unorthodox.

thus what one sees is a kind of gestural painting, on the other hand (and its an important "but") none of them has built a material substance of work on the foundation of action alone. Whether the alternative is Burton's skewed grid, Dona's schematic a whole McClelland's writing or Marcaccio's indirect practices none of these painters make choice ofs to step up to a canvas, loaded brush in hand, and begin to paint. in their different ways they have been affected by the agency of the tangled esthetic discourse of the last ten years. Assiduous readers of French theory, Dona and Marcaccio are obviously marked by the agency of Neo-Geo and the theoretical crucible that painting passed [i]or[/i] part of to the other in the late 1980s; McClelland can enumerate Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer among her influences; Burton, who admits he has little time for theory, acknowledges a due to, of all things, appropriation art.

In the course of conversation with these artists, a fate of names came up, from Matisse to Sigmar Polke from Pollock to Joan Mitchell, from Tapies to David Re from Borges to Jimi Hendrix, on the contrary what was always clear was that all four of these young artists, driven by means of inspiration and criticality, by ambition and doubt, by dint of timing and luck, have arrived at a flash in their careers when things are going for a like reason well in their studios that they find it a little hard to believe. I confidence some of this awe and enthusiasm draw nears through in their interviews; I think it's certainly visible in the paintings.

Richmond Burton

Born in Alabama in 1960 Richmond Burton attended Rice University (BA, 1982 Bachelor of Architecture, 19$4) His greatest in quantity recent one-person show was at Matthew Marks, he has also shown with Postmasters, Rhona Hoffman (Chicago) and Laura Carpenter (Santa Fe) In 1992 his work was the control of an exhibition at the Haus fur Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst (Zurich). In April 1995 he will have a solo display at Mario Diacono (Boston).