Marc Handelman @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Marc Handelman provides a lot to chew on. Layers, transfer techniques, cropping, clichés, concealment, found imagery, corporate commentary. How he builds the painting hints at a unique and complicated process.

This show presents a series of sunsets applied to canvas through a transfer technique that leaves empty irregular spaces––wrinkled gaps, like loose folds of fabric––as though they are pressed by a heavily painted trash bag. Although these pressed paintings are not confirmed by the spiked ridges of paint that one might expect from lifting off the painted source. This top-most layer of paint frequently stops an inch or more from the frontal edge of the canvas creating a self-made frame.

Allow me to imagine a progression for Monumental Solutions, pictured above. Handelman might begin with a single canvas primed with gesso to a neat edge along the side of the canvas. Then he paints the hard-edged shapes, thick and smooth, with blue gradations. This painting dries and is unstretched and cut into pieces. He restretches the sections on smaller stretchers. Two of these canvases are fastened edge to edge; on the sides of the bottom canvas the white gesso ground retains the neat parrallel edge around the sides, while the top canvas lets the blue reach all the way around the back. From here the sunset is laid on top.
One has to wonder: what does this process mean to Handelman?

Painting tropes are more accessible in their possible readings. The shattered sunsets concealing the lower geometric layers are elucidated by titles like Tomorrow's Forecast: Strikingly Clear. The sunset standing in for missile explosions, the feathered cracks in the transfers also taking an narrative role. Cliché illusions obscuring self-aware paint, or perhaps an allusion to armegeddon.

The strange thing about this work is that both the techniques of production and the possible symbolism seem to play subsidary roles. But to what? The elusive sense of these pictures leaves an empty feeling. Not for a lack of interesting painting, but a sense that whatever Handelman is not spelling out can't be said anyway.

At Sikkema Jenkins & Co until February 21.