Josh Smith @ Luhring Augustine

Josh Smith, known for exploiting his name as the starting point for abstract paintings, explores the ways that an object might generate images at Luhring Augustine. His objects: a crumpled oak leaf, a fish, and his previous oeuvre. Some panels are painted in mindless redundant decoration, while others turn out to be reproductions, lossy print-outs on legal-sized paper and reassembled to his consistant scale.

There are pages from his previous catalogs embedded (hinting at some of the art-career/identity content). The print-maker mentality of serial production generates issues, like commerce and artist role, to talk about. Smith contends with many ideas, but let's move the reading from within social and economic structures to a more basic language structure.

We are talking about invention here. We are looking at the thought of invention, attempting, even, to see that thought before it develops into something of its own. Smith doesn't give us a grand sense of the Source (no trace of Barnett Newman here), he gives us something less precise, less iconic and more demonstrative, than a zip. But I wouldn't mistake him for the crass slacker that a first glance suggests.

To take one angle of his work, his subject matter, we can see a development from the name paintings to these leaves and recycled pictures. He gives us a useless image, in muddy colors, with no thought to the future. The reproductions are an armature for another go at it. He works off of old ideas and empty ideas, and he appears to work mindlessly. The dumbness preserves the source, and the image never takes over. I am not talking about simply meaningless painting. I am talking about a continual reflection on the act of deciding to make a picture, never letting the picture fully develop, and capturing the moment again and again, so that it crystallizes. He chooses the easy to depict, and he works in the opposite direction from symbol–a reduction from cultural to natural. It is dumb and funny, and it is also profound.

This show comes down on March 14.

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.

David Schutter @ Sikkema Jenkins

In this show, David Schutter remakes Watteau and Constable pictures, to scale, from memory. At least this is the premise. His palette of ashy oils suggests the murkiness of memory, but they also suggest that mimesis is not his objective, rather, the opposite. Schutter takes a picture as his model and distills it, reducing it to pure subjectivity. Depiction evaporates, leaving only self-aware mark-making. As he transfers the task of assembling a picture to his viewers, and makes Constable transparent, one may entertain a notion of him as a hybrid of Cecily Brown and Robert Ryman. The viewer must sink or swim in his luscious mud, and, along the way, reflect on what Schutter enables painting to say.

Until February 21 at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

John Baldessari @ Marian Goodman

We don't know who these fragment eyebrows belong to. In the few pieces that offer a partner image (a hand of cards, a tuxedo collar, etc.) we don't know the story either. What we do know is that these pieces are bold, strange, and abstract. Most of the work extends from the wall, is irregularly shaped, and employs photography and paint together. We know that Baldessari enjoys giving us limited information (like filling figures or faces with flat colors in a film still). We may assume that these pictures pose a question about identity. They also press the question of their own identity as hybrid art objects. As Baldessari travels deeper into his deceivingly simple art practice it becomes less obvious to glean all of what might be out there, but as promised (tongue in cheek) in 1971, he is decidedly not making boring art.

At Marian Goodman until 10 January.

Terry Winters @ Matthew Marks

Terry Winters makes sketchbook diagrams of topological knots on larger-than-life canvases. He builds them in negative space; he works directly and he buries them; they are both ordered and random. While Winters holds science as subject, he delivers paint as content. He does not simply describe his idea. He paints his engagement with how to describe.

At Matthew Marks until 24 January.

Stephen Westfall @ Lennon, Weinberg

Confining his efforts to within geometric abstract ideas, Westfall plays with color and optics in context of landscape/real-world ideas. The slightly mis-aligned boxes in a picture like Looking West are moves uniquely his own. Westfall teases the expectations one might have of this kind of minimalist work––work that is so restrained that there appears to be little room available for surprises––and he avoids tautology. In this way, his subtle decisions bring heightened charm within his deceivingly limited game. At Lennon, Weinberg until December 20.

Lari Pittman @ Gladstone Gallery

The paintings of Lari Pittman, on view now at Gladstone Gallery, are reflections on transience in a style unto his own; he may be enamored by a great many things in painting, but his graphically rendered work severs superficial or stylistic ties to the history of painting. Pittman refers to vanitas, a 17th century Dutch still-life genre as a significant influence, while visually he conjures associations with stained glass, textiles, batik, and glossy illustration. Arrangements of kettles, chickens, and humble people, float in his compositional grids. Pittman uses white paint both for re-grounding (to lay on new transparent layers) and also as a primary drawing color. He spills linear webs of paint over the pictures, unifying compositions with flattening single-colored strands, sometimes delaying the reading of the picture as still life. Some of the larger paintings hold out in their complexity for quite some time as his subjects emerge and the busy picture plane gives way into the shallow stage where tight tonal registers and busy mark making demand long (and splendid) untangling. Until November 30.