Every new generation of artists, curators, and critics seems to feel the need to defend the painting. It makes sense: paint on canvas, nice for little else, is usually synonymous with big-A Art. The painting represents the angels and demons of art, its optimism and attention, its pride and solipsism.
“The Painter’s New Tools” at Nahmad Contemporary in Manhattan shows how far contemporary artists have advanced in new media without sacrificing the safety of what reads as art. Gathering 57 works by 31 creators, its curators Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick insisted that it is irreversible that new technologies have redefined what painting means, while maintaining that painting remains defined by the search for good things. Trying to hold the same idea at once, the show incorporates a mysterious, ambivalent embrace of tradition, from cottagecore farmlife to Catholicism, practiced by a subset of mostly young, very online culturati. Painting is at stake – and so is a conservative desire for the old avant -garde.
It’s true that painting is technology, and has always been. Just as the invention of oil paint, which dries more slowly than tempera, gave artists a revolutionary set of new effects, the lens and transistor-photography, video, and computer graphics-brought depth, irreversible changes in how artists, and the rest of us, view the world.
Hover brush strokes and vertiginous layering of an emerald Laura Owens canvas reinforce Photoshop techniques. Ei Arakawa’s tribute to Owens hangs nearby: an image of one of his paintings displayed on a low-res tapestry of LEDs. In a cutting-edge anatomical study by video artist Kate Cooper, the camera moves to a digital model of a human body, carved, like Leonardo playing with an MRI machine.
Cayre and Kissick conducted a thorough survey about the ongoing crisis in the identity of painting, whether or not the artists themselves feel they are painting. The show is tied to the concept on the one hand by artists moving from conventional painting to digital territory, and on the other hand by artists making animations and unpainted objects, shoeed in the painting company because they are glued to the wall.
Representing those trying out the new tools was the painter Julien Nguyen, who had a reputation for applying Renaissance techniques to contemporary dialects. Her digital photo of a beautiful teen smoking in the tub removes the brush and palette for an iPad. The massages Nguyen laid on the screen appear on a monitor, installed in the front and middle, as a blur of greasy, like paint marks.
For the latter, there’s Jordan Wolfson’s pixelated print of Dorothy and her Oz companions. The outdoorsy, eaved frame is aggressively styled with hearts, crosses and a Star of David pendant as well as devotional blurs like “Surrender to God.” The words “GOD IS GOD IS GOD IS GOD IS…” creep around the border. Despite the use of no paint, the untitled piece incorporates some of the common themes of the medium: Christian hagiography; tribute to the forerunners (who was Ashley Bickerton, a leading assemblage artist of the ’80’s); and enough logorrheic confidence to make an abstract expressionist blush.
Kissick is a New York critic whose regular column in Spike Art Magazine straddles like a stone between classical and ultramodern-from, say, thinking of a Fragonard to thinking of NFTs ( non-fungible token), all without leaving Frick Madison. Cayre was an independent art consultant who specialized from the 1950s to the present. Both have a stake in the contemporary – what it means to live nownot then.
Freshness is not always progress. Ezra Miller’s “Imago” (2022)-an artist, art director and web developer-is a washy abstraction that evolves in real time on a grid of four monitors that looks like it’s driving towards the rainy Monet when the wiper. A disturbing black cross runs into the center of the picture where the screens meet. Up close, what comes out are not brush strokes but black gaffer’s tape covering the seams. Give me a dusty Rothko in a new-media experiment whose physical presence seems slapped and reluctant.
Speaking of Rothko: “Disc Buddie #4448,” an NFT of Tojiba CPU Corp., shows up on a square screen: a rough, digital cartoon of a thick floppy disk with white hands and dove for shoes , the words “Rothko Maker 2” on its face. NFT projects like this, which generate thousands of unique images by combining sets of attributes, drive the idea that art should be easy and repetitive. Let the old guard moan about the bad taste. This is the “new painting” that even ugly paintings can be a good investment.
Beauty is still possible, of course-the exhibition includes Seth Price’s insane, wall-winning abstraction, which squeezes painterly gestures from industrial processes; Wade Guyton, who painted by abusing inkjet printers; or fine, moiréd surface by Jacqueline Humphries or Anicka Yi. These are among the smart updates of the painting habit to talk to oneself and ignore the wider world. The tone here is devotional, not iconoclastic.
The strange urgency of the age is coughing up in a 2022 photo by Jessica Wilson, “Perfectly Clear”-an almost photorealistic 3-D rendering of a hand drawing a squeegee down a sudsy windowpane. It’s a flat UV print on Dibond and one of the less attractive things on the show. However, its sour composition, our perspective from the outside, the glowing tactic of the blade scraping with soap, remind us that medium is not important. What matters is the primary intent of art to transcend the tasks of living.
New Artist Tools
Until Sept. 24. Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Ave., Manhattan, nahmadcontemporary.com.
