Chelsea versus Lower East Side? Press Review New York Observer
Raoul De Keyser at David Zwirner Gallery and Sarah Crowner at Nicelle Beauchene
Another open rectangle, this one tall and thin like a dressing mirror, stands on a white floor defined by another black line, leaning against what looks like a wall, except that in the upper part of the painting what ought to be that wall’s corner seems to have fallen down. This small conflict neither creates the optical dissonance you’d expect if it were more blatant nor shatters the Euclidean room completely, though a shallower space of overlapping shapes or interlocking lines is also possible. It doesn’t break anything—it merely bends. Instead of pushing his Platonic shapes and well-polished painterly techniques in new directions, Mr. De Keyser gently pulls at them, creating space, like the God of the Kaballah, through recession.
This vacant new space isn’t large: it has room for only a formal allusion to natural colors—grass green, sky blue, solar reds and yellows—and a few spectral lines and angles, which combine in delicate movements that are difficult to see. In No Title (8 Verticals/5), where vertical lines of yellow cross horizontal streaks of black, one thicker black line could be the horizon, but the rest remains unformed and void. In No Title (8 Verticals/6), seven sketchy red lines could be bloody fingermarks descending the canvas, or fiery spirits rising up, but they aren’t yet either: they’re in an amorphous state that precedes decision.
The most defined shape is a circle. In No Title (8 Verticals/7), an open circle of blue-on-red—a rigorously constructed ultramarine—inhabits a pale, blushing void, while in No Title (8 Verticals/8), a red disc is protected by a white buffer and incomplete black border from a darker, area of pink. In Falling Balls, white-on-white circles float in a different, red-bordered room; in The Failed Juggle, they burn red like a rash; and in two cases they even join with thick black lines to make vermicular, Munchlike figures. But the appeal of the circle—in addition to the reference to Zen painting—is that it’s the least definite of definite shapes, the best way to render substance without form.
In Double Crossing (8 Verticals/4), an arrow the color of dried blood, made of two lines that don’t quite meet in a point, crosses to the right, while another arrow, this one a mere shadowy darkness in the white void, crosses to the left beneath it, making a pair of guillemets collapsed together: the only thing being said is that something is being said.
The opposite of Mr. De Keyser’s ambiguous, gestural minimalism—bearing in mind that opposites, in dreams, are often unities—might be the younger artist Sarah Crowner’s “Acrobats” at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. Ms. Crowner sews together canvas and linen—painted, raw, and dyed—in sharp, paper-cutout shapes and bright colors to make theatrically cheerful abstractions of deceptive transparency.
A set of Matisselike painted wooden maquettes, caught halfway between sculpture and set design, set the stage for three untitled pieces of increasing size and complexity: a single sewn-up canvas painted in gouache; a related diptych; and a set of six canvases hung in one kinetic line.
The horizontally symmetrical diptych combines black, white and gray triangles into a pattern that looks like a stylized perspective exercise, or a close-up on a man’s stiff collar—and with six large triangles all pointing to the inch of blank wall between them, they’re very hard to look into. It’s hard not to imagine them further apart and framing something else. The accompanying single piece, which duplicates the right panel (with a slight variation of color), makes it easier to see the sophistication of design. But even there, your eyes begin moving around before you have a chance to think. If Mr. De Keyser subverts the viewer’s vision, Ms. Crowner co-opts it: she moves you along with a deftly artificed ease that makes trying to stop feel as futile as looking for typos in David Copperfield.
The six canvases, also untitled, are of varying widths but all the same height, and constitute a single piece. Beginning with sky blue and a white swoop curving rapidly up into a yellow bar, the piece moves through broad curves and shallow angles, black blocks, gray skies, white arrows and white swoops again, with what can only be called poetic or musical devices—the structured repetition of themes and motifs—to a red-and-green coda that bounces you back to the beginning again.
The work’s generically modern looks borrow—as Andrew Russeth recently wrote about in these pages—from earlier 20th-century artists by way of the theater, but their looks, considered statically, aren’t the point. Their looks are only a means, because what they also borrow from the theater—and what is far more subversive than any amount of physical deconstruction of the painting—is the pragmatism of entertainment. This dynamic, six-part series knows what it means, but it doesn’t care, so long as the viewers continue watching.
editorial@observer.com
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