Tomassio Longhi
TOMASSIO LONGHI is a contributor to the Rail.
Photo-Architecture: Diurnal/Nocturnal
By Tomassio LonghiAs one would expect, an eccentric curatorial effort by Joe Masheck is an extension of his impassioned interest in modern photography and architecture. Gathered here is a good synthesis of both— a modest, but nifty exhibit of four younger photographers: Norbert Artner, Johannes Wegerbauer, Tyko Lewis, and Toki Ozaki.
John Duff at Knoedler & Company
By Tomassio LonghiConsidering that reductive form and the exploration of Gestalt psychology are only part of John Duff’s repertoire, the nature of his sculptures does not stem from Minimalism alone.
MARILYN BRIDGES
Markings (Sacred Landscapes)
By Tomassio Longhi
In her recent exhibit Markings (Sacred Landscapes), Marilyn Bridges offers a small survey of photographs she took during her numerous flights over the desolate plains of Peru, Gaza, Egypt, and the vast rain forests of the Yucatán. Looking at the work in sequence, in "Pathway to Infinity" (1979), "Yarn & Needle"(1979), "Nazca, Peru" (1979), and "Arrows Over Rise" (1979), I was reminded of the earth works of Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Richard Long, Michael Heizer, all artists who turned away from the early modernist fixation on primitive painting and sculpture in favor of the monumental organizational patterns of prehistoric culture.
Jonas Mekas and Rosa Valado: A to C Jumpin Over B
By Tomassio LonghiLast year’s two-person exhibit of James Clark and Joan Waltemath at Sideshow was a stunning success. Clark’s weirdly grouped blacklit balloon sculptures made Waltemath’s dense graphite lines and geometric forms on a long vellum scroll eerily smolder and glow.
Wolf Kahn
By Tomassio LonghiA painter whose name has been for the most part identified with landscapes which combine abstraction, representational motifs, and an unusual repertoire of high-key colors, Wolf Kahn has finally revealed to his critics and audience that his distinguished career has had a long and complicated evolution.
Elizabeth Josephson
By Tomassio LonghiThe study of how an individual feature reflects a person’s soul, spirit, or personality is an old concern of artists. However, it is only at the end of the 19th Century and the turn of the 20th Century, with the advent of modern psychology, that artists became more cautious of physiognomic analysis.
Lael Marshall and DeWitt Godfrey
By Tomassio LonghiIn her first solo show, Lael Marshall displays a strong repertoire of motifs derived from daily events, words, signs, or random images and painted them accordingly. Although her painterly language reminds us of Neo-Expressionist painting of the 1980s—I mean, the utilization of unrelated images and recomposing them in a number of disparate stylistic manners—Marshall’s relationship to her work is more intimate in scale and seemingly less extravagant in subject matter: Schnabel, for example, often loaded his work with mythological and historical references.
Williamsburg Bridges Vietnam-Vietnam Now
By Tomassio LonghiMuch of the effort to show works of artists from Vietnam has been rare—especially in New York—but then again the idea of big group shows never quite does justice to a single work by a good artist. Nevertheless, the show at the WAH Center in April 2003 was a worthy effort.
Loren Munk
By Tomassio LonghiLoren Munk is a painter who for quite some time has been engaged in a dialogue between the formal language of synthetic cubism and casual imagery derived from popular culture.
Friends & Mentors The Williamsburg Art and Historical Center
By Tomassio LonghiIn any curatorial effort with regard to a specific theme, it is essential that the works of art chosen appear cohesive as a group. For some time now, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center has repeatedly mounted indiscriminately curated group exhibits.
Cordy Ryman
By Tomassio LonghiIn mediating the on-going dialogue between painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation, Cordy Ryman’s latest exhibit at the Carol Shen, the Packer Collegiate Institute, seems to reveal a certain degree of natural responsiveness to and acceptance of the nature of this rather difficult and unconventional terrain.
GALLERIES
By Tomassio Longhi, John Hawke, and Jennifer CoatesLeslie Brack’s recent show of small oil paintings of collages, entitled Art in America, depicts an idiosyncratic array of images (a Led Zeppelin album cover, a postcard of Miami at sunset, a Gerhard Richter painting) that serve as grounds over which figures, both animal and celebrity, or text, cut and pasted, ransom-note style, are overlaid.
William Bailey
By Tomassio LonghiWilliam Bailey is a curious painter. His work might be seen as a bridge, at least in the tradition of figurative painting, between the old and the modern masters.
Elizabeth Murray
By Tomassio LonghiFrom the very beginning of her career through the monumental retrospective last year at The Museum of Modern Art, Elizabeth Murray has never lost sight of the humanity and dignity of her work.
Robert Ryman
By Tomassio LonghiRobert Ryman is a painter who appeals to me for his sheer peculiarity: practically self-taught, from early on he had the lucidity of mind, and depth of conviction, to proceed in his work with little stylistic evolution.
Cecily Kahn
By Tomassio LonghiCecily Kahn has been committed to the tradition of early American abstract painting for many years.
Yeardly Leonard Elizabeth Dee
By Tomassio LonghiThe tradition of American geometric painters has tended to aspire to a less idealized order of Platonic absolute.
Lee Bontecou: Drawings 1958-1999
By Tomassio LonghiMatisse once said "He who wants to dedicate himself to painting should start by cutting out his tongue." It was the reason de Kooning revered Matisse, for not making an "ism," but rather just making paintings.
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Gerta Conner
By Tomassio LonghiUnreal, give back to us what you once gave: The imagination that spurned and crave —Wallace Stevens
Carroll Dunham
By Tomassio LonghiMeyer Schapiro first met Fernand Léger at his 1935 retrospective at MoMA.
Thomas Nozkowski’s Drawings
By Tomassio LonghiThomas Nozkowski’s small survey of works on paper offers one of the rare occasions to view the work of an artist whose singular strength lies in his total submission to the austere and mysterious resonance of abstract imagery.
Jenny Dubnau
By Tomassio LonghiIn her first solo show at the dealership, curated by Liz Alderman, Jenny Dubnau’s series of large scale portraits is an impressive as any serious or well known figurative painter working today.
Nicolas Carone
A Selection of Works on Paper
By Tomassio Longhi
Nicolas Carone, who turned 88 this year, is a painter who has been reluctant to be categorized as a second generation Abstract Expressionist. His work—while leaning towards the same argument for and against de Kooning’s expressiveness of the then controversial synthesis of the figure and abstraction at the first glance—has in fact far greater affinities to wider sources in art history.
Jasper Johns
By Tomassio LonghiIt has been said that a painter’s “late style,” when old age prevails, is characterized by the coincidence of simplicity of pictorial forms and high ambition.
Jon Kessler: Global Village Idiot
By Tomassio LonghiAfter visiting the monumental retrospective of Dieter Roth sprawling from MOMA to P.S.1, an almost overwhelming revelation for me, Jon Kessler’s carnivalesque installation of new work at Deitch Projects was a fitting continuation.
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Kim Jones
By Tomassio LonghiA great new chapter in Jones’s epic has opened its pages to public view, reminding us that his on-going impulse towards idiosyncratic narrative should be read in its totality.
Glen Goldberg and Richard Van Buren
By Tomassio LonghiThe new installation of the painter Glen Goldberg and the sculptor Richard Van Buren is so harmonious a collaboration that their distinct styles and mediums hardly seem to matter.
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Out of the Picture
By Tomassio LonghiOut of the Picture: Milton Resnick and The New York School Edited by Geofferey Dorfman (Mid March Arts Press) As one would expect, most books written by an author about an artist he adores will likely be lopsided, uncritical, and even indulgent, rhapsodically accepting the artist’s myth. In such cases, few genuine insights into the artist’s oeuvre are forthcoming.
