Santa Fe (and Tucson) Art in Review
Winter under Snow
Edgy landscapes (by Andrew Lenaghan, right), modernist paintings, brightness out of Nicaragua, the glorious Jay De Feo.It's getting to be spring, supposedly. I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, while planning to head east for the suite of fairs titled Armory, Pulse, Scope, Volta, the Art Dealers show, while planning to burn shoe leather going from 12th Avenue and 55th to West Street and Houston to East 67th (don't remind me, it's nuts), I decided to go back through my photo files of art shows I've seen between intervals of blizzard in New Mexico this winter. Here are the highlights. Take that.
Andrew Lenaghan of Brooklyn spent time in Santa Fe capturing contemporary landscapes. Shown at William Siegal Gallery, Santa Fe. He's also shown Small Paintings of Brooklyn at George Adams Gallery, New York, like F Train over the Gowanus Canal (right). A 44-year old contemporary realist, he got a BFA from Cornell (where Susan Rothenberg went) and a MFA from Brooklyn College. I like the freshness of this vision and the quite excellent painting technique.
Three New Mexico modernists now visible at LewAllen Galleries (Palace Avenue location) include Douglas Denniston, protege of transcendentalist Raymond Jonson. Denniston was born in '22 (died 2004), roughly the year Ray Jonson started thinking abstraction. It was Denniston to whom Jonson bequeathed his University of New Mexico teaching post in 1952; Denniston had first showed at the Jonson Gallery as one of Eight Young Artists in '50. The abstraction of Jonson's protege, like that of his master, are so symbolist that they appeal to the human desire to identify form as fill in the blank: a thunderbolt, lumpen hills in a row, a chamisa colored dagger, a red streak like the signature red pumice approaching La Bajada pass, red an interval in the landscape, yellow its eternal underskirt.
In Tucson, Eric Firestone Gallery has mounted a show called Warhol from Dylan to Duchamp. Leaving aside that judging by Warhol auction success last spring everything Warhol is market teflon -- that is market forces slip away from it igniting greenback alchemy--I like this Bob Broder image for its hunched Andy outside (I ask you, how often?) wearing hat inspired by Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps. Next to him is cowboy Joe Dallesandro. They had come out west in '68 to film Lonesome Cowboys. Back in New York Andy moves the Factory. This picture I imagine was taken before he was shot (by gun) by Valerie Solanas in '68. Other photographers in this show include Cecil Beaton. Wow.
Belgian painter Dirk de Bruycker moved part-time to Nicaragua many years ago. His palette altered to reflect the rubylith of a more Kool-Aid redpink than the redblue that I have enjoyed in the painting shown in my house below. We traded an essay for a painting years back. In mine, a saint, I am not calling to memory which one, dances in a field umber and dark, much like entering a dim cathedral at the instant enough light penetrates to reveal the jig of the figure. In De Bruycker's newer work the lavishness of color contributes to the painting's having grown as if purposely, fulltime, backlit.
This photograph by Jay De Feo comes from a recent show held at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, by special arrangement with the estate of Jay De Feo. The Whitney Museum still plans a retrospective for this artist whose talent across media continues to astonish me. Not long ago I came across, in real life, a vacuum cleaner similar to one she had photographed. It made me so happy. It belongs to a friend of mine so I plan to photograph it soon and will show it to you.
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