ART: LACMA, Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting

"The dichotomy between figuration and abstraction is untenable. All representation is abstract, and all abstraction, no matter how rigorous, is funneled through the language and habits of mind that are representation.  It's not even that one can't have one without the other, but that they are simultaneous."

Helen Molesworth, Exhibition statement

Amy Sillman

Simultaneous funneling?  Sounds like a hydraulics system - the "black box" cognition theory, a mental "push-pull" process of birthing images.  

I love this painting - it looks like an earlier work by the artist, but the color sense is sure and right, and the shapes are at once playful and beautiful, colliding and then erect on the left side of the painting - a no-man's land if one tends to "read" paintings visually from left to right like a text - which I have trained myself not to do.

The idea that all representation is abstract is of course, fundamental to understanding human perception of reality.  "The map is not the territory".  It destroys the "primitive" use of figurative imagery.  Think of all those stone gods worshipped, the "captured soul" perception of portrait photography.

I wish to expand the idea of simultaneity   beyond a linear metaphor and imagine it as a unimaginably dynamic open-ended process involving time, space, somatic perceptions, and mental constructs - like a Julie Mehretu painting come to life, or those exploding images we see at the beginning of movies.

I chose paintings from this exhibit that I "liked" - a "simultaneous" and seemingly pre-verbal process.  For me, finding language to analyze and explain experience, whatever it is, has a desperate, pressured feeling, like being at bat in the ninth inning with 2 out and the bases loaded. 

My liking of them is not merely an intellectual exercise. I love each of these paintings and feel great energy about them and from them that is entirely an emotional response.

Then the struggle begins, to find the words, for they are hiding in those mental caverns that gave me the experience.

Amy Sillman

Oh what colors here - that grey seems to be delivered direct from analytic cubism, but the purple and sly pale yellow slices of color beneath the coffee pot and the lovely violet and lavender blocks to the right of the forms and part of the forms seems to speak to me: I'm perfect here, this is exactly the way it should be - like a Giorgio Morandi does.  All perfect form but exciting directions and finally harmonious balances resolve within and around the volume and mass of shapes.  All flattened illusion.

Mark Bradford

I love this particular Mark Bradford painting - a welcome and recent appointment to the MOCA board - because I am drawn to maps, directionality, and grids. How easy it is to move among the colors here, then halted short by that dark blocky section, then permitted to move around and above it.  I don't wonder what it is.  It's for me to have color, to move in the blocky, accreted directions and be stopped by the "shoreline" of exquisite mint green. 

I think there's something rather retro 50's about the overlapping blocks and their orange color.  How unstable the crazy blocking seems, ready to tumble but never doing so, making for fascinating and repressive energy within and between the forms and colors.

Bradford's body of work is really interesting to view.  His exploration and direction seems so right, yet so fresh.

This last painting I love, but its a very different painting.  The tactility and tonal quality call me to think of Antoni Tàpies, another favorite painter.  How I love that line moving over the rich and hatched surface.  How puzzled I am by the two triangles seeming to quarrel with each other and the painting whether they are below the surface of it or above.  

And that line - free, swinging, yet compressed from the sides of the canvas and the top it seems, forced to slow,curve and turn, pick up speed again, then slow again, until it arrives at a place which concludes the movement, rather like a work of programmatic music - something earthy, like Dvorak. 

The shapes are doughy, and childlike, and the line seems patient and then scribbly. I love the pressures against each other, rhythmic reversals.  At the same time, it's still  flat, a denial of depth and space even as it references it.  Like maps do.