Painters Louise Belcourt and Justin Margitich and abstracted landscapes

To Be:  Liminal -- how to arrive at this delicate place?
.
"...the liminal spaces of perception"    

What does "liminal" mean?  I thought it has to do with light, illumination that provides perspective. Something elevated, spiritually pure, rational, intentional, unlike its scary opposite, subliminal, with its 50's brainwashing reverb, its paralysis of analytic insight.
Liminal, it turns out, is actually simpler:  

liminal |ˈlimənl| adjective technical 1 relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.2 occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. (New Oxford American Dictionary)

Louise Belcourt, Mound #8, 2015

The word was used about the work of Louise Belcourt, a Canadian artist who lives in urban Brooklyn and rural Canada.  I immediately loved her paintings.  They are easy.  I love her colors. Oh, that pea-soup army green, the delicate lavender, the blackish voids!  They are colors of haute couture fashion, perhaps found on scarves, textiles, or area carpets placed in cool Manhattan high rises.

Lamb's Ear #5, 2016

Blocky shapes pile upwards from the horizon line at the bottom edge of each canvas and coalesce into abstracted vistas. Belcourt utilizes an organic approach to perspective and sophisticated shifts in color to render depth, space, and atmospheric light. The liminal spaces between the tightly packed fields of flatly applied color function as alleyways from foreground to middleground. ... I recognized the images as completely imagined places assembled using the language of landscape painting, rather than relating to the real world around us. (from website artblog: Imaginary Vistas-Louise Belcourt at Locks Gallery)

Belcourt’s paintings explore the intersections between the built and natural world. For her first show at Locks, the artist presents new oil paintings of architectural “mounds” in shifting spatial planes—what she calls “paintings of sculptures of landscapes... her paintings, which blend impressions of the countryside and crisp Canadian light with city rhythms and the blocky architecture of New York City. Belcourt’s imagery evokes forms from prehistoric “mound-builders” to urbanization, while creating a visual language distinct from a purely representational or abstract syntax. ..Using bold colors, radiant light, and dynamic perspectives, Belcourt’s images of tectonic landforms—stacked, occluded, and cascading into foreground and background—meld nature and man-made forms, reflecting an ecological awareness and heightened sensitivity to the world around usJuThe artist employs a directness, physicality, and visual clarity in her paintings that feels increasingly rare in our media-driven digital age. (from Locke Gallery website).

The writer comments that, despite the contemporary palette, the paintings have no references to digital culture.  The painter and the paintings act as visual mediator, cleared of digital processing. 

I guess that makes her a romantic, and possibly irrelevant to contemporary art. I think she's moving wonderfully in the formal issues of painted abstraction, still grounded in earthly splendor.  

We could go for a walk in her paintings, the forms of nature reduced to mounds, meanders, and structures that shift the relation between self and world, like entering a well-proportioned home.   

In painter Justin Margitich's new show, "A New Sublime" at Moskowitz Bayse, the artist seems to embrace digital forms, according to the gallery commentary.  In the painting below, fluid ribbons struggle to escape the clinch of empty and connected "frames",  (television screens, film frames?)     

Justin Margitich
Iridium #3, 2014
Acrylic and colored pencil on paper
24 x 24 inches

 Pieces on panel painted with acrylic, heightened with graphite, express brightly hued linear gradients that both expand and contract in space; works on paper mounted to panel echo the wildly colorful line work, while adding the complexity of organically fluid forms. Across media, the artist’s compositions make use of a world of color that goes far beyond secondary and tertiary while simultaneously resisting muddiness, creating a near impossible balance. Together these paintings present a series of spaces unseen; bizarre and foreign vistas of arcane forms that resonate at once as eerily familiar and strikingly unknowable.
Justin Margitich meditates deeply on natural forms in a digital world. His paintings distill and fracture landscape, creating a formal language that challenges common perception of perspective and logical space. Margitich reconciles vanishing notions of idyllic landscape with our growing reliance on digital technology in a cohesive aesthetic act, creating a new sublime image. (from Moskowitz Bayse website)

Justin Margitich
Variations 15, 2016
Acrylic, watercolor and paper on panel
30 x 22 inches

In "Variations 15", two ovoid globes just begin to touch, the frisson seems to blacken and burn, overlaying the radiant content, like a piece of film burning.

Justin Margitich
Derivation 3, 2016
Acrylic and graphite on panel
36 x 36 inches

"Derivation #3" references light shafts, fractals, or perhaps rockets taking off? Shapes are juxtaposed, overlaid, interwoven. I mistrust myself when I  find such narrative material in painting.  I cringe because I think of all the artists I've heard explain that there's no there there.

And as Steven Alexander explains: discerning meaning in a painting is not the same as reading a narrative. To regard a painting simply as a text is to ignore the extreme complexity and the mystery of non-sequential interactions that take place in the inclusive realm of aesthetic experience. (from his blog post, 5-18-08, "Meaning and Abstract Painting")

Just the casual viewer puzzling through his abstraction encounter, making a guessing game out of enigmatic figure/ground relations.  Not that it's the painter's fault, it seems more a failure of my own perception here. 

Margitich's agenda is formidable - to explore the digital sublime, and resolve it in painting. To me, his paintings remain cool and aloof,incomplete passes at a goal worthy of further attempts.