COLOR RUSH: THE PAINTINGS OF BERNHARD BUHMANN

March 24, 2020 COLOR RUSH: THE PAINTINGS OF BERNHARD BUHMANN "Twister" (2019), Oil on canvas, 78 x 57 inches, When Clement Greenberg first espoused the notion of flatness in art, he never suspected it might find its most ideal model in computer screens, which can display color in a pure form unadulterated by the marks of gesture or the illusion of depth. This was decades away from his knowledge. One can trace the paintings of Bernhard Buhmann at Marinaro Gallery all the way back to Barnett Newman, Al Held, and Morris Louis. Hiis painterly constructions achieve a hybrid state in which a sort of lackadaisical geometric layering meets a subtle anthropomorphism aided by his titles. The paintings take two sizes, one nearly monumental and the other intimate. Of his larger paintings, I chose Twister and The Chatterbox, 2019, both with oil on canvas, measuring 79 by 57 inches. Buhmann has an esthetic affinity for the proscriptive appeal of right angles, especially as they can be used to delineate borders and peripheries creating spatial tension, into which he can then introduce pictorial motifs that create, despite the overall flatness of application, an impression of layering and depth. His titles add context and humor to the viewer’s experience. In Twister we have a large painting measuring nearly six feet across by nearly seven feet. The large bands of strong color that encircle it originate near its lower center with burgundy so dark it’s nearly black; and moving clockwise in a rapturous almost serpentine fashion, it alternates to red, orange, and yellow. At the center, which is painted separately, with a faded lighting, is a checkered field, like a tablecloth or tiled floor. Buhmann likes to lend his painted constructions a degree of entity or agency, so here he adds a pipe, two feet, and one hand, all minimally depicted, as if by afterthought. The Chatterbox is organized not in a circular fashion but has plates of distinct colors stacked one atop the other, as if to imply the superficial characterization of this particular portrayal. This character also has feet and a pipe, but the color plates are organized so as to give a face to it that is more overtly depicted. One eye of green stares directly at the viewer, while the other, of blue, droops, as if closed or looking askance. Below the eyes the mouth area is also in green, and a mouth sticks open, as if in continuous chatter, a thin line of orange giving it a macabre appeal similar to Phud from The Beatles’ cartoon extravaganza “Yellow Submarine” (1968).

Of the two examples that exemplify Buhmann’s smaller paintings, there are Model S and Mad Man, both with Oil on canvas, measuring 27 ½ by 16 ⅛ inches; one from 2019, the latter from 2020. These are even more visually complex. The first has more sections, and its not meant as a person but a vehicle, with wheels below where feet usually are. Despite this effort it still comes off as implying an entity of sorts, although that is perhaps more a product of perception. It’s inherently difficult to give ourselves over to pure matter except when we have no choice. If we can project some semblance of our own proprietary agency, we will. Therefore a window becomes an eye, a wiper becomes an arm; and a light shining from within becomes intelligence or mere consciousness. Either way it is beautifully painted with shades of sky blue, turquoise, purple, grey-green, and umber all denoting separate areas or constituent parts.

Mad Man does the most with the least detail and the most amount of mood. We have another wheeled figure, separated into upper and lower hemispheres, a solid real green below, and above globular forms at the midsection which could either imply eyes or breasts, we have a progressively fading degree of the same color, suffused by an aura of pinkish orange, creating a tension between a very male color associated with military khakis or lockers in barracks, and one that is more associated with women’s makeup or colorful summertime clothing. As the dark area fade upwards, they lose all hardness, and at the top is a pinkish sun gazing down.

Buhmann’s characters, if they are to be seen as such, are in a way Miroesque, appearing at first like abstract fields of color that transform into complex visual constructions replete with areas that fade and evolve into other colors, creating a narrative of mood within a single figure. The peripheral details that fill them out into discrete entities serves to make them altogether more ambiguous. In Buhmann’s universe hard edges contain colors that dictate behavioral responses, and when they are less hard, or made more pictorially ambivalent, they slacken to allow the viewer control in the pleasure of their perception.

Ann Kraus | Above and Beyond

Impressionistic events in nature naturalistically depicted and those surreally suggesting natural events are the dual streams in Ann Kraus’s work in Above and Beyond. The relationship between these modes of expression rests upon an amorphous middle ground stylistically and formally sourced. Form originates from actual iterations that structure and compound inspiration.

There’s a broad range to Kraus’s depictions of the sky. The artist has traveled, and with her she has always taken her fascination with the boundless upper reaches. She sketches them endlessly but also employs a camera to document a sequential engagement with her subject matter, so as not to miss out on especially choice impressions. It’s in the active and the after-the-fact engagement that her subject reveals itself. The implicit rendering of nature not specifically circumscribed by the departure point of a physical landscape into realms of cloudscape are at the heart of Kraus’s work. Nature is open to as much interpretation as the will finds possible. The print allows for a certain finality of gesture that gives presence to the immense force at hand in the natural event without the illustrative stagecraft in picturing each cloud system, the greater sky around it, and the ocean or land close by. It is compared to painting a view through a microscope rather than a dramatic projection in a theater, though in no way less sublime. In choosing the elements that she does, Kraus achieves a series of elliptical moments that range from tender to expansive. One can read a single impression into these images or one can wander esthetically around each one, seeking alternate impressions, allowing each one its power to affect over others.

Above is contextually idealistic. The artist’s intimation that the viewer, like herself, should “look up” suggests a willingness to commit ourselves to a higher aesthetic, and whether that translates to images or to beliefs, it’s still provisionally indicative of a willfully altered state of mind. Humanity spent a millenia looking up, so it’s nothing intrinsically new, but to encourage our sense of wonder is an important artistic role to which Kraus happily submits. It makes me think of the famous quote from Hamlet, when encountering the skull of his father’s former court jester, he so solemnly states “There’s more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy!” Though with far less bathos, Kraus interprets this edict as a means of freeing the mind from its petty everyday minutiae to enjoy the clouds above.

By comparison, Beyond is introspective and cerebral, immersing the viewer in a universe of interior meaning that embodies neither an idealism nor its absence or opposite. The details in each work from this series are generally less important as sensory indicators. Each image is like a petri dish where all the myriad as yet unobserved matters of a teeming life are unveiled. Looking beyond is not merely an indicator as to the augury of the mysterious, but an option to examine with deft attention the activity of essential materials.

Ann Kraus is a portrayer of ineffables. Her paintings of clouds and her abstract prints both skirt the edges of what is traditionally considered proper subject manner. She is not just depicting what is there, but is denying the importance of more prosaic and provisional subjects, such as everyday scenes of domestic or workaday life, or those in which the body, clothed or nude, as a connection between artifice and our personal narratives. Her scenes have no people in them, they depict places with no structure but that which the viewer can bring to them. We are invited in one circumstance to join her in reading clouds, seeing the same symbolic story she lived. In the other, we are given keyholes that look out upon a greater universe, in a medium not normally given to causality. It’s important to consider not merely the symbolic or speculative quality of her work, but how formal accomplishments allow the works to demand more or us. The complete oeuvre represented in “Above and Beyond” is easily more than the sum of its parts, because their combination does not create a resulting theory or solution to answer all plausible questions, but alternately confronts the sources of inspiration and the products of the imagination. They coalesce together, alternating between the seen and the perceived. Both of them enlarge what we understand as the definition of “having an experience” and the knowledge they access for us, though not immediately quantifiable, is no less important for that fact. Together they set the mind dancing on the edge of its next range of questions.

Elisa Johns "Ghost Flower" at Gates of the West for Art Quips Blog

Elisa Johns’ current body of work presents us with paintings of ‘pretty flowers’—not effusive bunches ornately arranged, but lonely little boughs almost accidentally discovered, that proclaim their idiosyncrasy. She photographs them while on regular hikes amid the peaks and vales of the Sierra Nevada’s, a 70-mile wide by 400-mile long range of mountains crossing the length of the state of California, a vast landscape reminiscent of the early pioneer era in American history. Despite this dramatic backdrop, lush with historical reference, and bounding with breathless vistas, Johns makes little discoveries that she documents photographically and then works out her compositions from the photographs.

Johns has a penchant for the uncommon growth, although the chances she may have had to encounter these plants in areas where they are most common may have been aided by a bit of homework and an aptitude for looking in unusual latitudes—areas previously scorched by fire, where vernal pools have formed, or within the dense undergrowth of birch trees, where little sunlight penetrates—to find unique and hidden beauty is a talent. A certain emotional emancipation from the struggles of everyday life is afforded by the languorous pastime of gazing at beautiful flowers. Yet a difference exists between a public garden and a mountain range. Johns is not interested in pure escapism, but in finding aesthetic moments that are tied to subjects with specific background roles in nature. The photographs distill their subject into an expressive microcosm of the natural world. Johns’ aesthetic register is bound on one side by veracity in context and on the other by an all-pervasive sublime. Johns’ newest work reinvents and reinvigorates her inspirational wellspring.

“There is something precious in Johns’ depiction of these images, in which the fleeting quality of sensory associated pleasure commingles with elements of its opposite: random occurrences of danger, as in the poison, associated predation and violence, of a rattlesnake’s bite

Though no humans appear in her newest series, they possess the intensity of a sensory moment as an instance of lived experience, receiving the images she uses of plants and animals as characters in their own right. She frames the central flora figure with diffuse colors to replicate the shimmer of petals in sunlight; presents them as frozen or floating in an overwhelming void of whiteness; and she brings out the nuanced line, gesture, and chromatic elements that make each of her forms idiosyncratically human. Part of the appeal and power of such artfully simple images as Fireweed and Western Rattlesnake is their spirit of innocence, which is an element in our earliest comprehension and construction of dimensions of beauty as presented by nature. There is something precious in Johns’ depiction of these images, in which the fleeting quality of sensory associated pleasure commingles with elements of its opposite: random occurrences of danger, as in the poison, associated predation and violence, of a rattlesnake’s bite. But really, the opposite of beauty is the sublime, a beauty couched in elements that overwhelm us. The framing of her subjects within a void of whiteness achieves this. This whiteness is the limit of memory, an arc of recognition that allows only certain things to enter, but not the entire environment. What draws our attention is therefore connected to us not merely on a sensory level but attaches to the unconscious, becoming mythical. Johns has made such a repeated study of her favorite wildflowers that they have become archetypes, characteristic of different aspects of her personality. Her Fireweed says, here I have survived a great calamity, and I breed in great numbers. Limnanthes claims, I am reborn from unknown sources, inhabiting a wet and fecund place where small things grow to feed larger things. And with Ghost Flower, I grow in darkness. I feed on indirect light. I am solitary yet I cannot live alone. I connect to larger structures to maintain myself.

The beauty of Elisa John’s wildflowers is tied specifically to their role in the overall landscape, elements within which the random yet devoted hiker, even one with artistic motivations, would find a rich context. To be “wild” is not to exist without purpose. Nature itself is a complex weld of systems. Human beings tend to assume that any exigency amid them exists for their own designs, such as foraging among these flowers for food, or to create useful items such a baskets; but nature exists to perpetuate itself, and Johns’ depiction of these smallest and most beleaguered elements of a vast natural landscape gives agency to the unknown forces behind them. Johns humanizes them without reducing their power over us.