Painters Painting at Melanie Flood Projects
Installation view featuring Tanner Lind, Untitled 4, 2021 and Erin O'Keefe,Circle Circle Elipse Elipse with Purple Block, 2020; photos courtesy of the gallery.
BY JASON N. LE
In downtown Portland, on the third floor of the Bullier Building is Melanie Flood Projects. Currently, on view is Painters Painting a group show featuring Martha Daghlian, Rose Dickson, Matthew Fischer, Derek Franklin, John Houck, Lila Jarzombek, Erin O’Keefe, Tanner Lind, John Opera, Ofer Wolberger, and Sarah Wertzberger that surveys the action and object-ness of painting. The exhibition’s title references the 1973 Emile de Antonio documentary of the same title. It loosely draws inspiration, offering a sense of context to the artworks that argues for a playful disruption of the notions and considerations of what a painting can be. De Antonio’s Painters Painting is an extensive collection of interviews with New York School Painters active between 1940 to 1970. In the film, canonical figures like Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella give primary accounts from their studios. These firsthand insights help audiences understand the radically American approaches to painting that are discussed today as Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Color Field, and Pop Art, to name a few.
In the years that followed World War II, these movements placed the United States of America as a significant contender in the international art discourse. For perhaps the first time, Americans began to break away from European visions and developed a distinctly, ferociously Modernist understanding of painting (and, subsequently, art) that gave status to artists working in the period to be taken seriously within the art world. Artists and critics during this period were concerned with the successes and shortcomings of American painting and how it should function and be observed. The questions that pressed these artists decades ago have now evolved into something new but not entirely divergent, explored by the featured artists in Painters Painting: What are our expectations of painting, both noun and verb?
The gallery’s architecture is initially considered a directive on how to perceive the works in the exhibition. The installation effectively disrupts any categorical expectation of how to view the artwork. Hung on the trim of the north-facing galley windows are San Marco, 2022, and Pure Colour, 2022, by John Houck. These paintings offer surreal visual narratives depicting vignettes of endless rooms, staircases, windows, and portals. Symbols such as keys, white gloves, birds, and skeletons are embedded in vignettes. Still, their references are indistinct and not fully defined, as if trying to remember a dream immediately upon waking. Beyond the Surrealist nod, the paintings engage with the discourse of historical northern European still life, mainly Spanish bodégons by Juan Sanchéz Cotán and Diego Velázquez, that toys with the banality of direct representation and a witty lineage of artists playing with the innate hilarities of art history.
John Houck, Pure Colour & San Marco, both 2022; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Installation view featuring Matthew D. Fischer & John Houck; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Matthew Fischer’s Light Organ, 2022, a geometric stained glass sculpture juxtaposed with Houck’s work, initiates a conversation of technique, concept, and history. But why is this piece here? In a show about painting? Well, because it belongs. The vehicle of color for Light Organ is not literal paint itself, but glass, light, and the space around it all at once. Fischer structures fields of pure color that interact to generate gestural combinations, conceptually in line with the neighboring I.H.P. 2, 2022, an oil and acrylic painting on wood panels. In all three of his selected works, any logical palette structure is damned! And smartly so. The seeming rejection of academic color theory opens the door for new relationships through absurdity and excitement. Fischer's three-dimensional glass sculpture sparks a spirited but fascinating discussion when displayed with I.H.P. 2. This comparison demonstrates Fischer’s use of color — whether with paint or stained glass — as robust and energetic.
The conversation of color continues with the solid chromatic choices by Erin O'Keefe with Gathering, 2021, and Circle Circle Elipse Elipse with Purple Block, 2020. These works also introduce facets of texture and graphic arrangement echoed in Derek Franklin’s MMTH#4, 2022, which connotes a Bauhaus-Esque aesthetic wherein circular elements and bisecting linear strokes of fuchsia and periwinkle resist intimation.
Similarly, bold and direct color representation in Ofer Wolberger’s Study for a Height Indicator and Height Indicator (4 feet), both 2022, lead us to reconsider painting through a lens of Conceptualism with the vocabulary of Minimalism. What particularly comes to mind is an intersection of On Kawara’s Today Series/Date Paintings and Donald Judd’s famous essay, “Specific Objects.” Wolberger’s approach to painting here shifts the artwork from merely painted surfaces to an expanded thought about our physical relationship with the object-ness of the paintings themselves.
Installation view featuring Erin O'Keefe, Gathering, 2021 & Martha Daghlian, of thy new paradise, extended, 2022; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Installation view featuring Martha Daghlian, Matthew D. Fischer, John Opera, Sarah Wertzberger; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Installation view featuring Derek Franklin, MMTH#4 & Johnson Creek Floodplain Sample #7, both 2022; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Technique and tradition are well-positioned for a debate in the smallest gallery room. Sarah Wertzberger’s Transperse 1, 2021, a handwoven polyester and digital cotton-weaving, three two-dimensional multimedia watercolor pieces by John Opera, all titled Untitled, 2022, are positioned next to another colored glass sculpture by Fischer’s, Double, 2022. These artworks create a triadic conversation about the medium of paint and expound on what that means in their application. Martha Daghlian’s of thy new paradise, extended, 2022 poses questions about what painting can and could be: digitally printed cotton mixes images of violet flowers, Doric columns, trees, and other natural and obscure imagery are layered together in a textile wall hanging through the entryway to another room in the gallery.
Tanner Lind’s Untitled 4, 2021 punctuates the most significant room. Its predecessors inform it without succumbing to mimesis, allowing the piece to exist as both its object and the subject of Lind’s creative output. The non-representational and highly graphic mark-making with ink and acrylic is reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler's or Julie Mehretu's works.
Not all celebrated painting comes in the form of conceptual abstraction. The selected works of Rose Dickson, Hivemind, and Heat Map, both 2021, and Lila Jarzombek, Weed and Shrooms, and A Garden Needs its Flowers, both 2022, offer alternative and distinct approaches to pictorial representation and its relationship to painting’s history. Jarzombek presents psychedelic Impressionistic renderings of the natural - flowers, mushrooms, and stars consumed by humankind. Dickson’s work interplays the referential and the mystical with intimate works reminiscent of Abstract, Modernist, and Surrealist painters like Hilma af Klint, Helen Lundeberg, and Dorothea Tanning. Her egg tempura-based paintings showcase elusive pictorial scenes between the negative spaces in the patterning of interlocking chains. The combinations are embedded in symbolism and create relation when paired together.
Installation view featuring Lila Jarzombek, Weed and Shrooms, 2022, Ofer Wolberger, Height Indicator, 2022; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Installation view Lila Jarzombek, Ofer Wolberger, and Tanner Lind; photos courtesy of the gallery.
Painters Painting pushes viewers and artists to look for new conversations in a genre rich with tradition and history. Weaving together the conventions of painting with new inspiration for the physical object, the works presented in the exhibition remind us that the materiality of painting is grounding, deeply intellectual, and delightfully fun. The featured artists have found effective ways to carry on this dialogue in lively and highly informed ways that carry the sentiments of the mid-century American painting with new life and contemporaneity. This contemporaneity stares directly in the face of an all-consuming digital age. We return to the original question asked by the exhibition: What are our expectations of painting? Perhaps the answer is simultaneously everything that came before it and absolutely nothing we already know. We continue to witness how painting can shift between pictorial, conceptual, and expanded realms both within and beyond the surface of the canvas. Perhaps we need to look at painting today as a call to continue moving forward in contemporaneity, fully informed by history but ready to strike down any bondage of tradition to maintain momentum.
Painters Painting is currently on view at Melanie Flood Projects until May 7th, 2022.
Jason N. Le (they/them) is a Vietnamese American writer and thinker based in Portland, OR. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and a Bachelor of Arts from Portland State University.