This Month's Highlights: Langberg, Barskaya, and Fasnacht

Painters on Paintings Editor Julie Heffernan reflects on three current painting shows in New York City.

Photographs as tools for artmaking are as common and tacit as the pencil, but for many years, when I was young, I believed that painting based on copying photos was the death of creative invention. I thought that because I, myself, was so dependent on them, and knew they had me too much in their thrall. Using a projector was even worse, I thought - nipping in the bud the development of the eye; only purely conceptual artists could get away with it.  Even then, most of those, whether Photo-Realists or Pop artists, seemed to have abdicated some important aspect of their own potential as creative weirdos, the kind of peculiar inventiveness that would have been theirs alone, was my belief. In the hands of great artists --Bonnard, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas -- the photograph might jumpstart the painting to become something unique and other; otherwise the ghost of the photo often felt too evident, intruding into the final artwork, weakening it with the photograph’s greater technological star power.It was when artists started telling stories again, in the 80s, that I began to understand how to use the photograph, now as just a tool. How could Eric Fischl tell us all his great adolescent male secrets without them, or Angela Dufresne wade into the goo of her painterly love affairs with Gina Rowlands, or Ellen Harvey mark the transitions of a life using all her driver’s licenses over time? In the hands of an adept, the photograph became as necessary a conceptual and technical tool as the palette knife.Rather than detracting, that very ghost lurking behind the scrim of the image radically informs the work of several artists showing now in New York. Three artists with NY solo exhibitions that stand out in this capacity are Doron Langberg at Yossi Milo Gallery, Polina Barskaya at Monya Rowe Gallery and Heide Fasnacht at Dorsky Curatorial Projects, opening on September 29. 

Doron Langberg, Daniel Reading, 2019, Oil on linen, 96 x 160 inches

In his work, Doron Langberg slides right past the photograph, using it only to surf the high seas of liquid paint with encrustations of denser matter that together tell stories of friends and family, tales that rupture from within as flagrant paint and shape take over the dictates of resemblance. He uses the ubiquitous family photo to take us into domestic settings where, now, rapture trumps the quotidien, and we are all invited to the scene of seduction.

Polina Barskaya, Vence, 2019, Acrylic on panel, 20 x 24 inches, Courtesy of Monya Rowe Gallery, New York

Polina Barskaya uses the flattening properties of acrylic paint to create dual worlds -- interior and exterior. Light and color are harnessed to describe intimate moments that invite you into their whispering intricacies. Interiors groan with dull palettes of gray while some exterior event seen through the window glows with the kind of radiance that only a framework of tertiaries could conjure.

Heide Fasnacht, Mid Ocean Explosion, 2000-2001, Graphite on paper, 22 x 30 inches

And Heide Fasnacht uses the photograph’s function as record keeper to explore phantasms of destruction. The Devil is in the  details, and hers bring home their lessons on what man has wrought. Her fine use of subtle tonality and suggestive touch allow the viewer to feel up close and personal to events whose destructive potential would otherwise overwhelm.

Editor's Note - Art Abroad

The editors of Painters on Paintings are traveling this summer and thought we’d share some observations on the art we’re seeing abroad. Virginia is attending Documenta in Athens and Kassel and will be painting in Berlin through August. Julie will spend a month at the Bau Institute arts residency in Cassis, France. Here are some musings on Frida Kahlo from her recent visit to Mexico City.

According to a Mexican acquaintance of mine Frida Kahlo is considered south of the border, nothing more than kitsch, in the same vein as Norman Rockwell here, her popularity a signal that her work shouldn’t be trusted since it is simply too likeable. She offers so much to so many different interest groups: mediocre paintings for beginning painting students (Marxism will give Health to the Sick) and great paintings for the connoisseurs (Broken Column, What the Water Gave Me), upbeat quotes for the footless (“Feet what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”), a brilliant fashion sense for Rei Kawakubo and Ricardo Tischi of Givenchy, profound sorrow and rejection in love for the double-crossed and cuckolded alike (Diego screwed her sister!), and affairs with Trotsky for Oberlin students. What else do you need from an artist to win the love of everyone but the suspicious intelligentsia?

I went to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul while on a recent trip to Mexico City and found myself regretting that I had ever heard about her haters from my colleague, wondering why crossover art tends to trigger so much disdain and whether Kahlo might just be that rare thing: the artist that is truly popular and serious. If I wasn’t convinced by the work (which I am) I became so by her kitchen. She filled it with ceramic pots and painted the floor bright yellow with blue and yellow wooden counters. She and Diego rejected conventional stoves, using instead a huge clay pot with a wood fire beneath it-- the indigenous chimenea--which infused everything they cooked with the fragrant nuttiness of pecan wood, or the delicate sweetness of mesquite. And there was a recipe for mole on her kitchen wall that had more flavors and spices than I ever could have imagined combining within the same pot.I’m aware that Kahlo isn’t lacking in fans. I just want to put it out there, as Mary Oliver says, that it’s ok to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. And in 2012 Patti Smith had the press conference for her first show in Mexico City at the Casa Azul. So, there you go, doubters - no one could ever accuse Patti Smith of being kitsch.