GEORGE NEGROPONTE at Anita Rogers By Eric Holzman

GEORGE AT ANITA'S

George Negroponte comes to making art with a pure love of painting. His aim has never been to turn over the apple cart, or in Al Held’s words, reinvent the wheel. As such, he has been compelled to paint his way through various modes and approaches, learning and searching for authenticity and resonance. A few years back GN spent five years in Sweden with his family where he painted in isolation, save the input of his wife Virva Hinnemo, also a wonderful painter. He painted and looked after his family’s needs. After an adult lifetime in close proximity to, or in fact at the very center of the NY art world, this was radical, and a trial of epic proportion.

At GN’s last show at Jason McCoy before leaving on his Swedish adventure, he had already started to dismantle his gestural paintings by tearing up works on paper and reassembling them. The work found a new supercharged, stripped down energy. They were fresh and open and seemed like a beautiful beginning for what would come; Franz Kline and romantic abstract expressionist paint handling still remained in the mix.

Negroponte showed work on two occasions at Kouros Gallery. This was work he made in Sweden. His isolation created a kind of opening for him and a sink or swim situation ensued. Only what was essential now could be allowed into his mix, and the last affiliations with anything or anyone else finally vanished. He was working at the level of bone on bone.  This work was quite surprising, even shocking. It gave me a chill. It looked cool but felt hot. It was stark, and bare. It used decorative materials, i.e. wallpaper but was tough, evasive, intriguing and beautiful.  Underneath the immaculate surfaces was a romantic even desperate attempt to invent a way to express himself and I believe to connect to something larger. He had found himself in a difficult situation from which he would eventually emerge, but not with out making work that was totally unique and very expressive.

In his show last year at Ille Arts in Amagansett, and now living on Long Island, Negroponte’s work took another interesting turn. In this beautiful, sensual show, he paired small scraps of wooden board, usually in the range of 5x3’’x1’’painted in a manner that suggested a force other than the painter’s hand, and definitely not a hand with a painters brush. They were immediately likeable uplifting and luminous.  The paint was hi-keyed in tone and soft in hue; hard and shiny because he used housepainters enamel paint. In other words they felt natural, airy, easy and relaxed. They were Asian, Zen in that way of seeming effortless and gestural- an offering of the natural world. The couplings seemed completely intuitive based on the color and textural harmonies set up in pairings. They were hung a-symmetrically and casually on the wall and the work exuded a beautiful soft light while maintaining a wonderful, charming, profound, and poetic presence. As with all of GN’s work it spoke clearly in the language of painting and in this case of quiet, sensual pleasure.

In his current show titled “Gravel Road” at Anita Rogers’ beautiful new space in Soho Negroponte uses shaped bits and pieces of cardboard as his support. The work feels softer than the previous body of work as the material itself is porous and absorbent in nature and the deep tan color of the cardboard radiates a warm muted soothing light, in a way similar to Vuillard who often used earth colored grounds to inform and unify the colors in his composition. Like Vuillard the work tends to be understated, approachable and intimate. These works are small, all under 20” in height, on the longer side.  The warmth of the ground is balanced by a predominately cool palette, though occasionally he uses a hard fire engine red and there are also whites, deep browns, rich greens, and black as well. As in his last show Negroponte occasionally uses pairings of smaller pieces in combination. The dialogue is intriguing; it’s like watching two children in a playground conversing and sizing each other up. But this is not a defensive matter of the mind as it would be for many adults, but an natural intuitive attempt to find connection in an infinitely opened 5 dimensional field.

In the end what I take from this show, and keep in mind I have watched GN’s paintings since the early 70’s when he was painting his way through Venetian painting, is a man who has over years done everything he can, using every means possible, discarding every shred of unnecessary baggage, finding the most delicate coloristic, harmonic chords that are carefully modulated and applied, to wring out of himself a statement from his heart, that approaches and proclaims his love for this world, his fellow man, and it is my conviction, for the human spirit.

Eric Holzman 2016 

George Negroponte: Gravel Road
Anita Rogers Gallery, New York
Through January 7, 2017 

A TRIBUTE TO JAKE BERTHOT by Eric Holzman

 Jake Berthot, graphite on Xerox (image from Artnet)

PART ONE

A VISIT TO JAKE’S                         

Kazimira and I arrived from Soho,  around twelve oclock. We could see through the front door, Mara, (Mara Held) and Jake were sitting comfortably around Jake’s Kitchen table. Mara signaled through the front door for us to come in. Jake and Mara were drinking tea with local honey.

Jake lived in Accord, upstate NY, in a beautiful home converted from a chicken coupe. It was opened like a loft, but cozy like a country home, nestled in a beautiful landscape that Jake designed when he moved in. Jake had removed enough trees to reveal the terrain surrounding the house, which was full of undulating, softly shifting slopes, rocky planes and graceful young trees that now populate his paintings and drawings. There had once been a quarry on this spot.

Inside, the walls were covered with beautiful things. There were two Pisarro’s and prints by Cezanne and Renoir. There was a Bill Bailey drawing and a small sculpture by Bruce Gagnier. And there was a small masterpiece by Jake, an earlier abstract painting that radiated a quiet silvery-blue light.

Jake and Mara were already engaged in conversation and we joined right in.  I brought up the Al Held show at Cheim Read and wondered if anyone had written about it yet. Jake said John Yau had. He felt John Yau hadn’t done justice to Al Held’s place in the NY School. It was nice to hear one artist defend the reputation and achievement of another with such affection and reverence, especially since they could not have been further apart in temperament and philosophy. When I read the article myself, it did seem positive. I thought that it went into depth to describe Al’s history and achievement. Al Held was a full generation older than Jake but they had known each other.  I was enjoying my good fortune at being a part of this conversation. Al had been one of my  teachers in grad school at Yale. I spent two years working around Al. I liked Mara, his daughter a lot, and was pleased that we had become friends. 

Speaking more about Al’s show, I related that I had sat on the floor near the big red painting during a panel, held earlier that week at the gallery. As people spoke, I felt Al's presence, that is to say his muscle and intellect, through the force and physicality of the painted surface that was just over my left shoulder.

Mara said she was too shy to say so at the panel, but felt there was more to be said about his color in these paintings and that no one had really gotten to the essence of what that was about.

Kazimira, who of us four, makes work which most resembles Al’s geometric abstractions, spoke in interesting ways of how it was both like and unlike her own work. Jake spoke in some depth about all this also. Then for a while I had the pleasant feeling that although my connection and understanding of what was being said was slipping away, I was still enjoying the music of the conversation. It had veered into the more abstract realms of space, shape, all over formalism, and the metaphysics of the painted surface.

Later, Jake spoke highly of Ivan Karp; a dealer who Jake said had been wonderful to him, giving him a yearly stipend equal to that of his teaching salary so he could be full time in the studio.

Margrit and Bill Jensen entered into our conversation.  They thought perhaps Kazimira and Margrit had gone to the same Catholic school.  Jake and Mara who know Bill and Margrit well, agreed that Margrit was not quite a saint, but close. The conversation switched back to Al. We all agreed that though Al loved nothing more than his own work, his love and commitment to painting in general was monumental. He enjoyed friendships with artists as romantic as Bill and Jake.  I said I could attest to his inclusive nature, remembering my student years when Al made sure I was invited to join nights of eating, drinking and arguing with Joe Santore, Judy Pfaff and Nabil Nahas. These were the nights he stayed over in New Haven between his two teaching days. I don’t remember contributing much during those nights. I was shyer than my friends.

This March day in the Catskills was still cold and wintery, though the snow had mostly been washed away on the weekend by warmer air and rain. Inside we were toasty, the sunlight pouring through the large windows and the wood stove easily heating the whole space. Now we were deeper into the warmth of afternoon light.

The conversation swung back to our personal experiences painting. Jake and Kazimira and Mara spoke of painterly technique and the perils and challenges of scale, the meaning of touch, and how these interrelated. Eventually we realized that hours had flown by and still we had not visited Jake's studio, so we made our way outside.

 Jake Berthot, 1994, oil on linen

Jake’s studio was a nice size, large enough, but not immense, just the right size for Jake's work. It was filled with the stuff of painting. It was orderly, studio-clean, with a prevailing feeling of quiet meditative stillness and of life being lived.

The first things Jake took out for us to look at were three very handsome pencil drawings in different stages of completion. Each exposed the mysterious personal geometry upon which he built his compositions. Earlier he had spoken of this component of his work, its function and its evolution. Honestly, I didn’t really follow his explanation at the time, but upon reflection I have some insights. Since Jake came to landscape painting from a different angle than everyone else, that is abstract painting, I imagine the grids provided a scaffold upon which he could build and construct his compositions. They must have made the space between things seem palpable and real, measurable in some way. With them in place, he could more readily move and feel his way through the warp and flow of form and space. Jake came to the sensuality of landscape and representation not through direct observation, but through abstraction and geometry which was also real to him. I bet he saw, felt or sensed those grids underlying the physical world, connecting and flowing through everything that we inhabit.

Next we looked at a gorgeous sketchbook from the 60s and 70s that was exclusively geometry. It reminded me of the flavor of abstraction in the air at that time among some artists I thought were very advanced.

The first oil painting Jake showed us was the largest we would see that day. When he

had carefully placed it on the wall a surprising thing happened. All the easy talk ceased. We were struck dumb. What Jake had said about his geometry and the structure of his landscapes had been totally realized in this canvas. We all recognized it and felt its presence and depth immediately. It got inside my head. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking at other new work. Slowly, silently, one at a time.

The end of the day was bittersweet. After a meal at Japanese place in town we said our goodbyes, as that cold, kind-of-scary Hudson River Valley winter twilight settled in. There was plenty of that purplish grey color Jake had spoken of earlier in the afternoon, the color of trees in a Catskill winter.

We met up several more times, usually at a museum show that Jake came down to see.  At the Gauguin show at MOMA the beautiful painter and mutual friend, Power Boothe, joined us. It was a show I was prepared to love but didn’t. Jake did. He was already weak, but spoke of, harmony, tone, color and dissonance. There was something in every painting. Jake was opened and easily moved himself into a position of appreciation.

I saw Jake for the last time 2 months ago, and he was dying. He was still a handsome man. His mind and his talk were fresh and sharp. He wanted to die because he didn’t have the energy to paint. He was angry because he did not feel he had finished what he had started.  Still it was a wonderful visit. I must have been there five hours or more. Still, I wished I could have left him more at peace. I was told that soon after my visit, he had gotten back into the studio for a short time.  I like to think I had something to do with that. We had talked a lot about painters and painting and it was energizing and fun for both of us.

Jake was a courageous explorer, an adventurer and since I have known him, a solitary. When I imagine where he is now, I see him fully engaged creatively with his imagination and his curiosity. He is exploring in an infinitely interesting place, an infinite space that we call death.

Jake Berthot, Ashton's Tree, 2010, oil on linen

ON JAKE BERTHOT

I got to know Jake, a few years before he hurt his wrist. My family and I were staying near Accord one summer and I called him out of the blue. We hit it off. He was funny, down home and brilliant. I was very happy to get to know a kindred spirit. Our dark, moody tree paintings resembled one another's, as did our search for resonance, depth and meaning. 

The search for meaning is an aspect of painting we don’t often speak of. It is a slippery slope. I think everyone knows about it, but I will try to say something about what I mean. Hmm, well soul is another word for it, like soul music and soul singer. It’s a funny thing that a lot of great modern artists and writers have made it a point to take everything including soul and spirit out of painting. Amazingly you can actually make great work without it. Maybe the shear force of intention and creative intelligence or playfulness can actually be another guise for what I am calling meaning.  But some work emphasizes the mind primarily while some speaks to the body and soul.

I remember a conversation Jake and I had about this. Jake was referring to what he called sensation painters. Cezanne used the same word. Sensation painters evoke a feeling response, in contrast to more conceptual artists. Ironically, Jake said Van Gogh was the first conceptual painter.  He saw Cezanne as his primary sensation painter and I think he mentioned Giorgione in that conversation. Jake was certainly a sensation painter and a most soulful one. If you didn’t get that from him, you might have missed him. He left out a lot and didn’t embellish. Some paintings weren’t that easy to love. Sometimes they seemed as if he had felt his way through the darkness with his fingertips. In fact many of Jake’s paintings reside more in my heart more as a feeling, than as a visual event.

For me, taken as a whole, the work was an expression of faith and philosophy. It is a treatise on a way of being in the world of consumption and competition. It is an alternative to irony. Jake's work attempts to build a bridge to another way of being, to the sacred. Sometimes, I think he got deeper into hidden worlds than anyone since Cezanne. For Jake painting was a portal, a transporter to other dimensions where the line between life and death fades.

After his accident, I remember, in an attempt to see something positive in his suffering, I said to him that perhaps his pain had driven him deeper into himself, and that the work reflected this in a positive way. He would have none of that idea. Still I wonder at the role suffering had in Jake’s painting and Jake’s world. I read recently that at this time in man’s evolution, the ‘way of the cross’ is no longer a necessary component to spiritual growth. Jeeze I hope so.

We artists are drawn to our paths unconsciously, by character and personality, even by nature. But at the same time, through trial and error, we make choices about who we want to be and what we want to do.  I thought of Jake as a person of character and I think he consciously became a painter of soul.  I admit that his paintings are not easily understood in modernist terms. However, painters with an emotional and humanist bent who bring warmth, and sensuality, and a measure of peace into our world may be considered among the most modern of painters. They seem to paint with optimism and responsibility toward the future.

Jake Berthot, Skull, 2012, oil on linen

Images courtesy of Betty Cunningham Gallery

ERIC HOLZMAN at Lori Bookstein

 Eric Holzman, Afternoon, 2014, 12 x 9 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman is presenting an exhibition of small paintings in the back gallery at Lori Bookstein Fine Art through February 7, 2015. While we might call these works landscape paintings, I would say that they are first and foremost paintings, that take elements of landscape as their subject or starting point. One of the most recent pieces in the show, Afternoon, is almost entirely frontal -- a luscious organic object whose surface undulates with a most subtle umber/ultramarine contrast -- like a lovingly handmade effigy of a momentary memory. Other works as well, particularly the smallest pieces, read from a distance as virtual monochromes, then draw us into a dense amalgam of shapes and spaces that are at once as inviting and as impenetrable as nature itself. Several of the slightly larger paintings feature a heightened contrast between color-saturated sky and silhouetted trees, creating a hallucinatory presence that again emphasizes both the beauty and otherness of the landscape. In their extreme compactness these diminutive paintings all have an intensely worked physicality that creates an aged timelessness that calls to mind myriad art historical references. But while they are of course full-fledged self contained paintings, they are also used by the artist as studies for the fierce and magnificent 8 foot paintings where Holzman is absolutely in a league of his own. 

Eric Holzman, Rest I, 2009-13, 17 x 14 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman, Sleepy Hollow III, 2009-14, 14 x 12 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman, Tree & Car, 2014, 12 x 8 1/4 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman, Forest at Crestwood, 2009-14, 10 x 12 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman, Sleepy Hollow II, 2014, 18 x 14 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman, Late Afternoon/Crestwood II, 2013-14, 10 x 10 inches, oil on canvas

Eric Holzman, Elm, 2008-14, 20 x 16 inches, oil on canvas

Images from the gallery website

Studio Visit with ERIC HOLZMAN

Eric Holzman, 2012, oil on canvas, about 50 x 36 inches

It was a privilege and a treat to spend some time with Eric Holzman in his Soho studio last week -- looking at a group of new paintings, some works in progress, and some older paintings being reworked. In fact Eric often works for years on a painting, constantly shifting shapes and adjusting color -- leaving it, coming back months later and opening it up again. Recently he has been attempting to shorten that process a bit with a series of paintings that utilize and explore the kind of abbreviation he achieves in his drawings.

Eric Holzman, 2012, work in progress, oil on canvas (above), and a group of small paintings, oil on linen (below)

Eric Holzman, 2012, oil on canvas, about 32 x 36 inches

Eric Holzman, 2012, oil on canvas, about 30 x 40 inches, w/ detail below

Eric Holzman, 2011-2012, drawings, above and below

Eric Holzman, 2012, oil on canvas, about 30 x 40 inches, w/ detail below

Read my post about Eric's exhibition last year at Sideshow HERE.

ERIC HOLZMAN at Sideshow

Eric Holzman, Miyazaki Sunset, 2007, 71 x 46 inches, oil, sand chalk on canvas

Eric Holzman, Miyazaki Sunset (Detail), 2007

So many painters are constantly trying to come to terms with the so-called "weight" of art history -- either by distancing themselves or by selectively lifting references, or through myriad other "strategies". But in the paintings of Eric Holzman, the distinctions that separate past from present and future become irrelevant -- the history of painting is not a burden to bear but an arena of perpetual richness, a place to dwell.

At Sideshow in Brooklyn, through December 20, is an exhibition featuring a group of Eric's recent paintings (as well as some wall sculptures by Tracy Heneberger). Holzman is showing four large canvases, and one small piece along with a few small works on paper. Each of the large paintings is a tour de force of engagement with the elemental properties of painting, and with the artist's own sensate world. To call these paintings landscapes would be to severely limit their scope -- although indeed the subjects are trees, light, color. But as though zoomed in to a one inch portion of the distant horizon in a Titian, then blown up to 8 feet high -- Holzman's central tree image is inseparable from the teeming atmosphere and the kinetic surface, all unified by a patina of light. Holzman builds his images with a chalky mixture of oil paint and grit, layer after layer, in a constantly mutating dance of color resonances and shifting shapes -- achieving a heightened intensity of shimmering color and sensual space that is truly hallucinatory. The tension between the chunky roughness of the surface and the flowing softness of the space holds the image in a kind of vibrating stasis. These are not paintings about the appearance of landscape, but about its abiding spirit -- and about painting's ageless ability to embody the best of human spirit.

Eric Holzman, Pink Sky, Tree #6, 2006-2009, 83 x 65 inches, oil, sand, chalk on canvas

Eric Holzman, Miyazaki Sunset, Matsu, 2006-2007, 54 1/2 x 69 inches, oil, sand chalk on canvas

Studio Visit: KAZIMIRA RACHFAL

Kazimira Rachfal, studio wall w/ group of black paintings

It is always an exciting privilege to visit another artist's studio, to see work in progress, or finished work that has never been shown, and an environment that reflects working and thinking processes. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Kazimira Rachfal in the fantastic Soho studio she shares with her husband, painter Eric Holzman and their son. Eric was savvy enough to acquire this loft in the late '70s, just before the real estate boom priced these classic spaces out of reach of most artists. In addition to being extremely warm and generous people, Kazimira and Eric are dedicated hard working painters doing wonderful work.

Kazimira Rachfal's recent paintings are intimate in scale, and highly sensuous in their humble materiality. Working with an endless variety of simple geometric configurations, she goes about creating delicately layered surfaces and finely intuited relations among colors, shapes, edges and planes. Thin veils of oil paint are applied, scraped, dripped to form subtly colored accumulations with an equilibrium that is slightly askew, and always unified by the richness of the surface and the focus of a simple dynamic relation. In one area of her studio, Kazimira has collected various small bits of paper and fragments found on the street, each an example of the sort of integral happenstance that she notices in the world, and which she values as a source of release from convention. Indeed that release from convention is a key element in the resonance of Kazimira's work, in her dedicated mindful search for direct experience, and in the dialogue that occurs between the intensity of her intent and the apparent offhandedness of her process. She repeatedly achieves a plain-spoken visual poetry that is disarming in its simplicity, and in its beauty.

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 10 x 8 inches

(sorry I do not have titles for these paintings -- and all dimensions are approximate)

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 10 x 10 inches

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 14 x 11 inches

Kazimira Rachfal, studio wall

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 8 x 10 inches

Here is a view of Eric's studio space where he is finishing paintings for a show that will open November 21 at Sideshow in Brooklyn. More on that later.

Eric Holzman, studio view w/ new paintings & firetruck

Thank you Kazimira and Eric for a lovely visit.