The Easel

1st November 2022

Inside Deana Lawson’s first museum survey at MoMA PS1

Cassidy George | W Magazine | 26th May 2022

Since Lawson’s photography entered the MoMA collection a decade ago, the accolades have kept coming. Curators remark on her “singular” vision of Black culture and identity and an ability to “find glamour in the quotidian”. Her images, all carefully staged, have become more “theatrical” over time. Perhaps theatrical means more intricate. One critic notes “they’re images that make you think, lean in, and look. In that way, they’re not easy images.” Images are here.

Pierre Soulages: Beyond black

Deborah Wilk | Christie’s | 26th October 2022

Soulage’s lofty reputation undoubtedly benefitted from an immensely long career. Throughout, he stuck to a very specific concept of art – abstract works often painted purely in black. He resisted comparisons with the abstract expressionists because his sources of inspiration (primal art, such as cave paintings) were so different to theirs. And Soulages affinity with black? “[Its] an extraordinary colour. [It is not black] that gave meaning to [those paintings] but the reflection of light on dark surfaces”.

Thomas Ruff with Will Fenstermaker

Will Fenstermaker | The Brooklyn Rail | 15th October 2022

Having trained as a realist photographer, Ruff’s career seems like a journey away from realism and toward manipulated images. His most recent work, using algorithms to produce fractal images dispenses with photography altogether. They have an aura of “objectivity” although they don’t exist in reality. “A fractal set is like a big landscape [and sometimes] you find something that doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. That’s where I dive in.”

No common or garden sculptor

Michael Prodger | The Critic | 15th October 2022

By late 1700’s, Baroque sculpture, with its wrought emotions and twisted forms, had been eclipsed by the refinement of neoclassicism. This style looked to the simplicity and calm repose of the ancients and in Canova found its undisputed star. His sculptures boasted “movement and purity of form”, their polished surfaces having the look of “living softness”. Since his death in 1822, his renown has waxed and waned; he now receives “less than his due” compared to contemporaries such as Delacroix.

‘Strange Clay’ review: a mucky, uncanny, visceral survey of ceramic art

Emily Steer | Wallpaper | 29th October 2022

Ceramics, apparently, are “exploding” in popularity. Not surprising then to see a major group show that surveys this art form. The variety of work is impressive, “everything from beautiful pitchers and pots to stupid, quasi-conceptual knick-knackery”. What accounts for the resurgence of ceramics? “It is an emotive medium and I think we relate to it”, says the curator. “[There is] tactility … the untidiness of the medium … enabling a conflicted expression of what it means to be human”.

The Vorticist who was nearly painted out of history

Sarah Watling | Apollo | 27th October 2022

In 1915, Britain’s modernist impulse produced vorticism and Saunders was in its vanguard. Using an exuberant colour palette, she combined figurative forms with “hard edge” abstract elements. After a successful first exhibition, her story disappoints. Vorticism disappeared quickly under the social impact of WW1. Whether because of a lack of support or a change of mood, Saunders scarcely exhibited again, sank into obscurity and most of her work was destroyed by a bomb in WW2.

A City in the ocean of time

Dave Hickey | Gagosian Quarterly | 16th August 2022

This essay by US critic Dave Hickey illustrates why his death last year was so widely mourned. “Characterizing [Heizer’s City] as an earthwork seems redundant. It is made of earth and rocks, of course, but it is only an earthwork in the sense that a Raphael is an oil painting. There are echoes of [pyramids and Mayan buildings]. Standing there, we sense a compression of human time. The heyday of Egypt and the Yucatan don’t seem so very long ago at all.”

25th October 2022

Jadé Fadojutimi: Can We See the Colour Green Because We Have a Name for It?

Beth Williamson | Studio International

Fadojutimi is young, and hot property. Still under 30, her work has already been acquired by Tate and she is represented at this year’s Venice Biennale. That’s the easy part. Rather more difficult is how to evaluate such a young artist with a limited output.  Her work has “intense graphic energy” and, says one critic, “exists in a thrilling mid-point between the abstract and the figurative”. The above writer expects Fadojutimi will eventually be ranked as one of the greats of British landscape painting.

One Man’s Trash

Eric Wills | The American Scholar | 24th October 2022

An ode to Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture, located east of Los Angeles. He was a social worker with a low-ish profile art career, who retired to the desert to make sculptures using salvaged materials. Dozens of works sit out in the open and “reveal themselves as if in some fever dream, their range and ambition astonishing.” A 2015 retrospective led one critic to describe Purifoy as “the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years.”

The painter who revealed how our eyes really see the world

Matthew Wilson | bbc.com | 18th October 2022

Not a review of Cezanne’s London show but rather an explanation of the visual effects observable in his paintings. Since Descartes, the eye was thought to be like a “passive camera”. Not so. The eye makes “continuous darting movements”, seeing objects from different perspectives, with varying levels of accuracy, and improvising in real time. “A conventional still life gives us a frozen moment … There’s no such thing as a present, Cézanne tells us – only a continuous flow between past and future.”

New Yorker Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl Dies at 80

Jasmine Liu | Hyperallergic | 22nd October 2022

Schjeldahl came to art criticism via poetry, a background that equipped him to say a lot in a few words. He only ever wrote essays (“I am a miniaturist”) and preferred painting above all other art forms. A stellar critic, he was by his own lights “just another art lover” who tried to communicate with clarity. “Writing clearly is immensely hard work that feels faintly insane, like painting the brightest possible target on my chest. To write clearly is to give oneself away.” Some notable essays are here.

Art and advertising collide in ‘Objects of Desire’

Susan Stamberg | NPR | 18th October 2022

In 1970, serious art photography had to be black and white, in an 8×10 format. Meanwhile, commercial photographers like Irving Penn were having a wild time working in colour. Eventually, artists began working with ads, manipulating them to create new meaning, while commercial photographers were picking up some of the aesthetics of art photography. It’s an obvious marriage, says one writer: “what is art without manipulation? What is advertising photography without seduction?

Turner prize 2022 review – as baffling as ever

Laura Cumming | The Guardian | 23rd October 2022

It’s Turner Prize season, with works by the four nominees now on display. Past controversial – even incomprehensible – nominations have been avoided in favour of (gasp) traditional-sounding artists. One critic likes the result – “ferocious imagination [given] blazing form”, but the above writer is more circumspect. While admiring the individual artists, she admits that this prize often seems like the art world talking to itself. “The Turner prize never makes any sense”.

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