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Two from Chelsea
In “Focused Aggregate Intensity”, Will Yackulic works with typewriter characters, in red and black ink, which radiate from or weave around a painted sphere of multicolored facets. Earlier this year (“Sometimes It Takes Ice To Cut Ice” at Gregory Lind, San Francisco) he was building similar compositions with a blue-and-white block motif, set into topographical formations, rather than the spheres. They were very clean and well-designed paintings, reminiscent of archaic video games. For this recent exhibition, Glen Helfand in his Artforum blurb mentioned Ed Ruscha text-work, which is a fitting observation I suppose, as the text in Yackulic’s images sometimes coalesces into fractured language, something thematically unsettling, disturbing the flat calm of retracted space. But Helfand’s perspective was distracted by the silly typeset riddles found in some of these paintings, a hardly representative and certainly uninteresting device in Yackulic’s work. Primarily they are charming little things, nearly illustratory, but entirely mute, leaving the observer to provide interpretations.
There is a questioning of historicity, in the artist’s integration of contemporary design and minimalist pastiche, where items of pop-ephemera like the Q-Bert block are placed upon yellowed textual layouts, lazily recalling early conceptual work. There are echoes here of grids and repetitions, but rather than meditative or ethereal, these constructions are cute, sharp, even commercial. Yackulic’s method, signifying challenge rather than tribute, is indicative of this new generation of artists — one typically more interested in “total design” than the previous — and tending to mute pop-art clichés and low-art preciousness with the organization of high design, while rarely resorting to (and often disdaining) digital means of generating images1. Curious as well is the typographic instability of these images. I thought a Rosalind Krauss L-Schema might be an interesting model in purporting the relationships between image and text — figure and ground — and their nebulous hierarchy in the frame, but it is clear, however, that advancing Yackulic’s work into such analytical interpretation is hasty and uninteresting. His work is fluidly conceptual, but coyly, beneath its patterns. Its attractiveness precludes concept (“cooling off” postmodernist rhetoric).
The paintings of Kate Shepherd in “No Title Here” find a more direct link in minimalist tradition. They consist of delicate lines of white oil paint, arranged into scaffold-like structures of both technical and organic impetus, upon backgrounds of glossy, colorful enamel. Galerie Lelong’s press release claims the paintings “speak of collective experiences and environments” and quotes Shepherd directly: “Line […] is the voice of the painting.” While vague statements about collectivity are bandied about I’ll listen to Shepherd, who may have been reading Agnes Martin —
My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.
The work in “No Title Here” cannot be judged in digital reproduction. In fact, the punctum of it is only found in person, face against the wall, close enough to notice the shaky, immechanical nature of Shepherd’s lines. Paintings, disguised as blueprints, rematerialize as records of analog (human) imperfection — fragile and impermanent. The contradiction in “Brave Tailor’s Swath, Lit Lake on Small Moonlight Billboard” and “Faience Blue Building with Half Entrance” is between the technicality of surface and the personality of line, a tension which speaks not of collective experience but a connection to the artist herself. This Martinesque tactic is performed with sincerity; Shepherd’s invention of mnemonic environments as a world of skeletal planes is a compelling reduction of latter-day surrealist methods, specifically those of Gerhard Richter.
There is a simplicity and intelligence in these artists that engenders depth and honesty to their work, qualities lacking (and sometimes, despicably, avoided) in the contemporary mainstream2. An innocent Agnes in 1974 is sadly long gone.
When interest in graphic art wanes I suppose it is possible to imagine its slipping out of sight but I do not believe in that possibility. […] My interest in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent. It is really wonderful to contemplate the experience and the works. I am sure there will always be some who make this response who will want to try to express it graphically.
1 One version of this definition.
2 The real op-ed would begin like this: the rarity of this sort of artist, particularly in a heavily commercial arena such as Chelsea, is indicative of a complete degeneration of not only taste, which already fled many years ago, but of goodness, honesty and intelligence, which are endangered qualities in the current situation. But while I argue about truth and justice in art, I fall back; the arguments become familiar. Does simplicity now signify a direct formalism in the face of contemporary conceptualism? Too utopian? Am I contradicting myself?