Lodestar Contemporary – Leuven, Belgium 20 July

JOHN YAU

John Yau, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 5, 1950. His father, a Chinese American bookkeeper, met his mother, who was descended from a prestigious Shanghai-based family, while living in China. Yau’s parents settled in Boston after emigrating from China in 1949. Yau studied at Boston University and received his BA from Bard College. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College.

In 1976, Yau published his first collection of poetry, Crossing Canal Street (Bellevue Press, 1976). Since then, he has published many books of poetry, including Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018); Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010); Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002); Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow Press, 1996); Berlin Diptychon (Timken, 1995); Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow Press, 1992); and Corpse and Mirror (Holt Rinehart, 1983); which was a National Poetry Series book selected by John Ashbery.

Yau is also an art critic whose books of criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Ecco, 1993); A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns(D.A.P., 1997); and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He has also published a novel and edited Fetish (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), a fiction anthology.

Yau has received numerous awards including the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize, the American Poetry Review Jerome Shestack Award, and a 1988 New York Foundation for the Arts Award. He is also the recipient of a 1977 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowships, and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Yau was a distinguished visiting critic at the Pratt Institute Graduate School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts in the late 1980s. In 1992, he was a visiting poet at Brown University and in 1994 and 1995, was a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. He was also the Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From 2006 to 2011, Yau was the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail. He is currently a professor of critical studies in the visual arts department at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He resides in New York City.

JUUL KRAIJER

SIMILE (2004)

Over the past twelve years I devoted myself entirely to drawing, making a total of two hundred and twenty drawings. The present book contains a selection of thirty-nine of them, dating from the last six years. My work is marked by monomania. Unlike those artists who from time tot time venture to make a new turning, I seem to be the type of artist who recognises a small field as his or her domain, to be explored in depth and detail. In the drawings made during those twelve years, the main principles remain the same. Changes do not occur in the form of an abrupt break; instead, they appear as gradual shifts, leaving the core intact, like landscapes at the turn of the season.

Some of the changes came about in spite of myself. The drawings became less linear, angular and gauche, and increasingly more modelled with soft-woolly, silver-grey tones. In that respect, they became more classical, although drawing in a classical way is not particularly my preference.

The drawings are all done on the same kind of paper and in charcoal or – when colour is needed – pastel. Wiping and rubbing are occasionally used as techniques in their own right, just as important as drawing proper. Traces of earlier positions of heads and limbs are still visible, showing how the bodies obeyed the choreographer’s guiding hand. In all drawings, the bounds of what is anatomically possible are exceeded. The female body, which in some of my drawings verges on androgynous, is remodelled into simple and elegant calligraphy – unnatural yet credible. The guiding principles in making these drawings are conciseness and reservation. To my feeling, these principles are not of my own choice; they seem to be dictated by the drawings themselves. Every drawing contains no more than what is strictly necessary. Everything that could provide time and space coordinates is absent.

The drawings are decidedly not representations of situations existing in reality. Rather, they are incarnations of frames of mind. The bodies are nude but neutral – vehicle rather than flesh. They remain in the domain of the spirit.

In the older work, all postures are still, and countenances unmoved. There is no suggestion of movement or spontaneous expression – just an intensely concentrated posture which seems to have been adopted for eternity, as being the most meaningful one. More recent work shows figures immersed in complete self-absorption: profound sleep, unconsciousness, or death. The postures in some of the drawings – for instance, that in which a figure is composed of flocks of hundreds of migratory birds – are akin to that of Maria in a state of swoon in paintings representing the ‘descent from the cross’. Occasionally, instead of an absence of time there is momentarily frozen time. Postures display a tension like that of compressed springs; the absence of movement seems to be but the lull before the storm. Faces also tend to become more expressive. Drawings belonging to this group were preceded by a series containing creeping and lying figures, their bodies covered with volcanic landscapes. Apart from suggesting plasticity, these landscapes are also patterns on the bodies. In this series might also be included a drawing made after a stay in the Himalayas in 1999 – one of the few to refer to a concrete experience – in which the body is filled with glaciers and faades of mountains. Whether or not the landscape in this drawing is spatial is equivocal. Two different scales, that of the body and that of the landscape, coexist. Less equivocal are the patterns of tattoos covering the skins of some figures. However, although these patterns are just linear and therefore less illusionistic, they, too, confuse the eye by displaying multiple image layers. Initially the tattoos were drawn in ink. In later drawings they were incised into the paper itself by means of a surgical knife; thus, the drawings enter the realm of the third dimension.

Drawings featuring swarms and flocks are the most recent. Here the shape of the body partly dissolves into a pattern of vibrating particles. Such decomposition of a form which is experienced as absolute appears again, though in a rather different manner, in drawings of mosquitos settled on faces. The red transparent bodies of the mosquitos are full and drop-shaped. As winged drops of blood they will soon spread. Transience is a permanent companion.

The drawings elude traditional iconography. In its place, use is made of physical sensations granting access to the inner mind. Human bodies are joined to animals or elements of a landscape. This fusion of incompatible entities has a matter-of-course calmness in spite of being enforced and creates a short-circuit in reason. For a short moment in time meaning can be perceived in a different way. This mechanism is analogous to that of imagery in language. Each drawing contains a trope: a simile or a metaphor.

In relation to the drawings, the present text should also be perceived as a simile, and no more than that.

J.K.

DENIS FARRELL

Denis Farrell was born in Ireland, and after graduating from Limerick School of Art Farrell started exhibiting his work at Taylor Galleries in Dublin. In 1989 Farrell attended the New York Studio School, and then received his MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art in 1993. From 1994 until 1999 Farrell maintained studios in New Haven, Connecticut and in New York City while exhibiting in New York, Boston and Ireland. In 1997 Farrell founded Bingo Hall, a contemporary Art Space, in Williamsburg Brooklyn, to exhibit the work of a diverse group of international artists not represented by the commercial gallery system. The gallery was opened by Nan Annan, wife of Kofi Annan former Secretary General of the UN. In 1999 Farrell had his first museum show at Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2003, with catalog. In 2005 he was invited to exhibit at Irish Art Center in New York, and at The Dock Art Centre in Ireland in 2009. Farrell has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright scholarship for independent research, and grants from the Arts Council Ireland, and Culture Ireland. He has been teaching painting and drawing in Ireland at the Galway-Mayo and Sligo Institutes of Technology since 2000. In 2014 he founded Lodestar School of Art, a painting/drawing summer intensive. Farrell now divides his time between Aubepierre-sur-Aube in France and Ireland with his wife and two children.

ELIZABETH MAGILL

Elizabeth Magill’s paintings are enigmatic and evocative psychological takes on the traditional landscape genre. Rich with fragmented forms and kaleidoscopic patterning her images are formed from the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs, to become something other. Although depicting realistic rural or coastal settings, the term ‘inscape’ has been used to describe Magill’s works – landscapes not conceived by direct observation but imbued with a sense of self and reflection. Though they have a cinematic beauty, her paintings are eerie and foreboding: trees or telephone wires conceal the view, birds flock in the night sky, distant silhouetted human figures, hills, lakes and over everything there is often a lurid, polluted light which broods over impending environmental disaster and an apocalyptic threat of instability. Her images stem – as much as does her imagination – from the County Antrim coast of her childhood and the unhappy coexistence of a landscape of legendary beauty with a social history skewed by political conflict and toxicity.

Magill’s complex and densely layered paintings employ a multitude of techniques including stencilling, screen-printing and collage as well as the pouring, blending, dripping and scraping away of paint. Film and photography are also central to her work, infusing her approach to light, tone, and atmosphere.

Elizabeth Magill was born in Canada in 1959 and studied fine art in Belfast College of Art, Ireland 1979-82, and the Slade School of Art in London 1982-84. Magill’s work is represented in many museum and public collections worldwide including TATE, London; The Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; The Arts Council of England; The Arts Council of Northern & Southern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; The British Museum, London; Towner Art Gallery & Museum, Eastbourne; Worchester Museum and Art Gallery; Southampton City Art Gallery; Walsall Art Gallery & Museum, The Government Art Collection, The British Council and the National Gallery of Australia.

Magill lives and works in London and Ireland.

PATRICK MICHAEL FITZGERALD

Fitzgerald’s paintings are a response to things that surround him in his daily life while also being exploratory and a reflection on the history of the medium itself and its possibilities. He is also influenced by other art forms such as music, poetry, literature and cinema. For him, painting is not just a visual phenomenon but is also a bodily and haptic experience. The material density of his works as painted objects, contrasts with different kinds of ambiguous images where the difference between abstraction and representation is blurred and unclear. Over the years, different, contrasting family groups of paintings have evolved which explore different qualities, procedures and images. Though his works have an economy of means and are usually modest in size, Fitzgerald seeks a certain kind of intensity and reflective experience which is built up slowly over time. A state of affairs exists in his paintings and drawings where it is not clear if everything is collapsing and falling apart or, on the contrary, forming and coming together. Combining organic and constructed elements, these intermediate, transitional domains are what give his paintings their tension and dynamics:

…a painting should be a lived thing, it is lived through in its making and in the viewing, as such it will often contain certain failures or inherent problems. It is very often the case that the unresolved has a lot of truth in it. For me a painting is an entity that should not depend on a fixed one-dimensional face to the world. It is an accumulation of evidence which reflects the life of its own making and the daily life that has gone into it.”

Reviewing an exhibition of his drawings at Guest Room Contemporary Art in Brussels in 2010 for the Brooklyn Rail, the poet and writer John Yauwrote “By responding to his immediate environment, Fitzgerald shares something with two older abstract artists, Raoul De Keyser and Thomas Nozkowski. Fitzgerald’s works do not suffer by comparison. Fitzgerald’s vocabulary is Basic – there is nothing elaborate or stylish about his lines and circles, rough and ragged shapes. He relies on coloured pencils, ink, and collage – nothing fancy. And yet – and this is why Fitzgerald seems to me to be on the verge of becoming an important and singular artist – the work comes across as taut and fresh, brimming with an awareness that the act of seeing is a construction, at once fluid and disrupted.”

HANNELINE RØGEBERG

Putting together two or more parts into an order is a narrative. Often when starting a painting I have a specific sequence in mind, a self-righteous one with clearly identifiable assignations to the parts. Presuming that the baseline purpose of all critical activity is to unmake and/or complexify a preexisting order, mine is to both answer the urge to express my particular narrative, and to hope for its undoing.

My work is as much a monitoring of my uses and abuses of really primitive psychoanalytic models as it is an articulation of them. I know letting obsolete thought regimes go is the price I pay for cognitive realignment. In periods I have painted towards the comfort and confirmation of what I already know – this always fails – and in stronger times towards upending it. Which imperatives are open for analytic adjustment and which ones are temperamental are not always clear to me.

My work is a narrative retrofitted to the resistance, tempo and mess of paint. Distinctions blur, categories bleed and pollute each other and uncover multiple complicities in their painted incarnations. The material evidence of this process is the doubleness I experience when in front of a painting: the phenomenological excess. This never-perfect-fit between image and its container is both my reward and irritant.

Like everyone else, I struggle with painting’s relevance; I place the point of my continued use of it on its limitations.

Painting’s analogy to skin isn’t new: the painted surface is a hide where battle-scars remain as a record of its experiences. The privacy of painting makes the analogy even easier: I stroke, lick, brush, bathe, in its unmaking I sand and cut. I am drawn to the dumb puns and double entendres of the body, the creases that stand in for other creases, apertures that open in place of other apertures, infantile behaviors that return as adult ones, etc.: thought games that make the intolerable tolerable. In paint I am looking at a viscous flourish that reminds me of something else, but is potent enough to keep me from naming that other thing.

If consciousness knows itself through (painted) language, it is by mining painting for its systemic/grammatical failures that I can hope to find unexpected outcomes to my narrative. I want to pry the subject away from its infatuation with fluency.

—

Currently a full professor at Mason Gross School of the Art, Røgeberg previously taught at University of Washington, Cooper Union and Yale School of Art, and was a visiting artist at Skowhegan in 2009.

STUART ELSTER

Nationally, at Yale University School of Art’s 32 Edgewood Gallery, New Haven CT, Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT, Happy Lion Gallery in Los Angeles CA, Schmidt Contemporary Art, Saint Louis, MO, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago, the Herter Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, University of the of the Arts in Philadelphia. Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho. Internationally his work has been shown in Italy, France, Austria India and Germany. A selected Bibliography of Stuart’s work includes, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Artcritical, Hyperallergic and Tema Celeste magazine. Profiles and interviews with the artist have been published in Heeb magazine and the Kunstforum International.

Stuart Elster is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and a Visiting Artist in the Summer drawing Marathon at the New York Studio School. Stuart was the former Director of the BFA Fine Arts Department and critic in the Summer MFA program at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia PA. He has been a visiting artist and guest critic at Yale University New Haven, CT. and Yale University Norfolk summer program, Brooklyn College MFA program, NYU Steinhart MFA Program in Studio Art, School of Visual Arts, NY DePaul University, Chicago, IL School of the Art institute of Chicago, Chicago IL, Rice University Houston TX, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX and the Kunstakademie Munster, Munster Germany.

Stuart Elser

ANN MC CORMICK

Ann Mc Cormick questions the relationship between painting and real space. What happens when paintings unfold into the space around them, when they become 3-dimensional? She is concerned with how we experience urban space and how this informs our perception. Ann explores the relationship between the work of art and the environment, between materiality and context, critique and commercialisation.

Initially as a painter Ann Mc Cormick was influenced by the paintings of the colourfield movement. She worked with pre-existing colours, with tactile qualities and with the possible connotations of finds, fragments and ready-mades. She has moved away from conventional attitudes to painting and the presentation of art. The image is in itself an actual space.

Ann Mc Cormick draws inspiration from the experience of the city, from the experience of architecture and streets, from the open and closed spaces of the constructed world. In fact her pictures do remind one of the experience of public spaces – but which public space is being referred to? Hardly the space, in which the individual is hidden beyond recognition. Rather one which is as little capable of dealing with intimacy but is blatantly informed by it, which presents itself as imperfect yet rich in meaning, unformed and broken, unprotected and brutal. Thus understood, the artist´s work can be interpreted as an image of privateness expanding into the public realm. Thus conferring the greatest respect to the right to individuality.

(Sigrid Schulze, Art Historian, Berlin, Mitte Museum)

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