Steve Rockwell, Good Gordo, Casual Observer, In the Black, andHard Edge, 2024. Citing the work of Steve Rockwell, Hills Snyder, Lorser Feitelson (1963 painting), and Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” (with Lee Remick).Hills Snyder, Casual Observer/Causal Observer, 2010, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas, installation view
Curated Content #5 is a four panel image sentence that clusters pictures into paragraphs. As we read, a story may unfold. Dog observes a periscope rising out of the sea that breaks into light from something hidden – the “submarine.” Although Hills Snyder employed its image to advertise his 2010 exhibition at Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, Texas, the original periscope image was created byAndrea Danti for Shutterstock.com. Snyder’s employment of the periscope becomes a key that breaks the seal to his container of objects and experiences – now accessible to even the casual viewer. To get the “full” picture, however, further observation is necessary. A documentation of the work that went into mounting Snyder’s elaborate installation can be accessed by clicking Casual Observer.
Hills Snyder, Casual Observer/Causal Observer, 2010, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas, installation view
An attentive Gordo in the first panel mimes the periscope, having been obedient to his master’s voice (Stuart Regen) in posing for my photograph – a captured moment that merited the cover of the premier edition of dArt magazine in January 1998. By sheer coincidence, the dog’s front paws in the Good Gordo image cover a crack in the concrete floor, echoing the one in the Snyder submarine photo. In that respect, as the dArt genesis account unfolds, Gordo’s paw bruises the wriggling serpent crack on the floor of the Regen Projects gallery.
The third panel of a woman contemplating a black rectangle is derived from dArt‘s 1998 second edition and was provided ACME gallery in Los Angeles to accompany More Shifts in the LA Gallery Landscape, an article by Michael Darling. Two years earlier ACME had consented to take part in my Storage installation project by storing a 32 by 32 inch acrylic on panel painting showing my hand holding a black card. The project served as the visual component for the book work Meditations on Space, An Artist’s Odyssey through Art Galleries in Europe and North America, published in 1996. My earlier visit to ACME in Santa Monica on January 3, 1996 had taken a geometric bent, “I walked in a straight line from the door to the back of the gallery where someone was installing work. He pointed me towards the desk corner. I made a 40 degree turn and walked over to speak to Randy Sommer, and then a 70 degree turn for the door. That completed the triangle.”
Left: Steve Rockwell, Storage Project, 1996, ACME gallery, Los Angeles, installation view. Right: In the Black, 2024, oil and mixed media on dArt magazine page, 8.5 x 7 inches
The fourth panel, Hard Edge features Lorser Feitelson’s 1963 Untitled painting, managing a further echo, this time, of the red facade of Snyder’s installation exterior. If a connection were to be be made between the peephole in Snyder’s Casual Observer/Causal Observer to ones in the Spanish door of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an intriguing possibility is introduced – a murder of the mythic art kind. Lorser Feitelson’s red lozenge shape in Hard Edge is interrupted in its right corner by a film still crop of Lee Remick testifying in Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder.
Historically, artist Lorser Feitelson has a tie to the emergence of “hard edge painting.” He was featured in the 1999 dArt magazine article Testing the Fabric of the New Color Field by Michael Duncan. Duncan had been critical of this group of primarily Los Angeles-based artists writing, “For me a lack of ambition and conviction is the problem with the most hyped members of the so-called New Color Field movement.” Duncan preferred works of several older LA artists, “whose explosive and inventive use of color and abstract design provide quirky and fruitful contexts for the works of the younger experimenters.” A dip into the trove of art world narratives about Paris, New York, and Los Angeles from a century ago, should not disappoint those truly interested. Simply click the Lorser Feitelson Interviews for a brouse.
With colorful, gestural abstract forms, exuberantly captured through diverse emotions, conceptual word-games and expressive brushstrokes, Ariadne Vitastali’s paintings are a unique evolution of the visual tradition of the Northwest School Abstraction. Full of spontaneous markings of color tones with melodic lines as seen in Abstraction Lyrique, or automatist subconscious gestures, similar to Action Painting and finally gentle calligraphic movements reminiscent of the techniques of the American painter Mark Tobey, her neo-expressionist images can be formally compared to the radical experiments of the Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning.
Ariadni Vitastali, Untitled 096, 2023, mixed media on paper, 39 x 28″
Willem de Kooning believed about his abstract painting that «It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it…. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. … It [painting Woman, Ι] did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light – I put it in the center of the canvas because there was no reason to put it a bit on the side. So, I thought I might as well stick to the idea that it’s got two eyes, a nose and mouth and neck.». Artist statements can sometimes be misleading in that, out of a desire to control their public image artists sometimes overstate or exaggerate their statements.
Thus, one can safely assume that de Kooning’s work and by extension Vitastali’s were very meticulously planned, whilst both artists precisely considered the formal aspects of their compositions before their artistic execution in order to create a paradoxical sort of accidental perfection. Morphologically this can be confirmed by a careful examination of their artworks. De Kooning saved and cut-out various images of women from popular presses, something that demonstrates forethought and planning, while their placement also illustrates pre-planning and strategy as also Vitastali’s carefully chosen compositional designs. In fact, Vitastali’s compositions are often diagonally situated causing the eye to be active according to Expressionist principles.
Ariadni Vitastali, Untitled 111, 2023, mixed media on paper, 39 x 28″
Although Vitastali’s recent works are abstract, her oeuvre straddles the categories between abstract and abstracted, in that her non-relational images maintain some recognizable motifs. As seen in several 2022-2023 Untitled paintings, the artist uses abstracted modes in order to treat subjects with a feminist bent while depicting mythological heroines. One such painting is Untitled III, 2023 -wherein a figure is seen tumbling backwards into a chasm-that can be read in terms of the Demeter legend. When Persephone, her daughter was abducted by Hades the God of the underworld, Demeter went to Hades to seek her out, and her absence caused a famine on earth. To Vitastali’s predecessors -the American Abstract Expressionists- myth was also important informing the work of William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. These artists including Vitastali, used a semi-representational or abstracted style in their early careers later becoming increasingly abstract.
The term “abstract” and its varying degrees, carries a whole range of associations and descriptions. German-born American artist and museum founder, Hilla von Rebay, used the term gegenstandlos(to describe her abstract painting), which American artists later mistranslated as “object less painting.” Rebay who associated her visual production with “pure” music, like Kandinsky, believed that art should be externalized from the inner cosmos of the artist and not from a simple abstraction of external nature. This particular idea paradoxically already existed in the Christian aesthetics of the Middle Ages and Scholasticism and was quite widespread until the Renaissance and Mannerism. The artist-craftsman was not supposed to simply copy, or mimic the material world, but instead to reflect within his inner psyche, the divine “ideas” that constitute a higher dimension than world of phenomena or changing space-time.
Erwin Panofsky in his book Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, specifically wrote that the work of art “far from being merely derived from the creations of nature and transferred to the work of art by a simple act of copying, lives in the mind of the artist himself and is directly translated by him into matter.”Similarly, modern abstract painting rejected the Platonic concept of art as “mimesis” and attempted to return to a more primal state of art, i.e. to a non-representational art, where the artist expresses an inner and intuitive world-picture (Weltbild) of the external reality -or as Rebay meant the word gegenstandlos as“subjective”. The art theorist Wilhelm Worringer also believed that primitive art is par excellence a “pure, geometric and abstract” art, where the subject unconsciously tried to escape the eternal flux of the varying phenomena of the outer world.
Ariadni Vitastali, Untitled 9075, 2023, mixed media on paper
As Kant believed, despite all the avant-garde’s radical convictions about an abstract art of the future, abstract art essentially managed to return to a primordial side of pictorial art, where the inner world of the human psyche with all its violent permutations is no longer separated from an inaccessible rift in the external world. But instead, through abstract art (as well as music), the numinous phantasmagorias of the soul are translated externally without the need to appropriate a material form, or an external image. They should instead be expressed through a kind of formal “formlessness”, in which they visually diffuse without the metaphorical clothing of a phenomenal world. Thus, the Kantian separation of the thing-in-itself (i.e. the noumenon) and ephemeral phenomena no longer exists and the abstract artist as a new kind of shaman, or magician directly externalizes his immaterial and aniconic thoughts-feelings into objective reality, restoring thus a long-gone universal communication for humanity, despite linguistic, ethnic and cultural differences among civilizations. The imaginal (and also formless) medium of the abstract artist here manifests itself as a universal language of specific moods (Stimmungen) or even archetypical experiences, which every human, as Carl Jung strongly affirmed, everywhere in the globe subliminally shares.
Likewise, Vitastali’s complex, yet simultaneously time-minimal works externalize the boundary between abstraction and figurative painting. Between the dreamlike masses of pure color, anthropomorphic figures and illusory forms can be discerned, which blend together within the streams of discrete colorfulness. Thus, different fragments of lost forms are revived in an elaborate, but simple mosaic of lively hues, where the unconscious tendencies of an inner world are imprinted like living spots on the white paper, while morphic modulations and color-form sketches recreate the subliminal tones of a lyrical locus of abstract images. Her present paintings are abstracted, representing as such an engagement with her earlier mode of working, which rigorously marks her maturity as an artist.
As Ariadni Vitastali writes in her statement about her new works “the painting elements of form, color, gesture, line, as also fragments of phrases, or simply words, define the worked surface as abstract elements, insinuating a glimpse view of a momentary and subjective reality”.
Thomas Ackermann, I Love M Matisse, 1984, oil and beeswax on canvas, 66”X66″
Thomas Ackermann was born in Bad Hersfeld, Germany in 1952. As a child his first major influence was a set of Bibles his mother received in trade when Thomas was just four years old. Within the Bibles were illustrations by the Old Masters, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Jacob Jordaens, to name a few. Thomas became enthralled with the illustrations he constantly viewed in the Bibles.
The Ackermanns immigrated to Canada in 1964 where Thomas continued his studies. As a young adult Thomas enrolled in the New School of Art as it was then called, in Toronto, Ontario. The New School of Art was an academic school under the tutelage of Dennis Burton, Robert Markle, Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rainer, David Bolduc and John MacGregor, all of which had achieved artistic success within the art world of Canada. Out of a class of 20 art students, Ackermann was the only graduate that would go on to pursue and sustain a career as a successful full-time artist.
Thomas Ackermann, Cedar Lake Ritual, 2022, oil on canvas. 55″x60″
Inspired by the famous Canadian Group of Seven, renowned for their dramatic landscapes of Ontario’s northern reflections, Thomas Ackermann worked in a spontaneous and improvisational manner focused on creating his own painting style. While the aforementioned generation drew their inspiration from the all too familiar landscapes, Ackermann was greatly influenced by the abstract style of action painting. Artists like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko became the staple of New York Abstract Expressionism. In Canada there was Harold Town, William Ronald, Ray Mead, Tom Hodgson, Kazou Nakamura, Walter Yarwood, Jock MacDonald, Alexandra Luke, Oscar Cahen, Hortense Gordon and Jack Bush, who formed the Painters Eleven. That generation introduced abstract action painting to Canada in the 1950’s, influenced by what was transcending in New York City from the New York Abstract Expressionists.
Ackermann experimented with images taken from the Impressionists and modern artists and incorporated those images with the influences of the New York Expressionists. By using his own methods and techniques, he would completely transform the image by assimilating the two styles. Early works such as “I Love M. Matisse” (1984, oil and beeswax on canvas 66” x 66”) and “Curtain Call for a Flag 1” (1984, oil and beeswax on canvas 80” x 80”) took an inspired Henri Matisse “Blue Nude” cut out image and merged it with a Willem de Kooning “Women in Landscape” image creating an assimilation of the two styles on a William Ronald backdrop.
More recent works such as “Bacchanal on Cedar Lake” (2022 oil and beeswax on canvas 55” x 60”) and “Cedar Lake Ritual” (2023 oil and beeswax on canvas 55” x 60”) where the central figures are inspired by Matisse’s “The Dance” (1910, oil on canvas) were juxtaposed over a backdrop manipulation of Tom Thomson’s “The West Wind” (1917, oil on canvas) thus forming a dramatic combination. The former, a night vision with the crescent moon lighting up the dancing figures and the latter, a cloudy day vision of the dancing figures under a burning tree.
Thomas Ackermann, Northland, 2022, oil on canvas, 48″x76″
Another recent example is “Northland” (2022, oil and beeswax on canvas 48” x 76”) where he places a central figure inspired by Canadian artist Ken Danby’s “At the Crease” (1972 oil on canvas) juxtaposed over a Rorschach backdrop manipulation of Tom Thomson’s “The West Wind” (1917 oil on canvas). Ackermann often appropriates iconic images readjusting their history into his own poignant point of view. He continuously uses an inspired image in different combinations until he has exhausted its usage.
As a painter for more than 50 years Ackermann has endeavoured to elicit a visceral experience from his paintings to the viewer. His interest is not about the motif or images used as the central focal point but more so the process of transforming the painted surface with his unique manipulation of his medium, the oil paint, thus creating a physically, stunning painting. Ackermann quoted “Half of my subject is the painting itself.” He developed a unique way of applying materials onto the canvas, in spirit, much like Jackson Pollock or Helen Frankenthaler, dripping or pouring. Ackermann uses a 600 year old medium such as oil paint, mixed with beeswax, allowing flexibility to the integrity of the paint and re-invented or altered it to suit his own unique process. He is constantly altering his methods to discover new ways and techniques in which to express his vision. His works are either highly reflective, without topical varnishes, or extremely rough and textured. In his later and more recent works, a brush has not touched the final surface.
Thomas Ackermann, Le Dejeuner Sur L’une, 2017, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 65″x52″
Like many of his peers, Ackermann worked through a series of developmental phases or stages influenced by his surroundings. He began in Toronto, Ontario, moved to Spain, returned to Canada, and finally settled in the small rural town of Forest, Ontario. He has worked through different influential periods beginning with “Figurative Abstractions” (1973-1988). then transitioning to his “Spanish Paintings” during his residency in southern Spain (1988-1994). From there, on his return to Canada to Forest, Ontario, he commenced his transformation into his “Qabala” series (1994-2000). Constantly moving forward, Ackermann created “The Card Paintings”, an ambitious body of work at a grandiose scale from any previous works (2002-2004). Following this, he transitioned to works predominately on paper mounted to canvas with his “Target-ID” images taken from portraiture. He produced an oeuvre based on a photograph of “A Portrait of Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin”. This photograph was taken by his fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong, showing Aldrin standing on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. By using historical and biblical imagery, one sees reflections on the astronaut’s helmet face-shield/visor creating his “Astronauts” series (2007-2009).
In later years, Ackermann became discouraged with the academics of the art world. He turned to his dark period producing a series of paintings titled “Dead Men Standing”, “The Gates of Hell” and “Fukushima”. Here he stumbled upon a new technique that would transform his work for the next several years and which has continued to this day. This discovery consisted of placing a high grade acrylic film called Duralar over an image, than peeling it off and repositioning it on a fresh canvas. This created a soluble transfer which allowed him to not only paint one image but to transfer it to other canvases creating paintings from one master image. Ackermann further discovered that the longer he left the high grade acrylic film cover on the painting, the more plastic in nature the surface would become, and remain to the point where the surface looked as if the image was behind plexiglass, when in fact it is the actual paint surface. One only needs to look at the surface of any one of his paintings to visually see the quality and aspects of the applied oil paint to the canvas revealing the genius of a true master.
1. Bice Lazzari: Stacatto in a Blue Musical Forest.“Untitled” Richard Saltoun Gallery at Independent Art Fair 2023
2. Mary Watt: Sky-water dives into a deep river and walks into the forest, searching for light. “Shared Horizon ( Keepers of the Western Door), Marc Strauss Gallery at Armory 2023
3. Lakela Brown: Ancient gold piercing our history and our heritage. “ Composition #2 with Doorknocker Earrings, 56 Henry at Armory 2023
4. Stuart Lantry:Ferris wheel riding with gifts facing a dangerous reality. “Asleep at the reinvented wheel”, Spring Break 2023
5. Ed Baynard with a lineup of our daily treasures – “Bowl painting” , James Fuentes at Independent Art Fair 2023
6. Allan Wexler:Coffee seeks its own level. Jane Lombard Gallery at Independent Art Fair 2023
7. Pepe Mar:Face Off (Philodendron), 2023, mixed media and acrylic on museum board, 24 x 20 inches, David Castillo at Armory 2023
8. Gregg Woolard:Ancient call for energy and synergy in orange metaphors. “Valley of Kings”, Max Fish at Spring Break 2023
Mike Hansen, Off Minor, Big Band (Jazz Series), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Classical music and contemporary jazz is wound tightly into every thread of the weave of Mike Hansen’s “Spot-o-fi” installation of watercolours, canvases, and plaster sculptures at Lonsdale Gallery in Toronto. Scan the QR code on the exhibition labels, and hear the music that gave life to the artist’s visual output. Yet, there is no necessary chain here that binds one to the other. Hansen admits that his painterly output amounts to a critique on abstract expressionism and its latter day emotional hangover, a purely visual art conversation between modernism and its post-painterly derivations. Consequently, the “Spot-o-fi” visual wall art stands alone against the welter of Hansen’s “wall of sound” references.
Mike Hansen Spot-o-fi installtion view
If Hansen has a go at abstract expressionism’s watered down derivatives, he also manages to save some powder for the music streaming platforms of our day. His exhibition title, “Spot-o-fi” is a dig at the prevalent algorithms, encouraging a type of lazy listening that tend ultimately to denigrate the sonic masterpieces he references to background noise.
Mike Hansen, A Love Supreme (Jazz Series), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 74 x 74 inches (four canvases)
No better example of a modernist painter steeped in music, who succeeded in as tight a threading of sound and image as anyone, was of course, Paul Klee. The 2008 “Melody and Rhythm” exhibition at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria was a tribute to the Swiss artist’s uncanny ability to evoke “sound composition” from colour, line, and texture.
Mike Hansen, Reflections on Gnossienne No 3, 2023, acrylic on epoxy, 27 x 11 x 8 inches
I make the Klee reference since the painted forms of Hansen’s four-panel “A Love Supreme (Jazz Series)”, for instance, a tribute to Coltrane’s opus, draw no obvious parallel to the music that may have inspired them. Brightly coloured, amorphic cutout shapes that waft and melt in airy layers, possess a graphic life independent of sound – unless of course, a conscious inference is made to connect them. The positive for Hansen plays to the materially visual art in the exhibition, and that the gloss-candied surfaces of his sculpture production appear good enough to eat, can’t be held against the artist.
