Sacred beauty from ‘Desert’ artists
Stunning aboriginal paintings at Gagosian bring summer gallery season to a lively end.
As with Navajo blankets, Japanese Zen enso paintings, Gee’s Bend quilts and much more, the similarity between Australian aboriginal painting and modern Western abstract art is mostly superficial. All have their own codes and contexts, which are keys to unlocking the deeper beauty of what the artists have made. Think of them as outliers at your peril.
At Gagosian, “Desert Painters of Australia Part II” assembles 21 paintings by 11 artists made during the last 30 years, with most dating from this century. (The title’s “Part II” nods to an earlier exhibition at the gallery’s New York flagship last spring.) Many works are borrowed from the collection of writer Anne Stringfield and her husband, entertainer Steve Martin. The exhibition is an exciting conclusion to an unusually lively summer gallery season, which has departed from the more typical vacation-time quietude.
Most of these desert painters live and work in Australia’s Northern Territory, first settled by indigenous people 40,000 years ago, principally in the sparsely populated, semi-arid southern region. Perhaps that helps explain the prominence of searing, red-orange hues in more than half the show’s paintings: You feel the presence and power of sprawling desert landscape, with its similarly colored earth and light, even if you don’t see its forms depicted.
If there is a mark that characterizes these widely varied paintings, it is the dot. Atomized specks and spots proliferate, often coalescing to form lines, pathways and larger circles that create dense, canvas-covering patterns reaching edge to edge. Compositions have no center — or perhaps multiple centers, which con-
stantly shift attention across the surface.
Naata Nungurrayi paints a densely stippled, horizontal field of flame-colored spots against earthen brown and black, a stark contrast that establishes its glowing vibrancy.
George Tjungurrayi (Nungurrayi’s brother) weaves sinuous lines that seem to be an impossible fusion of a tiny fingerprint and a limitless landscape. Like dried brush on a hillside, dense thickets of horizontal rows of vertical dot-lines mark an exquisite painting by Yukultji Napangati.
Many of the show’s most captivating works are by women, including Nungurrayi and Napangati, ages 87 and 49, respectively. The standout is the justly celebrated Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-96), a Utopia clan elder regarded by the National Museum of Australia as among the country’s greatest artists.
Her career was brief but prolific, with some 3,000 paintings made over eight years — about one per day. The three Kngwarreye works in the show demonstrate her formidable breadth.
“Wild Yam and Emu Food” is a network of cellular shapes filled to overflowing with stabbed dots of color, like a roiling, barely contained energy field. “Yam Story III” is a vertical web of spidery white tracery over flat black, a ghostly trail of light standing 71⁄2 feet tall. “Merne Akngerre,” arguably the most viscerally beautiful painting in a show with tough competition for the title, is an ecstatic 10-foot horizontal expanse of teeming spots of rainbow hues, which marks the eddying flow of time through the ritual tapping of the brush.
The paintings were specifically made for outsiders. The sacred and narrative cosmology contained within them is, according to a gallery handout, veiled and fragmentary, transformed and intentionally withheld in their fullness from those outside the clans. Given the expressive richness of the articulation of experience contained in what we do see, these are masterful contemporary paintings, plain and simple.
Gagosian, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills. Tuesdays-Saturdays, through Sept. 6. (310) 271-9400, gagosian.com
Steve Roden’s bold oddities
Composers and painters often borrow from one another, but rarely are they the same person.
Steve Roden is one of those impressive oddities. New work at Vielmetter Los Angeles once again shows how captivating that rarity can be.
An unexplained system of sonic frequencies is crafted into something vividly visible in abstract paintings, large and small, that unite mark-making and color. No explanation is offered to give details of Roden’s systemic process for developing his dense compositions, but you sense it is there as you look. Improvisational it is, but haphazard it is not.
Not a cloud, beast or blade of grass is seen, but the compositions thrum with natural life. Vectors of rich color thickly or thinly applied zing across the canvas, cradling organic shapes within their geometric intersections. The paintings’ prismatic, crystalline structure paradoxically breathes, as if poised to open and close like a flower.
Perhaps the show’s sound installation is a clue to the pictures’ sources. Made by blowing into a vintage pipe organ’s disassembled wooden reed boxes, it gives sonic form to exhalation. A pair of projected videos, “detritus” (debris) and “orrery” (a mechanical model of the solar system) show the artist manipulating bits of collage into place, although nothing permanently sticks. All is provisional — a discomfiting proposition at first but ultimately a relief.
The show’s title, “could/ cloud,” is written all lower case, as if you’ve stumbled into the middle of a thought rather than its beginning. It encapsulates the larger motive.
Rational cogency is set aside, replaced by a moving blend of unguarded possibility (could) and amorphous delicacy (cloud). For art, that’s a trade worth making.
Vielmetter Los Angeles, 1700 S. Santa Fe Ave. Tuesdays-Saturdays, through Aug. 24. (213) 623-3280, www .vielmetter.com
Jay DeFeo works of 1951-54 Italy
Fourteen paintings on paper by Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929-89) offer a provocative thumbnail sketch of a crucial period in the artist’s development.
She tagged her extended 1952 stay working in a studio in Florence, Italy, as a foundational episode in her career. DeFeo made around 200 paintings on paper that summer, and these works from 1951 to ’54 frame the moment.
Tempera, acrylic, ink, chalk and graphite are sometimes densely applied, sometimes softly layered, often mixed together in dramatic and luminous ways. The list of materials speaks to her exploratory momentum.
DeFeo is up-to-the-minute in her awareness of Abstract Expressionism exemplified by the San Francisco and New York Schools.
But, unsurprisingly given her determination to experience European art history first-hand, she is also plainly interested in a visual mindfulness of earlier strata of time.
Layers of roughly builtup geometric shapes emphasize the paintings’ pentimento, which pokes through from beneath the surface, while radiant light was perhaps inspired by a visit to North Africa.
In about one-third of these examples, the paper is torn and irregularly shaped. (Most works have dimensions of 1 or 2 feet.) Some include paint-slathered collage, and one is done on hotel stationery. The painting is objectified, neither window nor mirror on outer or inner worlds, but a circumstance all its own.
Forms remain abstract, although hints of body parts — an eye, a limb — and suggestions of plants, trees and buildings can be glimpsed. DeFeo typically clusters her gestural geometry within larger fields of color, although texture dominates these bracing works. Often bold and assertive, the best come across as primordial place-making exercises.
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 9953 S. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. Tuesdays-Saturdays, through Sept. 14 (310) 277-9953, www.marc selwynfineart.com