This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers Reginald Madison’s mix of abstraction and figuration, Daniel Terna’s tension-filled scenes and Erin O’Keefe’s illusory photographs.
Lower East Side
Reginald Madison
Reginald Madison’s painting “Hot House 2,” the highlight of his show “Lucid Dreamer,” is named after a bebop standard performed by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and if you wanted to, you could find some pretty one-to-one correspondences. The back and forth shimmy of the two intestine-like forms, one blue and one orange, that move down the sides of the canvas could easily stand for the exuberant loops of the musicians’ improvisations. (The blue line, one assumes, would be Parker.)
A cloud of black-and-white squares supplies smoky atmosphere, the tropical green of two overturned brackets is a nod to the literal meaning of “hothouse,” and the background of gray and black diamonds evokes a tile floor, a textile pattern or a star map in another civilization. (Madison counts the experimental musician and performer Sun Ra, too, among his influences.)
The relationship is deeper, though. Some of the works in “Lucid Dreamer,” Madison’s New York City solo debut — at age 83 — go back 25 years, though most are recent. And while they stick to a bold, Expressionist color palette, Madison reaches impartially for abstraction or figuration, for corners or curves, for brushes or balled-up rags, according to the needs of the moment. He might even use cardboard or wood; the show includes several wall-mounted works of assemblage, like a tower of found chairs cut into shapes like finger pianos.
Just as a jazz soloist cuts away conventional melody to reveal the sheer creative force of untrammeled chord changes, Madison creates a relentless, sideways energy by letting his every gesture lead freshly to the next.
Tribeca
Daniel Terna
A deadpan boy in necktie and blazer at Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. A police officer adjusting rusted steel barriers outside the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Bavarian children dressed as knights and ladies for a folk festival. Creamy white bedsheets at an artists’ residency near Dachau, the concentration camp where his father, the painter Fred Terna, was imprisoned during World War II, and piles of sketchbooks that Fred left behind last year when he died in 2022: The photographer Daniel Terna shoots it all with the same acute but nonjudgmental eye.
Visually the photos are very compelling, and the Bavarian children in their cardboard castle especially are so interesting and pleasurable to look at that you may not get much further. What you’ll encounter if you do look deeper is a certain kind of narrative restraint, if not outright opacity. You may have guesses about that boy in Washington, but you don’t actually know what he is thinking; something’s clearly up with the police officer, but it’s impossible to say what.
With taut, tension-filled compositions and faces that are either absent or unforthcoming, Terna, who has shot photographs for The New York Times, just keeps reminding you of how much he isn’t sharing. Or, to put it another way, he just keeps admitting how hard it is to really know another human being. It’s an approach to photography that makes me think of “I and Thou,” Martin Buber’s book-length essay from 1923, in which he argued that to really look at the world outside oneself is to confront an absolute mystery.
Tribeca
Erin O’Keefe
The artworks in Erin O’Keefe’s new show at Sargent’s Daughters could pass for collages or even paintings, but they’re digital photographs. What makes them tricky to parse isn’t anything she does to the paper. It’s what, and the way, she shoots. O’Keefe cuts wooden blocks into tiny steps or long, flowing curves that evoke unfurling ribbons. She then paints the blocks with thick layers of vivid color and arranges them in tight still lifes in front of equally vivid backdrops.
Sometimes she adds trompe l’oeil stripes or shadows to make one block look as if it is overlapping a second, or to create the appearance of a third that isn’t really there. If you look closely, you can find brush marks and shadows; if you stand back, the photographs’ colorful shapes strike your eye like snippets of origami paper.
It’s a setup that, quite apart from the appealing images it produces, ingeniously illustrates the central paradox that makes photography so fascinating: However textured or three-dimensional the objects it portrays, in the end every photograph is flat. However flat or abstract or conceptual a given photograph appears, though, in one way or another it must always refer back to the three-dimensional world in which it was made.
See the October gallery shows here.
The post What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in November appeared first on New York Times.
