7/13/2007

Roger White

56 comments:

Painter said...

Roger White @
D'Amelio Terras
525 W 22nd St
New York, NY 10011


Group Show Joe Bradley, Daniel Hesidence, Chris Martin, and Roger White

amy boras said...

this shirt style should be outlawed.

Michael Cross said...

According to the gallery press release...

"The exhibition is a light-hearted attempt to create a movement, even a temporary one, for the duration of this exhibition."

So I guess now even 'movements' only get 15 minutes. ADHD-ism?

Thousand Points of Light said...

Why is NY abstraction stuck in such a rut? Curatorial gloss doesn't cut it.

youth--less said...

Cross you do not seem to have a light heart today. They did call the show Heralds of Creative Anachronism. How is this work connected to that dorky prescedent--that insular society of people who do sword fights in parking lots? ADHD and more. I'm into it. I sure like Daniel Hesidence and Chris martin.

no-where-man said...

ack the whole show felt loosely tided together forced and painfully weak. I got NOTHING out of the "Maleness". What a BS agenda.

dp said...

I get the strange sensation that my body is made out of stretcher bars.

Nomi Lubin said...

I like this painting. It's like a goofy playful Jasper Johns flag. It makes me smile. And that's what art is supposed to do.

milf-magic said...

Art is supposed to punch you in the face and call your sister names.

milf-magic said...

I like this breezy cotton number, but I'd much prefer a nice linen one, you know, for the discotheque.

*******

Hey did you hear? Abstraction is back... and better than ever!

2 things I never thought I'd see again: High-waisted pants and Abstraction!

And to think, all I have back at my pad are low-rise pants and figurative paintings!

!!!

youth--less said...

Don't worry. Hi-waisted pants only look good on a few people. They will be out in 6 mo.

Similarly, abstraction only appeals to the few. But what a few! My few...

Sven said...

I'd wear that

amy boras said...

blue and yellow and a bad wanna be hippie shirt do not = abstraction.

amy boras said...

do you smile when you see jesus crucified on a medieval cross?

Nomi Lubin said...

No. Then I cry. Art is supposed to make you cry.

Michael Cross said...

(I'm really pretty light-hearted... Just trying to live up to my name.)

Worrying about what art is "supposed to do" gets convoluted because each person, artist included, has a different take on that. But I'm pretty sure what it should avoid doing is submitting to artificial herding-together for the sake of some curator's idea of what the current market might bear. (And forgive my using the words 'market' and 'bear' in the same sentence.)

As with the practice of force fitting unrelated (landscape) titles onto abstraction, this type of show as light-hearted as it may be is commercial gallery driven, not artist driven. That eventually makes for weak art; art that places a priori restrictions on itself.

Yes, it is very difficult to get work seen in galleries and artists feel the need to submit to market conventions to survive. But survival of the artist should not lead to lifeless artworks, and recent shows are treading really really close to that.

Nomi Lubin said...

Hey, I was just being silly.

But I still like this painting.

DAMEONER said...

Jesus on the cross is a metaphysical abstraction of the highest sort. This funny looking shirt is not very interesting, unless you are into yellow and blue.

Unknown said...

this show was weak conceptually and visually, also the idea of 4 white male abstractionists as a "joke" just isnt funny at all, the work just looked dull as a doorknob. i dont get it.

dp said...

This is like one of those Magic Eye things. There's a pagoda-phallus-pacman coming up through the middle of the painting, eating worms or shoelaces. If you squint.

Anonymous said...

is it possible that the difficulty of showing work in galleries and the level of competitiiveness in the Art World generally does absolutely nothing to positively affect the quality of work held up to the public eye? bueller? bueller?

Anonymous said...

suddenly, james siena is looking pretty darn good!

Unknown said...

lots of people are looking good compared to some of the so called abstract stuff i saw in group shows last night. nozkowski, von heyl, greenbaum, hyde, heilmann, is it a generational thing or what.oehlen, wool, this reinvention of abstraction is so silly. yes even siena , painting is hard to do not just pretending to do it by mimicking older styles or using older styles as a way of trying to be new to get attention from the market. stephen mueller looks good too these days...maybe i am an old fogie but not that old.

webthing said...

so many horrid references
2007
Roger White
Oil & Pajamas on plaster

but then...

slowly, look a bit more
2007
Roger White
Commercial food dye on bedsheets

but...

challenge (horrid great horrid)
2007
Roger White
IKEA product#52

if you don't look away straight away, which is the reaction, it's got you. and then you want to laugh like bridget riley stoned on a yacht in fort pond bay.

Martin said...

i saw this (small) show today, and liked it.

he has two paintings in the show... i liked the other one better actually. this one is called "baja", and the other one is called something like "sheet", or maybe "towel"... i can't remember... but, it is evidently a painting of a sheet or a towel.neither of these i guess are really abstraction... but the sheet one is not obviously a picture of something, like this baja.

both of them are painted well, thin and loose. the "sheet" is full of a triangle design... and within each triangle the brushwork is unfussy and spontaneous.

very much liked that one.

Anonymous said...

All good fun, if it's confidently almost easily painted I think I would like it too. Not too serous but then does it have to be? Sometimes something comes out of it, later on. In a commercial gallery setting, well... 三角?
I waiting for some shots of Barnaby from last nite Martin.

Unknown said...

I think I bought this for my kid from Boden... Is that a good thing for Mr. Roger White or bad?

zipthwung said...

I haven't liked a subject this much since I got the Galaxians reference in the Matrix movie.

Because in the eighties these were pretty popular. I think maybe they sold them at Target. This was before the free trade agreement and Wal-Martization and regulation of lead lined childrens toys from China.

As an aside - acid wash denim would make a nice ground, if you read every single Artforum magazine and are now cruising the October files.

But really all the claims to lightness and whatnot are ill founded, because who just tiredly colonized first thru tenth generation abstraction (see the artists listed above yet again, but as a burlesque yet again?

Ask not of this work to be heavy - it shall never be as heavy as car crashing wrist slitting drug taking alcohol enema-d macho fucks.

No, better to surf the blue room, shredding the last curl, or out beyond the breakers, watching the old art world dye. For thine is the kindom.

Who ordered the pizza?

zipthwung said...

this rocks

the railings reminded me of the Torben Giehler.

Unknown said...

Shit, I missed the Galaxians reference in the Matrix so I have know idea what the hell you are trying to wax poetic on!!! You are linking some nice phrasing together ie; dye for die but you might be trying too hard.. nice Spicoli ref on the pizza though...

zipthwung said...

Thanks danielle, you really get me. or maybe its just because you are an american in my demographic.

Dye was an accident - no shit.

Let the rivers run red! But the matrix one is not the first - but when the spider eyed gigeresque squid dealios invade babylon (my god thats loaded!) through a hole drilled in the rock, they drop down in waves exactly like a video game to be shot at by these sort of cyborg chair people - man and machine and all that. Like flack gunners in ww2 actually. But really just an H.R. geiger trope.

But what that points to - and what the Matrix relies on, is the idea that reality is just a construct, a conspiracy (to quote baudrillard).

Well in the movie everyone decided to get plugged in at some point - or rather they were BORN INTO the system, so they can't see outside of it. Another way of looking at that is that people channel their energy into boxes - and thus become functional components of the larger grid. This effectively narrows your options and blinds you to other sectors of society - all of which work together synergysticly, like a hive.

Which is to say this work allows others to be heavy, but in a sense nothing is all that heavy as an individual unit. This might seem unbearable and sleight - your total insignificance and redundancy, but it is the truth, and as they say the truth is out there.

Cause, what the world needs now
are some true words of wisdom
like La La La La La

Be free.

Unknown said...

You are preaching to the choir on the Matrix my friend...(How did this painting lead down the Matrix path?) River run was an interesting ref.. I love Finnegans Wake but was curious if you could see my profile in light of said phrasing..

peace

Ryan Hancock said...

Painter is rolling with the "no admittance" type of space.

I like what I can gather from this jpeg combined with Martin's comments. What if it were peices of painted canvas sewn together like a shirt? Better or worse or just another thing altogether? Also, what if the scale were like saville.. The quick and simple paint qualities are what I like about this painting, but if it were Jennysized, these qualities would become a performance, like her paintings and her relatives in the west coast school, like Bischoff and Diebenkorn (though I like some of their work).

surfkook said...

This painting is good in a lame way. Like Joe Bradley's painting that look like flat Joel Shapiro sculpture.

Could someone clue me in on Daniel Hesidence. I've seen his work for years and I don't get or feel his abstract work. It's not bad enough to be BAD and it's sucks too much to be compelling.

Unknown said...

i dont get it either at ALL, i think its a case of the art world deciding that someone(usually a white male) has "heat" even when the work is mostly just bad work. i think there is a conceptual or theoretical back story that people think means that there is more there than there is. i thought the painting at DT looked amateurish and sophomoric, i certainly wouldnt want that on my wall. give me rudy stingl any day. but i think the story behind it is that its kind of a joke on dumb or salon painting, but the jokes on him, we will not hear of him for long. it will pass very soon i am sure, he is a one season wonder, without the wonder. mean sounding i know but with all of the talented people who cant get shows , older people who have been passed by because they are over 40 its really sad that this is what passes for relevance.

Anonymous said...

I had a look at the install views, actually the shirt looks OK, very plain despite the stripes. I get a kick out of Bradley's stuff, painting blocks reminiscent of Joel... with preference to them staying in the pop realm with a figure ...

Late Liberties probably offers something more substantial as a group show and as premise.

Nomi Lubin said...

I still like it.

None said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
surfkook said...

Late Liberties is a bit all over the map, but there are some good pieces by Kim Fisher, Dana Frankfort.

Steppen Wolf said...

Daniel Hesidence has a bit of energy that looks OK at this show. All the rest seem to be painted doormats..
Hey, but the show hoped to foster a lighthearted 'movement' (even if the movement lasted only for the length of the show) - I did not sense too much of a movement there though.

Unknown said...

thats a good title for a show, Painted Doormats. who will curate

David D'Andrade said...

Please, enough of Gene Davis's daughter shopping at Target.

CAP said...

Time for a new post I think, Painter.

zipthwung said...

(*)

milf-magic said...

I kind of liked the Bradley, but he's flirting a bit with sculpture don't you think?
I liked Hesidence's old work: the small fussy portraits with red-rimmed eyes and flesh-wounds (I know figuration is outre now, but bear with me) and I don't really get the shift to corporate-Gordon-Gecko-real-estate-eating-abstraction. Swirly. Oddly similar to Sue Williams' shift from painful figuration to pleasurable formalism, no?
Late Liberties (late for what?) was ok, but I've seen much more abstract work that feels like a "highly personal act" than those choices. The gal from CANADA I liked and a few others but overall? eh...
So how long does this go on huh? Figuration takes the lead 1-0. Oh wait Abstraction pulls ahead 2-1. Are we purely dependent on "the market" to tell artists when to expect to stop making wall decorations and start on the next aesthetic because, well, barbarous hordes have taken control of petroleum and military "operations" have extended into western Europe? Then what? Unemployment soars to 35% and those who arent rioting work and tend strange underground eco-farms? What art will the "market" require then? State regulated self-protection videos with clean neo-classical lines? Growth hormone-as-beautifier? Security-barrier-searchlight-land-art-performances? Lucrative to the talented and select few graduates of the Pentagon MFA, no doubt...

CAP said...

You're not really Peter Pezzimenti, are you Milf?

jpegCritic said...

nice piece, Z.

painter pentimenti?

petit objet a?

zipthwung said...

"The aspect of paranoia that Dalí was interested in and which helped inspire the method was the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked. Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena."

Employing the method when creating a work of art uses an active process of the mind to visualise images in the work and incorporate these into the final product. An example of the resulting work is a double image or multiple image in which an ambiguous image can be interpreted in different ways.

André Breton hailed the method, saying that Dalí's paranoiac-critical method was an "instrument of primary importance" and that it "has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, the construction of typical Surrealist objects, fashion, sculpture, the history of art, and even, if necessary, all manner of exegesis."


Exegesis.

Sounds religious or something.

CAP said...

Tell that to Wittgenstein and Archimboldo.

Anonymous said...

Well... you know when the lion roars there is only the faintest understanding of what the lion is saying. So too, with the loudest and most clear economy of communication -- having boxed ourselves in to only accepting what we understand suggests ideas outside the normal or agreed upon will not be heard, and do not exist.
Communication is often misunderstood as being between those who know. No, this is called relentless agreement despite arising new facts.
Old ideas, I think, are in line for renewed interest. Inklings, even a 'not the faintest', may be the new order's best bet.

Just thought I'd add.

zipthwung said...

One of the most important feature of Shannon's theory was the concept of entropy, which he demonstrated to be equivalent to a shortage in the information content in a message. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as in the 19th century, entropy is the degree of randomness in any system always increased. Thus many sentences could be significantly shortened without losing their meaning. Shannon proved that in a noisy conversation, signal could always be send without distortion. If the message is encoded in such a way that it is self-checking, signals will be received with the same accuracy as if there were no interference on the line. A language, for example, has a built in error-correcting code. Therefore, a noisy party conversation is only partly clear because half the language is redundant. Shannon's method were soon seen to have applications not only to computer design but to virtually very subject in which language was important such as linguistic, psychology, cryptography and phonetics.

youth--less said...

hand in the honeypot is the only thing that saves it

youth--less said...

the lion has been saying the same thing since the beginning of time. nothing changes for the lion, even its own extinction changes nothing.

Keith said...

erm.... I hate to say it, but I quite like this one :-S

Nomi Lubin said...

surfkook said...

This painting is good in a lame way.

That's funny. Whatever it means, it's funny. I wonder if I'd rather hear that or that my painting sucks.

Once in school, a teacher looked at my drawing said, "This is better than it looks." But that's kind of the opposite of "This painting is good in a lame way." A left handed insult, instead of a left handed compliment. (No offense to left handed people who are all automatically brilliant.)

Another time she said to me, "This is a good drawing." But she said "good" in such a long drawn out chilly bored way, that I knew what she meant was dutiful and boring. That was a left handed compliment. But she was right. Both times.

Anonymous said...

hey i took the title of the show to be ironic, heaven forbid:

heralds of creative anachronism

heralds, these gents are proclaiming creative anachronism ie they are telling you about the coming of creative anachronism (something that is actually always-already happening in fashion). in the midwest we called these shirts "rug" shirts. they came in and out of style rather quickly. to paint a rather attractive, obvious abstraction of a "rug" shirt is to recontextualize something you are already familiar with (characterize artgirls obvious reaction to the painting: "rug shirts blahh!"). tis ironic because you are heralding something that is already happening. but to paint it in this way isn't ironic at all. it's totally new. i loved it. i'm also drunk.