The Essential New Art Examiner

On View

A nn W iens On View Chicago May 1993 When the 1993 Whitney Biennial opened in March, it was greeted with the usual anguish, outrage, and expletives, followed, in a more apprehensive tone, by the observation that of the 82 artists included, only nine are painters. Could this possibly be an indication that painting really is, finally, dead? Did the inflated market of the ’80s, the rejection of a Modernist hegemony, and the impulse toward more “reality-based” art forms—installation, film and video, even sculpture—form the lethal combination to finally do it in? Hardly. Given the number of times painting has been said to have died, and its equal number of miraculous resurrections (even the King of Kings and Lord of Lords only pulled off this trick once), it is probably safe to say that it never died at all. As an artist I know who has watched this “now-it’s-dead, now-it’s-not” phenomenon through several cycles recently suggested, painting travels its own road, a road that winds in and out of critical discourse and public attention, frequently crossing, or joining, paths with other art forms, continuing, steadily, regardless of what’s hot and what’s not. And regardless of what’s currently enclosed by the granite walls of the Whitney, painting has been out in full force recently, not only alive, but relatively well. This is due in part to economic necessity—abstract paintings look nicer in the home or office than, say, hunks of gnawed lard or pools of rubber vomit and are therefore easier to sell—especially here in Chicago, where the collector base is small and relatively conservative. Several dealers I spoke with recently acknowledged that they’ve opted to “play it safe” 208   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer this season, and are necessarily reluctant to show much work they deem risky in terms of sales. But salability does not presuppose boredom, and although the voice of painting may have been drowned out by the din of more extroverted art forms it is still there, humming along. In fact, its voice has been steadily gaining volume over the last couple of years, providing harmony to (or a reprieve from) the prevailing didacticism of much current art. Whatever the reasons, we have seen a surge in serious painting— often competent, sometimes even exciting—that makes for pleasurable, if peaceful, viewing. While such soothing adjectives as “pleasurable” and “peaceful” may be perceived as somewhat derogatory in the current climate, they shouldn’t be. Confrontational is not always a synonym for compelling, nor is petulant one for provocative, and time spent pleasurably and peacefully observing quiet painting can remind one that innovation and interest are not the exclusive properties of the one who screams the loudest, and that painting is not always the safe harbor of conservative thought. Conceptually astute, Jonathan Lasker’s recent paintings at Rhona Hoffman Gallery (215 W. Superior St.) are also thoroughly enjoyable. They simultaneously parody and fulfill the legacy of artistic mark-making. They are about capital-“D”-Drawing and capital-“P”-Painting—the acts of drawing and painting reduced to their essences. In this reduction, this boiling-down of the painterly act, Lasker reveals its limitlessness. Each of the works shown here follows closely a format Lasker has been exploring for some time: A flat, monochromatic ground supports an arrangement of tangled black squiggles, absurdly thick swaths of paint, blocks of color, and/or any of several other painterly devices Lasker keeps close at hand. The allure of these works lies in their ability to be simultaneously satiric and genuine, to parody the tradition of Modern painting while functioning superbly within that tradition. In Artistic Painting, even the title evidences Lasker’s playful attitude toward the idea of art and artfulness, an attitude borne out in the painting itself. Here, a light blue ground is divided by rectangular blocks defined by a thin, Magic Marker-like black line and deliberately, but somewhat shakily, striped vertically, horizontally, or diagonally with the same thin line. This emphatically drawn line then turns scribbly, winding over and under itself in a tangled mass, a phone-pad doodle gone berserk, filling several of the rectangular blocks and escaping into the spaces between them. In the right third of the canvas, three fat, horizontal bars of very A...