On Art

...Has the challenge of finding counterinstances to this platitude grown just a bit tiresome by now...

...If the signal from Cezanne to Johns to Lasker has weakened in the relays, that only heightens the pathos of its warble...

...Willfully disembodied smears and splatters and self-conscious figure-eights complete the laid-back Pop parody of the rhetorically heroic Abstract Expressionist brushstroke...

...Stripe himself, but refuses to detour the ground simply because it has already been claimed...

...The new works are composed of multiple canvases, projecting high and low, with hefty, brushy stripes running this way and that over the discontinuous surfaces...

...Lasker, however, is distinguished from the other three by having won the respect of the fans of mock-abstraction (he is perhaps unique among "serious" artists in having done so...

...Scully, Reed, Janowich, and Lasker are all smart painters, and they are not mere wise guys...

...Scully knows he is taking on Mr...

...the ironic references are simply Reed's way of innoculating his pictures against retrograde misconstrual...

...How the stripes began to broaden and brighten is an interesting story thatspacedoes not permit...

...Reed's slick surfaces are just bumpy enough here and there to certify that the relation of pigmented goo to silkily detached finish is precisely what the artist takes responsibility for...

...by Lasker's time and ours, doubt itself is lost in the background static...

...The philosopher David Carrier has compared their surface to the technical gloss of photographic representation...

...Joseph Mashhk is a former editor ql \ it forum, and is the author of Historical Present: Fssays of the I970\s...

...Grafted onto this unreal space is aconventional landscape composition Lasker acquired "used" and went on to customize in a tellingly homemade way, with would-be dopey "hand-painted" biomorphic shapes...

...museum-esque look of old master art...

...You can meaningfully carry on with abstraction, provided irony is your broker with its past...

...So much experience to fall back upon, such rich possibilities for obliquity and allusion...

...Some go to the extent of offering a mock-abstract product, like atheists playing with death-of-God theology...

...the zones are defined not by lines or a pre-existent grid, but by dramatic discontinuities in brushwork and the comings and goings of bright, strangely translucent colors—sometimes liqueurlike, sometimes synthetic...

...though not constituting a school, they are united by their use of irony to keep the faith from getting too nostalgic...

...Things being what they are today in the art world, that is as likely to win Lasker enemies as friends...

...or, these two panels become one painting when a single considered brushstroke unites them...

...Because his work is virtually marinated in modern art history it is easy to dig right in to a painting such as Lasker's Popular Psyche...

...An earlier generation would see in Popular Psyche nothing but an impertinent exercise deriving from some textbook instance of decorative flat design—say, Paul Serusier' s lovely little Landscape: The Bois d'Amour (The Talisman), painted on a cigarbox lid in 1888...

...Janowich is not so much concerned with sending the viewer back to some specific art-historical moment as making him see the old masters as proto-abstractionists: He shows us how to get a peculiarly modern bang out of pre-modern art...

...Bidlo's "Kandinskys," "Picassos," "Legers," and "Pollocks" thus get to be new all over again, looking more abstract than ever...

...Lasker paints not so much like somebody whose license has expired and who goes on driving anyway, only more cautiously, as like a man who has loved, married and divorced only to remarry the same woman...

...Scully's constructions inevitably bring Frank Stella to mind, even if one is not familiar with Stella's boisterously manic latterday reliefs...

...On Art ABSTRACT IRONIES BY JOSEPH MASHEK Seventy-five years of diversity in abstract art have amply demonstrated that abstraction is more than a set style, and much more than a fashion that comes and goes...

...Whereas Stella's reliefs are massiveboth literally (having reputedly pulled down at least one wall) and expressively, Scully's loom in a light and conjectural way, as if to make the point that they are not merely big...

...Suffice it to say the personal evolution taking Scully from his early formal austerity to the big, chesty reliefs on view at the David McKee Gallery was a highly consistent one...

...When the basic setup is rotated 90°, as in a couple of paintings at the Germans van Eck Gallery in Soho, the "diamond" canvases of Mon-drian are automatically evoked...

...The shininess heightens the sheer bravura of the brushwork (like the oiled bodies of musclemen), rendering it ironic in advance—you'll get your thrill all right, but you'll have to acknowledge it as such...

...Oblong canvases, tall or wide, are divided into rectilinear zones of irregular area...

...They can only wise us up...

...Use of the utterly antique "black oil" medium gives his work the hallowed...

...His hatchings of parallel black lines can be likened to supermarket price-coding, but they also suggest the hatched patches of now classic Jasper Johns images from the '70s —and by that route hark back further still to the passionately deliberate hatchings of Cezanne's paintings (to which Johns himself meant to allude) with a longing for some still attainable profundity...

...At the risk of sounding naive, I must point out that their work is as beautiful as it is clever...

...Lasker, having heard—how many times now?—that painting is finished, figures he might as well go and fix himself whatever he likes...

...Scully mutes artfully, lending nuance even to categorical clashes (e.g...

...Something closer to nostalgia marks Ron Janowich's output of the last few years...

...Scully is sensitivity writ large...

...Their work is historically knowing, often to the point of defen-siveness—as if en garde against the past...

...Not that you have to be forewarned of all this to appreciate the lyricism...

...Like Scully, David Reed began by doing paintings that set down clear, fundamental propositions...

...Tersely put, Stella is lyric bombast...

...Recent work by Jonathan Lasker furnishes still more evidence for that proposition...

...With their quadrangular networks of brushwork, Janowich's paintings appear built, crafted as panels, "shaped" though symmetric...

...These paintings have an emphatically finished sheen—almost giving the impression that the artist proudly Simon-ized them...

...A fellow named Mike Bidlo has humorously insinuated as much by re-painting, in lively homage, earlier modern masterworks that have become too familiar to seem kicky any more...

...That would be wrong...

...Lasker has a pure heart, and a sense of the comic as profound, not derisory...

...Moreevidence accrues in passages where paint has been scraped away...

...Marcel Duchamp exposed what he considered the grossly culinary aspect of the esthetics of painting, inspiring many fad diets in the bargain...

...orange and blue...

...Provocatively enough, one of Las-ker's recent paintings at the Massimo Audiello Gallery in the East Village is entitled To Regain Virginity, and I believe his project may well be as quixotic as that (whether or not it includes the simultaneous cornering of two mutually hostile markets...

...The arroga-tion's outcome is happily distinctive...

...Stella makes his colors brassy and discordant...

...To wit: This canvas becomes a painting as soon as one long, deliberate brushstroke is applied...

...Here is a field of vertical lines on an eye-poppingly yellow background bisected by a lurching diagonal...

...MODERN ARTIST have long been used to hearing that everything capable of being done in the domain of painting already has been done...

...Way back in the 1970s, Sean Scully— the most established of the four—was doing so-called minimal canvases, consisting of nothing more than narrow horizontal stripes (between a quarter and an eighth of an inch), in close-valued dark tones, with every other strip of the masking tape that guided their execution left embedded in the paint...

...Even so, today's abstract painters seem preoccupied with the danger of repetition, of unwittingly making farce of what was tragedy the first go-round...

...Thanks to the black oil technique, one might think that Janowich's darkly glowing art had been lost f or generations and is now being seen fresh, perhaps for the first time...

...Still, there is something very up-to-date about these paintings, a sort of dietetic or decaffeinated quality— Rembrandt minus the unhealthy representational content...

...Better watch out, though, for those old bugaboos of taste...

...Since the mock-abstractionists (typified by Peter Halley) believe that paint should be applied to canvas only to blaspheme it, one might smell something cynical in Lasker's art...

...Again as with Scully, the change reflects not an arbitrary stylistic shift, but a gradual and conscientious personal evolution...

...Winsome though Bidlo's literal recap of art's past may be, it is not the only live option for today's painters—Scully, Reed and Janowich areproof enough of that...

...or, a unique white stroke on a black field is a painting that is chromatically complete...

...Reed's latest work, at the Max Prot-etch Gallery, is rather busier...

...Four young artists shown in New York galleries this fall, however, are still very much believers in the credo of abstraction...

...Some will no doubt take this as more evidence for the insolvency of abstraction...