Barnet’s Cards and Canvasses, Ingersol’s Fantasies
Few, if any, artists have as lengthy exhibition histories as Will Barnet (some 75 years and counting). More impressive still, few have so regularly renewed their art with wholesale changes of style. The large retrospective exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Academy Museum provides a luminous overview of his evolution through stages of Social Realism, Synthetic Cubism, hard-edged abstraction, lyrical realism and back to abstraction. By contrast, Alexandre Gallery’s current exhibition provides an intimate view of a seldom-seen portion of his oeuvre: the small works on paper from the ’40s and ’50s.
Like his canvases from the period, these nearly 20 mixed-media works are taut, abstract patterns inspired by Native American motifs. But unlike his paintings—which possess a certain edgy poise, thanks to their deliberate line and color—these small works radiate a playful spontaneity. For them, Barnet employed a familiar palette of earth colors, typically oranges and reddish-browns punctuated by green and blue-gray notes. These are applied freely, as if there were no gap between his impulses and marks. Could this be explained by the casualness of their facture? All were executed on old postcards and gallery announcements, sometimes (according to the informative essay in the National Academy’s catalog) when the artist was engaged in telephone conversations. One imagines the artist cleaning out a drawer, and realizing, mid-way to the trashcan, that the old cards had one last use.
Tonya Ingersol’s “Garden of Delight” (2009), oil on birch panel, 90 x 60 inches, part of the June Kelly Gallery’s Tonya Ingersol: Through the Woods exhibit. Courtesy of June Kelly Gallery
And quite a use it is. These are no doodles; they have the vigor of complete, independent artworks. Bits of original handwriting and postmarks inspire intense, jostling patterns of totemic shapes. An announcement card from the Delacorte Gallery, with its name circled, is covered with horizontal notes of ochre, sienna and green, rising in tiers around a central vertical vein, as buoyant and resolute as a seedling. On another card, a kind of cartouche circumscribes the address, which has been overlaid by a stick figure with dramatically lifting arms.
Peek into the gallery’s larger room, where a group show includes one of Barnet’s larger paintings from the same period. Over 3 feet tall, it features the same racing, angular shapes and modulated hues, but committed to the canvas with studied care. Though tiny in their dimensions, the compulsive designs of these cards feel almost as big.
Will Barnet at 100
Through Dec. 31, National Academy, 1083 5th Ave., 212-369-4880, www.nationalacademy.org
Will Barnet: Works on Paper from the 1940s and 1950s
Through Oct. 15, Alexandre Gallery, 41 E. 57th St., www.alexandregallery.com.
While adhering to a fairly conservative realism, the paintings in Tonya Ingersol’s previous exhibitions at June Kelly resonated with complex references to race and class. One painting memorably depicted African Americans and whites performing a ritualized dance at a masquerade ball. In another, an elegantly dressed woman labored on a half-finished tapestry picturing an infamous slave-trading depot. Other paintings referenced classical art and myths. Her latest paintings, then, are something of a surprise. Though still figurative, they capture fairytale-like scenes in large, exuberant patchworks of color. Their minimally modeled subjects—often built-up three-dimensionally in paint—defy all usual concepts of scale and perspective, imparting a fantastical naïveté totally at odds with her earlier work.
The fairytale characters populating these scenes are familiar, but combined in new, mystifying ways. Their busy, bright elements might easily have added up to mere decorative clutter, but the artist imparts to them a surprisingly clear order—and compelling pictorial rhythms in such paintings as “Mirror, Mirror” (2009), in which the flaming yellow-greens of a lawn give way to the subtler, textured band of wisteria and varying dark verticals of figures. The viewer arrives, eventually, at the only notes of deep blue: the Queen of Heart’s eyes, and a tiny cup clutched by another figure—the Mad Hatter? In “Change of Tides” (2009), a road of yellow brick nicely winds into the depths and to a discreet exchange between the Cowardly Lion and Tin Woodman.
Other figures from Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood put in appearances. Apart from the common background in fairytales, their relationships are obscure, and this predilection for multiple, oblique connotations remains the strongest connection with the artist’s earlier realistic work. For me, these narrational gambits are less interesting than the pictorial ones. Why is the White Rabbit hanging out in Red Riding Hood’s “hood” in a painting titled “Apple of My Eye” (2010)? A crate of red fruit teases, but doesn’t illuminate. In “The Battle of the Seasons” (2010), a few snowflakes and a serpent’s flaming breath lend credence to the painting’s title, but what really sticks in the mind are the implacable intervals of the face of the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland, presiding like an enormous rising moon.
Tonya Ingersol: Through the Woods
Through Oct. 4, June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer St., 212-226-1660, www.junekellygallery.com
