Gordon Moore put in context
Where would postmodernism be without paradoxes of context? After all, even works as dissimilar as Jasper Johns’ flag and Jeff Koons’ chrome bunny both recontextualize the familiar to challenge our perceptions of them.
At Betty Cuningham, Gordon Moore’s exhibition of abstracted paintings and photo-emulsion drawings poses similar questions about processes of cognition, but through entirely different means. The artist pursues his investigations with remarkably delicate observations of his subject’s appearance, then arranges these perceptions in dynamic compositions. The results are quite startling—a unique blending of the usually divergent concerns of postmodernism and traditional art.
Moore draws upon a number of contemporary trends: a focusing on the abject; a combining of multiple media, including photography; a juxtaposition of coarse and tidy textures. These come together in austere designs, dominated by brushy or vacant grays and laced by a few winding lines and sections of denser texture and subdued color.
A number of his works include faint photographic images of the armatures of an unbent coat hanger or broken umbrella, their linear gestures extended by the artist’s own hand-rendered forms and shadows. Larger prismatic structures, airy but abstract, emerge among the intersections of the “real” and the manufactured.
Moore’s modeling of the light-revealed objects is so subtle as to make one question which is truer: his eye or the camera’s? And which is more naturally spacious, the layered skeins of paint in the background or the jazzy polygon, flattened by its synthetically striped pattern but casting a faint faux-shadow? Even his darting lines thicken and narrow, giving the impression of twisted ribbons.
These moments might be merely clever, but the artist arrives at them with authority; his designs are—forgive the dreaded word—composed. That is, his images are filled with surprising formal events, coordinating accelerations of contour and concentrations of detail. In “Facet” (2011), for instance, the obtuseness of the dominant form, spacious in its interior but cordoned by those tense ribbons, narrows to barely contact a smaller but somewhat darker shape; in response, a small array of stripes flares into the larger form’s interior.
In many of Moore’s works, the massive encounters the small, the compact opposes the buoyant in particular times and ways. There’s just enough naturalistic modeling to suggest the sculptural weight of elements, but their characters are most profoundly uncovered through an embracing discipline of rhythm.
This exhibition features such moments frequently enough to make a memorable show. If you’re into this kind of pictorial expression, you may feel in these works the echoes of Mondrian and Matisse (and Matisse’s experience, in turn, of the distant rumble of Giotto). These are qualities of little interest to Johns and Koons, on the visual evidence of their work. Moore, however, reminds us that great traditions and postmodernism can be made to actually talk to each other—or at least wave as they pass.
Gordon Moore: Paintings & Photo-Emulsion Drawings
Through Feb. 11, Betty Cuningham Gallery,
541 W. 25th St., 212-242-2772,
www.bettycuninghamgallery.com.
