Last weekend I went to a gallery opening in the Lower East side. I was dragged by my father, but I allowed myself to be dragged, out of guilt at not having seen him in months, and also out of some masochistic nostalgia to recreate all those gallery openings to which I was dragged as a child.
Anyway. The opening was for a painter named Stanley Lewis and I actually enjoyed most of the work. Lewis is a mainly a painter but the show also included some of his drawings. And despite my art-entrenched youth I know next to nothing about any sort of art history, so I’m examining these completely out of context.
Now the actual subject matter of the paintings and the drawings was mundane, static images. Landscapes, pretty but not spectacular. However, upon closer examination, the paintings became much more interesting.
Texturally, the pieces are pretty engaging. Not only is the paint caked on in crags and lumps high enough that it protrudes past the shadowbox’s frame, but there are also bits of cardboard and additional layers of thick paper all underneath it, raising the image off the canvas haphazardly and lending the paint multiple textures. There is a sculptural presence to the work.
And so the initially least interesting work, the drawings, became fascinating. There are not simple two-dimensional pieces; the pen cuts through the paper, leaving patches torn. All painting is by nature three-dimensional; paint is layered over the canvas in a process of addition. The powerlines in the painting above are not painted on however; they are cut through these layers of paint. The drawings too operate on a strange parallel, in that they, rather than producing a positive shape, a building up of shapes on top of the surface, interact with the negative space. They are drawings produced by subtraction.
Hemlock Trees Seen from Upstairs Window in the Snow, 2007-2014, pencil on print paper
(As an aside, English nerd that I am, I of course must examine the titles more than I’m supposed to, and I just have to mention here that “Hemlock trees seen from upstairs window in the snow” is an amazing phrase.)
And so oddly enough it operates similarly to an inverse woodcut; the shaded spots are carved away in a sort of bas relief. I honesty thought that this was drawn on a lump of plaster, but no, the surface is just layers of adhered paper, which the ink cuts through. The image is static but the method and the lines produced are violent. This is especially striking on the sketches of his porch as it creates a strange moment of literalness in the carved wood of the deck.
Looking Out from the Porch, 2014, pen and in on paper
In the end I was entertained simply by the implications of the process it must have taken to make these pieces. The obsessive carving of those lines into the paper over and over again. Most of his work takes years to create and Some of the drawings even depicted this same porch-and-yard view
The show is at the Betty Cuningham Gallery, and most of the exhibit can be seen on their website if you’re interested, but if you get the chance I would suggest seeing it in person, as the physicality and the dimensions of each piece really aren’t as striking in photograph.
BONUS ANECDOTE: At the show, my girlfriend and I had an honest and in depth discussion about one of the show’s attendees, who wore an extremely dingy white blazer over a set of purple pajamas, about whether he was a wino attempting to blend in and pilfer some of the free zinfandel, or whether he was some eccentric/ego-centric artist trying to look hip. Of course we finally realized that it was Julian Schnabel, the artist and director, and he realized that we realized, and he gloried in it and left, scurrying down an alley back to his pink pleasure palace. With a plastic cup of zinfandel.
The Junction Journal 