Dennis Hollingsworth

Instagram Reviews

"California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud" @acquavellagalleries, Uptown NYC. Malevich's Suprematists were enthralled by aerial photography, the horizon line exiled from the picture plane. (Biographical detail: WT served in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force, '42-'45, RD served in the Marine Corps '43-'45, no flight experience reported.) POV of the dive bomber, the looming groundswell. What had changed in the intervening 50 years after the Russian aerial regard? WT's Aristotle to RD's Plato. WT had Pop legs while RD retracted towards Mondrian. For WT, the purity gets contaminated. Is RD a flat earther? RD's abstraction purified towards a Pythagorean Theorem, the earth's curvature meant very little to him. RD's representational referents in exile. Scaffolding is all that remains. I found more surprises in WT: 1) Vanishing perspectives tucked within flattened perspective. 2) Long shadows indicate a sun near a horizon, an indication of an actor off stage. 3) Things represented become clots and thumbs of paint, reflections off things like Rembrandt's stumbled highlights on a helmet. 4) Did I see Edward Munch in a grove of trees? #painting

A post shared by Dennis Hollingsworth (@pacificohollingsworth) on Feb 24, 2018 at 11:49am PST

Tom Wesselmann "Standing Still Lifes" at Gagosian 24th Street Chelsea I neither liked nor disliked TM as I opened the gallery doors. But then as I approached the first assembly, turning from two to three dimensions, my curiosity was piqued. The peep behind the curtain renders mountains. In the back gallery, a treasure of preparatory material. His oeuvre is a flat cut-out in itself. The backstory is the rest of the story, the depth of his art. To know him is to respect (love?) him. Schwitters, forced through Matisse, Bonnard with a Pop. I started to rank, who was better? Rosenquist? Katz made cut-outs too, by the way, flirting with the elimination of the ground. (For some painters like Judd, the ground was a problem that had to be dispensed with.) TW went past flirtation. Did I see a draftsman's hand, close to Oldenburg's? "Pointing at everyday life via conceptual means" (I quote myself with satisfaction), emphasis on the pointing. Indexical. This is this. That is that. Are prosaic objects elevated or are we instead shrunk? ("The Incredible Shrinking Man", 1957 starring Grant Williams and Randy Stuart.) Is G-d in the details? Did he ever create theater sets? Is the viewer an actor on a stage? #popart

A post shared by Dennis Hollingsworth (@pacificohollingsworth) on Feb 24, 2018 at 11:53am PST

Milton Resnick "Boards" @cheimread, Chelsea NYC. At first sight, they all look the same. All-Over and everywhere at once. From a distance, you need time for the eye and mind to adjust and resolve. First sit and relax. Allow the eye and mind to adjust. Then get up close, an arm's length away, like MR did. These are nose paintings, you have to press into them. Frank Auerbach! Knots and burls and skeins and curls of paint. Impasto, wanting to lift off and then pushed back into the canvas, face smash. Brushes ground to destruction, leaving trails all over. All-Over, Pollock's long shadow. I think of the telescope photos of the sun, the roiling surface, loops of ejecta sucked back gravitationally. They will never escape. Black suns, green suns, brown suns. I am certain that most of these paintings did not look that fresh in the studio. At times, he surely used medium to alter the paint out of the tube/can. Paint shrinks somewhat when it dries, and even more so when oil and varnish and who-knows-what is added to it. It puckers. It wrinkles. Then there are all those insults that happen on their way to destiny: for example, something stacked on its face that smashes the largest knots of paint flat. And this is all for the better in those paintings, they not only handle it, they seem to ask for it. #painting

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Sue Williams "1997-98" @skarstedtgallery Uptown NYC. The loaded brush line swells from fat to thin and back again, a freight of representation in each single stroke. Traces of Pettibone. Curiously, vaguely 50's era figures / characters. The first two photos presented: probably her Ur-paintings, what I assume to be the spring boards for what quickly came later. What came later? A cartoon Pop reverse osmosis towards an All-Over Abstract Expressionism. Why the All-Over? The vision of a fragmented society gang banging in a froth. Fetish soup. Later in the cycle: a Suprematist constellation of orifices. Clusters of penetrating moments. Panel comics, unbound. Caricature pulsed in a blender. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre... surely some revelation is at hand...". #painting

A post shared by Dennis Hollingsworth (@pacificohollingsworth) on Feb 24, 2018 at 12:02pm PST