Introduction to the Catalog

John Goodrich

According to one fanciful account, the Renaissance began in the moment Giotto mischievously painted a life-like fly on a panel; it was so true to life that his teacher Cimabue tried to swat it away. History, of course, is never quite so pat, but we may still be struck by the underlying presumptions of this account: that the purpose of painting was to duplicate nature, and it succeeded when it fooled the human eye.

This presumption has been, in fact, remarkably durable. In a fabled contest in the fifth century BCE, Zeuxis proved his mettle with a painting so realistic that birds pecked at it. Parrhasius surpassed this with a painting that fooled a human—namely, the hapless Zeuxis, who tried to lift its painted-on curtain. Nearly two millennia later, according to legend, the teenage Leonardo da Vinci proved his chops by painting a dragon so life-like it startled his unsuspecting father. A multitude of schools and styles flourished in later centuries, but the goal of tricking the human eye continued with trompe l’oeil painting. (A master’s thesis could be written on which more faithfully recorded nature, the trompe l’oeil illusionism of William Harnett, or the ordered classicism of the great still life painter Chardin.)

Today, we may be more inclined to agree with Delacroix’s dictum, “Exactitude is not truth.” Indeed, strolling through a museum and absorb-ing the likes of Giotto, El Greco, Turner, Monet and Picasso, we may well conclude that there are as many truths as there are artists. After all, a painter’s challenge is not to duplicate life—a physical impossibility—but to find its most evocative equivalent within a pictorial discipline. We know that through a vitalization of forms, a painter can lend compositional weight to invis-ible sensations—like gravity—and as well as to perceptions experienced in time—such as human movements, or even a vase’s stretching neck. Through these means, a sum of impres-sions—visual, tactile, cognitive—can become animate, in a single, stilled image.

So many of the powers of painting begin where mere depiction ends. They lie beyond description—and this of course inspired these two exhibitions curated by Eric Elliott and Jordan Wolfson. The eighteen participating artists include the much-esteemed veterans Stanley Lewis, Ruth Miller and Wilbur Niewald, as well as younger and mid-career painters from around the country and the world. Very sadly, Mr. Niewald passed away this April 30, having continued to work in the studio up to his final days.

The strategies of the artists in “Beyond Description” take many paths, including investigations of the processes of seeing and representing, exploring the materiality of the painting medium, and fragmenting and rebuilding the observed in time and space. But every painter, in his or her fashion, examines what it means to see the world today, and re-make it on canvas or panel.

Like the traditional masters, Wilbur Niewald largely honored the factual proportions and arrangements of his motifs while imbuing them with pictorial vigor. One has to see his paintings in the flesh to fully absorb their eloquence of color: the way, for instance, his hues substantiate the clustered energy of a pile of apples, and the sweeping enclosure of fabric, in “Still Life with Onions and White Drape” (2016). Niewald’s forms don’t depict, they embody, so that in his landscape from 2019, a complex of trees faces us as a tangible wall of green, anchored between receding land and strip of sky.

If Cézanne’s soulful investigations echo through Niewald’s canvases, they can also be felt, a little more distantly, in the paintings of Ruth Miller. This artist’s colors are heightened, and her forms more inclined to assert their abstract independence, but all to serve a greater truth in a painting like “Shell, Bottles, Green Tea Pot“ (2018), in which every volume and spatial interval is measured against a rhythmic whole. The viewer palpably senses the spindly rise of a bottle, pepper shaker, and other verticals from various points on a table, and between them the luminous, curving masses of shell and teapot.

Stanley Lewis, too, honors the observed world, capturing the looming density of a tree’s over-head boughs and its sturdily supporting trunk in “Tree and Houses, Lake Chautauqua” (2015). Given the artist’s raw, improvisational attack, with thickly layered paint and re-attached portions of canvas, the coherence of such an image is all the more remarkable. Its bucolic subject and dark palette may recall Courbet, but—befitting an artist of Lewis’ generation—its surface suggests something much closer to the restless probings of de Kooning.

Though differing greatly from one another, the paintings of Niewald, Miller and Lewis all reflect a certain earthiness of approach and a faith in observed nature. Many of the other painters in “Beyond Description“ share this approach, among them Alix Bailey, who models every volume—as if inviting the viewer’s touch—in complex compositions of figures in light-filled interiors; though impassive in their expressions, her figures become irrefutable as presences. Mathieu Weemaels, working on a smaller scale with simpler subjects—a single, empty chair, or two or three objects before a mirror—employs denser, jewel-like colors to achieve a poetic, almost otherworldly intimacy. Dean Fisher animates his figure paintings and still lifes with an attack at once analytical and empathetic, summarizing broad aspects in atmospheric hues, and then zeroing in on such telling details as curling fingers or a teapot’s gleaming highlight. Favoring an overhead view, Edmond Praybe brings an especially subtle sense of illumination to his still lifes and single figure painting, taking advantage of a raking light that disperses precise, muted shadows across complex scenes; the circular rims of plates and cups punctuate these pulsing fields, like craters viewed from a passing satellite.

Catherine Kehoe’s paintings may be tiny, but they powerfully demonstrate how color and line leverage each other. Their blocks of intense, thickly applied color re-create, plane by plane, the workings of light to define volumes and spaces; each element is unabashedly pigment and object. In subtler fashion, Christina Weaver’s affection for both nature and visual pattern comes through in close-up views of flowering plants and tree trunks. In one especially radiant moment, a yellow-green records the weight of sunlight pressing behind an upturned leaf. Osnat Oliva proves herself the most lyrical of cubists, turning light-suffused still lifes into faceted, dream-like veils of color. In Ann Gale’s painterly portraits, the unaffected becomes the beautiful, the forms of her figures—their volumes, illumination, even their relationship to the viewer—emerging, viscerally, from vivid scatterings of color. And, in terms of gestural vigor and intensity of hue, Ying Li’s paintings have the final say. At a glance, their thick, slashing strokes of full-bodied color test the limits of our cognitive powers. Linger a moment, though, and worlds of pathways, trees, clouds and blossoms emerge, each one located through shifts of hue.

Intriguingly, the paintings that come closest to “realism,” at least in terms of naturalistic modeling, refrain from taking the final representational step. With richly atmospheric colors, David Baird’s paintings beautifully evoke the volumes of plates, grapes, lemons and eggcups, but small portions of each canvas—often conspicuous ones—are left unfinished. The still lifes and portrait by Diarmuid Kelley, which feature the most precise modeling of all, leave bare sections of canvas around his exquisitely modeled subjects, like the deserts surrounding the bustle of certain Southwest cities. Juxtaposing the compellingly rendered and the indeterminate, the work of both artists suggest the transiency and fragility of all painted representations.

Such paradoxes of visual experience serve as other artists’ starting points. Eric Elliott’s objects gradually dissolve in his series of images of cups and other ordinary objects; what is crisp, volumetric, and anchored—“real”—in a first version turns slowly, painting by painting, into clouds of luminous hues: a devolution into visual essences. Jordan Wolfson’s series of paintings of a single interior range intriguingly from clear, vivid delineations to sheer tapestries of pigment; the conversation between a chair, rug, wall and window emerges and then dematerializes into layers of atmospheric color. Stephanie Pierce’s renderings of everyday items—a studio wall, window view, or simply objects placed flat on a table, all articulated in richly naturalistic hues—acquire a stuttering intensity through ghostly doublings (and sometimes triplings) of their contours. Zoey Frank’s complex compositions of real scenes are abstracted to varying degrees; a wide-angle view of a single loft apartment realistically depicts its disjunctive spaces and geometries, while a painting of a pool-side scene, repeated in side-by-side versions, teems with figures that fragment (in the left half) and re-integrate (in the right). In all these paintings, one’s left to wonder: are the worlds of objects coming, or going—or both?

Our surroundings do not stay still, and neither do we. Our understandings and even our perceptions shift with time, place and vantage point. But as “Beyond Description” reminds us, human perceptions can endure, captured as individual visions, and expressed through the unique discipline of painting. In these two exhibitions, the results ultimately speak for themselves, as varied, intense and eloquent as the artists themselves.