Up from Abstraction

Imagined Architecture: Cordy Ryman, Claire Seidl,
David Ersser, and Christoph Morlinghaus

On the sedate Upper East Side, artists get to play at once abstract painter, architect, and voyeur. They even indulge in similar titles, like Porch and Door. It might seem less strange were one not nominally a sculptor, another not peering over rooftops, and another not sharing her family photos.

Cordy Ryman has a comforting plainness, until one tries to figure out how to look at it. One cannot walk around it like a sculpture, view it head on like a painting, or picture it within one's head like architecture. Yet it looks so very handmade and sits so very still. Laura Newman hovers more actively between genres, not unlike her subject—the restless gaze of a New Yorker at night. And Claire Seidl hovers more restlessly yet, not just between photography and abstract art, but also between moments in time.

Lower the roof beam, carpenters! Even in Chelsea, not everyone is turning oversized gallery spaces into pigsties. Thomas Lendvai and David Ersser use their own woodwork to bridge between the white cube and the A-frame, while Christoph Morlinghaus photographs Modernist architecture as a hymn to other absent dimensions. He makes me want to make up for the absence—by seeing buildings this alive in person.

Cornering painting

Cordy Ryman's corner pieces slip easily into place. They run from the floor to never quite the ceiling, without sticking out too far. Something approaching a row of sticks might ascend the wall. Small squares may stack tightly or nestle in parallel to the floor, evenly spaced. They could pass for found scraps of wood, like the components of an earlier Studio Sweepings, except for their geometry.

But never too neat a geometry. Ryman might dismiss the attention that irregularity brings to the artist's hand, along with other compliments. If only, he might add too modestly, he were a better craftsman. Perhaps he knows that geometry will take care of itself, by sheer accretion. It makes the work impossible to trip over but also impossible to miss. I first spotted one in a packed National Academy annual, like a smart commentary on the narrow but elegantly fashioned winding stairs not far away.

The paint helps make it so. Ryman covers the wood in white and bright enamel, sometimes one color to a unit. Naturally neither the colors nor their application come anything close to a norm. Adjacent close hues never quite match, and the paint runs rather than drips. This is not Abstract Expressionism. In fact, it has a lot in common with the 1960s and 1970s (as with Ron Gorchov or Richard Tuttle), before geometric abstraction became Neo-Geo and when Minimalism at times still looked hand-made. Painting seems to have gotten up and walked into the corner.

Unlike formalism, however, this painting fosters illusion. In one corner piece, each small white square has a large red dot at its center. Somehow they seem to grow slightly smaller as they near a natural vanishing point, in the ceiling. Again a physical object encourages only visual access. That semblance of geometry, too, remains imperfect. At least one square is missing its dot.

Ryman's work looks simple enough, but it does not sit in the corner like a child in need of discipline. In the past wood strips have run across the wall, and the latest selection emphasizes a place between painting and sculpture. Two painted rectangles hang on the wall, but in one a succession of angled wood fragments suggests a magnetic field. Another has swirls of paint but the thick support of a formalist's painting as object.

I found the latter the only weak work in a fine show, as if trying too hard to be painting. The best heads right back to the floor. Three sets of wood frames are arrayed back to back, and the frames grow smaller as the arrays converge toward one another and toward the wall. They may allude to the three-part mirrors in a fitting room or to a painting's stretcher. They also look at first like public sculpture—until they, too, find their specificity in the site. One can walk around them or enter them, but only in the mind's eye.

Friendly spirits

The combination of painter, architect, and voyeur may come easily to Ryman. His paintings do have that habit of climbing into the corners of a room, perhaps leaving their brightly colored stretchers stacked on the floor. Laura Newman, however, really does paint, and her geometries evoke night views onto distant rooftops and across still other windows. Other materials may underlie paint, giving tar beach an almost natural texture. However, surprisingly bright blues substitute for the night sky, crossed by paint-streaked lines and trapezoids that take on patterns of their own.

They look like abstractions at first, and they avoid the curves of water towers or the jazzy lettering of Stuart Davis. They do not, however, altogether dismiss Ryman's urban rhythms. Nor does Judith Page, who has the gallery's project room. Her buck-tooth portraits come too close for my taste to Roz Chast cartoons without the jokes. Elizabeth Peyton might have moved from the celebrity circuit to a park bench on the Upper West Side.

Claire Seidl, who also considers herself a painter, has quite another time frame from a weekly magazine. Her photographs of a rural home have the strangeness of photograms, with intense light sources that produce shadows alternately brooding and crisp. I thought of other personal landscapes in black-and-white, by Eileen Brady Nelson. However, Seidl accumulates much more architectural and human detail. Sunlight through the imperfections in worn windows, normally invisible, create the dense tracery of a rainy night. Spheres of light hover in the middle of a room, as in the preposterous spirit world staged in nineteenth-century photography.

Those spheres turn out to be older family members and friends seated at dinner. The more one looks, the more they take on recognizable shapes and personalities. The artist says that they enjoyed recognizing themselves. The coalescing blobs let others join, too, in the humor and animation. To add to the sense of realism, the course of a meal necessarily constrains and defines the long exposure. However, that again sounds too much like metaphysics for a party.

Seidl's photographs suggest multiple time scales and points of view even when they do not play tricks. The most abstract do not need long exposures at all. None involve special processing later. The grayest emphasize layered rectangles of windows and wood frame. No doubt abstraction once both incorporated and rebelled against the idea of a picture as a window onto nature. However, one should not foist theories of art on these photographs, not when one can watch the encroaching darkness.

At the dinner table, the time scales become particularly explicit. One has the shot, the original scene, the gap between generations observing and observed, and the deep history of New England, as preserved in the aging wood of the ceiling. The five years of work in the show, the endurance of a photograph, and the viewer's commitment all have scales of their own. The elderly move that much closer still to a longer view, perhaps the eternity of those glowing spheres. In another photograph, an empty chair faces the brightest glow of all, seemingly at an angle apart from the light source. There light must have found something off which to reflect in the night sky, but even the artist had to wonder at its reality.

The last lath

Chelsea has no shortage of glass windows and gloriously timbered ceilings, along with Sheetrock walls and steel steps. For a moment, however, the white cube gives way to some old-fashioned woodwork. One gallery extended its summer group show, "The Lath Picture Show." elsewhere Thomas Lendvai seems to have brought his summer time-share back to the city. His blond wood slats span one room and protrude into the next, just above eye level, as if the rafters had descended and thrust right through the walls.

Lendvai calls his A-frame memories Between Pain and Boredom. It achieves considerably less than the first and more than the second. It proves, however, that spare art can fill a gallery, and it makes an obvious commentary on the neighborhood. Chelsea is constantly rebuilding, poised between car washes and condos, not to mention the pain and boredom of several hundred galleries. And much of the art within represents the changing landscape of middle America, but to a select audience that can afford the coasts. All this turmoil may explain the renewed interest in Gordon Matta-Clark's building cuts or Exit Art's "The Building Show" this past spring.

David Ersser supplies not just another paean to wood, but the tools to make it all possible. He has crafted an entire workshop in balsa wood. His finely sanded, unstained surfaces have the rawness and polish of their title, Nothing but Heavy Duty. A wooden power saw slices across a broad wood sheet, its wooden electrical cables wind smoothly along the floor, and the whole rests behind, naturally enough, a wooden partition. They convey an impressive illusion, heightened by the cheap material associated with toy airplanes. Sawdust adds to the comic self-reference.

Wood here does seem like a rebellion against Chelsea. It looks back to a time when craft mattered, not just to artists, but also to a way a life. With its echoes of rural America, it does not seem too much of a stretch to speak of spiritual values. At the same time, the mind games allow one to talk of this art as entirely modern—or perhaps Postmodern—and an act of self-construction. In the same gallery's main space, Christoph Morlinghaus pursues those very themes, through actual modern architecture. He calls his photographs "Form/Faith," as if unsure whether to alternate or equate the two.

I first encountered Morlinghaus's work in Brooklyn. There, at the gallery's former space, he had photographed the TWA terminal by Eero Saarinen. Then abandoned, it is again to become an active part of JFK airport. Ironically, Williamsburg art is now on exactly the reverse course. Morlinghaus, who also does commercial photography, found beauty in Modernism's form, but also in its abandonment and in the banality of empty spaces. Like Andreas Gursky, he clearly wants more, in a more determined tribute to the recent past and a heightened spiritualism.

His new photographs capture church interiors, mostly in Europe and all by well-known architects, Saarinen included. Where before he showed clearly the terminal's walls and interior, here he frames his shots more closely, so that the walls and, especially, the tall church ceilings press against the picture's edge. Where the terminal's beauty depended, too, on muted artificial light, cast shadows, and austerity, here he plays up sunlight passing through brightly colored glass. Where the terminal came by its lack of human traffic naturally, here churchgoers are conspicuous by their absence. The buildings look larger than life but also abstracted from life. Modernism, he seems to say, would have liked it that way.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Cordy Ryman, Laura Newman, and Claire Seidl ran at Lesley Heller through October 27, 2007, "The Lath Picture Show" at Friedrich Petzel through September 22, Thomas Lendvai at Winkleman Plus Ultra through October 6, and David Ersser and Christoph Morlinghaus at Roebling Hall through October 6. The section on Cordy Ryman first appeared in Artillery magazine.