Out the Window

John Haber
in New York City

Mary Obering and Patrick Wilson

Pádraig Timoney, Claire Kerr, and Peter Halley

Even now, sophisticates can overlook the obvious: most people just want a painting to look nice—and to look real. They still think of art, as the story goes, as a window onto nature.

Would that have sounded shocking once, when people saw instead a window onto the heavens or darker spirits? Maybe not as much as you might think. Maybe not even now, when you might demand instead a window onto lived experience, race and gender, or the very nature of art. Mary Obering and Patrick Wilson take windows as a guide to abstraction, Pádraig Timoney and Claire Kerr take realism one version at a time. In the process, familiar languages of art go right out the window. Then, too, windows for Peter Halley still come with bars, but his prisons have acquired some interesting means of entry and egress.

Window dressing

Cherish the new Whitney on Gaanesvoort Street as New York's only museum interior with a trust in natural light. Not that you go to galleries for the chance to look out the window. Yet two concurrent shows invite you to do just that, with Mary Obering and Patrick Wilson. They just happen to offer fictive windows within the space of their art. The sensation is no less real for that. It also offers insight into an old art still worth exploring and questioning.

Not that sunlight penetrates all that much of the Whitney on its own, apart from the very top floor and the rooms nearest the terrace. Anything more is the work of an artist, like Edward Hopper and Hopper drawings in the Whitney's collection. His nude facing a window looks all the stranger for seeming so real. Obering and Wilson, too, seem more interested in particulars than in grand metaphors. Obering insists on it with the show's title, "Window Series, 1973," with its emphasis not just on a window but a date. Wilson, in turn, does so with windows in a recognizably American vernacular.

Obering's date refers to the first installation of her series—speaking of particulars, just blocks from her Tribeca gallery now. She came to the newly formed Artists Space at the behest of Carl Andre, and she has something of his approach to a work's internal and surrounding space. Like his typing on paper or tiles on the floor, her painted strips have a clear but seemingly slapdash geometry. She tacks them to stretcher so that they hang down of their own weight, pressing against one another as they will. Real windows would demand more independent space. Still, the strips let in plenty of light.

She asserts a different local color in drawing on the early Renaissance for her strong matte tones, like those when art in Florence was just making the transition from tempera to oil. Halfway across Manhattan, Wilson's palette is less earthy, but also more translucent. He could be compiling changes in the sky. His messy geometries run to frames within frames—and, now and then, a suggested horizon. They become a compendium, too, of New England clapboard architecture. They run large in one of the gallery's two Chelsea spaces, while unfolding in a single row across three walls a block away.

Their window dressing is distinct but elusive. It is all the more so for belonging to the space of abstraction. In truth, the old metaphor of a mirror or window onto nature came to art more slowly than you might think, and abstract painting made it newly relevant but also newly problematic. A window is not a mirror anyway. Mirrors entered Western painting as reflections of the viewer or painter, with Jan van Eyck, while windows entered at sharp angles to the picture plane, like Hopper's. For him as for Jan Vermeer centuries before, light enters much like divine radiance to Saint Francis in the wilderness or to Mary at the Annunciation, but now with disturbingly human implications.

With abstraction, the frame of the painting can align itself with the composition. In the process, the painting becomes more evidently a real object, even as the scene loses its aspiration to seeing beyond itself. That slippery new reality is part of how Hopper flourished as a representational artist at the heart of Modernism. It also helps explain how an artist as quietly decisive as Vermeer entered the canon. But then I have just departed once again into grand metaphors. Obering and Wilson have instead their abstract particulars.

Making art babble

Pádraig Timoney is good with languages—or at least the languages of art. When he paints a landscape, it can dissolve into large dots, like Pointillism that cannot quite get its act together. He can adopt instead a looser brush, as if sketching casually in brown ink. So what if he works on a good-sized canvas? He can allow its central tower to break apart into odd silhouettes, layered onto free-flowing stains for electric skies. They lack the naturalism or apocalyptic fervor of J. M. W. Turner, but then even Turner stops short of a sense of humor or abstraction.

Of course, that tower is the Tower of Babel, in Genesis, "with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth." Timoney, too, has aspirations, and he quotes past art in a spirit of competition. Then again, biblical humanity "cast bricks and baked them hard," borrowing from Mesopotamian art and its famed ziggurat at a time when early Israelites worked in stone. For the most part, Timoney quotes the great painting of the tower by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. If followers often copied it, he has no qualms about revisiting it in many a style from many a period in art history. He does not mind at all if his god in yet another hissy fit "made the language of all the earth babble."

After that, humanity finally gave in and peopled the earth, as they were meant to do all along. Still, why worry about a few miscommunications here and there? These days an online service for teaching languages, babbel.com, insists in its ads that "bilingual is sexy." Timoney would probably agree, but he would definitely appreciate the irony. So would Claire Kerr in paintings that could pass for a group show. They stick to a single style apiece, and if each style is just a little off, painting has only itself to blame—and photography.

One in the sepia tones of early photography places a standing, suited man on his side, like a zombie that cannot quite escape its grave. What look like arbitrary shapes out of Minimalism amount to a "pinhole camera kit." What look like abstract color planes out of Paul Klee leans on technology, too, for a "random pattern generator." Other paintings evoke a stereogram and a simple horizon line. In working between painting and photography, Kerr attests to and undermines the authority of both. She and Timoney might well be reflecting on the chaos of art today, when media mix and anything goes.

Critics can be harsh on the old bag of tricks, and you have seen this irony and these tricks often before. Nelson Goodman, the philosopher, wrote about "languages of art" in 1976, and the "Pictures generation" of the 1980s was skeptical of them all. (Pictures, get it?) Others have blamed painting for aspiring to photography, as a window onto nature—or hoping to put it behind them in search of originality and expression. Others, too, have copied past styles, with or without Timoney's casual aplomb (and snarky titles) or Kerr's photorealism. When Kerr paints "paper raindrops," she more or less repeats landscape by Vija Celmins or liquid text painting by Ed Ruscha.

They keep one guessing all the same. Kerr is painstaking and Timoney a good riffer. And both approaches have a deep history in great painting as well. One can take pleasure as her lush forest opens onto shimmering skies, again out of early photography, or as he leaves Bruegel behind. At his most realistic (so to speak), he shifts his point of view so that the tower moves closer to the picture plane or deeper into the landscape. The surrounding human activity looks that much more of a mystery, and so, for that matter, does art.

Th' other place

Try not to have too much fun with Peter Halley. His colors have never looked brighter and his paintings more colorful. They also look less confrontational and more like playthings, now that they share their rubbery Roll-a-Tex with painted walls. They seem a natural successor to the inflatable bathers of Paul Chan, fluttering about in the breeze from electric fans barely a month before. Clambering up and down stairs between rooms has its appeal, too, for its satisfying successive discoveries or for its own sake. You can even get in a workout.

Still, as always, Halley has a mental workout in mind, too. He means his irregular layout as not a treasure hunt but a maze, where you enter at your own risk and may, for all you know, never escape. He means the narrow windows between rooms to tempt you while revealing next to nothing. And in truth you had better watch your step, for the stairwells vary sharply in height. You are most unlikely to get lost in this maze, but you may still run into a formidable obstacle at that. I mistook shimmering verticals for the curtain on the way to a video, only to discover that they cover the back wall.

For that one brief moment, I felt myself in a very concrete prison. It lends thought-provoking physical reality to a career-long metaphor. He has identified the blocks and bars in his abstract paintings for decades now with prisons, and he appeared in a show on the theme of "Cellblocks" in 2012. Here he calls the exhibition "Heterotopia II," after a coinage of Michel Foucault. There are utopias (literally "no place") and dystopias, but Foucault means instead literally "different" or "other places," apart from everyday life. Examples, Halley explains, include "ceremonial, sacred, and institutional spaces"—such as chapels, cemeteries, libraries, and (yes) prisons.

Where is Polonius, Claudius asks, just after Hamlet has run him through on the far side of another curtain—hoping to have killed instead the king. "In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself." Of course, there is no place like home, and Halley wants you never to feel at home, no more than the occupants of a prison or hell. And he still identifies the place of power imbalance and confinement with the art world.

This is not his first move fully into the space of the gallery. For "New Concepts in Printmaking" back in 1997, Halley papered the walls. His conceptual focus long allowed him to paint at a time when politics and theory ruled. He may now seem almost a period piece, quoting a concept in Foucault that I frankly forgot. Still, metaphors have a way of running free, to delightful or unsettling effect. That is why his generation did so much to exclude them from art.

Go ahead, then, and run free in person. The neon pink and yellow walls invite it, and they accord well with the layered paintings within paintings. Maybe Halley loses some of the critique of art by abandoning white walls and the gallery or museum as a proverbial white box. Maybe his politics have come to seem more abstract, now that criticism is more likely to concern prison brutality and high rates of incarceration (the subjects of Sherrill Roland and "Marking Time" at MoMA PS1). Maybe it is no longer so easy to contrast the ceremonial or institutional with everyday life—and you can question what unites chapels, cemeteries, libraries, and prisons in art. Still, he has created an installation unlike any of them, neither sacred nor its antithesis, and he has also become more than ever a painter. Seek him in th' other place yourself.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Mary Obering ran at Bortolami and Patrick Wilson at Miles McEnery, both through November 9, 2019, Pádraig Timoney at Andrew Kreps through December 21, Claire Kerr at BravinLee Programs through November 30, and Peter Halley at Greene Naftali through December 20. Related reviews look at Halley's prints and "cellblocks."