May 10, 2002
The idea that painting is dead is more passé than ever, judging from the medium’s dominance in New York City’s commercial galleries this weekend. Perhaps it is taking its revenge on museums that have been mostly otherwise engaged this season. Maybe dealers have put their best (selling) feet forward for the annual rite of spring auctions. But let’s not quibble. There’s too much to be seen.
The so-called death of painting has made sense only when the medium has been narrowly defined. Current circumstances call for a wide-angled approach to the two-dimensional that takes in a global and multicultural amalgam of pictorial arts. The ages-old surface power of ceramics and textiles, for example, is evident in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s resplendent show of Renaissance tapestries. The liquid-crystal screen is only the latest in a succession of flat surfaces to transfix the artistic imagination. More than ever, painting is a house of many mansions. The current plethora of shows amounts to a movable seminar. It offers a rich progression of calls and responses between different generations and reputations, voiced by artists from around the world in exhibitions that are often only steps apart.
Peter Halley
As for straight lines, Peter Halley, in his show at Mary Boone in Chelsea, continues to posit geometric abstraction as a happening, techno-Pop thing, with slightly crazed results. The new works hang, à la Warhol, on wallpaper whose computer-generated patterns suggest chip circuitry or Op Art explosions.
The individual paintings are similarly overloaded. In some cases, small panels, each painted with the artist’s signature jail cell window, have been ganged together into single surfaces. In others, his battery motifs sprout multiple conduits. One painting layers cell windows over a battery cell. The mixture of high-impact Day-Glo tones and darker, more subtle colors increases dissonance. The abrasiveness of Mr. Halley’s work used to be more outer-directed; now it threatens to implode, but its optical subversiveness remains intact.
