III: Abstraction, Utopia, and The Right to Roam
By Michael Gormley
Overview
In October of 2020, four curators, this writer amongst them, presented “Intersections” —a sprawling and ambitious show meant to jumpstart a COVID-somnambulant art community with a broad exploration of ascending trends seen as emerging from lock-down art practices. It worked. Friends came out, artists mingled, sales happened. We had fired up some hope.
A year later, Equity is mounting “III” an exhibition of three artists that cemented a bond during “Intersections”: Christopher Stout, Allen Hansen and Miguel Otero Fuentes. The work exhibited by each artist extends their idiosyncratic practices, yet what is apparent, (as the works were conceived and completed over the course of a year specifically for this exhibition), is a vital and entirely novel aesthetic discourse that stages a proximal geography whereas said shared concerns are given free reign and foregrounded for the viewer.
A genuine and organic appearance of a collective with shared aspirations is rare and never random. In this instance, no three artists could have come from more divergent backgrounds and yet their work converses on an intimate and formalist level with adjoining narratives and motives to be further explored in this essay.
Allen Hansen
Hansen is a symbolist process painter; originally a Californian native, he studied under second generation abstract painters and minimalists at the University of California, Irvine in the late-1970s. A precocious talent, he was sent to New York on an internship with the Mary Boone Gallery, then an ascendant player in the burgeoning SoHo art district. He never left. He worked briefly as a studio assistant for Gary Stephan, dove into the punk music scene and actively exhibited his paintings until 1994. With the birth of his daughter, he became an ardent stay-at-home dad. His studio practice slipped away. Hansen recalls “I no longer knew what or even how to paint”.
Recuperative sojourns to the East End and the Jersey Shore saw a return to drawing—moody ink washes inspired by sulphureous sunsets and the scintillating light of crashing surf. The late works of Goya, Morandi and Braque provided further inspiration and a way forward. Hansen muses, “These works seemed so personal. It was as if these artists no longer cared about public opinion and were just working for themselves. I too needed to work for myself again and the numinous light effects I glimpsed on those beach trips, as an active force, stuck me as being as worthy a subject matter as any. There is a transcendence there…”
In “III”, Hansen shows three mid-sized canvases titled Coil #1, Coil #2 and Coil #, painted in grey violet shadowy tones. Their surfaces are split lengthwise with off-center painted and incised axes orbited by concentric spiraling lines (likewise painted and incised) echoing nature’s favored forms—the funnels of storms, the turn of seashells, the sweep of capes across bays. The works are at once modern and archaic; a skilled painter, Hansen exploits the numinous viscosity of sedimented layers of oil paint to effect dense surfaces activated by a highly charged chiaroscuro technique. Evincing no less than a battle of light against dark, Hansen’s rhythmic symbols trigger totemic associations, the visual code of pre-lingual rituals. Crudely painted, incised and painted over again, the symbols alternately submerge and rise above the canvas surface. Hansen adds, “I think of them as scars.”
The canvases, now imagined as ritualistic initiation sites, and appearing to be actively split into left and right precincts, trigger compare/contrast reactions. Our eyes shift rapidly from left to right and back again to gather information and to impose order. Light effects, and subtle shifts in color and texture, become heightened and our tracking movements soon replicate the mapping of the spiraling lines. We circle the composition and decode its totemic patterns, taking due note of the “is/is not” juxtapositions that produce a palpable tension which in turn activates a visual field pushing against imposed polarities. Yet, we sense this field to be infinite in possibilities as evinced by countless shifts in form, tone, and an emanating light reminiscent of Tintoretto. The restriction is the human condition implied by the rhythmic ebb and flow of the mortal coil—a scar on the divine.
Miguel Antonio Otero Fuentes
A Georgia Tech trained architect and largely self-taught sculptor, Fuentes hails from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He maintains a studio in Brooklyn where he alternates between working on architectural projects (largely façade design) and his sculpture pieces. His corner working space is enviable with tall ceilings and wall length casement windows facing east and north. Painted white floors are overlayed with hand-drawn geometric forms and algebraic calculations. Lighted candle requiems (featuring his namesake archangel and talismanic minerals) adorn the windowsills and add to the impression that Fuentes is working out of an alchemist’s laboratory that is just posing as a designer’s studio for the uninitiated. “Absolutely”, Fuentes confirms when I joke with him about being a heretic. “I was beheaded in an earlier life”.
At “Intersections” Fuentes showed a constellation of deconstructed hollow spheres made of concrete. At Hansen’s request, for “III”, he has installed the first iteration in that series, titled “CS (24)1_Las Fuerzas del Bien y el Mal” in the street-facing window at the entrance of Equity Gallery. Translating to “The Forces of Good and Evil”, it references the same integration of light and shadow polarities seen in Hansen’s paintings. That said, if Hansen’s work subtly implies an exploration of universal underpinnings whilst remaining true to formalist tropes, Fuentes offers a no-holds-barred, deep-dive into the realm of the sacred made manifest by astrological calculations, psychic phenomena, and visionary revelations.
If one ventures that Hansen encodes his universal narrative with a coil, then for Fuentes, the universe is a circle. Mixing engineered concrete with pigments in a palette of cool greys, violets, rose tones, and ivory whites, Fuentes composes cylindrical wall reliefs and a free-standing sphere in a range of shapes and profiles. The three-dimensional sphere appears as a broken shell comprised of fragmented pieces; its core hollowed out; its surface disrupted. A tension arises, a paradox; the sphere is both empty and full with space. The weight and volume of empty space similarly informs Fuentes’ wall reliefs that appear as hollowed out bowls or circular rims. The latter have circumferences varying from 4 to 44 inches. The dimensions are arrived at through complex geometrical calculations and astrological relationships. They betray Fuentes’ obsession with the time-honored philosopher’s quest to unlock the secrets of the universe. His earthly mission is to delve beyond the mere appearance of things and discover a grand design informed by a higher intelligence and a spiritual order. “Edge of Jupiter” for example, references calculations comparing the orbits of Jupiter’s moons.
Fuentes’ practice is not all based in textbook science and math, however. “Lumn” for example takes its title from an automatic writing experience ---a consciousness suppressing method favored by the surrealists which opened a channel to the unconscious mind. Similarly, “You Do Good” references waking dreams and parting skies revealing full moons. A true alchemist, there’s more than a touch of the mystical in his musing about nature and the talismanic powers of the perfect sphere.
Christopher Stout
In keeping with the overarching aesthetic motives informing “III”, Christopher Stout shows a series of five sublimely austere abstract works that offer the added socio-political intent of signaling Queer activist histories that cojoin artistic production with egalitarian striving. An avid supporter of non-profit organizations that promote Queer empowerment and the visual arts Stout notes, “Before gay cultural production was overwhelmed by the AIDS epidemic, its Queer practitioners were, in tandem with other marginalized groups, actively engaged with creating sociopolitical activist work that privileged experimentation, process, and novel form. This work, birthed in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with Black abstraction and Feminist abstraction, eschewed the human figure, and language related to sexual representation, to discuss the Queer experience.”
A man in his early prime, Stout is once removed from the generation that created artwork in response to the AIDS crisis. He is without question struck by the emotive representation and specificity of AIDS generation work as it relates to the Queer experience — but it is history, and his knowledge of that health crisis will remain (hopefully) a coded simulation apart from his lived life. That said, the prevailing aesthetic representation of Queerness, i.e. “Queer Art”, continues to privilege style considerations that proliferated in response to the AIDS crisis—generally a quasi-retrograde mode of figurative representation diversifying sexualized bodies by proffering a “queered” gaze.
One may ask what socio-political objectives and attendant aesthetic concerns were sidetracked by the AIDS crises? In response to that break, Stout offers an exploration of Queer activist artists and allied practitioners productive in the pre-AIDS period. That exploration has led to the creation of a series of highly responsive yet reductive abstract works, and Stout reasons, an elucidation of a visual art expression representative of a post-AIDS Queer experience. He adds, “I wondered how I could render Queer abstraction easier to understand and experience. I decided that if I aligned my work with other types of work made by Queer artists, such as writing, dance and music, I would be providing multiple points of entry for a broader audience.”
The III series # 1 through #5 reflect upon the choreography of Queer choreographer John Jeffery Bernd. Bernd attended Antioch College, a social justice college in Yellow Springs Ohio. Upon graduation, he moved to New York City where he became identified with the downtown experimental dance scene.
Stout notes that, “Today much of the work that Bernd is specifically remembered for concerns his artistic discourse with AIDS. He is identified with the “first wave” of creative people caught unaware and struck down by the disease at the height of their careers”. While cautiously honoring Bernd’s AIDS-related work, Stout resumes his search for aborted Queer cultures (across the AIDS gulf) by redirecting our focus to Bernd’s earlier exploration of the relationship between art, artist, and viewer. Stout’s hybrid works, a visual essay on interactive dance, are part painting, part assemblage, and appear as layered constructions composed of wood panels, linen, and mirrors. The foundation layer consists of stacked panels sewn together with umber-toned linen and reference Bernd’s midwestern roots; a mirrored middle layer is sandwiched panels painted battleship grey to represent the sprung floors and mirrored walls of a dance studio. The topmost panels, at a quarter size ratio to the layers beneath, partially reveals the mirrored layer. The placement of this topmost panel is rhythmically “choreographed”; some are placed vertically, others horizontally. The viewer, gliding from piece to piece, can glimpse their refection in the mirrored section by adopting the posture intimated by the mirror placement and, so posed, dances as one with the work.
Exhibition Details
III: Allen Hansen, Miguel Otero Fuentes and Christopher Stout
October 6th— October 30th, 2021