Art Fair madness last weekend; Two Picks

This past weekend I took in multiple art fairs; The Armory Modern and Contemporary, The Independent, Scope and The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory. Overall, I discerned a fairly clear division between the flavors of the art fairs, what Ken Johnson in the New York Times aptly described as ‘The Old New and The New New’; the former providing the comfort of familiarity like visiting old friends, the latter more of an adventure filled with peaks and valleys.

A stand-out at the Scope Fair was Giampietro Gallery from New Haven, with consistently high quality abstract painting and sculpture. One of their artists, Enrico Riley, had a row of small (22 x 20) paintings whose apparent childlike charm belie the formal sophistication with which they’re constructed. From a distance the artist’s scrapes and scrawls almost look they are done in crayon. The bluntness and blockiness of the arrangements strongly suggests Guston as a touchstone without seeming overly reverential. The impression I got from these lovely little paintings is that the artist works with something or things in mind, but wishes only to evoke and suggest what those things might be. This leaves the viewer ample space for their own experience. Image below.

In a related vein, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery I was reintroduced to the paintings of Paul Wackers whose recent show at Morgan Lehman had impressed me. Wackers makes paintings that shuttle between interior and landscape and are built from a wide range of mark-making devices; stencils, blends, glazes, stumbles, sprays, dashes and dots, lines and flat color areas to name a few. The colors are mostly muted greens and browns with intermittent bursts of high-key color. There is a disarming humor and joy in the way the artist creates unexpected and jumpy juxtapositions that both create spatial illusion and reassert the picture’s flatness.