Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Lino Lago, Crash (Nattier), 2025 oil on canvas 68.9 x 55.1 inches (175 x 140 cm), courtesy of the artist and Madison Gallery
By DONALD KUSPIT February 2, 2025
As the difference between the Venus de Milo and the Willendorf Venus makes clear, there have always been different kinds of art—radically different kinds of art, that is, different at the root.
And as Andre Malraux’s “Museum Without Walls” makes clear, art has always been pluralistic—radically pluralistic. This is not only because it has been made at different times and places—in different societies with different ideologies, in different situations with different conventions—but because there are “multiple possibilities and real opposition of direction within the general field of art,” as Lawrence Alloway wrote. The “abundance” of art demands respect for “difference,” he insists, suggesting that no one mode or style, manner or idea of art is innately more important or meaningful than another. There is no God-given hierarchy of values, but a simultaneity of different values, inherently irreconcilable, for each has its own essential purpose. Opposites need not be reconciled, but allowed free reign, their conflict indicative of the abundance of possibilities within each mode of difference.
Lino Lago, Multipolar (Nicolas de Largillierre), 2025 oil and acrylic on canvas 59.1 x 47.2 inches (150 x 120 cm), courtesy of the artist and Madison Gallery
But Donald Judd has no tolerance for figurative art. “Chia is rehashing academic mythology, including Picasso’s waltzing Hellenistic figures, bad when Picasso did them and decadent in the first place.”(1) “The public doesn’t know that after Kirchner and Nolde…there have been hundreds of painters flailing Expressionism, so that when they see Baselitz whipping a dead horse they expect it to stand up, or at least roll over.” “Expressionism is not an important idea in the art of this (20th) century, since it is the weakest attempt to deal with the disintegration of traditional representation, in fact a reactionary one, being just a distortion of the picture.” “The brushwork in the paintings by Baselitz is thoughtless, passionless, flaccid, and is a parody of Expressionism.” Even abstract expressionism is “an inadequate style…a compromise with representational art and its meaning.” Spatial illusionism is an inevitable “compositional effect” in even the most advanced European abstract painting. Such effects “tend to carry with them all the structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition.” Evocation and expression of emotion imply what Heinrich Wolfflin called “the double root of style,” but for Judd there is only one root of style, what he calls its “specificity”—more “specific than art has been and also specific and general in a different way,” and thus unmistakably itself—self-identical—and nothing else. Clement Greenberg distinguished between the literal order and expressive order of artistic effects and their interdependence, but Judd emphasizes the former at the expense of the latter. With the “decisive advances” of the paintings of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland “that’s all down the drain…over with”; Judd is totally uninterested in European art. Spatial illusionism, whether implicit in abstract art or explicit in representational art, is a symptom of the “general decline,” all the more so when it is mediated by the figure.
Lino Lago, Multipolar (Peter Lely), 2025 oil and acrylic on on canvas 47 x 39 inches (119.4 x 99.1 cm), courtesy of the artist and Madison Gallery
I think Judd wants to erase desire from art, deny that art has anything to do with desire, as the human figure unavoidably does. Desire, as the psychoanalyst Barnaby Barratt writes, “is like a mysterious ‘energy,’ a temporality moving through, yet occluded by, the structuring of signs”(2)—art being one way of structuring them. “Picasso’s waltzing Hellenistic figures,” Baselitz’s “parody of Expressionism,” however much decadent reprises of earlier modes of art, are informed by and convey desire, which “subverts” the “coherence” and “completeness”—hermetic insularity and sterility—that Judd’s stacks, boxes, and progressions--have. Judd’s works are masterpieces of sterility, all the more so because they were made by small fabricators using industrial methods. They have an indirect affinity with Constructivism, in that they are symptomatic of industrial society—Judd’s later furniture makes that clear—and aesthetically simplistic, not to say indifferent. At best, they are redundantly simplistic geometrical abstractions. They have what the Russian Constructivists called spatial presence, but as the gestalt theorist of art Rudolph Arnheim said, lined up, as they often were, his boxes had a certain affinity with rows of suburban houses.
I suggest that Judd’s Minimalist boxes are geometrical abstraction in decadent decline, more particularly simplistically reified geometrical constructions, finally dead ending in slickly simplistic furniture. Their geometry is more straightforward, not to say simplistic, than Malevich’s square, ostensibly minimalist but emblematically fraught with spiritual feeling, as its derivation from sacred icons make clear. Technology comes to the rescue of Judd’s simplistic works, but it does not give them aesthetic credibility, let alone the emotional poignancy of Malevich’s square, and as such they beside the point of art. Judd’s boxes are an example of what Allan Kaprow calls postart—“an art which isn’t perceived as art, which is not so much a contradiction but a paradox.” But it is not the kind of sacred paradox that Christ is—man and God in one—but a profane paradox, like Duchamp’s Fountain, urinal and fountain in one.
The issue that haunts contemporary art is whether traditional European and modern American art can live with each other, as Judd thought they couldn’t. European art, modern or traditional, had to go into the graveyard of history—presumably to let American art make history. One might say that Judd carries the American Revolution—the rebellion of New World America against Old World Europe—into the realm of art. Abstract Expressionism didn’t do so—its an extension of Kandinsky’s abstract expressionism—nor did Picasso do so, for he regressed from Cubism—which Judd’s Minimalism shows a perverse affinity for (it reads as a rundown paralyzed Cubism, a miscarried, aborted Cubism, a Cubism without the ironical complexity, not to say perverse aesthetics of the analytic and synthetic Cubism of Braque and Picasso). But Lino Lago’s brilliant Multipolar paintings, all 2024, show that traditional European representation—one pole--and modern American abstract expressionism—the other pole, dialectically superimposed on the European pole, can inhabit the same space, conveying an unusually fresh new aesthetic sensation. Intoxicating color and sober representation, manic gesturalism and precise description comfortably inhabit the same space in dialectical intimacy, however ostensibly at odds.
Sober representation, in which fresh, luminous swabs of color-filled paint, some forcefully gestural as though flung on the surface of the Old Master work they partially cover, some subliminally biomorphic, some geomorphic, seem imprinted on the brilliantly copied Old Master work. Each has its autonomy, but they inform each other to make unusual aesthetic sense. The museum-worthiness and somber grandeur of the traditional masterpieces is seemingly attacked and compromised—marred and mocked—by the gloriously radiant colors of pure abstraction—the colors that Kandinsky saw at the expense of Monet’s haystack. But in aesthetic fact the freshness and immediacy of the flashy spasms and blobs of color give Lago’s treasured Old Masterpieces a new lease on expressive life, not to say a fresh sense of aesthetic purpose and presence, even as the cognitive complexity and cultural meaning of the grand traditional paintings—one by Caravaggio, another by Peter Lely—give the “non-objective” colors a sense of conceptual purpose they do not usually have. They have not only been raised from the dead by the color, and the color has been given new expressive power and spiritual meaning by being injected into the dead old masterpieces, revitalizing them and rescuing them from oblivion. Lago’s colors are no longer only vehicles of feeling, as Kandinsky said they are, but of thought—for they are like exclamation marks on the Old Masterpieces, forcing us to think about them not simply dutifully respect them, and, more broadly and deeply, about art in general, and to realize its wide-ranging complexity.
Lino Lago, Multipolar (Caravaggio), 2025 oil on canvas 53.5 x 45 inches (135.9 x 114.3 cm), courtesy of the artist and Madison Gallery
The opposites of Old Master art and modernist color—both now inhabit Malraux’s museum without walls--not only affords an unusually new “sensation of the new,” but their dialectical reconciliation, however seemingly haphazard and perhaps ironical, not to say perversely arbitrary, generates speculation about painting as such and the awareness of the long, complicated history of art. Lago dialectically reconciles—ironically integrates--the opposites of traditional representation and avant-garde abstraction while demonstrating their irreconcilability—their radical difference-- giving us a new “sensation of the new” by reminding us that it is an overlay on the sensationally old and traditional. It is a wonderful demonstration of the creative use that can be made of Malraux’s Museum Without Walls, where all new art ends up, becoming true and tried and with that traditional, tradition the necessary ground for explorative originality and expressive depth. Where Judd’s Minimalist boxes announce the dead-end of art, Lago’s marriage of sober traditional representation and intoxicating modernist color shows that the infinite variety of creative possibilities would not exist without pluralism. It makes it clear that neither representational nor abstract art is more important—inherently more significant—than the other because one is more of the essence of art than the other. There is no essence of art, only different kinds of artistic existences. Without such seemingly stale Old Master representation and seemingly fresh New Master abstraction Lago’s daring paradoxical marriage of them would not be possible. Without the generative conflict made possible by pluralism—the “abundance” of art, with all its differences, seemingly irreconcilable--creative originality and authenticity, such as we see in Lago’s art, would not be possible. WM
Donald Kuspit is one of America’s most distinguished art critics. In 1983 he received the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, given by the College Art Association. In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Davidson College, in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2007 from the New York Academy of Art. In 1997 the National Association of the Schools of Art and Design presented him with a Citation for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he was the Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow. In 2008 he received the Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. In 2013 he received the First Annual Award for Excellence in Art Criticism from the Gabarron Foundation. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations.
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