The art world of the New York I moved to was a domain of Isms

 MIKE COCKRILL | Bouquet | Oil on Canvas | 66" x 46" | 2024, oil on canvas, 66 x 46 inches

 

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST November 11, 2024

  The art world of the New York I moved to was a domain of Isms. Mary Boone made the cover of New York magazine on April 19 1982 for shows which plunked, for instance, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente onto an artscape ruled by Minimalism and Conceptualism, but upon which Neo-Expressionism would swiftly bloom.

BILL BUCHMAN | SAFFRON SATORI - Acrylic and Oil Stick on Canvas - 38 x 44 in 2023

  Debbie Dickinson’s current curation, which is hung in an elegant gallery space at 32 East 57^th Street, is an in your face Ism smasher. She has hung pieces which don’t relate to each other in the how nor the why of their making but because each piece expresses the theme of her exhibit. Which is Transfigured.

  The show includes, for instance, a number of pure abstractions, including strong paintings by Bill Buchman and Combustion in the Clouds by Evan Lagache, and Spin 4, a sculpture by Seth Howe. There’s a canvas by Mike Cockrill in which a pop-eyed fellow is favoring a lissome three-armed lady with an understandably startled male gaze and there’s a remarkable piece of hyperrealism, a drawing by Chris Weller of Lemon Anderson, the poet/performer, sitting alone in a bus.

 EVAN SEBASTIAN LAGACHE | Combustion in the Clouds | Acrylic on Canvas | 48" x 60" | 2018

  Rick Secen’s Last Light is a painting of muted realism that depicts a man looking at a burning candle. He is, as the title indicates, looking at his death, but, as the artist writes, he is surrounded “with a radiant glow of light that could suggest a metamorphosis rather than a death.”

  Then there’s Screen Shot# by Deborah Perlman, a piece in which abstraction and figuration don’t just co-exist on the same surface in the nowadays fashion but in which the abstractions suggest a real situation. So just what is Transfigured about? Over to the artists.

CHRIS WELLER | Portrait of Lemon Anderson | Watercolor and Graphite on Paper | 40" x 28" | 2024
 

 “The word transfigured refers to a complete change of appearance, “ Bill Buchman says. “It’s making something more beautiful. And for me the job of abstraction is the translation of the beauty human beings experience and see into the language of music.

In other words colors, shapes and forms exist in relationship to each other in a way that notes and rhythms relate to each other.”

   Buchman though is also a professional musician. Evan Lagache’s work is powered otherwise. “That piece is about all of the energy, all of our data that we’ve accumulated, it’s the idea that we’re in the realm of technology, we are part of the matrix,” Lagache says of Combustion In The Clouds, one piece in the show. “It’s the idea that what if one day all of our information was destroyed? What would it look like? Is it fearful? Is it beautiful? Is it madness? One day all of our information will go up in flames. What are we then? Do we just update it for the cloud? Or is it gone?”

DEBORAH PERLMAN | Screen Shot #8 | Paper and flat Aluminum Wire | Framed: 15,5" x 11.5" x 1.5" | 2024

   Deborah Perlman’s work also comes from elsewhere. Very elsewhere, in fact. “My work lands somewhere between the real and the imagined, featuring spaces and shapes that evoke mystery and the unknown,” she observes. “I encourage viewers to ask themselves “What is it?” “Where is it? What do I see and feel? And ultimately, do I find myself in it, or not?” Of her portrait of Lemon Anderson, Chris Weller observes that the transfiguration “occurs as artists delve beyond mere physical representation to reveal deeper truths about the subject’s life and inner world.”

  Seth Howe sees Spin 4, his abstract sculpture, as also an instrument.  “My artwork is about the act of seeing,” he says, “Not what we see, but that we see. My aim is to illuminate. The ways in which we see are so often

defined and constrained by language and cultural conventions. My goal is to highlight visual perception

in an effort to transfigure the viewing experience itself; to see in a new way, and to discover the beauty and awe that exists in the everyday reality of being human.”

INGA KHURIEVA | Genius Boy | Oil on Canvas | 28" x 36" | 2024
 

 RICK SECEN | Last Light - 50" x 40" - Oil on Canvas - 2021 

 SETH HOWE | Spin Series A -  #4 | Pigment Print Photographs on Cotton Rag - Framed in Wood Shadowbox Frame | 51” x 41” x 3.5” | 2023

   Other artists describe art making as a quasi-spiritual experience. It all begins with a spark of an idea, a subtle very abstract energy that gradually takes form and substance as it descends into our world, writes Inga Khurieva. As I paint I allow this energy to flow through me … There is a constant interplay between the material and the ethereal, the animal and the divine. Elena Seroff, a painter, sees transfiguration as a form of metamorphosis. Familiar forms are deconstructed and reassembled into new compositions, she writes.

  For Michael Cockrill, rather refreshingly, Transfigured has been the result of a process arising from the way art connects with the viewer. “The artist sets it up but the viewer transforms the object,” he says. “I think to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary is our role as artists. Also we draw attention to things that tend to get overlooked.”
  Cockrill feels furthermore that for such reasons art can play a positive role in our troubled times.
 “I think art is a common ground in the political divide. There’s a common ground in loving art. And loving images.” And just the right fit for Transfigured. WM