"Fresh" at the Debbie Dickinson Gallery by Anthony Haden-Guest

Andy Warhol's Vision of Hell, by Anthony Haden-Guest

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST, May 2023

Debbie Dickinson, the New York curator/dealer, has put together approximately eighty shows over the last dozen years, for instance, New York, Palm Beach, Paris and Nantucket, but she doesn’t necessarily do so for the usual reasons, these being to platform a hopefully budding Ism, tug a neglected figure back into the light or to document a relationship, as with the illuminating Manet/Degas show which is up at the New York Met until July 23rd. Dickinson however has chosen her own highly individual direction, creating four shows set up specifically to capture the different ways that the mood generated by the onwards flow of increasingly dark current events has affected her chosen artists and just how it has got into their art. 

Dickinson mounted The Sleep of Reason, her first such show, in a Palm Beach gallery in November 2019, the title being a lift from the talismanic Goya etching, “That was the precursor to crises,” Dickinson says. “Because everybody was asleep and not understanding all these forbidding situations yet it emerged in the artists work and conversation”.  Influence, her next such curation, which she mounted in a gallery space on West 23^rd in May 2022, consisted of the responses of eight emerging artists to the even uglier events that were then dominating the cultural conversation, but which were IRL. rather than paranoid fantasies, and which ranged from the Ukraine to the rollback of abortion rights. The highly disparate images included both turbulent abstractions and a painting by Bryan LeBoeuf depicting a parachutist falling off a cliff, while being blown contradictorily backwards by the wind. Curtis Wallin referenced escapees at the Ukraine border with neon sculptures which replicate devices that were used at the Czech Border during World War II. 

Ombre, earlier this year, consisted of work by twelve artists responding to the sense that the culture needed to be lifted  from darkness to light. Did Dickinson herself have a lightbulb moment in coming up with that show?

 It came from the general response to Influence. “I understood that it was creating in the audience a lot of questionable fear,” she said. “I didn’t want that, because we had experienced heavy times.”

Dickinson’s new show, which has just opened at a pop-up in Carl Hansen & Son, a majestic space at 150 Wooster Steet, is called Fresh. “It is at the other end of the spectrum,” Dickinson says. “The work has emerged into “The Light Period”. That is what this show is about. And it’s about how artists are leaving it open-ended for the viewer at this point. They are waiting for an exchange, for emotions and ideas to come back from the viewer after they have been expending so much energy for the last year”.

Fresh puts together work by ten artists, including several who have been in Dickinson’s earlier shows, such as Bryan LeBoeuf, Iran Issa Khan and Evan Sebastian Lagache, plus a number of newbies, including David Richardson, the Marine colonel become painter, Tom Krantz and Prince Palace.

Evan Sebastian Lagache, Soil

So why is the show called Fresh?  Well, it’s a word with multiple but not necessarily connected meanings, such as deliciously new, but also saucy, even snippy, and many can be applied to what is on view here. The art includes both abstraction and figural work. Indeed, in certain canvases Geraldo Perez, a Dominican artist, uses both, but not in the manner of de Kooning and the Ab Exes, when they are plainly abstracting from landscape or the human figure. In such a canvas as Caballo Crusando el Rio, Perez combines both. A more covert example is Myth of Progress No 4, by David Richardson, the largest painting in the show, which is given urgency by his use of what he sees as a tool of entrapment, the binary pictorial signage of AI.

Jorge Vascano, Petrified Marble Sculpture

Which hooks into another element of the show and this is very much of Right Now, namely the work that puts both tech and technique to adroit use. Like the sculptures of the Peruvian artist, Jorge Vascano, who slices both wood and stone to make pieces, such as a head with a mouth opened in an ambiguous scream - it might be signaling horror or  ecstasy - which the artist made by putting together pieces of very differently colored stone, each about a half inch square, and so deftly executed that somehow that sculpted head looks as smooth as a single chunk of carved Carrara marble. 

Prince Palace, Jockey Race
 

Prince Palace, the youngest newbie, built his paintings and photographs in the show from stock images of pro athletes which he has recuperated from the web and also by re-scanning older images, painting them in multi-layers. “When I have put all the layers through the scanner I’ll put it in Photoshop,” he says. He will conclude such an operation by collaging a highly specific kind of digital photograph on top of a completed piece.

Another element in Fresh is the pure abstraction, the works produced by artists who are making no references to figuration, whether in your face or sly. Bill Buchman, a veteran, who has shown with Dickinson before, most recently in Ombre, is one such. He is also a gigging musician, playing both jazz and the Blues, and he has no problem with those who find such rhythms and harmonies in his paintings. 

The abstractions of Evan Sebastian Lagache, one of the youngest artists here, but who has multiple exhibitiona under his belt, are generated otherwise. There has been a spiritual element in abstraction from its beginnings. Hilma af Klimt, the recently rediscovered early abstractionist, Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian were all, heavily influenced by Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement. Not so Lagache, but he is similarly ambitious for his work, and this is why he has embraced a smidgen of chaos. “Before the Big Bang there was Chaos One,” he says. “The city we live in, New York, is a very chaotic place but I believe it has reached a certain balance”.

Which is also why Lagache sticks to pure abstraction. “I try to avoid figurative references,” he says. “So that people can relate to an emotion they have felt for each other.

Or that they have felt maybe just sitting in the park, a smell,

Or a sound. Or an emotion they have felt in nature.”

There’s also a cartoon artist in the show, by the way. Yup, me. I had a piece back in Dickinson’s Sleep of Reason, featuring such attention-grabbers of the time as lethal vaccines and tin foil hats. And in this show? Five pen-and-ink cartoons and the nod to Andy Warhol incorporating found objects which I have immodestly included here. WM