Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By PETER FRANK July 6, 2024
Born in Los Angeles, New York painter Daniel Licht returns to his hometown with a flock of – well, very New York paintings. Licht’s sensuous appreciation of facture, of pigment and even support (whether wood or paper), occupies a loamy and tactile realm that, if anything, figures as contrapositive to LA’s vaunted Finish/Fetish practice – but displays the same level of materiality.
Licht’s is a materiality coaxed from reticent, even obdurate, paint. Neither the process nor the end result is the goal; rather, Licht seeks a dynamic interrelationship – intercausality, really – between these polarities. At basis, this approach updates, if not renews, Abstract Expressionist aesthetics; but Licht personalizes manner and experiments with gesture (as well as material), so that a fully rounded artistic character emerges. Cy Twombly is the most obvious predecessor; but Licht is not concerned with notation or mark-making as such, but with marks’ ability to infer, even describe, space and support, even induce color and atmosphere. In this respect he admits a painterly heritage as European as it is American, evidencing the “belle peinture” (and écriture) of Jean Fautrier and WOLS as well as the neo-expressionist subtleties – yes, subtleties – of recent painters such as Per Kirkeby, Markus Lupertz, and the Leipzig School.
Has Licht reached the existential levels these august artists have? If not, it’s only a matter of time. He finds a profundity in mark-making-as-space-making that, with its sober palette, often moves into the tragic. Licht is already an eloquent spiritual witness to the gravity of our times. Such sorrow does not befall him directly, but manifests in his grief-laced tableaux. The Kantian notion of the sublime as an empathetic response to those observed undergoing (catastrophic) misfortune fits here: Licht’s is a ponderous, if soft-spoken, protest at a near and cruel world, echoing the cries and whispers that barrage us from the 24-hour news cycle.
Licht does not devote his entire oeuvre to the elegiac. His drawings and collages, as compact and intimate as even his small paintings are grave and expansive, effervesce with joy and eager anticipation. The mark-making and clustering is similar to his painting, but the vigorous working of the paper, or conversely the sensuous membranes that seem to buff the collaged morsels, radiate an energetic spirit of play and display. The linear elements carry over from the paintings, but their dance is now jubilant, even frenetic. The existential gloom enfolding Licht’s painting is foreign to his works on paper. The ghost of Kurt Schwitters haunts these jocular little gems, providing Licht with an alternative tone. Will the paintings’ funereal largos ultimately combine with the scherzos of the paperworks? If Daniel Licht allows himself sufficient symphonic resonance, sufficient vision, they will. WM
PETER FRANK is an art critic, curator, and editor based in Los Angeles, where he serves as Associate Editor of Fabrik Magazine. He began his career in his native New York, where he wrote for The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News and organized exhibitions for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Alternative Museum. He is former Senior Curator at the Riverside (CA) Art Museum and former editor of Visions Art Quarterly and THEmagazine Los Angeles, and was art critic for LA Weekly and Angeleno Magazine. He has worked curatorially for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and many other national and international venues. (Photo: Eric Minh Swenson)
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