New Langton Arts: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Artists: Robert Bordo, Charline von Heyl, Rebecca Morris, Avery Preesman, Annabeth Rosen, Amy Sillman, John Zurier.

Comment: The New Langton show curated by Pamela Wilson-Ryckman is an interesting sampler of abstract art today. The curator explains that she chose works by artists "who found ways of opening up the language of the abstract." Such is the colorful composition by the New York based artist Amy Sillman who challenged, in an intuitive approach the limits between abstraction and representation. Annabeth Rosen, from UC Davis, challenged similar limits by basing her work on narratives of extruded intestinal-like tubes to create formal geometrical patterns bunched into spherical ceramic sculptures. The narrative of these tubes is further formalized in the surprising inclusion of brown paper into the ceramic lattice.

The contemplative nature paintings by the New York artist Robert Bordo are a very different approach to the abstract. In a few flat strokes he evokes an emotional vision of abstracted pink stones on the seashore, or of the movement of grass in the wind. The paintings of LA artist Rebecca Morris are formalistic. Her geometric forms create a vibrant collage of triangles that are collected side by side to form a vivacious slanted grid.  The grid is also the basis for the organic concrete wall piece by the Dutch sculptor Avery Preesman. This hanging sculpture or three dimensional painting is challenging the foreground background relations in such work. Finally, German born New York base Charline Von Heyl takes an expressionist approach in her narrative abstraction. This dramatic colorful canvas is placed against the black void paintings by Bay Area artist John Zurier, which, at close look reveals a viridian narrative mystery.