The contemporary art world isn’t lacking for painters these days, from the success of market darlings like Oscar Murillo and Lucien Smith to the steady popularity of Eddie Martinez. But laid back, conceptual abstractionism is all the rage, and artists working figuratively — and doing it well — who grapple with the more traditional styles of painting, are few and far between. However, two beacons of hope can be found on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the exhibitions of Brian Novatny and Kent Monkman, who are proving that old traditions die hard, and skilled painting is not dead.
Monkman, a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry, delivers a provocative series at Sargent’s Daughters titled “The Urban Res.” The work is jam packed with social and political commentary, exploring the displacement and disenfranchisement of indigenous populations, the damage that modernity has done to regional and traditional cultures, and sexual identity politics (the latter involves an installation starring Monkman’s alter ego, “Miss Chief Testickle”).
His acrylic paintings are impressively detailed for their grand scale, with an Edward Hopper-esque quality of light and illustrative, bright crumbling scenery that evokes the Main Streets of Norman Rockwell, though sparsely populated and now inhabited by the angels and ghosts of art history. Earlier series by Monkman painstakingly borrowed landscapes from 19th-century German-American painter Albert Bierstadt, but in “The Urban Res,” Monkman’s paintings take a step closer to modernism’s rebellious legacy, subverting the very tradition it seeks to uphold by playing with contemporary scenes and historic figures.
Monkman has a studied command over the relatively new medium, but the effectiveness of the work’s conceptual elements overshadow its technical achievements — the numerous nods to art history draw attention away from his own masterful realism. Reproductions of Bacon’s grotesque figures stand in a doorway in “The Deposition” and Picasso’s flattened, and geometric bulls run alongside massive bison in “The Chase.” But while each element is certainly recognizable, the details of the miniature homages are not as refined the larger, architectural elements of the background. I would rather have seen a more academic approach to the style of each master to match. The paintings depict modernity’s destructive effect over art’s masters, yet that effect is also subtly revealed in the artist’s own handiwork, the perspective ever so off and scale askew.
Brian Novatny, however, turns any standard for technique on its head. The Yale educated, Brooklyn-based artist was praised by the New York Times’s Roberta Smith for the technical prowess he showed in his 2011 drawing exhibition, “Picture FIshing.” His understanding of oil is radical — the paintings don’t even look like oils. He pushes paint around the canvas, bleeding, scraping, and feathering it to create an effect more akin to watercolor or a monoprint. “Sailor’s Diary” at Mulherin+Pollard is a haunted, dreamy exhibition that depicts silhouetted ghost ships tossed by stormy waves and obscured portraits of fictional officers — the works possess the hazy quality of early 19th-century photographs.
In “Gideon” and “Sebastian,” the figures’ faces are treated with a refined, soft, blended hand, and then mutilated to obscure what could have been photorealistic perfection. Novatny uses paint to create the illusion of a photograph marred by time or disaster. Meanwhile, “Going Under” and “Capsizing” capture violent, spontaneous energy that is to be applauded for emerging from a medium that requires incredible patience and time.
