Chuck Close at Pace

Checked out Chuck Close at Pace on 25^th street.  These portraits may not be the most interesting pictures of people I’ve ever seen but the technique and paint handling combined with the use of color is everything that is good in this world.  Close uses thin washes of yellow, cyan, and magenta to build layers of thin, transparent, color in oil on canvas.  The effect looks a lot like layered watercolor.  Up close, the grid is beautiful and entirely fulfilling.  The self portraits are great and the midsize ones are the absolute best.  Each square seems to be almost 3-D standing about four feet away at an angle but up close the paintings are incredibly flat.  I loved the show.  New work from old ideas.  The back gallery was filled with some older sketches that directly inform the work in the larger gallery.   The show closed Friday.  I’m glad I squeaked in!

http://www.pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/12759/chuck-close-recent-work

Mari Lyons

There is still time to see: MARI LYONS F L O A T I N G  P A L E T T E S and other recent work  Mari Lyons, Time Remembered IV, 2015, oil on canvas, 70 x 80 in.   October 6 - October 31, 2015 In her new show, FLOATING PALETTES and other recent work, Mari Lyons borrows an image, a sign, from the late, magical studio paintings of Georges Braque -- with a nod, too, to the floating world of the Japanese Ukiyo-e print. In Braque's metaphysical studio interiors, objects are transformed into towering events over which palette and bird float. He reinvents perceptual space. Lyons, in her interiors, uses objects, some real some imagined, to explore (for her) new spaces. Some of these objects, subjects, are an Ibibio sculpture (which she has nicknamed "Geraldine"), a carousel horse (the subject of many of her earlier paintings), an African rooster, a wooden copy of an eighteenth-century angel, casts from the ancient Greek, and all the paraphernalia-paints, brushes, paintings, vases, bottles, easels-things that inhabit a painter's studio. In these, she mediates on the ever floating and forming language of painting in the dramatic world of the studio. "In these works," says Lyons, "some more objective, some more subjective. I have sometimes used the language of abstraction. All works in this show are an attempt to anchor 'floating space' into a bold celebration of the act of painting."   Check out the new firststreetgallery.org website for more information!   Gallery Hours: 11 am - 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday 526 West 26th Street, Suite 209, New York, New York 10001 646-336-8053 · 646-336-8054 (fax)