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Roaming Imagination

Millree Hughes — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:54:51 +0000

Roaming Imagination Millree Hughes March 1, 2026 - 11:54

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Mike Cockrill: Falling in Place
Mosaic Artspace, 19-28 31st Place (Andromeda Building)
Long Island City, NY 11101
Thru March 20th

I became a curious fan of Mike Cockrill's paintings and drawings on Facebook, beginning in 2022, when the artist returned from a Covid-imposed isolation to meet in public. I approached him at a Mark Kostabi show on West Broadway. He's tall and confident, easy to pick out in a crowd. One of the reasons I was attracted to his FB art profile is his graphic versatility, drawing skills, and sharp imagination. Artists such as Daumier and Goya, and editorial cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, created nightmare fantasies and ironic jokes with their pens.

His technical facility is deceptively mainstream, serving a subversive bend. "I had an early fascination with popular forms like magazine illustration and political cartoons." As a young artist, he took a job designing business forms in the financial district for Merrill Lynch, getting an inside view of cubicle life.

By the time we became acquainted, I had morphed into a veteran of the outdoor billboard-painting scene. In the blue-collar circus of ropes and ladders, the painter of big signs was called the "mechanic." Apart from a chuckle about the sinister Charles Bronson movie by that title, I identified with the cold impersonality of the content (cars, bottles, fax machines). The old-school bosses and shop managers put complete trust in my hands. I often dreamed about a clean job at a Madison Avenue desk.

1> Office Drones

In The Idea Room, a distressed gray office like a prison cell, three co-workers are pitching a campaign proposal. They are dressed in sparse Mormon black pants and shoes, white shirts, and ties. The result of their labors is demonstrably futile, the floor littered with paper airplanes and crumpled pages. An executive sucks on the lifeline of a cigarette while another sketches an invisible idea on a floating easel, yet a third lies supine in the exhausted pose of a patient in a psychiatric session. The figures are rendered as ciphers, thin suggestions with clown noses. A clockface stares like a merciless moon.

The Idea Room

2> Maps and Neighborhoods

Mike is from Virginia, a bedroom community close to the nation's government offices. In other paintings, he shows off his gift for storytelling in sunny, halcyon landscapes. The types of children and activities in those are deceptively innocent and attractive. Mike's plots add a sinister twist. In earlier works of lawn parties, sweet girls in pastel pinafores hold pistols aimed at cowering clowns.

His views of suburban houses are devotional and can resemble pre-Renaissance Italian art. The ranch-style houses are composed with a model-maker's care and patience, often using multiple perspectives, or more pastorally, seen from a bird's-eye view. In these, we see a sharp-edged Japanese space, the curved roads gracefully disobey logical connections. The surface is layered and scraped to reveal hidden layers, with drips and veils, seams of patchwork, affirming the flat canvas. Nowhere do we see the anecdote of dogs, figures walking, and cars on errands. An eerie quiet prevails, as if the families have all departed for offices and schools–perhaps a reminder of the Cold War.

Maps and Neighborhoods

The grinning malevolent map of the USA is another of Cockrill's inventions. The omnivorous face of a US map grasps with tentacles and mechanical arms, a reminder of MAGA's threats of rogue imperialism, the face of America: arms dealer to the world. Heads roll, and bloody conquests from history are revived: the map is an ogre–the tenuous Union affirmed by Lincoln at the surrender of Lee's army still festers, remains a squirming, itching bed-case. Anger against scapegoated minorities is normalized.

The Skull Gatherer

3> Falling in Place: Watteau and Fragonard

One wonders whether, by drawing on Watteau and Fragonard, Mike gives free rein to beauty and refinement without contemporary content. Or maybe the bubble-dwelling courtiers of the Rococo era mimic the climate deniers or the isolationists of today's head-in-the-sand retreat from stable alliances? The Rococo world, highly decorated and refined, is now the poster child of a blind and willful negligence of the social order. A student of history knows what followed the last Bourbon monarchy: The French Revolution. Who can say, as some historians claim, that the violence of the 1790s was seismic, causing a chain reaction of mass death, into the Russian Revolution and the two World Wars? The expedient of the guillotine is expressed in Mike's related drawings of decapitated heads.

PUDDLE OF REGRETS

These concerns seem secondary to his fun in picture making, teasing delicate gestures of storybook women and girls from homely scraps and playful accidents on the canvas. The clash of materials and subject is charming as it is contradictory. His attachment of layers and shifting of the focal length on the players in this farcical, self-conscious space vibrates like an earthquake.

Blindfold Falling

4> Parents

There is a similar cancellation or discretion in this canvas. A traditional painter would be locked into the tedious posing of the couple in tiring positions, the result usually forced into its own stiff reality. Mike suggests a dreamlike flash as the principals assume the pose–a memoir deliberately faded, a fashionable red blazer worn by dad, a stylish car coat and handbag for mom. The likeness is an homage, emerging from the mystique of unity.

Parents

In modern culture, the painter is an uneasy hero, constantly striving towards a more complete reality. Bonnard said: "...the artist is grounded in the palette, but when the illusion appears, that's when the nonsense begins." Degas worked on Young Spartans Exercising for ten years. Hopper spoke of "a deepening affection" in his slow process, coaxing finality out of only two paintings a year. They were fiercely committed and took painting as far as their talent would allow. Revision for Cockrill is a source of life.

5> Destruction and Reconstruction

Perhaps living in our challenging, densely opinionated society requires nimble reassessments and constant reactions to the latest shocks. Who is not aware of some imbalance and insecurity? For artists, self-awareness is a top concern, as a daunting field of competitors claim and fight for their own style message. His painting, Fighter Jet No. 3, channels amoral, jarring realism—a pathos like stepping near a bird flattened by car tires. The layering of accurately cut textile shapes conveys a grim, inhuman force.

Fighter Jet No. 3

There was a saying from the abstract painters of the 1950s: "...you paint it out, and it is still there." What was the "it?" Could the artist see the ghost of his failed attempt through the veils of overlaid paint and start over on a new tack?

I think of the myopic trance of Melville's anti-hero, Captain Ahab, searching oceans for the white whale. Mike Cockrill's process of scavenging layers of textile, building images with ready-made colors from the thrift store racks, feeds and satisfies this anxiety. It comes of an impatience with fixed goals and of his roaming imagination. His work is from a tradition in which talented admirers of past masters allow themselves gauche manners and not-so-subtle jokes. Painters hope to surprise themselves, and maybe get some laughs.

John S. Paul, Brooklyn 2026

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Thank you for the review

What a pleasure to read John Pauls insights and reflections on my current exhibition of collage paintings. Thank you JP, Millree Hughes and Culture Catch.

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PSYCHOPOMPS

Millree Hughes — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:12:52 +0000

PSYCHOPOMPS Millree Hughes February 23, 2026 - 20:12

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Josh Smith: Destiny
David Swirmer Gallery, 519 West 19th Street, New York
January 21 - February 28, 2026

I believe that I can use a combination of mental looseness and an almost meditative concentration to access Consciousness. The same place that the artist goes to make the art.

Giacomo D'Ariano and Frederico Faggin's new theory of Consciousness* claims that it is not linked to the functioning of the body and can persist even after death. That it is somewhere else, in another dimension. The body behaves like a drone controlled by this source.

Josh Smith's new show at Zwirner is of paintings of Grim Reapers on bikes on New York streets.

I believe they are painted from AI-generated images. AI really doesn't understand how bikes work at all, any more than it understands how arms connect to the body under that shroud. The hands become wheels, and some join the body to the bike. AI is looking for patterns on the plane at the front of the image, mainly because it has difficulty with the Z-axis. Consequently, wheels order themselves decoratively; lines of handlebars or cross braces link with bike chains in gestural strokes.

AI is perfectly situated to communicate with another dimension.+ It has become like a global unconscious. A dream state that is in danger of becoming a mass hallucination.

Before that happens, perhaps it can reveal pure states of being.

What other ways can I use to access the creative infinite? I have read that drugs can help, but which ones? The shimmer of ketamine? The feel-good confidence of MDMA? There are Halloween colours here that could've come from a 'shroom schema. Purple skies, dirty yellow lights, Pepe the Frog green bikes. Do I need to be on drugs to understand them?

This painting depicts a reaper at the top of some subway steps wieldinga bike object. Josh Smith makes his paint the consistency of a high-class moisturizer. Slippery but not drippy. The line bears no pretense of elegance. It has a hand-wavy quality, a little flutter that gives you the sense of an activity that may vibrate to the point of falling apart.

It is a good example of Smith's tendency to turn an image into a symbol. The amalgamated reaper and bike form an X shape in the middle of the canvas. I closed my eyes and tried to deepen my connection to the piece. But the symbol became an obstacle barring the way to the city and to life itself. The British slang term "Christ on a bike!" connotes surprise.++

This image is of inevitability.

In some areas of these canvases, the figure, bike, and bike chain become obnebulated. AIhas given up, and the artist has rendered its ejecta as is. Abstraction that is merely confusion.

In an attempt to reach out to Consciousness, I took dowsing rods to the gallery. They can also be used to foretell the future or divine hidden truths by bypassing the mind's logical processes. Unfortunately, although they told me where the water pipes were in the building when I asked, "Is this a good painting?" They did not respond.

Conclusion:

What can I understand about Josh Smith's new show at David Zwirner Gallery called Destiny in terms of quantum Consciousness?

Embrace Uncertainty.

Smith's work thrives on contradiction. Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, let them exist simultaneously, much like a quantum system holds multiple potentials. That state of not-knowing is central to the experience.

Deep Seek.

*"Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach" by Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin, January 2021

+According to Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, "A structure trapped in an endless feedback loop of self-referentiality." https://iai.tv/video/the-language-of-the-unconscious

++Similar, less common variations include "Christ on a stick" or "Christ on a cracker."

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thanks Millree - deep dive into AI and risk

The underworld carnival mask shares the high risk thrill of urban youth culture – train surfing, skateboard stunts & those tags on impossible hi-rise construction projects & bridges where there is no safe place to stand. (an “angel spot” )– in a kid’s mind the risk is the payoff.

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Routes/Roots

Millree Hughes — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:58:53 +0000

Routes/Roots Millree Hughes February 3, 2026 - 19:58

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Odila Donald Odita: Shadowland
Kordansky Gallery, NYC
January 15 – February 28, 2026

"Fear is the flash, the gorgeous dress our skeleton wears." - Dambudzo Marechera.

It's better if the content of a painting is clear or at least available when you look at it. If not, you need a statement to guide the observer. Often, with abstract painting, writing the statement may require more lucubration than usual. Why these colours, why these forms as opposed to any others? It might end up being as significant an artwork as the paintings themselves.

Odili Donald Odita creates acrylic paintings and wall murals. He was born in Nigeria and raised in America. He has made the intersection of the two cultures a reason for making the work.

This is Odita's second show at Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea. He has included some paintings by his father, who was an artist in Nigeria, and some of his own identity-oriented photographic work from the '00s. The inclusions suggest that he's not sure if the work will communicate its purpose without some background information. The rest of the show is work made in 2025.

At some point in the late '90s, the influence of Illustrator, the vector graphics editing program, was felt across the visual culture. The patterns were used for digital wallpaper, desktop backgrounds, and in the physical world, sometimes as nightclub murals. They seemed to reflect the digital optimism of the era. You could hover over an area with your dropper tool and fill it with your bucket tool in any colour you fancied. Fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg used it to update Emilio Pucci's patterns, and some artists decided that the vector images might make good paintings. It was a large part of Franz Akkerman's work. I think I noticed it first in 2000 in a Mathew Ritchie show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

But after a while, it faded away. There were all kinds of other ways to make images on the computer.

Once Odita had adopted the look, he took a few years to refine it and then produced a lot of quite similar-looking paintings. There are some key motifs in the work. The squashed and fractured stripe painting that might be seen as a landscape, as inHeavy 2025 or Future Perfect from 2008. The loose verticals with a diagonal cut, as in Cut 2025 or Cut 2016 (lithograph). There are the diamond-shaped patterns that appear to have a figure in the middle that could either be "Nude Descending a Staircase," or a figure (sometimes figures) dancing. Like "Protector" in this show or "Here and There" from 2008. You get the idea.

There are lots of interviews online in which the artist talks about his relationship to Nigeria and how it informs his work, yet "Protector" has twenty-eight different colours. I still can't pick out which ones are Igbo and which are American. It's not like looking at a Mary Heilman. There is a lot to choose from. Also, I don't know why a digitally derived image should be a painting rather than a print. The associations are with weaving and block printing, so is the complete lack of human touch somehow ironic? Only the slightly raised ridge along the taped edges remains.

Protector, 2025 acrylic on canvas 90 x 40 x 1 3/8 inches

But more than that, there is a caution at the centre of the work that I can't ignore. For example, he often uses a marigold yellow as a highlight colour, but unlike Akkerman, he can't let it stand on its own. In "Camouflage," on either side of this coloured shape, there is a sliver of yellow ochre, or in other places, it has been backgrounded by a low-key azure blue. One shape has a line of dusty mauve running through it, but despite being its colour opposite, it merely subdues it. The whole effect throughout is one of balance, of resolution. The colour arrangements have sanded down any rough edges, and the forms themselves have suffered from the heavy toll that Shutterstock vector wallpapers have demanded. It looks too much like graphic design.

"How do you observe a stone that is about to strike you?" - Dambudzo Marechera

Watching them pluck our friends and neighbours, our loved ones, out of the crowd because of the colour of their skin is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. But anger and fear alone cannot make great art. Max Beckmann's ghastly shadows depended on his detachment, and David Hammons' blade was whetted by critical judgment.

I don't think all artists should or could be actively political; the act itself is political.
I understand that Odita came up at a time when it was harder for black artists to get gallery shows; he may have felt it was necessary to get his point across subtly. But today, I believe, if it can be said, it should be said without a filter.

Odita's statement at the gallery's front desk asks you to consider his work as a philosophical reflection and a meditation on how political forces shape what you perceive. It's a lot for this work to carry.

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modernism (post modernism)

thanks for your concise review of these vigorous works by O. D. Odita, released amid the turmoil of today's unacceptable reality. Odita's work reminds me of another black artist, William T Williams, who chose a similar path: hard edge colors in a structure influenced by the Bauhaus and the geometric fan-shaped spectrums of Frank Stella. In the figurative world, there is also a hard edge approach to the heart-wrenching stories painted in modestly small tempera panels by Jacob Lawrence. At the end of 2025, the Jewish Museum celebrated Ben Shahn, at a time where being Jewish is under increasing attack. As you mention, not everyone can take to the high ground of political commentary.

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Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:15:57 +0000

Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins Thalia Vrachopoulos February 2, 2026 - 12:15

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Han Ho, 21c The Last Supper, 2017 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED 1,350x6x300(h)cm

Han Ho ETERNAL LIGHT
Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, N.J.
Nov 21st - Dec. 10th, 2025

I recently encountered a consummate and mature articulation of the aesthetic imagination in Han Ho’s solo exhibition, Eternal Light, at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. While differing from such artists’ work as Yuan Goang-Ming’s in his meditations on domestic fragility and geopolitical tension, it achieves an equal, if not markedly greater, degree of intensity. Internationally renowned for his monumental light sculptures, spatial installations, and large-scale works imbued with biblical and metaphysical symbolism, Han Ho constructs environments in which illumination itself becomes both the medium and the message, using Marshall McLuhan’s phrase.

Entering the exhibition resembled stepping into a prismatic, otherworldly field of perception rather than a conventional gallery setting. Vast luminous structures, radiant surfaces, and kinetic constellations of LED punctures upon traditional Korean Hanji paper generated a transcendental atmosphere of refracted light that seemed to suspend gravity. In a way, such an experience inevitably recalled the medieval cosmology of Robert Grosseteste, for whom lux was not simply illumination but the metaphysical origin of matter; the first corporeal form from which spatial extension and physical reality unfolded. In Han Ho’s installations, a comparable intuition is materialised sensorially. Light operates simultaneously as both the material and the ontological agent, shaping space while also suggesting its own pre-existence to it.

This metaphysical primacy of illumination finds a particularly forceful expression in the monumental work 21C The Last Judgement. A vast mixed-media composition of charcoal, oil with traditional black ink, Korean paper, and embedded LED constellations, in which light operates not merely as an accent but as the principal medium from which the entire visual field emanates. At once painting, relief, and glowing installation, the work evokes the grand iconographic lineage of Western art history, especially Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Simultaneously, the piece displaces it into a contemporary register marked by nuclear anxiety, territorial divisions, and the fragile dialectics between war and peace reminiscent, in thematic gravity, of Yuan Goang-Ming’s reflections on state fragility and mediated disaster. Yet where Yuan often situates the viewer within the hyperreal circuitry of simulation, Han Ho propels the spectator toward a more cosmic horizon.

Structured in a tripartite vertical narrative of celestial aspiration above, the anguished threshold of lived reality at the center, and the infernal debris of human destruction below, the composition stages an allegorical drama in which clouds oscillate ambiguously between heavenly vapor and nuclear mushroom, embodying the Janus-like conceit of humanity’s technological triumph and existential peril. The punctured Korean paper, illuminated from within by LED light, produces an ethereal radiance that renders figures and gestures almost immaterial, as though suspended in an aethereal continuum where matter itself seems provisional; this internal luminosity simultaneously evokes the silent diffusion of radioactive glow and the spectral afterimage of irradiated atmospheres of nuclear fallout. Subtly interwoven into this vertical apocalypse is the unresolved memory of Korea’s partition, whose geostrategic fracture reverberates less as a cartographic fact than as a psychic and metaphysical condition.

Han Ho, 21c The Last Judgment, 2022 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED Variable Install

This particular concern likewise inflects the almost stereographic The Last Supper, in which Han Ho extends his theology of light into a historical and political allegory, reconfiguring Leonardo’s canonical tableau as the Last Supper of the Twenty-First Century and inscribing it with the unresolved tensions of the Korean peninsula. Christ occupies the center not as a doctrinal sovereign but as a luminous nucleus of life, of inexhaustible radiant vitality amidst collective precarity. Around him, the disciples are reimagined as fractured embodiments of contemporary subjectivity. A uniformed NBC-clad sentinel registers nuclear anxiety, and the aluminum mirror embedded in a Chinese costume reflects not only the spectator but also the weight of hostile forces bearing upon the peninsula. The nude figures facing toward a primordial Korea, silently split across the pictorial axis into North and South. Upon the table, symbolic objects such as tanks and barbed wire cruelly transmute into aestheticized toys, Peter’s denied chicken, kimchi as a sign of cultural homogeneity, and the sushi bomb as purposeless destruction, coalesce into a post-modern still life of poised devastation.

However, it is again light that confers metaphysical coherence upon this dense iconography. These images resist total instrumentalization even within a technologically mediated platform, understanding the form as a vital force rather than an inert representation. In a way, light here becomes a spectral intermediary, binding fractured histories, divided territories, and dispersed identities into a single, trembling field of presence; an eschatological supper staged at the end of time and history.

My encounter with Han Ho’s Eternal Light at Mana Contemporary became an occasion to contemplate through association the unsettling proximity of large-scale annihilation, sensing that the spectre of a global war no longer belongs solely to speculative discourse but hovers as a tangible possibility within the collective imagination. Yet the exhibition does not succumb to despair; rather, it staged the primordial element of light as a fragile but persistent counterforce, offering these aesthetic environs in which existential fear and the enduring human impulse face toward transcendence.

Han Ho’s sublime works, radiating an otherworldly glow, function as a spectacular luminescent architecture of consciousness, dissolving the boundary between sensuous experience and philosophical inquiry. In a way, Han Ho strongly affirms that even when art confronts the imagery of conflict and violence, it retains the singular capacity to momentarily liberate the observer from the contingencies of personal will and social turmoil, reconstituting the viewer as a disinterested and lucid subject of pure contemplation.

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WARP

Millree Hughes — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:32:51 +0000

WARP Millree Hughes December 2, 2025 - 17:32

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Trespasser no. 4, 2025, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 72 x 96 inches

KARIN DAVIE: It Comes In Waves

Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Through 20 December 2025

Karin Davie is famous for a suite of extraordinary paintings that she showed in the 00s. They seemed to be her last word on the Stripe Painting, which had been her subject since the early 90s. She cut the stripes loose from the edge, and they recoiled like heavy rubber bands. These large abstract works consist of wildly interweaving fist-sized strokes on a coloured ground. The lines are painted wet on wet, picking up colour as they travel, each brush stroke loaded in such a way as to imply weight and volume and evidence of a light source or sources hitting the surface of the line. She never lets you forget, however, that this is paint speaking the formal language of Art.

In her dynamic new show at Miles McEnery, the stripe is back with a new set of instructions. The show consists of two sets of glorious paintings. Two red wave-like paintings, made up of two joined canvases, and a second group of wavy paintings, each in a predominant colour. They are unusual colours that can appear natural, artificial, or both. All of the second set has a divot cut into the top in the middle of the canvas, as if a giant's thumb has pushed into the picture plane.

"Trespasser No 4" is a particularly lovely golden-haired painting. Lines move horizontally in sensual gestures from one side to the other with a kink in the middle, so that by the time the last line is made, there is a groove or path running vertically through the canvas, finishing at the cut-in divot at the top. As the line moves, it picks up lighter or darker versions of the prevailing colour. The way that darker tones gather in parts of the image makes me think that the shadow of clouds has been cast on Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows." The line sometimes stops firmly before the edge or runs on as if it didn't exist. Drawing attention to the formal limits of the canvas and then sometimes totally ignoring them.

Words have worked for Davie in the past. Not in a literal way that say "container" did for Ross Bleckner with his paintings of the '90s made in the shape of urns. But her '90s pieces were "wavy" Davie's and sometimes "curvy" Davie's. But after the '00s, she began looking inside for inspiration rather than at how she looked from the outside.

"Abstractionists see no more sections, no divisions between different sections of reality, and this is not surprising since reality has been transferred from the outside to the inside of the artist, where experience is all one, and everything exists on the same plane." - Guillaume Apollinaire

Strange Terrain no. 5, 2025, Oil on linen, 60 x 105 inches

A more internal perspective persists in the Red Wave paintings. In "Strange Terrain No. 5," we are reminded of both the sea and the body. These are gorgeous paintings, but she doesn't let you just fall into fairy-tale beauty. She brings you back to the real condition of the body. At one point, a cut opens up between the lines and drips over the undulating surface.

There's a carnal shadow. It's not only a billowing pomegranate sea at dusk, but it's also viscera heaving with the breath, the tissue that covers the ribcage.

Both Strange Terrain paintings are composed of two canvases. It means that when she is painting the horizontal stroke, she has to stop and then continue the line again on the next canvas. This deliberate obstruction asks the question, 'Is the action still authentic if it is made a second time?'

Or in this case, if the line is continued.

It harks back to one of her earlier diptychs like "Ummm….#1 & #2," 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Where a curvy form covered by stripes had to be repeated in the second painting.

Ummm….#1 & #2, 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Oil on canvas over shaped stretcher. Each canvas: 90 X 60 in

This emphasis on the performance side of painting reminds me of the difference between the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan. It didn't matter whether Jimi was playing with his teeth or behind his back; you took the notes he played to be an authentic response to the music. But in a performance by T Rex at the Rainbow music venue in the early '70s, Marc ran his tambourine up and down the neck of the guitar until he finally ejected the tambourine into the audience. It really didn't matter what the sounds coming out of the speaker were; it was about the performance of the action. Marc was no slouch as a guitarist either, but he sometimes used the guitar as a prop as well as an instrument.

While I recognize that this example is not exactly the same thing, because Karin very much cares about what the painting looks like. I'm just using it to make a comparison between how glam was much more playful with the rock music form in a way that is similar to how the post painterly abstract artists used Minimalism. The exact same thing would be if Marc played an impassioned solo and then reproduced it, immediately note-for-note. That would be very Karin Davie.

Karin's work is about aesthetics and poetry. She asks: can a painted performance be authentic? Is the edge of the canvas the end of this particular state described by the painting? At the same time she's alluding to places and things in an optical way. This line casts a shadow, this one emanates light. This picture reminds you of waves. Consequently, the image seems to shift constantly between different states.

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Makers Mark

Millree Hughes — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 01:51:41 +0000

Makers Mark Millree Hughes October 31, 2025 - 21:51

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Stretch, Hold, Release
Picture Theory at 548 West 28th Street, NYC

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition." - Walter Benjamin

AI is not regarded as a tool by artists the way the tools of the past were: burnt willow sticks, polished lenses, and Photoshop, because it’s seen as a threat to the artist’s existence.

Walter Benjamin's "Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is in full flow. Music, images, and books are being created to order by producers. Soon, just as Spotify is making its milquetoast music, Netflix wants to generate ambient, half-digested TV using AI and other means. It will be created according to the digitally tracked needs of the public in the service of the corporation. Mechanical Reproduction intends to obliterate the ‘who’ of art making.

Craft-based art returns the focus to the object—how it was made, where it was made, and by whom it was made.

At Picture Theory, the gallerist Rebekah Kim has curated a show of craft-based art called "Stretch, Hold, Release."

The relationship of the artist to where they are from is significant here. Unhitching art from its tethering post of origin has been useful for corporate-made content. It wants to make a global product from a global culture. The specifics of the place make it harder to control.

Luis Emilio Romero paints Guatemalan fabrics, going as far as to imitate the raised stitch in paint. They remind me of Scottish Tartan, '60s hard-edge abstraction, and city plans. However, here, all the shapes and colors that comprise a traditional woven piece can refer to animal, plant, or cosmological patterns. It’s a metaphor for the Mayan worldview.

Lior Moran is an Israeli artist, raised in a country partly populated by people who came there because they had to hide their religion, now caught in a terrible darkness where the objectives on both sides are hidden. He takes found objects or makes sculptures that he hides under a velvet canvas. He shaves off the protruding planes, creating an inverse shadow. He uses twilight colors in his work. They are then bound along the side with a flesh coloured belt that sometimes has a buckle, like a bundle wrapped for a hurried exit.

The multiple handles and thick knotted rope, the little pinafores that she makes for her examinations of Peruvian pottery, draw attention to the utilitarian character of Terumi Sato’s own Japanese ceramic traditions.

Elisa Lutteral is an Argentinian artist born in New York. She is represented here by hanging lengths of woolen fabric with a glove at each end. In the video, the glove-wearing performers are positioned in a specific location from the camera's perspective. The resulting braid is achieved by their movements around each other. It’s an improvised group performance of one of the first crafts that we learn as children.

JaLeel Porcha’s contribution is the least didactic in the group. It’s a deep-pile hanging rug. It appears to represent a clearing in the woods, featuring two black children and a pond, perhaps. He’s influenced by the illustrators of classic American children’s books. The nostalgic quality is enhanced by being a knitted piece, which adds an ironic element to its shadowy mood.

An object that has only been created by hands and shows ´where’ and ‘when’ it is made and ‘what’ it is made from is crucial to understanding ‘what’ it is. Without these interrogatives being answered, it probably isn’t Art at all.

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The New York Art World Rebooted

Mary Hrbacek — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 01:54:55 +0000

The New York Art World Rebooted Mary Hrbacek October 9, 2025 - 21:54

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Nathaniel Mary Quinn Study for Grange Copeland, 2025 Oil paint and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel 18 x 15 inc

Gagosian Gallery: Nathaniel Mary Quinn - Echoes from Copeland (9/10–10/25/2025)

Hauser and Wirth: Ambera Wellmann - Darkling (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Company: Ambera Wellmann - One thousand Emotions (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Marianne Boesky Gallery: Celeste Rapone - Some Weather (9/4 – 10/18/2025)

Nathaniel Mary Quinn explores personal, family, and historic narratives in twelve intense new oil and oil pastel paintings on linen, where he uncompromisingly excavates pictorial planes in his search below surfaces for the underlying, intrinsic, emotionally charged forms that spur and motivate his life and his art. His meticulous, exquisitely composed vision displays a strong formal connection to the methods employed by Francis Bacon, while also delving deeply into the visceral underpinnings of the personalities he constructs and describes. This is the primary focus of the complex, highly empathetic structures that build the psychological force that each image conveys. Quinn’s mastery of the paint medium and its many possibilities provides a level of expertise that has long been scarce in contemporary art. The intimate works are forcefully compelling and meaningful. Their complexity draws viewers into the process of painting, assaulting their senses to make them experience otherwise subconscious or unexpected feelings.

Quinn’s ability to submerge the main subjects in a revealing context accentuates their truth on a number of levels in their attempts to escape racism, in their efforts to flee poverty in rural and urban America, and in their desire to put the slave heritage that haunts their quest for freedom and equality behind them. His search for self-realization involves a closer look at the circumstances of his dysfunctional family members. The hope and possibility of redemption is inspired by the novel “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” by Alice Walters.

Quinn’s dynamic blue, red, and yellow hues activate the central themes of his plots to a level of power that sensually engulfs the viewer. The combination of black and white within the maze of the facial forms and features sets the stage for deep introspection and personal tandem feelings one may relate to in one’s own family history and experience. Quinn explores the emotional pain frequently released through the painting process by creating fierce shapes and expressive forms that may function as a healing measure. One can only appreciate the artist’s special ability to transform disturbing-looking structures into unusual embodiments of beauty that grow from facing harsh realities. His distinctive “paint-drawing” technique enlivens the authority of each vignette, where scenes and backdrops express a graphic sensibility that is counterbalanced by his painterly interpretation of the facial features and specific body parts. The show is unique and powerful.

Ambera Wellmann, Mother, 2025 Oil on linen 45 x 49 in 114.3 x 124.5 cm (AW152) Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Ambera Wellman’s two current shows in New York overlap in their visual narratives with the “One Thousand Emotions” coming in as an edgy depiction of the destructive forces in former times aimed against women who are discerned to defy societal conventions. In “Darkling,” her seven oil on linen paintings feature masked congregations who have gathered, as in James Ensor’s masked assemblies, to commiserate, to support, or to experience a sense of communal dread that foreshadows the impending apocalypse. Her painting style is semi-representational, not realistic, which provides a successful vehicle for her phantom-like reveries. Wellmann’s visions of the naked and departed, in a feast that hints at an interim stage of the afterlife, seem to refer to a frightening existence devoid of the order to be found in everyday life. These specters and hallucinations relate to the hellish visions of Hieronymus Bosch projected forward into the contemporary mind.

Wellman is one of the present-day artists to visualize and express the unsettling implications of the current world turmoil. The artist’s beautifully rendered works express emotions of terror and foreboding. She intimates in the painting entitled “Siren,” that our original human genesis as sea creatures will become our endgame. Wellmann delves into her personal philosophy to explore the path to oneness with the Universe; her meditations hint that through the release of the ego, we will achieve that unity. She explores personal, societal, historical, and philosophical ideas in forceful, intricate visions set in fraught outdoor settings and in ethereal evocations of mystical, sensual inner worlds.

Wellmann’s show, “One Thousand Emotions,” displays six oil on linen paintings that are connected by photographic and drawn wall imagery in installation formats. Her emotionally charged images are steeped in nudity, sexuality, and flirtation with the spiritual dark side. Wellman evidently intends to conjure the apparitions of disobedient women from dark, unstable ages, who were persecuted as witches and executed as dissenters. Death is depicted as a metaphor for chaos and change. Wellmann has the courage to explore subjects that spark our fears and resistance to the reality that life is transitory, changeable, and fleeting. Her provocative, intriguing work represents a committed intention to bring universal meaning and philosophical content into the contemporary art arena.

Celeste Rapone Poised, 2025, Oil on canvas 32 x 28 inches 81.3 x 71.1 cm

Celeste Rapone’s large-scale oil on canvas paintings, presented in her current show “Some Weather,” provide a clear vision of believable, ultra-personal imagery that describes a quotidian life every viewer can relate to. In an unusual perspective, Rapone infuses her contemporary imagery with art historical spatial interpretations that evoke the work of Cezanne and Modigliani. Her anatomical distortions accentuate an arm around a shoulder or a female figure shuddering as wind blows her hair under an inadequate umbrella. She piles figures on top of each other in what appears to be the morning after an all-night drinking party. Figures in a hot tub swelter red against glowing white bubbling water. Rapone has a very European vision of the figure, where elongated legs or enormous hands call the viewer's attention to the distorted, accentuated anatomical forms. Her colors are muted, sophisticated, moody, and convincing. The facial features seem morose and reserved, not exuberant. A figure wearing a LOVE T-shirt sits with a girl, suggesting the pair is a couple. There is a sense of orderly melancholy in this vision that is quietly believable. The artist paints beautifully; the subtle tones distinguish these paintings. By their extreme introspection, they create a calming effect that allows the viewer to focus on the personalized, elongated distortions. The group formats allude to unsurprising ordinary relationships present in the everyday lives of the majority of people, which provide a sense of community in life. The elegant rendering of the forms puts these works in a category of their own, as a formal achievement well beyond the usual depiction of common objects and normal people. The delicately modeled, unique figures set in distinctive milieus are poetic and mesmerizing.

The three exhibitions reviewed above, as well as the solo shows “Yuan Fang: Spaying” at Skarstedt and Austin Martin White's “Tracing Delusionships” at Petzel, indicate that the windows in Art have been opened to allow fresh air to circulate. The New York Art World seems to be diverging from past constraints, which have long determined the style of art that holds dominance here. There is a refrain from a song from 1963 by British folk-pop duo Chad and Jeremy called “Yesterday’s Gone.” Its sentiment expresses the space and opportunity for the freedom to flourish that is enabling a new trajectory to flow in the Art World. Unrest and chaos in society often spur creativity. I think this is an upbeat time to encourage and foster the daring types of individualized art that are entirely acceptable, very marketable, and above all exciting and engaging.

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Trust Issue

Millree Hughes — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 02:31:31 +0000

Trust Issue Millree Hughes June 8, 2025 - 22:31

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"Pond with Early Snow III," 42" x 38"

Mary Temple: Rough in the Distant Glitter
Pamela Salisbury Gallery
Hudson, NY
May 17 - June 15, 2025

"Devoid of locus, there is nothing to objectify." Nagarjuna (2nd C)

It's another important time for painters. Digital Art, Photography, and Video Art have all suffered because of social media. We have endured so many ghastly lies and had so many useless products foisted on us that all remote artwork feels untrustworthy. Anything with a physical quality or that is as unlike a phone image as possible is true.

With a landscape painting, you feel as though you are witnessing a genuine response to a real place. You are looking at a different place, in a different time, asking yourself, "Whose eyes am I looking through?"

Temple mixes abstraction and figuration approaches together. Or rather, certain modes of abstraction are employed to convey space. Different artists and times come to your eye as you pass over the surface. A Whitten-like smear, an occluded Guston blodge, a treacley Mitchell line. Compactified dimensions whose works are revealed across a small surface.

It also happens along the Z axis. She situates the viewer a certain number of paces away from the painting—the place where it coalesces. The closer you get, the more it disintegrates into abstraction.

It's one of the many dualities of this show. Hot/cold, light/shadow, close/far. The blue and the orange. One representing the physical, the other representing light, the évanescent.

These landscape and seascape paintings are mostly empty. There are no obvious stand-ins for the figure, like a landform or a lone tree. Snowy branches bend ant-like arms, creating an empty frame.

"Pond with Early Snow III" increases the chromatic value of different parts to distract your attention from the whole. The snow obscures areas of the scene. The water, the land, and the sky share colours. Everything teeters on the edge. It's all part of dematerializing the subject.

Campfire in the Snow 1

Her "Campfire in Snow I" painting finally fills the space, acting as a mediator between the blue and the orange. You are no longer looking into a clearing but are focused on an object and an activity. The flame crackles in swathes of hot colour, melting the blue. The broken branches take on a broken figure appearance, like an abstracted body.

Mary's paintings work well on social media. They transform well into posts. But there are certain colours that are not photographable. The contrast is pushed for the phone image, which limits colour possibilities. Texture can't be seen either. You have to turn up because these are paintings that demand your presence.

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Thank you Millree, this is…

Thank you Millree, this is so gorgeously written. 🙏🏼

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Alchemical Romance

Millree Hughes — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:50:39 +0000

Alchemical Romance Millree Hughes April 17, 2025 - 10:50

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Flame, 2024 oil on linen 44 x 31 ins.

"My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed/into new bodies." - Ovid

PPOW gallery feels hushed by Judith Linhares's new suite of paintings. There's a chapel-like quality to the room; each painting gives off a subdued glow. But these are not windows; rather, each piece is like a slab of the material that this dimension is made of.

The painted subjects are occupying an impossible space. They defy the normal rules of perception. A motif of a knitted quilt appears under many of the figures and vases of flowers. However, frequently, their own perspective lines throw the vanishing point into the deep distance, even though the shadows on the wall behind the objects make them seem very close. At other times, the knitted surface tilts wildly towards us, pitching the objects out of the canvas as we fall into the "space."

The lighting is often both front-lit, top-lit, and sometimes side-lit too. A recurring double daisy image seems to have flower heads lit on one side and the other in shadow despite this hard light not affecting anything else in the space. The place that we, the viewers, are in seems to light the canvas and create shadows like Plato's cave that dance behind the flowers in an animated cartoony silhouette. This light appears to come from a fire or candles.

In one of the most spectacular paintings in this powerful show, "Flame," the quilt has been shrunk(relative scale also follows its own rules in this world), a figure, which may be the artist as a young girl holding a toy rabbit. We can't make out her expression.

A tiny votive candle on a red bandana casts unflickering shadows in four directions, like the spokes of a wheel. It reminds me of a pavement memorial that you might see in a Hispanic neighborhood. There are doublings and intimations of mortality throughout this show. The light will eventually go out.

Behind it is a disproportionate brass vase sporting dark flowers. Behind that, a double circle of radiating lines is either the apex of a circus tent without its pole or a new kind of nonlight casting a dark double burst.

Judy has always employed stripes. As backgrounds, wallpaper hinted at tents or otherworldly rays of light. They can be parallel or radiating from a single source or, as in "Backyard Bouquet," performing an impossible half zig zag under a vase of flowers.

Flower paintings have long been part of her output. In more figure-orientated shows, they've acted as less loaded images so we can step away from the psychic drama of the figure pieces and enjoy the bliss of her colors and forms entirely for themselves. But now the flower paintings are filled with loaded images. A drawing of two open hands in a book. An old photograph of a man. An image of a pregnant woman is a reminder that in her world, from girlhood to womanhood, women give of themselves and that even though they encounter dangers like narcissistic men, other jealous women, and angry lions, they do so without fear.

In this dimension, we have to accept the rules, whatever they are, or run the risk of having our hippocampus frozen by the contradictions in an unresolvable paralysis.

PPOW Gallery 392 Broadway New York, NY 10013, Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Tel 212-647-1044 (tel:212-647-1044)

info@ppowgallery.co

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On Sense

Millree Hughes — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 02:05:05 +0000

On Sense Millree Hughes February 2, 2025 - 21:05

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David Humphrey: PorTraits

Fredericks & Freise, NYC

Dec. 12 through Feb. 8

Social media and the engines that power its algorithms engage us in a race to the bottom. The stupider depths have worse music, more ill-informed news, and bad ideas.

David Humphrey's wild melange of painting styles was an argument for pluralism. He and other New York artists like Amy Silman and Michael St. John imagined painting as a manifestation of '90s tolerant liberalism. All kinds of things can coexist on the canvas because relationships matter.

In a big, messy, diverse country like America, this all makes sense, but nowadays, I believe that breaking rigid habits of thinking is more important.

In the main room, David's large paintings are made of carefully arranged parts. They seem to be worked out in advance rather than "found," as there is very little reworking going on. The paintings are much less oily than they used to be, and the colors are keyed up. I think a lot of artists are thinking about how their work will be read on the phone, as this is how a lot of painting is experienced now.

Plant Thoughts, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 72 inches

Is it a good example? The parts are laid out for consideration, and there is plenty of space between them. The conflict of black squiggles to the right on the blue and orange ground has a calligraphic quality. It contrasts with a more Instagram-like selfie head to the left.

Figures are often going through something. Stretched, smooshed, and, in this case, "censored." This one is pixelated, which relates to denying the viewer the ability to read it accurately. She has a plant growing out of her head, which reappears in other watercolors.

I'm reminded of the late Richard Foreman. Watching his plays, I often felt as if I was at the center of a vortex. There was an activity on stage that I couldn't follow. It was occasionally abated by a direct-to-audience speech that didn't really go anywhere in narrative terms.

With Foreman, as with David Lynch's movies, I find it best to adopt a relaxed, alert, but accepting state, just as I would do if I were meditating.

These artists all work within glittering structures made to contain their ideas. Seductive formal qualities make the work more available. Lynch's movies happen in gloriously lit vistas. Foreman's plays are like exquisite clock mechanical ballets, and Humphrey's paintings appear in gorgeous colors. They ask us to be free, despite the obstacles, to be open, even if we are afraid.

Above the pixelated head is a flourish of orange paint. It seems to act as a shadow to the head/mass of black strokes.

This play of like and unlike in unusual constructions is crucial to his work. It's poetry.

The back room of the gallery is like the inside of David's head. There are sculptures on shelves, watercolors, and a video curated by his wife, the artist Jennifer Coates. It's where experiments happen.

Looking at the back room, I saw connections from the sculpture to the sketches and into the video. Humphrey reminds me to perceive associations outside of narrative or familiar perceptual connections. For example, a thing may cast a "shadow," even if unformed. A ceramic cat with a broken face took me back to the first show of his that I ever saw at Deven Golden's gallery in the '90s. It was a show of piles of found broken ceramics formed into new sculptural totems.

A conjunction of yellow balls on a pedestal reminded me of a Cezanne fruit bowl in some kind of flux. The watercolor behind it is an ectopic portrait. An image of the artist sleeping on a sofa seems to be a focal point. Reality reassembles itself in his dreams.

The absurd is a way to open the mind to new possibilities. In the world we live in now, we are constantly being forced to make normal decisions and have normal responses. As I write, AutoCorrect is changing my wurds! Nonsense is a powerful antidote.