picks March 12, 2020

Tom Waring

Currently occupying Downs & Ross are ten candy-colored oil paintings by the British-born artist Tom Waring. His first show with the gallery serves up endless facility and art-historical influences, from the Renaissance and proto-Surrealism to the beginnings of Op art and well beyond. The press release insists that this presentation isn’t merely a game of I Spy by contextualizing it with two quotes. The first one is from a 2017 essay by the art historian Luciana Parisi that defines “post-truth politics,” while the other is taken out of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of stories

picks February 04, 2020

David Reed

I didn’t notice it at first: a stark-white, totally alien non-brushstroke on a black ground that practically looks like a sticker adhered to the upper half of #710, 2005–2009/2018–19, one of the fifteen canvases in David Reed’s latest exhibition. I say “non-brushstroke” because this thing is anything but painterly; in fact, its speed is so out of rhythm in this composition that it’s practically an anachronism within the field of swooping marks beneath it. (Perhaps it was executed after the almost decade-long pause in the work’s process.) Yet, due to the frame’s towering proportions, you hardly

picks October 28, 2019

Ron Gorchov

In 1966, Ron Gorchov decided to ditch the woefully rectilinear confines of painting’s traditional support in favor of something more curvaceous. A year later he came upon the ideal form, one that would become his signature—the “saddle.” Geometrically speaking, these saddles are hyperbolic paraboloids, a kind of conoid used frequently in architecture for its stability or, alternatively, in the design of Pringles potato chips for their stackability. (Coincidentally, this quintessential American snack food hit shelves the same year Gorchov began working with this unique structure. The mind wanders.

Julia Ribeiro