“Painting as Paradox”

Will the shiny bubble of these multiartist painting shows eventually burst like an overheated dot-com? Not likely, given that artists (and curators) can’t resist the siren song of painting’s potential, its tortured history, and, as this smart though sprawling show points to, its many paradoxes. Shifting, questionable, relevant, obsolete—painting in “Painting as Paradox” at Artists Space offers as many approaches as could possibly fit on the walls. The hectic, salon-style installation demonstrates the profusion of painting-based practices of young artists and also hints at a number far greater than the over sixty brought together by curator Lauri Firstenberg.

Installing the works in this way means we get to see a lot of painting in a lot of guises: unformed (José León Cerrillo’s colored acrylic spills), sculptural (Anton Vidokle’s freestanding Plexiglas panels dotted with logolike shapes), and digital (Roberto Bermejo’s flat-screen abstraction). There are some New York regulars (Mark Bradford’s fusions of pigment and hair-dressing papers, Graham Parks’s subtle near-reliefs, and Benjamin Edwards’s Colorform landscapes) and a few whose work is gaining notice (Sebastian Blanck’s veiled figurations and Thomas Pihl’s waxy slabs of monochromatic acrylic, to name just two). Completely new to me were Jessica Rohrer’s quiet architectural facades and Frantiska and Tim Gilman’s hotel interior. But this variety means the sacrifice of a degree of autonomy for some works, which suffer by juxtaposition or location (it was tough to find a resting place for the eye on a wall of portraiture). But these are conscious curatorial choices, and Firstenberg has trodden the line between quantity and quality adroitly.