Liam Everett + Josh Smith @ Altman Siegel
Yet another handsomely curated show at the new SF dealer of dealer’s space in the 49 Geary building giving Bay Area collectors, artists and fans some great art to sink their teeth into. In a group painting show featuring Jessica Dickinson, Liam Everett, Alex Olson, Josh Smith and Garth Weiser, painting is still a medium of surprise, commitment and openness.
I encountered Smith’s work in New York at Reena Spauling’s, a downtown artist run space that pretty much launched the career of the artist before handing him over to Chelsea’s bigger monied gallery. He laid out a bunch of wooden bar stools that took over the space and his paintings strewn all over the floor kinda made you feel like you missed the party. Josh’s name spelled out on his paintings became his moniker, even in Japan shows where he used the Kanji spelling. He’s translated his namesake from text to his hand print onto the more recent paintings on view at the gallery. With De Kooning’s rough hewn yet energetic strokes smeared into his stamp, the color blocking areas and over painting collide with an edge between rawness, disruption and accessibility to our senses. The hand print itself conjures images of the first finger painting teacher, Ruth Faison Shaw in 1926, a story of her discovering one of her students who cut his hand in class then retreating to the bathroom and later found painting the walls with the iodine from his finger. She went on to develop a non-toxic finger paint for children and used it as a tool for therapy for her patients. As Jackson Pollock was in therapy, he would bring in his drawings to show his doctor for analysis and by the 1940’s abandoned brushes for sticks, knives and dropping fluid paint. There are traces of his hand print in his Number One (Lavender Mist) painting at the National Museum. Or if you’re a Gen X’er, you could just relate these handprints to the eerie DIY blockbuster horror flick, the Blair Witch project where little handprints, supposedly bloodied marked the walls of an abandoned house.
This was my first exposure to Liam Everett, a recent transplant to SF from New York where he lived and showed work for ten years. His work kept me the longest at the gallery inspecting his painting closely and then completely just pulled into his dyed hanging shroud. I couldn’t tell if the gaze of the painter in these pieces was male or female. The painting held a similar vein with Smith’s where you could visibly witness the tools. A palette knife moved the paint away from the canvas creating black and white negative traces like a windshield wiper leaves in the rain or the style of the later Batman cartoon series drawn starting with black and then erasing back with hues of various deeper colors. They were like spotlights rotating in the night. His hints of blood red in the painting palette continued into a life-sized shroud that hung from the wall with ease. The material cascaded off its nails and looked like a big ink blot on the wall which drew you in immediately. Exhibited like a painting, it lent a different aura as a soft barely dimensional sculpture if it swayed. It held water and wine, miracles and tears saturated into its delicately dyed and natural folds as a hybrid of modern sculpture and painting. I wanted to just touch it. If I owned it I might even lie under it for just a short while…
5 Painters is up through Feb. 25th.
