Persistence of Painting
A showcase presenting paintings by four artists whose works exemplify the centrality of eye/hand coordination in painting and whose individual techniques of representation reinforce the vibrancy of that medium and its relevancy to contemporary art.

Painting as an artistic pursuit is commonly decried as being inert or irrelevant, yet paintings still sell, virtually unimpeded by that stigma, at auction and in galleries. Not that the marketplace is the most desirable bellwether of innate cultural value, vibrancy or relevance, but the persistence of painting today reinforces its determined continuum throughout human history. The ability of the painter to remain relevant as a town crier, storyteller, historian or visionary speaks of the primacy of the medium's ability to speak to us.

What we find particularly relevant about the painters in this show is that they all seem to be connected simultaneously to history, the moment and the future. There is, to be sure, a provocative mix of abstract and representational elements to the work, yet this over-worn dichotomy is not singularly germane to this work since these pieces represent a synthesis of many styles and philosophies of art, not absolutes and endpoints. One can see references here to styles in the realm of painting from Impressionism and Expressionism to Surrealism, Cubism, Color Field and Pop Art, but this work is also vibrantly connected to the moment through references to film, digital photographic manipulation and communication on the internet; essentially, the entire gamut of our technologically based understanding and subjectivity.

The hand to eye coordination so essential to the history of painting has a strong presence in this show and is of particular interest here in that the artists so ably and with seeming little effort use that connection to capture the perceptual essence of technologically filtered experience directly onto canvas, without resort to a mechanical filter. The only intermediaries here are the painters' respective minds. These paintings are manufactured entirely through the uninterrupted connection between eye and hand of the respective artists and their ability to explore and harness that connection.

Are we just being hitchhikers on the Roberta Smith painting bandwagon? No, not really, but perhaps fellow wagoneers. Having initially spent a good deal of the free time that unexpectedly came our way in this economic bog wandering the galleries of the usual museums, museum-show ennui soon took hold. But, as there is never enough art in one's life, attention turned more significantly during the past two years to meeting young painters in their studios, attending open studios and thesis shows at metropolitan area MFA programs and visiting an ever-growing number of struggling, smaller galleries displaying the work of young and artists. This show is a product of that very happy endeavor.

For many years before this, each of us has, both privately and professionally, taken a strong interest in, and supplied what support and encouragement we could to, a wide variety of young and emerging artists, including those who work in pretty much every medium and from the most formally minimalist to the most challengingly conceptual.

Despite our relatively extensive laymen's adventures through the world of contemporary art over the past decades and a strong desire to stay current, we have retained what many critics and scholars would disparage as a reactionary and naive admiration for the medium of painting and a belief in its continued pertinence. Painting has certainly been persistent in its refusal to simply go away, and based upon our own experiences these past few years, we would feel pretty confident declaring that its death has been prematurely reported.

Thanks to the trust and generosity of our host, Alix Sloan, this pair of best friends who studied art history together at Columbia thirty-some years ago and have kept our respective legal and architectural practices, along with our personal lives, entwined with the art world ever since, are tremulously going public with our admiration of contemporary painting and, in particular, the work being produced by these four young artists whose graduate studies all coincidentally took place at Hunter College.

This showcase is intended to highlight the skill, dedication and hands-on approach of the artists presented, along with their individuality, their innate creativity and their ability to communicate with a contemporary audience through a traditional medium. While the work of these artists is distinctly painterly, each is so in a very different manner, and while their works all have representational aspects, this show is not intended as a celebration of representational art. In fact, the works here all admirably balance representation and abstraction along with the intellectual and creative vigor of the artists, making them conceptually challenging, as well. Our hope is that visitors will come away from this show with a feeling not only that the exacting painterliness of these works holds its own in a contemporary context, but, more broadly, that the works serve to continue the debate as to whether the medium itself remains a viable vehicle for artists to explore their vision and deliver their messages to 21st century viewers.

The argument against painting seems to revolve around the central tenet that in order for art to move forward and to be a genuinely creative and pertinent force, it must continually break new ground and that breaking new ground precludes reference, whether via medium, content or style, to older works. But being referential is very different from being reverential. It is true that for art to emerge from its original status as mere craft, pure representation needed to take a back seat to individual creativity and a transference of ideas from artist to viewer through the chosen medium, and the result has been centuries of experimentation and innovation in artistic technique and material. A broadening of artistic media to include photography, video, constructs, installations, performance and even emptiness provided additional room for growth and progress, and the leap to a purely intellectual connection between artist and viewer now discourages even the existence of a physical work as a go- between. Even if art can become a purely intellectual process, absent any connection to it original roots as a hand-guided craft, does that negate the work of those artists who use old media in pursuit of expressing contemporary thought and connecting intellectually with a contemporary audience?

The artists in this show have strong personal voices which they choose to express two-dimensionally. This choice attests to the genuineness of their commitment to art, as they have all struggled against the modern academy which has continually assaulted them as practitioners of a dead artform. Imagine just how much internal fortitude and certainty of purpose is required to pursue a practice that is so frequently eulogized by highly regarded artists, critics and scholars. As true artists, though, they possess a drive that would allow them to do nothing else, and fortunately for the viewers of their work, they also possess assuredly unobstructed neural passageways from eye to brain to hand that are central to their ability to express themselves in their chosen media and to their aesthetic success as artists.

--Douglas Lederman and Peter Franck

The Curators

Douglas Lederman
Private collector and attorney, whose practice includes art collection advisory services for individual clients and trusts and pro-bono work for artists and not-for-profit galleries. As a Columbia undergrad, studies concentrated on Italian Renaissance art under Howard Hibbard, James Beck and Howard Davis, with later diversions into the field of modern and contemporary art thanks to such professors as Kirk Varnedoe, Arthur Danto, Rosalind Krauss and the ever- present influence at Columbia of Meyer Shapiro. Has actively supported and encouraged young artists working in the United States and in Italy.

Peter Franck
Private collector and practicing architect. Studied architecture and the history of art and architecture at Columbia, Pratt and the Sorbonne. Partner in FT Architecture with artist/designer Kathleen Triem. Board member and curator of The Fields Sculpture Park at ArtOmi, Ghent, NY. Extensive involvement with young and emerging artists from around the world through work with ArtOmi and with private clients. Architectural practice includes the design of private residences, commercial structures and museum and gallery spaces. Has written and lectured on contemporary architectural theory and design and served on the faculty of the graduate architecture program at Pratt.

The Artists

Truly due only to six degrees of separation and not any hidden agenda, these four painters have all successfully navigated the rigors of Hunter College's MFA program, as well as its rather gritty studio building on West 41st Street. There they interacted with professors and peers and submitted their work to criticism from both. What they also have in common is that none of them caved in to the pressure exerted to mold their respective works to anyone else=s concept of what is properly contemporary and pertinent, not to mention commercially viable. These four artists paint because that is who they are. They need to create, to communicate through their art. This is intentional, committed and detailed hand-work, not work directed by the artist or left to the vagaries of process. Innovation? Yes, that too. While all artists are influenced by what they have seen and learned, and there is truly little unique that can be created with paint on flat surface, these are not works that can be dismissed as derivative. In choice of materials, technique, styles of representation and aesthetics, these artists are clearly individuals. It is individuality, along with fresh and pertinent communication, that assures newness. To take a line from the script of one of Tino Sehgal's works (but absent the ironic inflection), AThis is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary.

Rachel Budde



Rachel Budde, a native of Wisconsin, studied miniature painting in India and has traveled there extensively. The influences of that classical tradition are central to her technique.
Budde combines the fine brush strokes and resultant intimate detail found in classical Indian miniature illustration with contemporary socio-economic, psychological, cosmological and gender themes, along with an unsettling and occasionally morbid imagery, endowing her work, in both her small and large-scale paintings, with a unique visceral impact. Body parts, mythic creatures, and the organic and inorganic detritus of modern life all share the same visual space. Even in her largest images it is important to focus on the smallest details, perhaps a flee-sized helicopter or a floating plastic garbage bag. She works predominantly in gouache on paper, with the additions of ink and metal leaf, again referring back to the tradition of Indian illustration, while communicating a strong and unquestionably contemporary sensibility. Budde lives and works in Brooklyn. She is currently studying in Germany and will return to New York this summer to complete her thesis work at Hunter.

Noah Landfield



Noah Landfield was born and raised in New York City, in a Tribeca that was still full of commercial lofts and artists' residences, rather than brimming with expensive boutiques and families out with strollers. This was fertile soil for a budding artist. Landfield, a son and grandson of painters, studied painting in the City, as well, and his work reflects the often volatile nature of metropolitan life. This reflection of volatility, seen particularly in the abstract foundational cloudbursts which fill his canvases, derives also from his longtime fascination with volcanic activity. His impressionistic overlays of metropolitan architectural renderings are inspired by his visits to Japan and his reaction to the compact urban environment of Tokyo and other major cities there. Landfield's canvases are redolent of the tension between manmade urban structures and the forces of nature and also expressive of the way they manage to coexist. His execution of these ghostly images combines fine detail with broad sweeps of near abstraction in vibrant color. Are these images the present, past, future? Are they warnings? Which came first, the volcanic clouds or the cities? The unsettling nature of these temporal questions give a strong contemporary edge to Landfield's work, as does his playing with visual perception in the near-photographic quality his depiction of cities, which are actually painted in a masterfully pointillist manner.

Karen Seapker



Karen Seapker is taking a well-earned break from her years in New York City and has set up her studio temporarily in Pittsburgh. Seapker ably and imaginatively conveys movement, the passage of time and the bursting of emotion in physically static two- dimension. Her images would risk the label of Mannerist if they were not so completely contemporary in their warping of time and experience. Bold strokes of color move across the canvases, but with greater purpose than abstraction often allows. At her best, Seapker treats us to time travel, to the experience of the worm hole that allows us to skip ahead and back at the same time. The figurative studies which she inserts in some of her time-warped spaces are eerily elegant and refer to older, academic styles of painting, yet their juxtaposition with near abstract/color-field backgrounds is strikingly contemporary. And those backgrounds are anything but static in the way that color-field canvases and much abstract art can be. Even her solid architectural elements, such as a bridge or overpass, have an ephemeral quality. The viewer feels the power of swirling vortexes and sweeping winds marking the passage of time, or the whirls of emotions, thoughts and interactions of the figures presented. Our vision is frozen just long enough, though, to capture vaguely familiar, perhaps ghostlike, images of people. They are often archetypes, but they are also clearly individuals who caught the artist's eye or imagination, and Seapker shares her fascination with them with her audience. It's as though we've been granted access to human memory, though not in a nostalgic manner; it is more like being made a part of a collective social unconscious. These are often unsettling images, both in their content and through their temporal and physical distortions, yet we are drawn deeply into them as comfortable voyeurs, perhaps experiencing a bit of déjà vu, or maybe a window into the future.

Jeremy Wagner



How easy it is to initially, and from a distance, mistake Jeremy Wagner's work for representational realism. But there is something in the alternating glow and flatness of his work that draws us in, and that confuses our brains until ultimately seeing abstraction amidst the realism: pure geometric forms, fields of color. The viewer is drawn close enough eventually to be able to admire Wagner's use of the roughest of materials to create his jewel box-like surfaces. Rust is interspersed with layers of opaque color, and patches of the raw steelAcanvas are left revealed. Gritty urban settings, along with slap-in-the-face, agit-prop political messages and tongue-in-cheek art historical references, all reveal Wagner's wit, wisdom and personal journey as an artist and individual. His skill with his tools and his ability to affect our perception is also revealed upon close inspection. Which of the fields of color are really just absence of color, the steel or rust showing through? He makes a white rectangular patch into a luminescent billboard. Two dimensions become three, again, from a distance. New Yorkers know his scenes. Isn't that the street in Brooklyn where Y? And isn=tthat the sign on the bank at the corner of Y? Wagner depicts the grit that surrounds us in New York in some of his work and the rusted waste of post-industrial American society in other works, but he also depicts cheerful greenhouses full of botanical life and has recently added to his oevre detailed images of the technological massings of wires, switches and computer boards that speak of contemporary life. Eye-hand coordination is innate to Wagner. He is a technically masterful painter, but it is his chosen imagery, his unique play with materials and his knowledge of, and teasing references to, art history that makes his work truly contemporary and pertinent. Jeremy lives and works in Brooklyn.