Photo via The Alice Wilds
If you came into consciousness at any time in the last millennium, you’ve witnessed more than one mass-proclamation of painting’s demise. As one would expect, those repeated obituaries have led to counter-responses, leading to new perspectives if not fundamental reinventions. Proof of this messy case lies in the occurrence of “zombies”–“zombie formalism” and “zombie figuration” at this particular moment. That mythical and metaphorical zombie is dead and alive, fact and fiction at once, and the painter now has to decide whether this is a paralyzing fact or a ripe and juicy challenge to find vitality and salvation outside modernism’s long since forsaken Garden of Eden.
Sean Heiser’s current exhibition at the Alice Wilds, “Even Animals Struggle with Time,” through May 29, makes a good case for the more sanguine possibilities. The 14 paintings in the show appear old and new, formal and informal, abstract and abstracted, in one moment. They suggest that good thinking can always irrigate and refresh even the most seemingly parched terrain. And these are juicy paintings, chromatically, conceptually and compositionally.
One of the highlights is the aptly titled Processor with a gear-like form at its center, braced against a two-tone background of tinted chrome yellow and cobalt blue, themselves broken into tonalized fragments. It sizzles with a combination of mechanical and organic energy; the mechanical from the idiosyncratic content and the organic from formal execution. The painting is centered around a gear on hulking structural armature that almost seems to be an allegory of the painting’s history in an abstract nutshell–a reminder of the deterministic historical circumstances from whence it all came. And with all this going on, the Processor still manages to remind us specifically of American Modernists like Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe and Stanton MacDonald-Wright who were deeply engaged in their own transitional moment in painting a century ago.
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Creative Legacy
Image via The Alice Wilds
Other works such as Untitled (After Paul Reps) with its sectioned-off non-sequiturs recall Rene Magritte and any litany of painters injecting unexpected text and objectivized subject matter from Picasso to Johns to Salle. That’s not to say that his work resembles its forebears, but that it is clearly aware of its creative legacy and happy to give credit. It helps that Heiser is a skilled practitioner. If one isn’t going to reinvent them, it’s helpful that one’s wheels are well-made. His paintings are taut, often graphic, but still full of touch and liquid decision-making. The brush strokes are visible. His play with tints, shades, and matte surfaces in works such as Untitled (Pendulum) are on a string, with just enough touch to let you know that it’s all purposeful. The crystalline facets of tinted ultramarine blue in this particular work vibrate like a school of herring with sections popping suddenly and then sinking back into formation. This field of fragmented blue functions as a formal straight man to the rust-colored ball-and-chains dangling at center stage like a ridiculous lead. Pendulum builds continuity slowly only to disrupt it just as certainly. It, like much of the other work in the show, teems with bizarre representational elements that inevitably sink into a soup of ambiguous non-objectivity, hiccupping between being seen, read, and observed. It’s all a very fine balancing act, at a time when balancing is the last game in town; the best practitioners invariably drawing focus to their tight-rope performance rather than to the net that lies below.
Andy Warhol famously said that there’s nothing more bourgeoisie than being afraid to look bourgeoisie. It was a sage observation from a cultural clairvoyant with a Shakespearean understanding of what it means to protest too loudly. As we face a world of non-fungible tokens fighting with cynical painting zombies for preeminence on an insecure art historical timeline, we might consider that there may be nothing more predictive of the immortality of painting than the declaration of its death. Through a mastery of painting’s history, syntax, and application Sean Heiser confirms that painting is as much a language as a medium, doomed only to constant change rather than a slow death.
