Alex Katz
New Paintings

Alex Katz is inarguably one of the most persistently challenging painters of our time. His sustained critical relevance stems largely from his perpetual resistance to allowing any one of his compositions to settle into a “given” resolution. Despite doggedly establishing himself as a unique stylist- a faithful toiler in a self-determined genre- he yet remains a most critical authority of his own work. Sanford Schwartz recognized this tendency as far back as 1973, when Katz was on the cusp of broadening his painterly ambitions well past his early promise: “His commitment is impressive, and it hasn’t resulted in pompous or pedantic work. Unlike many other first-rate painters in New York, he hasn’t been trapped by his ideas; he doesn’t operate as if he were his own academician-in- residence.”   This is a salient point to reestablish, especially given Katz’s lionized status as the New York art world’s almost legendary elder statesman.  Hence, offering uncritical approbation of the artist’s current move would contradict the very ethos of continual self-questioning intrinsic to his creative process. Cézanne’s “doubt” has nothing on Katz’s.

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Katz’s ostensible analogy for this epic cycle of 10 paintings is a glancing reference to Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), though one would give these paintings more their due by hesitating to make that correlation too direct.  In the past the Katz’s generative ideation has had something to do with a declared subject (as in his 2022 sequence of canvases inspired by what he noted were Claire McCardell’s “democratic” ready to wear fashions of the 1940s-50s.)  but, more often than not, such self-prompts serve him more as creative starting points than illustrative destinations. Granted these most recent paintings are all painted in a high-key orange and so exemplify a similar dominant hue influence as in The Red Studio, yet Katz seems up to a much more complex détournement of the older artist’s blatant palette. In the Matisse one witnesses the artist assembling a variously colored compendium of his own works hanging on the insistent red walls of his studio , a hubristic, (and multicolored) allegory of his Modernist aesthetics “so far” (and so early in his career). In an accompanying Drawing Restraint video by Matthew Barney, Katz is documented as carefully rendering and considering a painting from the show in progress in his West Broadway studio. Katz’s intention in the exhibition seems to be to rather invert the literal and figurative space of Matisse’s assimilative self- consideration by inhabiting the pristine  white cube of the Gladstone space with an overwhelmingly orange presence emanating from each composition. And also, unlike the Matisse, in which his studio works represent a variety of subjects,  Katz’s compositions here are derived from one subject: the landscape. Over the past few years, the landscape has fairly dominated Katz’s oeuvre. Not that it hasn’t been an important recurring subject for him in the past, but one that he has returned to more pointedly lately perhaps for its capacity for generating a productive ambivalence between figure and ground.  In each of these monumental canvases, the majority scaled to 96x 106” with one at 84 x132”, is depicted a close-up reference to the artist’s pastoral environs of his Maine studio. Roughly half of these include a perspectival reference to a road ( apparently Slab City Road in Lincolnville, Maine)  while the other canvases offer a more abstract “dappling” of foliage referents.  While the former retain a sense of Katz’s well- known style- a shorthand fidelity to an intimate sense of real place-the latter expand into much more abstract territory.  In the largest canvas Road 28 (2024), no literal depiction of a road exists. Instead, a constellation of white shapes on orange could be read variously as a branch of leaves rustling in the wind or their negative forms tracing a light pattern on a tilted plane. It’s a masterful study of a primary gestalt encounter which establishes an abstract environmental presence of its own nature. Similarly, in Road 33 (2024),  Katz exhibits a precise, characteristic grace in his compositional distributions, yet in this instance the orange field is more dominant.  Between the two paintings the constant pictorial fluctuation of figure to ground and, accordingly, brushstroke to canvas, makes for a vitally kinetic movement in which the viewer becomes actively immersed.  As in the artist’s  most recent water paintings, such as Ocean 14 (2022) in which a specific locale (the surf off of Coney Island) got translated into an abstract orchestration of lateral expressionist brushstrokes, these paintings stress perhaps a more philosophically abstruse relation to a sense of place. Both Brooklyn and Maine are locations the artist has intimately known, yet one could conjecture at this point in his 98 years that they may have migrated into a mythos of personal memory that allows for a painterly abandon untethered by fidelity to any contiguous present. It’s important to remember that Katz came up as a figurative painter in a New York art world dominated at the time by Abstract Expressionism, bucking the non-objective trend as it was, while responsive to the onset of Pop Art’s egalitarian address of prosaic subject matter.  With this show- and certainly within the artist’s past decade-  Katz has demonstrated a growing willingness to fuse the prosaic with the abstract, achieving a balance in which neither mode overwhelms the other. Instead, the two cohere into a visual immediacy that preserves the vitality of perception in the moment.

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1.  Sandford Schwartz,  Alex Katz So Far, The Art Presence, Horizon Press, NY, 1982 . p. 31.

2.   Cezanne’s Doubt is a 1945  essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in which the philosopher explores Cézanne’s struggle to reconcile painting’s static nature with the fleeting sensory experience of the world. Katz seems to have taken this radical skepticism a bit further in his ever evolving and inventive reconsiderations of what painting can phenomenally “capture.”

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Images by Tom McGlynn