art:: SEPTEMBER 08, 2004

Kresge spots trend in painting: ‘Paintings That Paint Themselves’

By AMANDA TIGNER

(top) ‘Flaming Gorge’ by East Lansing artist Irving Zane Taran. Courtesy of Kresge Art Museum. (bottom) ‘Untitled,’ 2003, by William Wood. Courtesy of the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Elegant yet idea-oriented, grounded in history but very contemporary, the 24 artists included in Kresge Art Museum’s fall show, “Paintings That Paint Themselves, or so it seems,” all take the artist’s hand out of the painting in exciting new ways. Viewers are immediately taken with the beauty of the paintings’ sleek surfaces, but are left with a tantalizing question: Just how were these paintings made?

At the entrance of the main gallery, a large Kenneth Noland painting, considered hard-edged and devoid of the artist’s hand when it was made in the ‘60s, welcomes the viewer to the show. “Paintings That Paint Themselves” reminds that the idea of painting in a manner that looks as if the painting made itself is not a new one.

Yet these recent works are radically different from Jackson Pollock’s paint-splattered canvases and make Kenneth Noland look like an expressionist in comparison. Many of these new approaches rely on technological innovations such as computers, high-tech painting machines, Mylar and body suits to escape the effects of layers of epoxy.

This exhibition features internationally renowned artists such as Prudencio Irazabal and Roxy Paine; numerous paintings made in the past couple of years, fresh from the New York art scene; and Kresge’s first fully online exhibition catalog, available at www.artmuseum.msu.edu/ptpt.

Particularly exciting is the work of up and coming Canadian artist Jason Young. Young has two works in the show, “Gunmetal Tap” and “Gold Foil,” both of which were painted earlier this year. Young creates incredibly thick paintings that shimmer and burble by building them up with layers of epoxy injected with acrylic puddles and finally coated with resin. There is an organic, eerily alive beauty to his work.

Accomplished local artist Irving Zane Taran has two large paintings from his series, “Heavy Weather\Superior,” in the show.

Historically, Taran is a kind of bridge between many of the young artists included in the show and the artists of the 1960s — Taran trained with Charles Pollock, brother of Jackson Pollock. “I’m a person of the‘60s,” he says, “but I’m very enamored of what I see the younger people are doing.”

Taran’s own work, which has been evolving for years, follows the same path as much of this new work by up and coming artists. He seeks to create surfaces in which he “loses the identity of the stroke.” People have remarked to him over the years, “It almost looks like nobody did it. It looks like it just happened.”

To achieve this result, Taran uses thick layers of shimmery acrylic paint and has abandoned brushes altogether. “From about 1970 to ’81, I was spraying … now I’m squeegeeing,” he says. “My tendency has been, for my whole life, away from the brush.”

Actually, Taran uses the same floats common in the cement trade to spread the thick layers of acrylic onto the surface of a birch panel. His paintings take about 6-8 days to dry on the surface, and require another two weeks for total dryness. Because of this, Taran has always been very mindful that students and onlookers shut his studio door to prevent flies from landing on the paint surface. “The flies know that it’s wet,” he laughs, “I call it the dance of death.”

Though visually diverse, the paintings in this show form a coherent group: The artists have all moved away from the painter’s brushstroke, adopting techniques that produce a glossy, perfect finish. According to Taran, “They don’t all look alike, but they share certain tendencies — surfaces that are glassy, viscous, fluid.”

It was Kresge’s curator, April Kingsley, who picked up on this trend. “I keep seeing stuff at galleries and art fairs,” she says. “Once you see one thing, and then another, that looks like it just got there, just painted itself, then your antenna go up.”

“I think what April has brought to Kresge is the sensibility to contemporary issues,” says Taran. Intuitively picking up on a new trend in contemporary art and bringing together artists with various backgrounds and goals under a theme like this makes “Paintings That Paint Themselves” an impressive and important show.

For the museum visitor, this exhibition is a window on the state of contemporary art. Spotting these trends in the tangled web of the New York art scene is the tricky part. Fortunately, Kingsley and Kresge Art Museum have done that for the Lansing art world.