Dark clouds have silver linings. An incidental consolation of the
shift that has occurred in the visual arts in recent
decades—
the triumph of preconceived form over achieved form—is that the old
battle between abstraction and representation has ended. Not because one
side defeated the other, but simply because the theater of war moved on as
it does in real war when technology changes. Nowadays, to paint or sculpt
at all expressively in an art world where painting or sculpting must be
done ironically—better still, deconstructively—is to ally oneself, as
an artist, with a project diminished in its intellectual
respectability. Yesteryear’s arguments now seem like futile civil strife.
Nonetheless, among the brave few, the most common way
such painters describe themselves
these days is “somewhere between figuration
and abstraction,” which is where, with sensitive hindsight, all great
painting always was anyway.
And yet, there is still a sense of occasion, a frisson of triumph or
transgression, when a stalwart of one camp moves to the other. The late
Rodrigo Moynihan made something of a habit of
alternating between
abstraction and figuration: his late self-portraits and still lifes were
the subject of a recent exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery. Jake
Berthot, meanwhile, who exhibited landscapes at the McKee Gallery, is a
painter whose reputation was secured on the basis of abstract work. The
art world is not sufficiently resigned to the shift of aesthetic goal posts
for such a switch to
go wholly unremarked. That his audience should