Elliott Green by Miles McEnery Gallery

ELLIOTT GREEN

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

IMPOSSIBLE HILLS ...ON THE ART OF ELLIOTT GREEN By Wayne Koestenbaum

Dreamt I tried to climb an impossible hill. Its surface was striated, flecked. Rungs—or were they indentations?—guided the climber’s feet. Beyond difficult, the hill (I realized upon waking) reminded me of two lines from Paul Valéry’s poem “Profusion du Soir” (“Evening Profusion”): 2

Une crête écumeuse, énorme et colorée Barre, puissamment pure, et plisse le parvis. (A foaming crest, immensely pure, imbued With color, bars and creases the hallowed strand.) —Translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody Are Elliott Green’s paintings the hallowed strand? Consider this essay an act of hallowing, or an act of admiring the idiosyncrasies (the foaming, abstract creases) of paintings already hallowed by the artist who composed them. Making paintings as complex as the works that Green produces seems impossible, yet the artist approaches the activity with a sense of lightness, curiosity, and tenderness, as if the painting underway were not an agonistic dilemma but a kitten, nervous yet affectionate, that the artist is absentmindedly petting, the absentmindedness a side effect of his concentration on minute happenings on an ultrasmooth linen surface, stretched to a satisfying, timpani-like tautness on

lightweight aluminum. The new paintings on which Green has embarked, the day I visit his studio in upstate New York (near a village called, as a gesture of yearning for lofty ideals, Athens), are ambitiously large (and therefore epic, or historic) in their aims and echoes, recalling the grand canvases in my favorite rooms in the Louvre—the red rooms, where Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii stare down at visitors who learn from such works to consider painting a matter of daunting proportion and of an importance not quite cosmic, but nonetheless as momentous as the founding of a nation or the overthrowing of a seated power.

I’m surprised to learn that Elliott Green is Jewish. I feel that I am more conspicuously Jewish than Elliott. This issue—Jewishness—doesn’t ostensibly connect to the subject of his paintings, which suggest landscapes, not figures. Is landscape Jewish? Are figures Jewish? And why am I including this digressive inquiry in an essay about his paintings? He says that I look like his cousins. Elliott Green learned how to paint from the Ralph Mayer classic, The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques (originally published in 1940). Green didn’t go to art school. Instead, he studied English at the University of Michigan. At a lecture on Henry James, Green made a discovery. He described it to me, but I can’t remember exactly what he said. His revelation involved transferring his allegiances from literature to visual art. I’m glad that Henry James, with his impossible, charismatic revolutions of syntax and perception, sent Green toward painting and, I imagine, toward a style of painting that includes ambiguities as refined and Apollonian—as detached from mere mess—as James’s novels. Green’s paintings, or at least his method of making them, seem to imitate a form of literary rhetoric known as “stichomythia,” a style of dialogue (in ancient Greek drama and in its inheritors) involving

a quick and patterned back-and-forth between two speakers, each contributing a line at a time. As an antagonist on stage might offer a retort as a foil to the partner’s cry that came before, so, in Green’s studio, one “event”—one layer of paint, one rhythmic application of a home-crafted squeegee or sponge—follows another, in response to the preceding gesture. A certain quality of accident, even of whimsy, determines a painting’s tempo of unfolding, though the finished result approaches the condition of photography. Indeed, when I see images of Green’s paintings, perhaps as “thumbnails” on a gallery website, I sometimes mistake them for specimens of nature photography—close-ups, magnified, of a gem’s strata, a pond seen in cross-section, or a mountain’s veined interior. Is landscape, as Green renders it, abstraction pursued by other means? Certainly, his landscapes are fantasy terrains, like backdrops for Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, or fairy-tale illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Mythic adventures, involving armed heroes and divinely sanctioned wanderers, take place on the oceans and mountains, in the gorges and firmaments, of Green’s extravaganzas. But the people themselves are gone, just as, after we make the planet uninhabitable for our species, this earth itself will be empty of human conversation. Joan Mitchell’s chromatic expanses come to mind when I view Green’s paintings, and I wonder whether their two bodies of work—Mitchell’s and Green’s—occupy the same point on the spectrum between figuration and the nonobjective. Mitchell conquers unhappiness and ennui through lavish color and by severing color from the forms it usually composes; Green conquers abstraction by ignoring it and producing specific shapes that drift from the moorings of recognizable natural entities—the “cloud” and “mountain” that define a cosmology oriented toward the human. Green thus liberates “mountain” and “cloud” from their imprisonment within a Romantic vision governed by soulfulness and by a fear that interiority (the bounty of the imagination) will be evacuated by a sudden vanishing of inspiration.

Green’s art strikes me as the product of a craftsperson chained to an obsessive refinement of technique. In fact, he tells me, he has chosen what is easy, not what is difficult; he has opted for this method of composition, this steadfastness and meticulousness of paint application, because it comes naturally to him. By surrendering to ease, artists embrace their own idioms, habits that originate from unnameable sources, deep as DNA and perplexing as a nervous system’s flux and fire. Green’s paintings, indeed, look to me as if they were literalizations—graphs—of a nervous system’s undulations, transformed (as if by a compositional technique, like the expanded serialism of a Pierre Boulez or his artistic progeny) into sounds that approximate the folds and ruches of a dandy’s sleeve, as seen by a Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres whose eye has gone sci-fi.

Green tells me that he rests his hand on the canvas as he paints and draws; the hand is everywhere in his art, but, in an odd and revealing act of erasure, we rarely (or so I hypothesize) see a mark made with a direct reference to the way a hand might impinge on a canvas through brush, pencil, or palette knife. Green’s manual interventions—if I recall the surfaces of his paintings accurately and am not, as it were, applying Vaseline to the lens through recollection—don’t appear overtly but seem to have landed on the canvas from a godly distance, as spray-painting or screen-printing might deposit color and line upon a sheet. No Sturm und Drang drags down Green’s work, no melodrama of the brush or hand: Instead, we see a sovereign tranquility and an untainted evenness of pressure: a sponge (or other nonce devices, including a battalion of different brushes) bringing to the canvas a deposit of paint not thinned by medium, and thereby left to be its own thick chroma-rich self. Think of the way a dancer or any physically seductive presence must glide rather than march across the stage—or, if not glide, then must defamiliarize the usual repertoire of ambulatory motions to make them seem gilded by subterfuge and a mandarin intentionality, like a thief (in a caper flick) wearing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

Where Green’s facture is concerned, an instructive contrast might be the work of Louise Fishman, whose abstractions seem to reveal more explicitly the delivery vehicles that landed the marks there. The sheen of Green’s evanescence, a magic trick, has less to do with the vigor that infused Fishman’s material proclamations, and more to do with a mode of contemporary painting that prizes a finished surface and exults in the aura of completion—of satiation—that clings to the work, arrested in its pose of polished closure. Green’s paintings, at their most epic (his recent works on paper—8 x 11 inch copy paper, to be exact— are a different story, in their roughness, their willingness to revel in disorderly accident), may contain aspects of cliff-hanging inconclusiveness, but the overall effect is that of a masterful, and hence invulnerable, finesse. The absence of figures, too, consolidates the aura of invulnerability, an armor as attractive as a striated wave replicated by Claude Debussy in La Mer, which is among the acoustic origins of the seductive marine effects of Boulez and other proto-“spectral” composers. Green’s surfaces can reveal, if scrutinized up close, a variousness of texture and incident that seems more akin to Stan Brakhage films (with their kaleidoscopic stains and fissures) or documentary cinema (Winged Migration and other “nature” films that show us how alien the natural world can seem when enlarged) than to the equanimities of Katsushika Hokusai or Claude Monet. Does not the natural world, in Green’s depiction, acquire a certain monstrousness of finesse—the grotesquerie of the embroidered or filigreed surface—at its most extreme? Such grotesquerie contains the charm of a cosmopolitan politeness. Somehow, this paradoxical juxtaposition of nature’s sublime ferocity and a painterly sumptuousness reminds me of the bowls in Green’s studio, bowls he has kindly labeled “Not for dogs.” A dog might wish to drink water from one of these available founts, but they are polluted with the residue of paint and turpentine. What labels might we imagine seeing affixed, as warnings, to Green’s new paintings? “Not for the literal-minded”? “Not for killjoys”? “Not for situationists.” (With all due respect to situationists.)

A studio visitor’s casual impressions of the artist in action don’t always add up to a message, a concept, or a theorem, but such details have an instructive force that confounds allegory, like the detritus that remains in the mind of the dreamer after waking up. These gleanings, from a visit to Elliott Green’s studio, I’d like to leave undeciphered and jagged-edged. His studio is in a transformed garage, or outbuilding, where the previous owner worked on cars. Certain of the dragging tools that Green uses to move paint across the canvas are the kinds used by stone masons.

Green had a heart operation; he pulls down the neck of his shirt to show me the scar. He admires Alice Neel because, in her portraits, “she got out of the way.” Green made the transition to painting nonobjectively by extending his figures—which resembled the inhabitants of an Arshile Gorky painting—until they became landscape. Green refers to an area in one of his new paintings as the “Rothko area.” In Green’s studio, I see an old-fashioned, larger-than-usual herring jar. The label, which looks as if it dates from decades ago, says “Herring in Wine Sauce,” and I start pondering whether Green actually consumed the herring that once was in the jar, or whether he inherited the empty jar through a series of inconsequential circumstances. In any case, herring in wine sauce doesn’t have a direct bearing on his new paintings, unless you want the herring in wine sauce to matter. I’d like it to matter, and I’m trying, with conspicuous adamancy, to make it matter.

Wayne Koestenbaum poet, critic, artist, performer—has published twenty-two books, including The Cheerful Scapegoat, Camp Marmalade, and Figure It Out. In 2020, he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Acid Sound, 2021 Oil on linen 16 x 24 inches 40.6 x 61 cm

Angel Lake, 2021 Oil on linen 90 x 70 inches 228.6 x 177.8 cm

Ballistic Mist, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Be with Me, 2021 Oil on linen 16 x 20 inches 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Brainflower, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 126 inches 193 x 320 cm

Breath In, Breath Out, 2021

Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Calcium, 2021 Oil on linen 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

Cloud on Fire, 2021

Oil on linen 15 x 24 inches 38.1 x 61 cm

Crown of Fog, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Friends of Friends, 2021

Oil on linen 76 x 126 inches 193 x 320 cm

Gathering Ancestors, 2021

Oil on linen 96 x 90 inches 243.8 x 228.6 cm

Headquarters, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

High Fever, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Hurling Rock, 2021

Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Intertidal Zone, 2021 Oil on linen 16 x 24 inches 40.6 x 61 cm

Lock the Doors, 2021 Oil on linen 15 x 24 inches 38.1 x 61 cm

Shout, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Stranger, 2021 Oil on linen 16 x 20 inches 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Terroir, 2021 Oil on linen 76 x 92 inches 193 x 233.7 cm

Thruway, 2021 Oil on linen 16 x 20 inches 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Wealth of Depth, 2021

Oil on linen 34 x 30 inches 86.4 x 76.2 cm

ELLIOTT GREEN Born in 1960 in Detroit, MI Lives and works in Athens, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2021 “AutoRevisionism,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY

2019 “Syncretism,” Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM “Under the Map Room,” Pierogi, New York, NY “Real Atmosphere Imaginary Space,” Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI “Reverb,” Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA 2017 “Human Nature,” Pierogi, New York, NY 2016 John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY

2001 Postmasters, New York, NY

“Three Painters,” The Arts Center at Duck Creek, East Hampton, NY “Blue in Green,” Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY

2000 Postmasters, New York, NY

2019 “The Twenty By Sixteen Biennial” (in collaboration with Geoffrey Young), Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY “Oh Beautiful – The American Landscape,” The National Arts Club, New York, NY “perspex: american shift” (curated by Franklin Evans), Federico Luger Gallery, Milan, Italy “Pre|view Group Exhibition,” Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI

1998 Postmasters, New York, NY 1996 Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL I-Space, The University of Illinois, Chicago, IL Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago, IL 1994 Fawbush, New York, NY 1993 Fawbush, New York, NY 1991 Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago, IL 1989 Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY

2009 Gallery D’Amelio Terras, New York, NY GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2005 Singer Gallery, Denver, CO 2003 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY 2002 Center for Visual Art and Culture, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

2021 “Landscape & Memory,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY “You Again” (curated by Franklin Evans), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Naked In Brooklyn,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY 2020 “2020 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

2018 “Chain Chain Chain,” Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA “Paint, Shape, Form,” Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI “Les Fleurs du Mal,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY “Summertime,” Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York, NY “La Cage Aux Fauves,” Double V, Marseille, France “Oscillation,” Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA “The Nature Lab” (curated by Eric Wolf), LABspace, Hillsdale, NY 2017 “Space as Narrative,” Center for Visual Art, Concord, MA “Provisional Landscapes,” Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY “Life’s Rich Pageant,” Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY “Marking Time,” Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York, NY 2016 “Outside In,” Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, NY “Representing Rainbows,” Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, NY “Objecty,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY “Faulted Valley Fog,” Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn, NY “Shimmering Substance,” Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY “Creation Stories” (with Colin Gee), Frank Institute at CR10, Linlithgo, NY “Narratives of Enigma,” Studio10, New York, NY

2015 “Recipients of Honors and Awards and Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY 2010 “Myths of the Near Future,” Nicole Fiacco Gallery, Hudson, NY “Town and Country,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY “Recipients of Honors and Awards and Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY “Team SHaG” (with Amy Sillman and David Humphrey), Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN 2008 “Ultra-Concentrated Joy,” New York Academy of Art, New York, NY 2007 “By Invitation Only,” Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, New York, NY “Multiple Interpretations,” New York Public Library, New York, NY 2006 “Apres Nous, Le Deluge,” Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY “Team SHaG,” I-Space, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL 2005 “Visitors from the East,” Billy Shire Fine Arts, Culver City, CA “Team SHaG,” Lafayette College, Easton, PA 2004 “It’s a Wonderful Life: Psychodrama in Contemporary Painting,” Spaces, Cleveland, OH “Colored Pencil,” KS Art, New York, NY 2003 “Comic Release,” Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA “Into the Woods,” Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY

2001 “Contemporary Drawings,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO “Prints from Columbia University,” Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY

2000 “Self-Made Men” (curated by Alexi Worth), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY “Contemporary Art from the Norton Family Collection,” Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI “Blurry Lines,” John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI “The Figure: Another Side of Modernism,” Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY “The End,” ExitArt, New York, NY “No Rhyme or…”, Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY “Nude and Narrative,” P·P·O·W, New York, NY “Cyber Drawings,” Christinerose Gallery, New York, NY 1999 Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY Pace/Prints, New York, NY Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York, NY 1998 “Team SHaG,” The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT “Team SHaG,” Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, NY 1997 Campo and Campo, Antwerp, Belgium Singer Gallery, Denver, CO Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO Diverseworks Art Space, Houston, TX “Team SHaG,” Postmasters, New York, NY

1996 Thread Waxing Space, New York, NY Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI Caren Golden Fine Art, New York, NY Exit Art, New York, NY Adam Baumgold Fine Art, New York, NY Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago, IL 1995 Exit Art, New York, NY Three Rivers Art Festival, Pittsburgh, PA E.S. Vandam, New York, NY 1994 Fawbush, New York, NY Frumkin-Adams Gallery, New York, NY 1993 The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, NY The Drawing Center, New York, NY Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL 1992 Exit Art, New York, NY David Beitzel Gallery, New York, NY Marsha Fogel Gallery, East Hampton, NY Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY 1991 Galerie Schultze, Cologne, Germany Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY White Columns, New York, NY 1990 Pence Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Galerie Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Althea Viafora Gallery, New York, NY

AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS & RESIDENCIES 2020 The Shifting Foundation Grant, Salt Lake City, UT Award in Art, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY 2017 BAU Institute, Cassis, France 2016 Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY 2011 Jules Guerin Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy 2005 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY 1999 Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY 1998 Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, New York, NY 1995 Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Grant, Colorado Springs, CO 1993 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, New York, NY MacDowell Colony Residency, New York, NY 1991 Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ELLIOTT GREEN 17 March – 23 April 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Wayne Koestenbaum

Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Jeffrey Sturges, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-67-0 Cover: Crown to Fog, (detail), 2021