The Armory Show Rico Gatson David Huffman pages by Miles McEnery Gallery

RICO GATSON DAVID HUFFMAN

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A HEALING FORCE By Vinson Cunningham Early on in the avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler’s 1969 album, Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe, a woman with a quaking alto begins to sing. She pours out a kind of manifesto, a sermon gliding on vibrato, outlining an ecstatic vision of art, and of the spirit: Music is the healing force of the universe, Music of love, Music is the spirit, Music is life, Life is music ... ... It reconciles, unites, becomes oneness, It brings about a state of wholeness and purifies, Oh, let it come in, Oh, let it come in … It’s an appeal to art’s deep and unslakable roots in pure function—a galvanizing riff on that initial mystery: how a stroke or phrase or gesture or sound might guide a society, or tell a story, or change a life. But the woman sings over a chaos of noise made by Ayler, an icon of free jazz. Sometimes his sax sounds like a bagpipe, sometimes like a child’s hungry wail; a drum clatters skeletally underneath, trying to keep pace with the swerves. So the message becomes fruitfully mixed. The song is a clash between function and form, representation and abstraction, coherence and modernity’s scattering effects. If there’s a “healing force” on offer, it’s a harsh salve. And Ayler’s contradictions might offer a way to look at the works of two haunted formalists, Rico Gatson and David Huffman, and recognize

the clash from the song in their works. Gatson listens to music—often Ayler—as he works in his studio, churning through ruminations on Iight, consciousness, spirituality, and history. His long-running series of “Icons” portrays cultural heroes, usually deceased, and surrounds them with triangular rays in bunches of mesmeric color—electric blues, tough reds, fertile greens. Black stripes cage in the other colors, creating borders. Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Alice Coltrane—they and other lost artists appear here, photographed, reborn via realism yet shocked into a new and deeper kind of existence by a buzzing field of color, pattern, and shape.

Here are figure and feeling, fleetingly joined. These portraits make Gatson’s deeper abstractions seem inevitable. In Untitled (Ocular Vibrations), the eyes do indeed vibrate, and not only due to tonal adjacencies. Gatson knows his way around a triangle: He places triangles in clustered, huddled councils, and makes them look conspiratorial and vaguely menacing. In the “Icons” works, he scrapes known personages clean and makes them shine with meaning. In the abstractions, he pulls an almost opposite trick: making shape and color and their corresponding emotions congeal into strangely lifelike profiles. Suddenly, the triangle or circle is a worrying person, radiating what Gatson calls “expansive light consciousness.” Psychedelic Pan-Africanism, a certain fear of groups, the warmth of a distant sun: All of it starts to walk into view. Free jazz and radical politics were freakish twins in the late ’60s. Ayler bleated out his dissonant transcendence, and David Huffman’s mother made startling posters and signs for the local branch of the Black Panthers. She took her son to marches and bazaars, full of African prints, amateur art, and bold graphics. Up from that drastic, world-significant swirl of visual culture come paintings like George 8:46, which joins large, looming painted forms—swooshing brown and gakked-on pinks—with West African textile patterns and a cool succession of

sphinxes looking skyward. Bold stripes, cousins to Gatson’s, intrude. The reference, in the title and on the canvas, to the murder of George Floyd is clear, but it has been drawn into a furious formal scheme, a meditation on appearance and consequence—perhaps the only context in which, to paraphrase Ayler’s singer, it might be reconciled or made whole. Huffman has been rightly marked by his interest in science fiction and black futurism, but here he has synthesized those concerns with his perhaps more fundamental interests in abstraction and symbolic significance. These paintings are examples of what he calls “social abstraction.” His people, when they appear, are small, but, like Gatson’s, they ramify wildly. Gatson and Huffman both take what the great conceptualist poet Robert Lax called forms forms forms basic basic forms and surround them, layer by sparkling or vibrating layer, method by method, with a social and political complexity that reaches past form and into the music of life. This is painting as a healing, harrowing force. As Ayler told us, “Let it come in.”

Vinson Cunningham joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. His writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, the Times Book Review, Vulture and McSweeney’s, where he wrote a column called “Field Notes from Gentrified Places.” He previously served as a staff assistant at the Obama White House, and is based in New York City.

RICO GATSON Dizzy #2, 2021