NANETTE CARTER SIMPLY SEMIOTICS
NANETTE CARTER IN HER STUDIO, 2024.
November 21 - December 20, 2024
524 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10001
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VIEW THE ENTIRE EXHIBITION ONLINE AT WWW.BERRYCAMPBELL.COM © BERRY CAMPBELL LLC, NEW YORK, 2024 ALL ARTWORK IMAGES © NANETTE CARTER ALL TEXT © JASON STOPA AND BERRY CAMPBELL
ISBN: 978-1-960708-14-4
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2024923618
Material Choreography
Nanette Carter (b. 1954) is an artist uninterested in labels. She uses collage as construction, weaving together disparate materials to form new social relationships. This has a long tradition. Her influences include Romare Bearden’s transformation of everyday magazines into colorful photomontage and Frank Wimberley’s use of non-traditional materials like sawdust. Since the 1990s, the artist has been working with Mylar, paper, and oils. Architects began using Mylar in the 1950s, a material with a frosted texture allowing pigment to adhere but not saturate. It lends each work a frontal, non-recessive quality. Carter alternates from painting on the wall, working on the floor, and using materials at her desk. This kind of staccato rhythm, also evident in her studio jazz playlists, plays out in the formal resolution of her works which are improvisational and responsive. Working on the grid, her paintings read as stacks; gestural forms repeat like phrases, and motifs often resemble totem-like structures. The works she made during the 2020 pandemic explore the semiotics of form where the choreography of color and materiality mirror the structure of spoken language–slang, a formal expression or a dirge.
Carter arrived in the New York art world in the late ‘70s. It was a remarkably complex moment. Artists and critics including Thomas Lawson and Douglas Crimp argued that painting had exhausted itself. A rudderless America finally steered out of Vietnam, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, Blaxploitation film reigned supreme, and Nixon’s Watergate presented a crisis of legitimacy. The downtown art scene was under the radar. Hidden in plain sight, a number of artists were pushing painting to its limits with dynamic expansiveness, eliciting questions of authenticity, originality, and identity.
Sam Gilliam was one such artist. He once famously quipped, “Figurative art doesn’t represent blackness any more than a non-narrative media-oriented kind of painting, like what I do.”1 Gilliam maintains that abstract art is political, insofar as it reorients the viewer’s relationship to a set of givens, and that those givens are rooted in a social
reality. On the surface, Carter’s abstract collages may not appear to embrace explicit politics, but they don’t shy away either. Destabilizing #13 (2024, Plate 1) features matte black oil paint on a diagonal Mylar sheet overlaid with sharp, angular lemon yellow, vermillion red, and gray collage elements. The collage clusters and expands at the top and funnels into overlapping curvilinear bands at the bottom. The negative space around the collage arcs and contorts around the central form creating ripple-like effects that reverberate to the edge. The artist uses double sided archival tape to fix the orientation, leaving the final work to hang in a highly precarious balance. The pandemic years destabilized everything from our calendars to our relationships—the very structure of our personal lives—and in its wake we reemerge into a world in flux.
Six series comprise this show including The Group, Destabilizing, Shifting Perspectives, Black and White, Bright Light, and Afro Sentinels III (2024, Plate 2). Each set of works bears similarities, namely superimposed geometric planes treated as distinct yet part of a whole. They differ in terms of resonance with some series representative of the personal and political and others pointing to a universal humanism. The Destablizing series appears central to Carter’s recent practice, acting as a kind of master key to unlock the symbolic dimension of other paintings.
Shifting Perspectives #4 (2024, Plate 3) is a tour de force of continuity and variance. It is incredibly elegant. The work has a vertical orientation with a light color palette resembling a kind of open window. Thin, short, geometric collage elements composed of sky blue, Kelly green, light gray, turquoise blue, and black read as shards. Carter is a master of nuance and opposition. Each collage strip is not quite a rectangle; some feature stripe patterns, size/scale changes abound. What is over is also under, and soft form is butt up against hard form and transparent areas alternate against opaque ones. The negative
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES #6, 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 95 ½ X 27 IN.
space surrounding the work creates brief openings where audiences peer through its accordion-like body. Perspective, as it appears here, is something of which we are only privy to partial glimpses. Her titles are evocative and visual, but not didactic so as to illustrate a point.
Bright Light (2024, Plate 7), a Mylar mural adorning the gallery walls, is perhaps her most optimistic work to date, and given the gravitas of the other works on view, it is worth noting the incredible range in Carter’s practice. Its panoramic scale is complemented by bright yellow, cadmium orange, and baby blue vertical forms placed at separate intervals. Small patchwork patterns, black and white stripes, and yellow horizontal bands appear in repeating but not consecutive gaps. Each vertical form acts as a kind of dash on a timeline, radiating with white negative space and lending this work a graphic quality offset by its painterly appearance. The work is immersive and rhythmic. Audiences are made to walk around the work, yet experiencing it as a totality isn’t an option. A good painting cannot be entirely rational, some element of contradiction must be at play. Carter isn’t afraid to wade into it. Here, the relationship between wall and support, and the relationship to painting and object, are involved in a complex, visual game.
Six environmental scholars recently published “Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement,” with Cambridge University Press, arguing that “a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combine with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium.”2 A quick look at the text reveals that climate
change, the pandemic, the rise of far right authoritarianism, and global war appear to be the targets. Carter’s work uniquely responds to this otherwise dire prospect with a mix of hope and uncertainty. The task of any painter is to somehow find a visual language that maps onto their content. The devil is always in the details. The off-kilter presentation of her works combined with the uncanny surfaces and curvilinear forms present us with a complex set of relations, which in turn, mirror back to us our own strange predicament.
Carter shares affinities with other multi-media painters including Brenda Goodman whose mournful works use a sparse palette, Dorothea Rockburne’s recent enamel and wire paintings on layered boards, and Sam Gilliam’s metal collage paintings from the 1980s. Altogether, these artists lean into multimedia in an aim to get at referential content–art history, memory, or representation—and as a means to cleave the supposed purity out of abstract painting. Carter manages to address these themes without a whiff of grandiosity. Rather, these works are born out of a genuine belief in the humanistic power of abstract painting. The results speak for themselves.
Jason Stopa
1. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jun/30/sam-gilliam-obituary
2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/article/global-polycrisis-the-causalmechanisms-of-crisis-entanglement/06F0F8F3B993A221971151E3CB054B5E
NANETTE CARTER WITH AFRO SENTINELS III, PRATT INSTITUTE, BROOKLYN.
PHOTO: PHILIP GREENBERG
PLATE 1. DESTABILIZING #13 , 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 27 X 27 ½ IN.
PLATE 2. AFRO SENTINELS III (DETAIL), 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 96 X 396 IN.
PLATE 3. SHIFTING
#4, 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 56 X 23 IN.
PLATE 4. SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES #5, 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 56 X 70 ½ IN.
#7, 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 84 ½ X 30 IN.
PLATE 6. SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES #8 , 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 72 X 149 IN.
PLATE 7. BRIGHT LIGHT, 2024, OIL, OIL STICK, AND COLOR PENCIL ON MYLAR, 10 X 75 IN.
PLATE 8. BLACK AND WHITE #6, 2023, OIL ON MYLAR, 25 ¾ X 17 ¾ IN.
PLATE 9. BLACK AND WHITE #7, 2023, OIL ON MYLAR, 28 X 21 ½ IN.
PLATE 10. THE GROUP #4, 2024, OIL, OIL STICK, AND COLOR PENCIL ON MYLAR, 20 X 20 IN.
PLATE 11. THE GROUP #5, 2024, OIL, OIL STICK, AND COLOR PENCIL ON MYLAR, 20 X 20 IN.
ON MYLAR, 84 ½ X 30 IN.
PLATE 12. DESTABILIZING #9, 2024, OIL ON MYLAR, 48 X 61 IN.