The Neo & The Geo by pazofineart

THE NEO & THE GEO New Painting Forms 1986-1995

Mark Dagley Max Estenger Michael Scott Li Trincere Essay by Paul Corio September 25 - October 28, 2021

The Neo & The Geo In the second half of the 1980s, Li Trincere, Michael Scott, Max Estenger, and Mark Dagley were all making geometrically-derived abstractions and exhibiting in NYC galleries. It’s therefore easy and tempting to classify each under the umbrella of Neo-Geo, the contrarian and highly intellectualized heir apparent to Modernist hard-edged painting.

century. There are, however, some things that can be said about Neo-Geo with confidence. The term first appears in connection with a 1986 exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery which featured four young artists who would all go on to great acclaim: Jeff Koons, Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton, and Peter Halley.

But the reality is not that simple, and some historical perspective is in order. Neo-Geo occupies a somewhat shadowy place in the canon of 20th century art movements. Pop, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism are, along with a broad variety of other period styles, far easier to define in terms of motifs, objectives, chronological borders, and membership. There is some debate as to the whether or not Neo-Geo was an art movement at all. If it was, it was certainly among the last – the very idea of the art movement was effectively abolished by Post-Modernism in the waning years of the last

All were interested in pursuing a critique of consumer culture in late modernity, but the fast track that each of these artists rode to stardom cast some suspicion on the sincerity of that critique. Halley, the oldest of the group at 33, was the only one to strictly use geometry in his work (indeed, there are few people today who would count Koons or Bickerton as exponents of the style). Other names for this new movement were considered, including Post-Conceptualism, Post-Abstract Abstraction and Simulationism.

All this begs certain questions: Was Neo-Geo a visual style, or merely or a set of critical objectives? If the latter, why was geometry considered an integral part, particularly in light of the fact that some of the artists associated with the style didn’t actually use geometry? Halley, who in retrospect is considered the key figure of the movement, provides some guidance in an article entitled “The Crisis in Geometry,” first published in Arts Magazine in June of 1984: The formalist project in geometry is discredited. It no longer seems possible to explore form as form (in the shape of geometry), as it did with the Constructivists and Neo-Plasticists, nor to empty geometric form of its signifying function, as the Minimalists proposed. To some extent, the viability of these formalist ideas has atrophied with time. They have also been distorted and bent to conform to the bourgeois idealism of generations of academicallyminded geometric classicists. (1) Postwar French philosophy (Baudrillard, Foucault) takes center stage in Halley’s argument, and what he refers to as 6

the obsession with geometry in western culture is essentially recast as a methodology for Foucauldian notions of power, control, and surveillance. In describing his own work in the same essay, Halley confirms that he uses techniques adopted from hard-edge and color-field painting, but explains his true motive in terms of Baudrillardian simulacrum: “Nostalgia, the fantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials, alone remains.” (2) There are, however, contemporaries of Halley who would take issue with his somewhat grim formulation of geometry as an ironical phantasm, and Li Trincere is chief among them. She pursues no line of critique. She does not see geometry as an exhausted motif, and has been methodically exploring its nuanced possibilities in paintings and works on paper for the better part of forty years. Given these facts, it should come as no surprise that she feels no special allegiance to Neo-Geo and counts herself among those who viewed it with a certain level of mistrust based on the speed with which it became commercialized, even as it claimed to critique

commercialism. Trincere has reverence for the hard-edged styles that preceded her (Russian Constructivism, Neo-Plasticism, Reinhardt, Kelly) and sees her own work as an unbroken part of that long lineage. Trincere’s motifs are highly distilled and her canvases are often shaped, hinting at sculptural objecthood. But even under these conditions, she maintains that figure/ground is still a primary issue, as it was in essentially all painting trailing back to the old masters. In her own work, she subtly redefines the figure/ground relationship as the dominant and subdominant. Trincere’s Untitled from 1990 is 6’x 6,’ and takes the form of two nested L-shapes with a cut-out in the upper right. The majority of Trincere’s shaped canvases constitute discreet forms (see the hourglass-shaped canvas, also in this exhibition). In this particular painting, however, the cutout suggests an absence, which accounts for one quarter of the 6’ square that is strongly implied by the canvas. The fully saturated primary red is the more active color, and is supported and framed by

the black, suggesting red’s visual dominance – but the red “L” is considerably smaller than the black, and a visual balance is thus maintained between the supporting neutral and the more energetic primary. Further, the cutout suggests a white square (providing the painting hangs on a white wall) and this illusory square in turn finds itself in a dominant position (as if seated on a throne). But here again, the more visually active red, together with the reality that the square is an optical phantom, insures balance. As a young painter in New York in the early 1980’s, Michael Scott witnessed the birth and rapid proliferation of Neo-Expressionism. While not entirely dismissive of the style, there was always one nagging issue on his mind: each of these artists was seeking to express emotions of a very personal nature, yet in the overall din they seemed, in Scott’s view, to be expressing the same thing. His antidote to this contradiction was to make works in which the author, along with the author’s emotional state, was absent. Scott sought to make paintings that established a relationship 7

solely between the viewer and the particular work being viewed, and his approach entailed removing all traces of autobiography - aesthetic decisions made in real time were replaced by predetermined schema, and painterly touch was suppressed in favor of a cool application of materials, bordering on the industrial. It would be easy to infer from the above that Scott was seeking to make work that was self-consciously un-aesthetic. This would be wrong; the varying systems he devised over time produced arresting images, and while he does not consider himself an Op artist, the eye-catching and sometimes dizzying strobe effect so common to many of his black and white works is an integral part of his presentation. Scott has employed a variety of systems over time to generate images. In (Untitled) L27 from 1992, two opposing sets of notations are at work, all determined in advance and recorded on the surface without amendment. One system governs the width of the stripe and a second the number of stripes, and the overlap of these two systems 8

creates the dazzling, highly charged image. The surface swells and contracts as the clusters of stripes change width. The central column of stripes appears to lift f rom the two flanking columns, creating an unmistakable illusion of figure and ground – in spite of the fact that there is no hierarchy of scale or color or tonal value that would explain that illusion. All of this visual razzle-dazzle is not the result of artistic intention or invention, but simply the product of a faithful transcription of strings of numbers recorded in a notebook with an understanding of what the result would be. Max Estenger’s work f rom the ‘80s and ‘90s constitutes an immanent critique of painting, but not in the Modernist sense; Greenberg’s critique, as adapted from Kant, distilled the pictorial aspects of painting, but Estenger, taking a cue from Marx, critiqued the material conditions of painting; not just paint and image, but painting surface, stretcher bars, and methods of production. He referred to his project as critical abstract painting, something he saw as being initiated by Reinhardt and brought to

fruition by Ryman. In Estenger’s view, the 1980s was a crisis point for painting, but also an opportunity to do something new: The moment dictated only a few possible options: give up painting altogether (as Judd had done earlier); retreat into a self-canceling illusionism by the precarious balance of pictorial space through color advancement and recession (Noland, Stella); or simply start over again with the bare essentials of painting – brush, paint, canvas – and develop a highly critical and historically aware involvement with the material practices of painting (Ryman). (3) Estenger’s OSHA paintings are not merely architectonic, but constructed in a quasiarchitectural manner – discreet panels are assembled separately and bolted together. OSHA Green and Orange from 1994 bears more than a passing resemblance to an unfinished façade of a home, complete with exposed framing and a window, which, instead of looking out on the world, looks in at the wall on which the painting hangs. Despite its frank materiality and playful suggestion of a job site, it isn’t an object – it’s very 10

much a picture, and hints at Newman, an artist whom Estenger greatly admires. The use of raw canvas as one of the painting’s multiple surfaces is a nod to the Washington Color painters, especially Morris Louis - another artist whom Estenger holds in great esteem. All of this is to say that the sensuous aspects of painting are not, for Estenger, completely swallowed by the activity of critique. In Mark Dagley’s estimation, the term Neo-Geo was erroneously applied to a small group of artists for whom it wasn’t a natural fit, and who, apart from Halley himself, weren’t especially interested in membership. This opinion is borne out by the fact that more recent critical histories have emphasized that these artists’ conceptual leanings far outstrip any interest in geometry. For Dagley, this constitutes a missed opportunity – he believes Neo-Geo actually describes the wide range of geometric work being made in the ‘80s and early ‘90s that had f reed itself f rom the overly restrictive rhetoric of Greenbergian Modernism.

Seen in this light, a varied and lively roster emerges: Thornton Willis, Ted Stamm, John Armleder, Steven Parrino, Alan Uglow, Mary Heilman, and others, including the artists in this exhibition. In this broader view, Neo-Geo freely borrows artists from other contemporaneous camps: Radical Painting (Olivier Mosset), French Postmodernism (Mosset again, also Daniel Buren), and Neo-Op (Peter Schuyff). Hero from 1987 was featured in Dagley’s first solo exhibition at Shafrazi Gallery in Soho. In certain aspects, it is very much a product of that particular moment in time. The slick surface suggests industrial production rather than artistic touch. The eight-bit depiction of a jack-o’-lantern unmistakably calls to mind the video games of that era, which in turn nods toward the 1980s version of Pop. Warhol returned to prominence in that decade (and died in the same year as Dagley’s Shafrazi show) and Kenny Scharf was creating an avalanche of day-glo cartoons that were immensely popular. But after these connections are made,

something doesn’t quite compute. The colors used in Hero, and the pattern that contains them, don’t speak about the 1980s at all – they speak more about Dagley’s reverence for abstract painting. The palette is quite lyrical: primaries and secondaries are played against autumnal colors and delicately tinted greys. Dagley grew up in the DC area and admires the Washington Color School; the colors in Hero carry an echo of that influence. The diamond pattern strongly suggests the harlequin, here presented horizontally – a clear reference to Picasso. Further, the pattern does not have a specific relationship to the outer edges of the support, hinting at disjuncture between the old and the new, between Picasso and Pac-Man, even as they co-exist on the same canvas. For Dagley, the fact that this exhibition is taking place in the DC area is quite significant. As mentioned above, he grew up here, and the Washington Color School painters were a formative influence. Greenberg championed DC as a scene quite distinct f rom New York, putting his full weight behind painters 11

like Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. But even more important to Dagley are the regional artists who deviated from the Greenberg agenda while still using geometry and vibrant color - Gene Davis being the most notable example of this latter group. In Dagley’s view, this is the earliest precursor to NeoGeo, the true New Geometry, and coming back to the place where the style first took root seems a fine location to introduce a new understanding of the work. In my various conversations with the artists in this exhibition, several common themes emerged. The respect and affection they felt for one another was easy to see, along with the admiration they held for the larger artistic community within which they found themselves at the time – I heard the same names mentioned again and again. Their art historical influences had much in common, but

perhaps more importantly, they were very much interested in the work of their peers and immediate predecessors – they were a generation seeking to make art that was genuinely new and germane to their moment in time. After the apparent wreckage of Modernism and the complete assimilation of Minimalism, these artists perceived themselves to be on the precipice of a future that would (and must) look different, and they embraced this challenge with vigor and optimism. This, ultimately, seems to be the key to understanding the underlying theme of this exhibition; that it’s about something larger and more profound than a shared interest in geometric shapes. Paul Corio September 2021

(1) Peter Halley, “The Crisis in Geometry,” Arts Magazine Vol. 58, No.10, June, 1984. (2) Jean Baudrilliard, “Simulations,” translated by Pal Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983). (3) Max Estenger, “After Reinhardt” (New York: Tomoko Liguori Gallery, 1991), Exhibition catalogue

Mark Dagley Hero, 1987 Acrylic, polymer resin on canvas 72 x 72 in

Mark Dagley Zombie, 1987 Acrylic, polymer resin on canvas 60 x 60 in

Max Estenger, Osha (White, Blue and Orange), 1995 | Oil enamel on clear vinyl; stainless steel and raw canvas (six joined panels), 69 1/2 x 50 in

Max Estenger Max Estenger, 1994 Oil enamel on stainless steel; clear vinyl over wood, raw canvas(seven panels) 60 x 91 in

Max Estenger Unpainting, 1993 Raw canvas, clear poly-vinyl over wood, stainless steel (4 panels) 53 x 36 in

Michael Scott Untitled (Circle #4), 1986 Acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 in

Michael Scott Untitled (Line #27), 1992 Enamel on aluminum 96 x 48 in

Michael Scott Untitled (Line #12), 1990 Enamel on aluminum 96 x 48 in

Li Trincere, Untitled (Red Black), 1990, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 in

Li Trincere Untitled (Red White), 1990 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 72 in

Mark Dagley (b. 1957, Washington D.C.) Is a painter, draftsman, graphic artist, creator of 3D objects, guitarist and audio engineer. He studied painting and sculpture in D.C. at the Corcoran School of Art, and painting, video and electronic music at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently studies classical guitar privately in NYC and Music Theory and Analysis at the evening division of The Juilliard School. Dagley has exhibited for over three decades across North America, throughout Europe, in Australia and South America. During the 1980s he was active in the East Village art scene, showing alongside other pioneering abstract painters, among them Olivier Mosset, James Nares, Steven Parrino, and Alan Uglow. His debut solo exhibition took place in 1987 at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho. Subsequently he showed abroad at a number of influential galleries, including Galerie Hans Strelow (Düsseldorf, Germany), Galerìa Mar Estrada (Madrid, Spain), Galerie Swart

(Amsterdam, Netherlands), Galerìa Leyendecker (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands). In 1993 Dagley had his first solo museum exhibition at Kunstverein St. Gallen, Switzerland. In the same year, he received a major commission from Hoffman-LaRoche Pharmaceuticals: two wall reliefs, nine-foot square, that were installed in their new office building outside of Basel. His painting Concentric Sequence was included in the groundbreaking show Post-Hypnotic, which traveled across the United States from 1999-2001, and was featured on the cover of the exhibition catalog. In 2021, a major work by Dagley was included in the historic exhibition The Cool and the Cold, Painting in the USA and the USSR 19601990 at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin. Dagley has also been in exhibitions at Riflemaker Gallery (London, UK), Minus Space (NYC), Centre National d’art Contemporain (Grenoble, France), Daniel Weinberg Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Instituto de Artes Gráficas (Oaxaca, Mexico), ParisCONCRET

(Paris, France), The Suburban (Chicago, IL), Galeria Nara Rosler (São Paulo, Brazil), The Museum of Geometric and Madi Art (Dallas, TX), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (St. Gallen, Switzerland), Galerie Caesar (Olomouc, Czech Republic), MACBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina), San Martín Centro de Cultura Contemporánea (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain). His work can be found in many collections, including Bloomingdale’s Corporation, Cafritz Foundation, Collection Doberman, Credit-Suisse, EMI Madrid, Hoff man-LaRoche, Henkel GmbH, The Ludwig Collection, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Oppenheim & Co., Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Muzeum umení Olomouc and University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Max Estenger (b. 1963, Los Angeles, California) For the past three decades, Max Estenger has been developing new possibilities for abstraction. Using a rigorous formal language as the driving force, his painted objects are involved in conversation with art history and the ongoing dialogue with the various parameters of abstract painting—formal, material and ideological. Estenger’s work brings together a visual clarity, integrity and moral dimension with a toughminded tenacity, fusing a serious study of direct experience with aesthetic gratification. Estenger mines disparate materials—raw canvas, stainless steel, clear vinyl and wood panels—to create multi-paneled works. Polarities such as hard/soft, opaque/transparent, painted/unpainted, matte/ glossy, inside/outside, actual/virtual and so on abound and become the content of the work. Like “the simple expression of complex thought,” as

the minimalist Donald Judd once said, Estenger’s work takes on not only the compounding history of minimalism and hard-edge abstraction, but also its serialization and ubiquitous past. This is cutting-edge painting for the 21st Century. “I have always thought that abstraction was as epochal as Renaissance illusionism, and if that tradition could last 500 years or so, abstraction could yield at least 200 years. We are in abstraction’s second century and I see no reason why interesting, f resh, and inventive work can’t still come from what started in 1912.” –Max Estenger in conversation with Matthew Deleget 2017. He received his M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. He has been living and working in New York City since 1988. His most recent exhibition was a group of new paintings at

Norte Maar in 2017, which came after his midcareer survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson AZ in 2016 curated by Jocko Weyland. Fullyillustrated catalogues were published on both occasions. His work was recently acquired and exhibited for the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2016.

Michael Scott (b. 1958, Paoli, PA) Is an artist who lives and works in New York City. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received an MFA from Hunter College in 1983. Since the mid 1980s, Michael Scott has created paintings that are visual experiences pushed to the extreme. In his paintings he has juxtaposed narrow vertical lines, at times in different colors and patterns, on aluminium panels. His artworks produce an optical impact that makes them difficult to look at and compels the viewer to see them differently each time. This disruptive experience underlines the artist’s extreme approach to visual art. In the 1990s his paintings were known to be programmatic, in the sense that they were precisely calculated and the patterns were systematic. Later, they became more intuitive, allowing chance and the process to be

evident. Steering away from subjectivity, Michael Scott currently explores a systematic approach to painting which, though pure and linear in form, remains painterly. He began exhibiting his conceptually based abstract paintings at the Tony Shaf razi gallery in the late 1980s. Since then, his work has been exhibited widely in the US, Asia and Europe, in both gallery and museum exhibitions. His paintings are included in many public collections, including Le Consortium (Dijon, France); Le FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais (Dunkerque, France); MAMCO (Geneva, Switzerland); Le Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland); Kunsthalle Bern (Bern, Switzerland); Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain, Switzerland, Musee des baux-arts, la Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, MACBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA (Los Angeles, USA).

Li Trincere (b. 1960, NYC) Has exhibited her work internationally for the past 30 years, including Australia, Belgium, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. During the early ‘80s, she was heavily involved in the East Village abstract painting scene and showed at many of the landmark venues of the time, including Mission Gallery, Pyramid Club, Kamikaze Club, Artist Space, and Exit Art. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s she exhibited at key galleries presenting geometric abstraction, such as Julian Pretto, Stark Gallery, Annina Nosei, Gabrielle Bryers (all in NYC), as well as the legendary Rolf Ricke in Cologne Germany. A member of American Abstract Artists since 2015, Li has received awards and artist grants throughout her career, from, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and the Edward Albee Foundation.

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Kunstforum, among others, Her work is in public and private collections, such as the Osaka Museum, Baker Museum, Exxon, American Express, JP Morgan, and Chase Bank. She received her MFA in painting from Hunter College, New York City.

Acknowledgments I am immensely grateful to my friends for their help, guidance, and support in organizing and preparing this exhibition, including Michael Abrams, Gene Na, Mark Dagley, Michael Scott, Max Estenger, Li Trincere, Paul Corio, Lauri Bortz, and John Strausbaugh. In addition, I cannot thank my assistant Victor de la Cruz enough. Finally, my family, particularly my wife who supports what I do, trust, and believe. — Luis Pazo Design by Pazo Fine Art, LLC Essay by Paul Corio Editing by Victor de la Cruz Photography by Gregory Staley and Gian Carlos Perez Photo credits: Front Cover: Green East Deli, circa 1989, E 10th Street and 4th Ave,

NYC, NY, Courtesy of Max Estenger

p. 2: Courtesy of Max Estenger

p. 34: Courtesy of Mark Dagley

p. 13: Courtesy of Max Estenger

p. 37: Courtesy of Max Estenger

p. 39: Courtesy of Michael Scott. Photograph by Agnes Barley

p. 40: Courtesy of Li Trincere.

p. 19: © Max Estenger. Courtesy Pazo Fine Art First published in conjunction with the exhibition The Neo & The Geo: New Painting Forms 1986-1995 September 25 - October 28, 2021 Printed in the United States by Allegra, Rockville, Maryland All rights reserved. No parts of this publications may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the publisher.