Draft: Epicenter by pazofineart

Sue Crawford Elise Ferguson Richard Tinkler Catalogue essay by Frances Lazare September 16 - November 2

PATTERN BEYOND PAINTING by Frances Lazare

In 1908, infamous architectural theorist and author of the polemic “Ornament and Crime,” Alfred Loos, defined ornament as the almost obsessive “urge” to animate surface—anything from a façade to a forearm—with repeating patterns, markings, and designs. The primal (and indeed, erotically charged) “feelings of pleasure” Loos identifies as inherent to the accumulation of Image detail: Elise Ferguson, Lantern, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Romer Young Gallery. decoration on support haunt the treatise, which maligns any flourish that exceeds the imperatives of function in fin-de-siècle design. Loos’ paranoid repression of ornament—as a kind of irrational and undisciplined subconscious of modernist abstraction—places him firmly within a group of critics curator Emily King recently dubbed “ornament authoritarians.”¹ In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, these “authoritarians” attempted to construct encyclopedic taxonomies of form grounded in the perceived universalism of pluralism—or, the trans-cultural desire to append abstract patterns to the surface of otherwise utilitarian instruments, from manuscripts to machinery. Stemming from a distinctly modern homology, the pursuit of this sort of global compendium—the most famous of which is Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856)— prompted critics, even those as skeptical as Loos, to articulate the wide-reaching elegance of and authority of ornament within the built environment, broadly construed; the imperatives of abstraction, in other words, far beyond the wall-bound canvas. The contemporary prescience of ornament, or what the art historian Oleg Grabar calls “visible geometry on surface,”² is on display in Epicenter at Pazo Fine Art, where dazzling and pattern-dense canvases by Sue Crawford, Elise Ferguson and Richard Tinkler deploy a particularly ornamental mode of abstraction—predicated on the visual logic of repetition— as a powerful intermediary between the 1. 2.

Emily King, “What is it with Ornament and Crime,” in Joanna Ahlberg, ed., The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (New York, NY: The Drawing Center, 2022), 31. Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 136.

artwork, as a bounded physical object, and the world of the beholder. The dynamic arrangement of abstract pattern on support, in other words, functions as a means of invoking a broader world of form, encompassing tiles, textiles, and even the ornamental motifs of the natural world. The works in Epicenter thus recall the architectural and domestic origins of twentieth-century abstraction—no matter the antidecorative fantasies of those “ornament authoritarians.” One need only think of William Morris’ wallpapers, Edouard Vuillard’s dizzyingly patterned interiors, and, more recently, Cynthia Carlson’s and Betty Woodman’s immersive installations. The sustained interdependence of abstract painting and the built environment inform the artists in Epicenter, whose ornamental canvases are quasi-architectural and tectonic, evoking geographies outside the gallery.

Installation view, EPICENTER. Photograph by Vivian Doering.

Architectural metaphor is especially central to Elise Ferguson’s Op-esque abstractions. Ferguson’s Signatures (2022), a largescale work that exists somewhere between painting, sculpture, and print, sits physically and conceptually at the center of the show. As is customary in her practice, Ferguson generated this design in Photoshop and subsequently burned the pattern onto a silkscreen matrix, through which ten to ﬁfteen layers of pigmented Venetian plaster were pushed on primed support (here, panel, though she just as often works on paper). There is an almost masonlike nature to this process, in

which material is troweled on layer by layer until the surface reaches a near sculptural level. The result is a kind of “portable fresco,” whose complex ballet of redoubling lines evokes the snaking architectural flourishes of Viennese Jugendstil in both form and highly saturated hue. Such architectural associations are far from incidental. Ferguson embraces the decorative implications of abstraction, citing her early training in color theory and design history with her mother, a women’s clothing designer, and stepfather, an architect. The interconnection between the fine and decorative arts has thus long guided her practice; before turning to painting, Ferguson created gauche portraits of her floorboards and urethane sculptures resembling midcentury linoleum tiles elevated to the level of a monument.

Installation view, EPICENTER. Photograph by Vivian Doering.

The interconnection between abstraction and decoration is particularly evident even in Ferguson’s works on paper. On comparatively small-scale canvases Honey and Reduce (both 2023), the artist’s complex designs are pared to a singular motif and rendered via the same process as her paintings on panel, allowing her to achieve a smooth, precise surface in large and small-scale works alike. The balance between this appearance of perfection and the eﬀect of the hand-made—a feature in all of the painter’s work—is especially apparent in the paper works, whose edges are left stippled and raw, a reminder that paper is, in fact, a textile made of copious ﬁbers woven together weft over war. These unframed works, with their bright decorative forms and visible threads, are as much wall hangings as paintings.

Richard Tinkler’s drawings, too, evoke the pleasures of architectural ornament. These visually complex, geometric webs comprise thousands of primarily straight strokes of colored pencil that resemble “psychedelic tapestries.” The artworks’ algebraic appearance results from a similarly methodical process: Tinkler stores his copious drawings in a precisely organized series of albums, the archival logic formalized in his titles: ‘Book 7 Volume 1 Page 21.1,’ and so on. As soon as Tinkler sells one of his hundreds of patterned works on paper, he produces a duplicate in its place, drawing on a common vocabulary of colors, shapes, and designs. Drawings and paintings alike thus emerge from a self-multiplying, internally consistent logic, and artworks pulled from storage become palimpsests for new creations. Each drawing is, therefore, interdependent on the ones that come before it and generative of those that come after, functioning like a single tile in an ever-expanding tessellation.

Sue Crawford, Testudo #3, 2023. @ Sue Crawford

Richard Tinkler, Book 7 Volume 1 Page 21.1, 2022. Courtesy the artist and 56 Henry

The expressive potential of drawn line similarly enlivens Sue Crawford, who, like Tinkler, ﬁlls the surfaces of her sensuous abstractions with thousands of nearly identical strokes. The organic and improvisational character of these acrylic marks, however, connotes a visual language all her own. Of the three artists on view in Epicenter, Crawford’s works alone evoke both the logic of the historic handicrafts and the visual patterns of the natural world. The painter’s overlaid, snaking line work recalls both the movement of interweaving threads sewn together in the process of textile construction and the shape of a stream as it travels through the ground. In her Testudo series, Crawford takes topographic metaphor to its furthest, layering organic forms in earthen hues one atop the other such that they resemble layers of sediment built up over the passage of geologic time.

Well-versed in the history of craft and design, Crawford’s dual allusion to textile and topography is apt. Indeed, the decorative motifs found in nature have long informed the language of ornament, as on the face of Art Nouveau architecture, where curvilinear motifs conjure twisting tendrils and otherwise organic rhythms of flora and fauna. Crawford’s work thus reminds us of the privileged place of ornament in both the built environment—and thus in political, social, and civic life—and the natural world, evoking, along with Ferguson and Tinkler, those “feelings of pleasure” that, freed from fixed meaning or signification, are embedded in the fabric of visual experience far beyond “art” as such.

Frances Lazare September, 2023

Installation view, EPICENTER. Photograph by Vivian Doering.

PLAT ES

Sue Crawford Between Dog & Wolf, 2023 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on canvas 45 x 40 in (114.3 x 101.6 cm)

Sue Crawford, Between Dog & Wolf (detail), 2023

Sue Crawford Small Sounds, 2022 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on canvas 45 x 40 in (114.3 x 101.6 cm)

Sue Crawford, Small Sounds (detail), 2022

Sue Crawford Testudo #1, 2023 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on paper 29 x 22 1/2 in (73.7 x 57.1 cm)

Sue Crawford Testudo #2, 2023 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on paper 29 x 22 1/2 in (73.7 x 57.1 cm)

Sue Crawford Testudo #3, 2023 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on paper 29 x 22 1/2 in (73.7 x 57.1 cm)

Sue Crawford Dominant Myths #6, 2021 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on paper, wax resist 16 x 16 in (40.6 x 40.6 cm)

Sue Crawford Dominant Myths #5, 2021 Signed on the reverse Acrylic gouache on paper, wax resist 16 x 16 in (40.6 x 40.6 cm)

Elise Ferguson SIGNATURES, 2022 Pigmented plaster, pencil on panel 50 x 75 in (127 x 190.5 cm)