Alex Couwenberg Catalog

ALEX COUWENBERG & KARL BENJAMIN INFLUENCE, DIVERGENCE & THE EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY BERGAMOT STATION ARTS CENTER 2525 MICHIGAN AVE., E-1 SANTA MONICA, CA 90404 P 310-453-0909 F 310-453-0908 www.williamturnergallery.com

INFLUENCE, DIVERGENCE & THE EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA Pairing Alex Couwenberg & original hard-edge painter Karl Benjamin, Influence, Divergence & the Evolution of an Idea finally brings together master & pupil – except that Couwenberg (who in fact studied with Roland Reiss at Claremont University) wasn’t Benjamin’s student so much as his acolyte. The two are now fast friends, and the exhibition demonstrates the power of elective affinity through aesthetic DNA (or vice versa). In his 60-year career Benjamin has rung numerous changes on the possibilities of geometric painting, from dynamic asymmetry to insistent patter, and the wealth of forms and strategies his ouevre features recurs in a fascinating way in Couwenberg’s own work. While Benjamin tends to explore specific formulas deeply, in effect taking each apart and reassembling it with different color combinations or structural inversions, Couwenberg synthesizes such formulas into complex – and, compared to Benjamin’s featureless technique, painterly – compositions always on the verge of recomposing or even

disappearing into themselves. Benjamin, principally concerned with the articulation of planar region, always blends towards minimalism (and, indeed, directly anticipated that trend in the early 60’s), while Couwnberg, preoccupied as much with line as with color, returns again to the asymmetric harmonies of pre-war constructivism. Benjamin grew out of that aesthetic; some of his most handsome work recapitulates that almost choreographic dynamism. But by and large he sought a more neutral, open image, one that brought abstract expressionism’s meditative, all-over sense of field to geometric form. Couwenberg now seeks to re-introduce cubism’s facets and futurism’s kinesis into Benjamin’s minimalist colorscape – with the senior painter’s blessing.

PETER FRANK - FABRIK 2012

ALEX COUWENBERG I like to see complexity resolved. There’s a certain beauty in an intricately plotted mystery, a Baroque fugue, a Roman floor mosaic, a Dickens novel, anything that seems at first to be scattered and random, too filled with separate thoughts and contradictory impulses ever to come together — and then they do. They take what seemed to be chaos and turn it into pattern, they bring what seemed to be arbitrary and make it appear inevitable.

That’s part of what I respond to most about the work of Alex Couwenberg, how his is a highly personal art of retrieval and reconciliation, how he skirts the edge of dissolution and wreaks it into hard-won harmony, how he shuffles it — whatever “it” is - relentlessly to and fro, weighing and adjusting, calibrating and interrupting, a quick swivel here, an unexpected torque there, a whisper of the stability of line tested by a sudden tonal shift.

Well, you better bring your lunch, there’s nothing quick and easy about this work, you’re going to have to do some serious looking. If you’re a musician or a writer or a dancer you can take your audience through these acts of reconciliation in time - time gives you the thread you can follow from beginning to middle to end. But a painter!

Time is collapsed all within one surface, one rectangle, only the artist knows the layers embedded beneath the final painting, remembers when everything seemed lost, the false steps and conundrums that needed to be rectified and solved, the pivotal moment where it began to come together, the rush of being when all the intricacies began to resolve themselves, that final sense when you were finished, that it was done. That’s how I imagine Alex Couwenberg works, that within his own idiom (and more on that in a bit) he does his version of the painter’s core archetypal thing: to do something on the surface of a painting that requires him to do another thing that calls for something else that means he has to do this other thing and so forth until he’s locked in the taut embrace of picture-making which only ends when the damn thing is done.

Notice how rarely Couwenberg centers his imagery, it usually falls off somewhat to the right, as if it settles somewhere on the composition where a lot of to-ing and fro-ing had to happen. (This reminds me a bit of how a Scrabble board gets played, sometimes one quadrant gets all the action and another seems immobile, frozen, what begins in the very center ends up meandering away as the game progresses.) And while there may be a tendency to privilege Couwenberg’s painterly and linear incident in these works, one should never overlook the color he initially lays down on these canvases.

Somehow the first color is the first gesture for Couwenberg - the causal gesture. It provides the context for what will ensue. Only Couwenberg knows what that next gesture was. It may not even be on the surface any longer - it’s probably not. We’re left with the finished thing, the endgame, but only Couwenberg got to play it, there’s a process going on here but we don’t get to see it work itself out, we just get to see it resolved into a kind of hard won but inevitable perfection.

But let me tell you how I go about looking at a painting by Alex Couwenberg. I stare at it for a while, and then try to find a fulcrum point in it, some smallish element somewhere that somehow seems the opening salvo to the whole composition, the little Rosetta Stone that decodes it, the spring lock, the tether, the string that you can pull on to unravel it all.

I look at that thin circular line and suddenly everything starts to spin off it, sometimes logically, just as you would expect, but sometimes in riffs of such curious curvy inventiveness that it starts to careen about, into the vortex you go, up, down, left, right, solid, transparent, substance and schematic, flatness and texture, interpenetrating areas of positive and negative space that never seem to cease shuffling about. Tension and release, areas of tight energy then radiating and diffusing outward, almost centrifugal in nature, that’s a Couwenberg move, action and echo, a balance always achieved at last.

It’s an incredible communing with the fundamentals of a kind of so cool SoCal Modernism, a here muted beckoning of a giddy California 1960’s design, for sources it’s all woofers all the time, Philco TV’s meet Valley burger joints, Jazz LP covers in a Ford Fairlane, TV antennas from the Brady Bunch house, funny-car decals, the curve and the swerve, like nothing exists but bulbous swivel chairs and sleek hi-fi components. None of those things actually appear in any of these paintings, but their aura everywhere does, Couwenberg’s got all this stamped in his DNA, if DNA was only a bit more oval and torqued. It’s not nostalgia, certainly not retro, or only marginally and obliquely so, it’s a visual manifestation of time and place, as connected to its context as European Cubism is to the staccato rhythms of early modern urbanism.

Couwenberg summons the attentive optimism of SoCal design culture, its bold curves and upbeat rhythms, he layers and de- and reconstructs them, he channels them from function to pictorial language because it’s his vernacular culture, because it’s his. These new paintings, soberly and with exquisite control and attention to detail, appear to me to evoke these things and more.

James Yood James Yood teaches modern and contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he also directs its New Arts Journalism program.

BECAUSE I DO, acrylic on canvas, 48x46

FUHM , acrylic on canvas, 48x46

DUAL, acrylic on canvas, 60x96

LENS FLARE, acrylic on canvas, 48x72

RED VIOLET PULSE, acrylic on canvas, 22x20 PULSE (Blue Violet-Blue), acrylic on canvas, 22”x 20”

THE DEEP, acrylic on canvas, 45” x 70”, $18,150

PURPURE, acrylic on canvas, 66x80

BLAZING WEST, 2011, Acrylic, Collage, Resin on Panel 70” x 45”, $18,150

HAPPY CHOPPER, acrylic on canvas, 48x72

ORANGES, 2011, Acrylic, Collage, Resin on Panel 60” x 48”, $16,500

BARBICAN, acrylic on canvas, 48x46

BINKER, acrylic on canvas, 48x46

ALICE’S BUZZ, acrylic on canvas, 22x26

SOLO, acrylic on canvas, 22x26

SUNSET BLVD, acrylic, collage, resin on canvas, 54” x 72”, $19,250

CHEWY DELICIOUS, acrylic, collage, resin on canvas, 30” x 60”, $14,500

KARL BENJAMIN Born in Chicago, Karl Benjamin began his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1943. Interrupted by service in the US Navy during WWII, Benjamin resumed his studies at Southern California’s University of Redlands in 1946. Graduating in 1949 with a BA degree in English literature, history and philosophy, Benjamin began his career as a teacher with no intention of becoming an artist. However, his relocation to Claremont California in 1952, shortly after he had begun “playing” with paint in 1951, galvanized his sense of his career path.

Though he continued to teach in public schools and, later to great acclaim, for Pomona College, the artist’s work blossomed amid the extraordinarily lively art, design and architecture scene in Los Angeles in the mid twentieth Century.

Numerous gallery showings of his work during the 50’s culminated in 1959 with his inclusion in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s ground-breaking exhibition “Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin.”

The exhibition garnered national attention for the artist along with the creation of a moniker for Benjamin’s meticulously orchestrated color and form, Hard Edge Painting. Subsequently Benjamin’s work was included in the exhibit Purist Painting traveling to Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Columbus Museum of Art. The Whitney Museum used his work in Geometric Abstraction in America. Museum of Modern Art (NY) also featured the artist in their watershed exhibit The Responsive Eye. Benjamin was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Visual Arts in both 1983 and 1989. His work has been featured in numerous museum exhibition and is included in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, Israel; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY among others. Benjamin is currently a Professor Emeritus at Pomona College and lives in Claremont, CA. Opposite Page: Karl Benjamin, TAPE GRID #19, 1961, oil on canvas, 42”x 32”

#29, 1964, oil on canvas, 42”x35.75” Right: #20, 1964, oil on canvas, 51”x 42”

#1, 1975, oil on canvas, 27”x 54”

#7, 1980, oil on canvas, 72”x48”

Left: #4, 1981, oil on canvas, #43, 1965, oil on canvas, 25.5”x51”