Artist John Meyer: Explicit and elusive at the same time
The term “abstract” fails to evoke the unforgiving rigor of the paintings by San Franciscan John Meyer (1943-2002) that George Lawson has just brought back to light after many years in storage or in private hands.
Many people have little tolerance for artworks that resist viewers’ projections of narrative or emotion onto them, as Meyer’s do.
Meyer’s late paintings, especially the black and white diptychs here, plus a sleek, large all-black pair, mark an extreme of cold objectivity, displaying more affinity with, say, the metal sculpture of Donald Judd (1928-1994) than with the asperities of paintings by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) or Agnes Martin (1912-2004).
Formalist critics, especially Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), made much of perceived flatness as one of the qualities through which modernist painting distinguished its claims on our attention from those of all the other contemporaneous arts.
A viewer bent on interpretation might sense a Manichean impulse behind Meyer’s black and white diptychs, a mystic inclination to halve the real into domains of light and darkness.
In conversation he claimed really not to know, beyond the barest material definition, what constitutes a painting as an object of interest.
The installation at Lawson permits visitors to see that the incidence of light on the paintings’ surfaces matters crucially to their definition, or self-definition.
Yet even the surest perception of such aspects, under what seem close to ideal viewing conditions, feels tentative, subject to vagaries of changing daylight, viewing angle and our common incapacity finally to see as others see.
Explicitness and elusiveness converge in Meyer’s work with an intensity we seldom see in contemporary art, irrespective of style.
In recent canvases at Brian Gross, former California, now New York painter Teo González appears to take a step back from the complete abstraction of his earlier work, but a careful look corrects that impression.
The technique may bring to mind Chuck Close’s manner of fleshing out a grid into an image with dollops or dashes of color, but González leaves the grid implicit.
In “#687” particularly, among the works on view, an observer has to strain to see, or believe — because it is true — that the red delineating the tiny cells and occupying their centers remains consistent as the array showers down over the changing ground colors.