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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper Gallery

        Wayne Gonzales, installation view,
        Paula Cooper Gallery.


        Wayne Gonzales’ newest paintings depict crowds witnessing some off-screen event. Derived from anonymous images of sporting events downloaded from the internet, these paintings are the latest installment of a continuing exposition by Gonzales: pictures that reflect America’s ever expanding upper-middle class and its integrated involvement with the political landscape.

        Gonzales employs a strategy inherited from Warhol and Lichtenstein. He uses paintings’ decorative impact as camouflage for complex, and in this case, somewhat sinister content. The paintings are clearly made by projecting images and quickly filling in the enlarged shapes. The use of a gestural, loose mark-system denies detail and creates an optimal viewing distance of several yards. Moving closer to the paintings, the images become less clear, though the painterly application is revealed. In these new works the acrylic paint has a semi-translucent quality that brings to mind the adjective slippery. These paintings are manufactured very directly, a factor that had remained hidden in Gonzales’ earlier work. The palette, too, has changed. Gone are the acidic greens and jaundiced yellows of his stenciled renderings of McMansions. Now, the palette of carefully modulated grays mimics a sort of photographic representation that has not been a part of Gonzales’ painting to this date. They recall underexposed film, or prints left in the developer too long. The color has a gritty quality that alludes to the polluting residue of coal.

        These paintings bring to mind certain works by Manet; specifically his Music in the Tuileries of 1862, Un Bal Masque a la Opera of 1874, and The Battle of the Kearsarge and Alabama of 1864. Almost all of Manet’s paintings explore the various relationships between spectator and image, but these paintings are emphatically about the viewership of the public, and in doing so anticipate Gonzales’ project. The Tuileries painting is perhaps the most obvious in this respect. In it, a park full of petty coat and top-hat wearing bourgeoisie are engaged in no particular activity other than demonstrating and scrutinizing each other’s status. Lined up as if onstage, half of the figures in Tuileries (including the self-portrait of Manet) are looking directly at the spectator, implicating us in this most middle-class pastime. Additionally, in this painting and in Un Bal Masque a la Opera, Manet’s figures merge, collide, and loose their silhouettes into masses of black paint — as T.J. Clark describes it in The Painting of Modern Life, “the visible comes to be the illegible.” The figures in Gonzales’ crowds also loose their definition; not only do they merge with each other, but some figures shape-shift and disintegrate before our eyes as we move closer to them. What appears to be a perfectly fine head from 20 feet away melts into a grinning skull at 10, and is nothing but formless clouds of grey gas at 5.

        Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper Gallery

        Wayne Gonzales, Waiting Crowd, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 33×38 in.

        Manet painted another illegible event in 1864. The naval battle between the USS Kearsage and the Confederate Alabama was nearly visible off the coast of France and the scene rendered by Manet in part signifies the desire of the public to see such violence in real time. John Elderfied, in his remarkable catalog for Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, has drawn a parallel between the naval battle and Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico. Both events became subjects for Manet’s imagination as he received reports from newspapers; both were significant in reflecting Republican politics; and both became allegories for the act of painting.

        Manet was painting a burgeoning middle-class that was engaging in the potentials of the urban spectacle, whereas Gonzales paints the entrenched, anesthetized crowds of today. These crowds do not engage the spectator or even each other, for the position of being watched is no longer novel. Assuming we are always under surveillance, all we can do is glance to the side and wait to be entertained. The progeny of both the Union defeat of the Confederate Alabama and the development of the Republican revolutions of Europe, we are now rendered giddy by the spectacle of auction houses, NASCAR, and the shuffle mode of our iPods. The spectacle has evolved beyond the point of engagement; now we applaud ourselves and hope for the best. Manet’s paintings used wars in unseen lands as allegories for waging the battle of modernism; Gonzales’ paintings stand as an allegory of our mute position in a current war that rages overseas.

        George Rush received a BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1992, and an MFA in visual art from Columbia University in 1998. He has had solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen; Galeria Javier Lopez, Madrid; and Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. He has also taught at Columbia University and Vassar College, and in 2004 was the artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee. In 2004 he was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in painting. Mr. Rush has taught at Yale since 2004; he was appointed lecturer and assistant to the director of painting/printmaking in 2006.

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      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery