ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Painting, sculpture...blurred boundaries
BY NANCY ELSAMANOUDI
The show “Plush Paint” is a crazy, fun, weird
collection of sculptures by Susan Carr and
paintings by Osamu Kobayashi and Jason
Stopa at Next to Nothing on the Lower East Side.
This show is very much about paint and all of its
goopy, drippy, globby, heavily layered, bumpy, thick
or thin, slick, bold, sly, fl at, subtle and intensely pigmented
possibilities.
Carr’s magnifi cent, brightly colored, freestanding
sculptures and wall pieces are made mostly of
oil paint and wood. The wood she uses typically
comes from repurposed found objects that are
then cobbled together to make the basic shape of
the sculpture. Basic shapes, like triangles, squares,
circles and rectangles, as well as patterns, like dots
and stripes, tend to be the primary building blocks
of her visual language.
Carr paints the wood surface of her pieces as if
it were a surface for painting. Yet, she also works
with paint as if it were resin, wax or clay.
Her work has an affi nity with painters like Mardsen
Hartley, R.B. Kitaj and Tal R, as well as contemporary
artists working in clay and ceramics today
like Rebecca Goyette, Ana Weider Blank and
Joanne Greenbaum.
The surfaces of Carr’s sculptures are heavily, obsessively
layered with thick impasto. Pieces such as
“Green Window,” by Jason Stopa, 2018, 27 inches by 22 inches, oil
on canvas, above. “Bubble Brothers,” by Osamu Kobayashi, 2017,
112 inches by 120 inches, oil on canvas, left.
“Warrior” and “I Have Measured
My Life Out in Carrots” read as a
kind of three-dimensional painting
or a kind of “painting in the
round.” Her sculptures tend to be
uniformly covered in thick impasto
that has been layered on slowly
over time.
Like Carr, Stopa works with
thick impasto paint, yet differently.
The thick lines Stopa paints over
the mostly fl at surfaces of his paintings
are precariously awkward. At
fi rst, the thick lines look somewhat
like glued-on collage elements —
cords or ropes. But then you notice
the paint is still very much wet in
some areas. There are also odd moments,
where it looks as if he was
“Warrior,” by Susan
Carr, 2018, 13 inches by
21 inches, oil on wood.
squeezing out toothpaste or rolling out some neon
Play-Doh.
Like a number of his contemporaries, such as
Jonathan Lasker and Keltie Ferris, Stopa plays on
this ambiguity by deliberately creating confusing or
surprising moments in his artwork. For instance,
his paintings “Exit/Entrance” and “Green Window,”
feature large rectangles in their middle that
look like post-it notes stuck in a sketchbook. These
strange passages can be read possibly as fi gures,
doors, windows or gates, or as paintings
or a mirror within a painting.
There is a long history of artists
making paintings that contain paintings
or mirrors in them. These range
from the usual suspects — Matisse
and Picasso — to Vermeer, Van
Eyck and Velazquez.
At the same time, there is a gritty
kick in these works that speaks to
contemporary culture. Stopa pairs
neon pink and lime green with black
and rancid yellow. These paintings
seem to be informed by punk, interior
design, textiles, architecture
and a pop sensibility.
Kobayashi’s paintings similarly
seem to be informed by popular culture,
comic books, advertising, video
games and anime. His works are a little wonky, in
a poised, gratuitously elegant way — like a slightly
crooked bow tie. A sly humor undergirds his paintings.
This is especially true in “Bubble Brothers,” a
monumental 10-foot red, blue and yellow painting
of two hugging doughboys, painted in the colors of
the ultimate superhero, Superman.
“Plush Paint: Please Do Not Pet, Caress, Fondle”
on view at Next to Nothing, 181 Orchard St., between
E. Houston and Stanton Sts., until Jan. 20.
Schneps Media TVG January 3, 2019 17