Oliver Arms at Ameringer McEnery and Yohe

First, a confession - I'm not much of a fan of contemporary abstraction. I like many abstract paintings (pieces by Motherwell, Georges Mathieu, Philip Guston, et cetera), but at the same time I am able to view the pieces in a historical setting rather than within the realm of contemporary discourse. I feel that contemporary art, with an emphasis on concept and irony, has pushed abstraction to the side in favor of more "brainy" work. That said, I recently saw a show that renewed my faith in contemporary abstraction: Oliver Arms at Ameringer McEnery and Yohe.

Ameringer McEnery and Yohe is a gallery on 22nd that mainly shows dead or dying modern artists. They have some big names (Calder, Frank Stella, Motherwell, Pollock) in their inventory, and they have a few living artists who show there as well. The last show I saw there, of figurative paintings by west coast painter Rebecca Campbell, I found to be pretty underwhelming. While I usually gravitate towards figurative work, I found Campbell's paintings to lack any kind of staying power. It's usually a bad sign when I have to go to a gallery's website to remind myself of what the paintings looked like, but that's what I had to do with Campbell's show. It wasn't a terrible show, just not a memorable one.

After that experience, I wasn't particularly optimistic about the gallery's following contemporary exhibition - Oliver Arms. Arms is, like Campbell, a west coast painter, but his work is completely abstract. Given my general distaste for contemporary abstraction, I wasn't expecting much, but I decided to check out the show anyway.

Arms's paintings presented themselves to me as mysteries: they are very difficult to describe, which is probably a good thing. The closest comparison I can make is to crinkled-up marbled paper, but even that falls short of accurately describing the paintings. The images on the gallery's website do the paintings no justice - the JPEGs are far too small and there are no up-close details to be seen.

Not only are Arms's paintings difficult to describe, they're also difficult to deconstruct technically. There are no visible brushstrokes, yet they are oil on canvas. I fancy myself to have a decent knowledge of oil painting techniques, and it took me a while to figure out how he got the effects he did. It turns out that the paintings are sanded; my hunch was confirmed by the gallery's press release. Arms builds up layers of paint and sands them down, creating concentric rings of color and different textures across the canvas.

Another painter who is known to sand his work is Odd Nerdrum. I don't care for most of his large multi-figure compositions (they look stiff, posed, and like he's trying too hard to be surreal) but his smaller pieces can be excellent. One of the techniques used by Nerdrum is sanding - he's known to glaze shadows over his figures and sand off parts of it to break up the brushstrokes and create a hazy atmosphere. One enterprising individual claims to have deconstructed Nerdrum's technique and is trying to sell it, against the artist's wishes I imagine. How one can sell "sand your paintings" for $19.95 is beyond me, though...

Sanding isn't a widely-used technique in oil painting, probably because it can kill you. Many popular oil colors contain lead and cadmium, heavy metals that can easily enter your body when their dust is inhaled, potentially causing nerve damage, poisoning, and cancer. For example, according to the company's MSDS, most Winsor and Newton whites contain some amount of lead. Winsor and Newton is a very popular brand, and white is probably the most used color in oil painting, so sanding a painting can be risky. It even says right on the tubes not to sand cadmium-based paints because of the risk of lung cancer.

While Nerdrum is thought to only sand parts of his paintings (and I'm not paying $20 to find out for sure), Arms seems to sand the entire thing. I imagine he must use a power sander - sanding a 72x72 inch canvas by hand would be a painful ordeal. Whatever his method may be, the results are astounding. It's the kind of art that shows the failings of language - there's not really much to say about it. I'm at a loss for words, even more so than usual when trying to talk about abstract art. My inability to criticize this show in a sophisticated manner shouldn't be held against it, though. Silence is golden, and for work like this, the less that has to be said, the better.