Warren Kelly, Jules Olitski and Christo make contemporary art about the landscape.

By Michael Paglia
Westword

Published: Thursday, August 11, 2005

Another show that's closing soon and is definitely worth checking out is Jules Olitski: Works on Paper, at Sandy Carson Gallery on Santa Fe Drive. The paintings, drawings and prints in this exhibit are not the kind of thing you'd think of when you hear the name Olitski. The artist became famous for his '60s color-field abstractions, one of several logical extensions of abstract expressionism. His paintings of the time were utterly flat, then a desired attribute, but by the '70s, Olitski was reintroducing depth to his pictures.

Over the years, Olitski has relentlessly experimented, creating work in a huge variety of formalist abstract styles, but nothing represents as much of an aesthetic departure as these new works at Sandy Carson, which are crudely yet luxuriously executed landscapes and seascapes. Despite such a radical change in direction, the new pieces do bear some relationship to his classic work. The backgrounds are handled like color fields, as usual, but on top, Olitski places recognizable objects, especially trees and sailboats -- and that's not usual.

I first saw Olitskis of this type last year in a show at the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture. Then, as now, they reminded me of the style of the visionary nineteenth-century American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose awkward and expressive works were a source for the kind of modernist abstraction that made Olitski famous a generation ago.

Olitski, who is 83, divides his time between homes in Florida and New Hampshire and a studio warehouse in Vermont. William Biety, director of the Sandy Carson Gallery, met the artist in Florida in the 1980s and has remained in contact with him. So when Biety decided to do this show, he was able to visit the Vermont studio and select the pieces he wanted to include.

The exhibit is installed in the front gallery and starts off with a very traditional-looking painting, "Once Upon a Time in Tavernier," done in pastel on rag paper earlier this year. The composition, with its big, gnarly tree up front and sailboats in the middle, resembles a stage. The clouds reinforce this impression because they appear to be a proscenium. In the most abstract of Olitski's works, the composition runs side to side and top to bottom, with no defining framework within the picture, as in the extremely Ryder-ish "Green Sea Passage," which depicts a sailboat, done in black and white, placed in the middle of a field of alternating grays and greens. "Green Sea Passage" is from 2001, making it one of the oldest pieces in the exhibit.

At first the paintings in Jules Olitski struck me as primitive, even childlike, but the longer I looked at them, the more elegant they became. Maybe even sophisticated.