After visiting PhotoPlus Expo at Javits, I decided my feet weren’t tired enough and so I hoofed it on down to Chelsea to see some art.  There were quite a few shows that I enjoyed and found worth noting.

At Stephen Haller Gallery on 26th Street, a Ronnie Landfeild show celebrates 40 years since the artist’s first solo show in 1969 with large, wonderfully colorful landscape-inspired abstractions.  Several of these acrylic paintings are grounded on their bottoms by solid, hard-edge stripes of color, above which large fields of paint intermingle and blend together.

London-based artist Andy Harper has his first US solo exhibition at Danese.  The paintings in this show (viewable in the gallery’s very nice online exhibition software) read as abstract from a distance but up close are seen to contain twisted, interwoven organic forms:  leaves, tendrils, vines, hair.  One is struck by the amount of detail found at every level of these paintings and the amount of work that must have gone into them (and wondering what tricks might have been used to assist in the process).

Two years ago, while on one of my regular Chelsea expeditions, I noticed about a half dozen shows featuring mostly monochromatic, chiaroscuro atmospheric abstractions.  Two of the artists from Nov 2007 are back, exhibiting once again at the same time:  David Mann and Mark Sheinkmann.  At McKenzie Fine Art, David Mann’s  paintings are full of biological, cell-like (or perhaps amoeba-like) shapes that are something of a signature mark for the artist: perhaps a careful half-twirl of the brush, perhaps more meticulously rendered.  The compositions are relatively straightforward — either based around a central form or around one or two horizontal or vertical bands — but the surfaces are fun to look at from varying distances.  (This exhibition reminds me of another show I saw earlier in the week, photograms of glass arranged in plankton-inspired compositions by Laura McClanahan at the Hunterdon Museum of Art.)

Mark Sheinkman is once again at Von Lintel (now on 23rd Street) with smokey monochromatic wisps of oil, graphite, and alkyd on canvas.  This time, the paintings are more minimal and the wisps are less smokey, more ribbon-like.  I very much enjoy this artist’s work, though in this exhibition I found myself wishing for something a little deeper perceptually, even if was perhaps a different (maybe gloss?) finish on these matte works.

Sticking with the monochromatic theme, Abby Leigh’s show “The Sleeper’s Eye” at Betty Cunningham is something to behold.  Although the press release doesn’t mention it, to me the title referred to the “lights” you see when you close your eyes before going to sleep after glancing at your nightstand light bulb.  If you stare at the center of any of these paintings some wonderful perceptual effects take hold as simultaneous contrast and optical afterimages cause your perception of the paintings to change over time.  In fact, the subtle, circular compositions can completely disappear so that it appears that you’re viewing a solid plane, until suddenly as you relax your eyes a bitand the image reappears once again.  In addition to these paintings, a series of drawings made (somehow) from smoke call up target designs by Kenneth Noland as if drawn by Sol LeWitt.  Less dramatic perceptually than the paintings, these drawings still keep your eye moving with their inky wash texture.

Anselm Reyle’s show “Monochrome Age” at Gagosian (24th St) is in fact only partially monochromatic.  Two pieces in the show were most noteworthy:  Eternity, a highly reflective, violet swirl of a bronze sculpture; and Relief, a multi-panel mountainous wall installation back-lit with LEDs that change color over time.

I’ll mention one last monochromatic show:  Jaume Plensa’s “In the Midst of Dreams” at Galerie Lelong.  The front rooms display several alabaster sculptures of elongated female heads.  The artist works from photographs with digital tools to laser-cut the alabaster to form.  The resulting pieces look as if they can’t be sculptures, but rather must be projections or reflections.  Somehow the distorted shapes trigger an expectation of a certain kind of form that doesn’t really mesh with the marble-looking alabaster.  In the back room, a single multi-figure piece takes up the entire space.  Three humongous resin white heads, lit from within, are situated staring at each other among a field of white stones.  Carved into the heads are words describing “states of being”.  I didn’t really know what to make of this piece meaning-wise, but it was interesting to look at.

Finally, for something completely different, there are some beautiful still lifes up at Gallery Henoch.  Ranging from the baseball-themed (sold!) Daniel Greene “Throw ‘Til You Win” from his recent carnival series to the (also sold!) hyper-precise painting of stacks of newspapers (“Recycle”) by Steve Mills, this show is full of finely painted pieces to look at and provided a nice change of pace in the middle of my journey through all the abstract work in the surrounding galleries.

After all of that art, and all of that expo hall walking, my legs had just enough energy left to get me back to Penn Station for the quick and thankfully uneventful ride home.

On Thursday I visited the Jacob Javits Convention Center for the 2009 edition of the PhotoPlus Expo, an annual photographer’s trade show that I’ve visited every year since 2001.  One good sign for the economy was that the expo hall was completely packed with visitors.  Every aisle was jammed and many booths were stuffed with people.  (Other anecdotal evidence of a rebounding economy:  very crowded shopping centers here in central New Jersey last weekend.)

On the other hand, there were two notable absences from this year’s show.  Adobe, which always has a major presence in the front of the expo hall, was amazingly missing this year.  They are one of the big draws with a booth that includes demonstrations and tutorials about using Adobe software, with a focus on Photoshop techniques for photographers (though in recent years there’s been too much time spent on Lightroom, a piece of software that I regret buying and which I found completely unusable).  In the past, the first thing I would do at Javits is check out the Adobe booth, look at the schedule for interesting seminars, and make sure my butt was planted in a seat ahead of time.  No Adobe, though, in 2009, presumably because they’re saving money and because they have no new products to promote at this time.

The other obvious, and perplexing, absence was Panasonic, whose cameras receive rave reviews but which always seem to be in short supply.  With major presences from Canon and Nikon, it seems curious that Panasonic wouldn’t be here to get their cameras into the hands of the people most likely to spread word of mouth.  I don’t recall if Panasonic had been at past shows, though, so I don’t know if this was a new development or par for the course for Panasonic.

As for the show itself, I didn’t sign up for any seminars this year and stuck to the expo hall, which was the same as usual.  Perhaps less new stuff to drool over than in the past (though perhaps that’s because I’m pretty happy with my current equipment right now); a lot of online photo labs pushing their photobooks and other press products; many of the same software products from past years.  One booth that looked interesting was Metal Mural, a company which prints photographs onto aluminum panels.  I plan to give them a try with some reproductions of my paintings.  Also, if you were willing to wait in a maddeningly slow line (I was), you could get a free sample pack of some of Epson’s newest inkjet paper which looks quite promising for artistic purposes, such as Epson Hot Press Bright Paper (they also have a “natural” paper without optical brightening agents, as well as a cold press paper in bright and natural forms as well).  Can’t wait to give those samples a try!

I picked up a book from one of the several book publishers present, Practical HDR: A complete guide to creating High Dynamic Range images with your Digital SLR.  It’s a great looking book that contains some useful information about HDR photography (and some very nice HDR images), but I will admit that I pretty much read the whole book on the 56 minute train ride home from New York and found that you could probably summarize most of the useful information in a couple of pages (or even a few bullet points).  The most useful part was the explanation of how to obtain the proper range of exposures for best results, though afterward you realize it’s not particularly complicated or mysterious.  But I am now inspired to do some HDR photography and see how it turns out.