Essays

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=220 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <A HREF="essays__m.htm#essays" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays ">Essay By</A></div> <div> <A HREF="essays__m.htm#essays" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays "><B>Marcelle Polednik</B></A><A HREF="essays__m.htm#essays" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays "><B> </B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="essays__m.htm#enigmatic_urbanscapes_barry" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays ">Essay By </A></div> <div> <A HREF="essays__m.htm#enigmatic_urbanscapes_barry" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays "><B>Donald Kuspit</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="essays__m.htm#ecstatic_reserve_in_the_work_of_barry" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays ">Essay B</A><A HREF="essays__m.htm#ecstatic_reserve_in_the_work_of_barry" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays ">y</A><A HREF="essays__m.htm#ecstatic_reserve_in_the_work_of_barry" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays "> </A></div> <div> <A HREF="essays__m.htm#ecstatic_reserve_in_the_work_of_barry" TARGET="TRLX_Middle" TITLE="Essays "><B>Dominique Nahas</B></A></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" width="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="essays"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Recent Paintings"><B>HOME</B></A></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>BARRY MASTELLER</B></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Essays</B></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Essay By </B><B>Marcelle Polednik</B><B> </B></div> <bR> <div> In an age when California landscape painting is less an aesthetic category than a geographical designation, Barry Masteller contemplates the history of this genre and the distinctiveness of the scenery that inspired it. At first glance, Masteller's paintings evade specificities of time and place. Depicting a somewhere that is nowhere in particular, a golden, eternal hour, they are at once transcendent and elusive. This timeless quality, however, is neither universal nor indefinite. Rather, it has its roots in Masteller's sustained engagement with the particularity of his surrounding landscape and the history of its representation.</div> <bR> <div> Since the 19th century, artists have flocked to California compelled by the beauty of its natural terrain and the unique light that floods the soil. The exceptional setting inspired two diverging sensibilities, each one aimed at capturing the rare qualities of the environs. Artists such as William Keith and Joseph Breuer strove to painstakingly and faithfully record the luminous views they observed. Their contemporaries, Gottardo Piazzoni and Xavier Martinez, on the other hand, focused on light as a mercurial agent of transformation and created contemplative, abstracted compositions. </div> <bR> <div> While distinctly contemporary, Masteller's canvases betray the influence of those early pioneers who recognized California's singular fusion of land and light as fruitful ground for a more meditative approach. Piazzoni continually emphasized his concern “not with the external aspect of the landscape, but with its inward life.” The haunting glow that envelops Masteller's landscapes also hints at the mystery lurking beneath the natural world. For Barry Masteller as well as for his historical predecessors, the landscape serves as a conduit to unknown worlds and hidden dimensions.</div> <bR> <div> Tall and wiry, round and sensual, or angular, trees are the protagonists of Masteller's paintings. In The Woods series, rows of trees silhouetted against the burning sky transform the landscape into a contemplative interplay of light and form. In other series, such as Clouds over Sea, the sky itself takes center stage. The linear, horizontal bands of distant sea and clouds break over the middle ground, revealing billowing, recognizable cloud formations. Abstract color fields give way to the physical world. Rather than focusing on land, these landscapes explore what can be seen from the earthbound perspective. Though firmly grounded, the paintings soar to new heights.</div> <bR> <div> Masteller's works remind that paintings not only represent but also exist as physical landscapes. They reflect a keen understanding of paintings as three-dimensional terrains, formed by sedimented layers of pigment, binder and varnish, and built up, like geological formations, over the course of time. Rather than a weighty, physical presence, however, the works exude a lightness more befitting of a mirage. The ethereal brushstrokes that hover on the surface of these canvases enhance the insubstantial quality of the apparitions. The painstaking method with which Masteller applies the paint to canvas, the delicacy of the forms and the subtlety of the deep, sultry hues invokes the jewel-like tonalist surfaces that haunt his compositions. </div> <div> Barry Masteller's paintings offer a provocative challenge to the notion that the past brilliance of place California landscape painting has dimmed in recent decades. Light burns intensily, albeit wistfully, over the expanse of his canvases.</div> <bR> <div> Marcelle Polednik<FONT SIZE="4" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" >  PhD.</FONT></div> <bR> <div> Director of Collections and Exhibitions, Monterey Museum of Art. Currently Director of the Milwaukee Museum of Art.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="enigmatic_urbanscapes_barry"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></div> <div> <B>Enigmatic Urbanscapes: Barry Masteller's Boulevards</B><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> <B>by Donald Kuspit</B></div> <bR> <div> Is there a precedent for Barry Masteller's beautiful, haunting<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> boulevards? We see the same moody elegance in Gustave Caillebotte's Paris,<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> the Place de l'Europe on a Rainy Day, 1877--the same brooding isolation, the<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> same grandly empty spaces, for all the figures that inhabit them.<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> Masteller's cities are 21st century New York and San Francisco, and his<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> lights and darks are more cunningly balanced than Caillebotte's--the dark<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> clothing of his 19th century figures hardly makes a dent in the hazy<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> luminosity, while the strong radiation from Masteller's luminous windows<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> locks horns with the darkness (their interaction conveys the tension of the<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> city, hidden by its deceptively bland geometry)--but they have the same<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> strange spaciousness: a peculiar mix of seemingly infinitely extending<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> straight streets and the claustophobic intersections--deceptively broad,<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> open spaces--where they converge.</div> <bR> <div> Caillebotte's place and Masteller's boulevards are equally grand, but<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> the boulevards are much more complex--not to say dramatic and<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> disturbing--than the place. The Parisian buildings and umbrellas are<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> curved, fluid structures, with an ornamental flair, the American buildings<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> are bleakly rational--facilely functional rectangles, with the wrap-around<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> Bauhaus-style windows that confirm their basicness. Whatever curves<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> appear, as in the sidewalk of Boulevard 53 and the pipes of Boulevard 54,<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> both 2005, or ornamental patterns, as in Boulevard 46 and Boulevard 47,<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> both 2005, seem incidental to the matter of fact look of the scene.<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> Masteller's light softens hard American cities, more the products of<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> mechanical engineering than imagination, while Caillebotte's light brings<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> out the softness of the Parisian surfaces, giving them an imaginative<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> expressiveness.</div> <bR> <div> But in the end Masteller's New York City and San Francisco are much more<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> uncanny and fantastic than Caillebotte's place CityParis. Caillebotte observes a<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> scene, but Masteller invents his scenes: his pictures are abstract<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> constructions that convey the strangeness and alienation of urban life even<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> as they suggest the larger enigma of representation, hinting at its<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> problematic, uncertain character. Masteller is a conceptual painter: he<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> unites fragments of the urban environment--carefully chosen from a<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> repertoire of photographs--to create a kind of picture puzzle, that is, a<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> representation that conveys the unreal look of every convincing<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> representation even as it precisely realizes reality. The empirical is<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> subsumed in the enigmatic, making for a sense of uncanny truthfulness,<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> however factually bizarre the picture finally seems. Boulevard 44 and<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> Boulevard 45, both 2004 convey this doubleness--the sense of the<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> unfathomableness of reality that emerges from excruciating attention to its<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> detail. What Masteller finally represents is the uncanniness immanent in<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> space--space whose uncanniness becomes manifest because Masteller has lived<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> its contradictions. These are evident in the at-oddness of the buildings<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> and streets, and above all in the clash of light and dark. There is a hint<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> of latent violence in Masteller's Boulevards, for all their apparent calm.</div> <div> I think Masteller's urbanscapes are a breakthrough. He has previously<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> been known for landscapes, influenced by Monet, as he has acknowledged. His<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> trees have a glowing intensity, his clouds a peculiar impenetrability, for<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> all their ephemerality. Masteller is clearly a master observer of<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> atmosphere, light and dark, natural form, and their interplay. The results<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> are solemnly harmonious pictures. But in the urbanscapes this facade of<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> harmony is broken, nature is no longer the scene, and there is a sense of<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> disruptive, even demonic power. Perhaps Masteller has discovered himself<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> through his experience of the city. The innocence of the landscape has<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> certainly disappeared. No apologies for haunting beauty; it remains credible, </div> <div> despite the attacks<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT>on it by different modernists, among them Duchamp and </div> <div> Newman. Beauty<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT>conveys the esthetic conviction that is the core of art at its most<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <div> intimate.</div> <div>  </div> <div> Donald Kuspit </div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Donald Kuspit</B> is an art critic and a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Kuspit is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture,and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism, and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="ecstatic_reserve_in_the_work_of_barry"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></div> <div> <B>Ecstatic Reserve in the Work of Barry Masteller</B></div> <div> <B>By </B><B>Dominique Nahas</B></div> <bR> <div> The shimmering bimorphic forms of Barry Masteller's landscape paintings predominate the artist's work. This is not to say that Masteller has ignored urban scenes or the use of hard-edged geometry. In his Boulevard series, for example, the artist has arranged city streets and apartment buildings, along with the silent movements of silhouetted Hopperesque people seen through store or apartment windows, to create a sense of community and isolation. In another body of work entitled Moon Sequence the artist has gone out of his way to investigate geometric repetition by painting naturalistic scenes as sequential events. We see the differing position of moon and stars over varying dusky silhouettes of trees in Moon Sequence 6 (2004), for example, where an entire image consists of nine panels stacked vertically in sets of three. In Moon Sequence 2 (2003) the artist lays out, predella-like, a horizontal ordering of three small panels. When read from left to right the work creates a narrative of shifting perspectives of land and night sky, as if we were viewing several frames of a film at one time.</div> <div>  </div> <div> Deep vistas of land, water and sky, however, are where Barry Masteller finds his essential voice. His sensory landscapes, all imaginary, are immediately identifiable through his signature use of saturated colors such as auburns, crimsons, browns and ochres. The varying light effects in his work recall the glowing effects in the works of Rembrandt and Turner, the charcoal drawings of Seurat, as well as the early-century California Tonalists.</div> <div> To achieve his chiaroscuro effects the artist uses a light, delicate touch in which brushes and rags are used to apply pigments and washes as well as to wipe away wet areas of the canvas. Mark making and image-formation and spatial tension, therefore, are created as much by accretion as by reduction. The essential drama that Masteller suggests through his deft use of light is cyclic: perpetual emergence and dissolution from gauzy indeterminance into anticipatory consciousness. His paintings, irradiated with light, are seemingly at a standstill, mysteriously elusive and ecstatic. In the works, the suffused contours of our world as we know it are present but they seem wholly other, as in Earth and Sky 479, (2003). This is not surprising, as the artist's indwelling worlds --- not inhabitable by man - appear to be undergoing deep-rooted, slow change. </div> <bR> <div> Masteller wants us to participate in his intensified perception of objects and the space around them, in the transcendental sublime. His image making compels us to take stock of primary dimensions of sensible phenomena, which open up and then dissipate into the realms of invisibility and the hidden. These immanent fields of possibilities, paradoxically, seem to rise up from within the earth itself, confronting us with an outward sense of harmonious fullness which seems to close in on itself, as in Earth and Sky 470 (2003). In a mid-ground of reflected water there lies a concealed reserve of time and space which pulses secretly throughout the artist's work, often punctuated by the silhouettes of round-shouldered trees, as in Earth and Sky 498 (2004) which serve as surrogates for the human form. This imagistic play is clearly not so much a depiction of the actual physical world held in suspension as much as a reflection of the painter's varying states of mind.</div> <div>  </div> <div> Barry Masteller's ongoing Earth and Sky series asks that we reconsider, in pictorial terms, what we take for granted. When we see a horizon line shimmering in the distance of his bucolic scenes we are not meant to train our eyes and thoughts solely and exclusively to time that is to be but also to be aware of hidden realms within his work. Subliminally, we join a dimension of absence, which is literally grounded in the artist's work, as we consider the terrain that lies below the mounded earth in the foreground, expressed as unseen. Similarly we become slowly aware and marvelously compelled by a sense of the unknowable in the area which lies beyond the horizon in each of his paintings --- implied but undepictable regions of time and space --- made manifest through the suggestion of aura which permeates the earth.</div> <div>  </div> <div> Wonderment regarding the hidden face of the order of things seems to preoccupy Barry Masteller. He captures that feeling in his paintings. In his notes he writes: “ With the passing of the years I feel a greater connection to the earth, especially to light and the way the physical world responds to light with illumination, reflection and emanation.” </div> <bR> <div> Dominique Nahas</div> <bR> <bR> <div> Dominique Nahas is an art critic and independent curator based in Manhattan. He is also a regular reviewer for Art in America and the editor of d'Art International</div> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <B> <A NAME="lecture"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B></div> <div> <A HREF="#essays" TITLE="Essays ">Return To Top Of Page</A></div> <bR> <div>  All text and images contained on this site copyright  Barry Masteller 2014</div> <div>  <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2450319-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); </script>         <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? 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