Modern Painters

REVIEWS104 MODERN PAINTERS JUNE/JULY 2016BLOUINARTINFO.COMNEW YORK``````Jake BerthotBetty Cuningham Gallery // March 12–April 23``````A PAINTER WHO began activelyshowing in New York in the 1970s,Berthot is represented here bya selection of works made between1969 and 2014, the year ofhis death. They range from wildlyPHVV\DOPRVWJUDIÀWLLQÁHFWHGcompositions—like a 1991 canvas,named in honor of Dylan Thomas,ZLWKSDVVDJHVRIGULSS\ZKLWHwashing and Pollockian lines—to1973’s Bone, a shaped canvas in coolgrayish greens that resemblesnothing so much as the schematicdiagram of a carefully opened boxas seen from above. Berthot is knownfor paintings depicting obfuscatedlandscapes—as if a forest were tobe glimpsed through fog or gauze—but the works here are more purelyabstract, showcasing experimentswith the grid, surface texture, and``````WKHFODVKRISULPDU\FRORUHGVKDSHVSometimes It’s All I Want, 1995,with its brash, waterfallingcollision of red and green, recallsHoward Hodgkin; Three Triangles(Red, Yellow, Orange), 1991, isa Suprematist whirlwind of formslayered over a smudgy, hazy ocherground. In certain smaller works,like Untitled (Carl’s Red), 1988,Berthot lets the titular oil pigmentbuild up into a mottled, unevenskin. You’d be forgiven, in descendingWRWKHJDOOHU\·VORZHUÁRRUIRUthinking that you’ve wandered intoanother exhibition entirely. Here\RX·OOÀQGWKHDIRUHPHQWLRQHGBoneas well as Nympha Red, 1969, ahulking, symmetrical, shaped canvas,nearly monochromatic, the boxygeometry offset by seepage alongits straight lines. —Scott Indrisek``````NEW YORK``````Raoul De KeyserDavid Zwirner // March 18–April 23``````“GENTLE FIGHTS” is how architect PaulRobbrecht described the working methods ofhis friend the late Belgian painter Raoul DeKeyser. It’s an image that jibes with De Keyser’spractice overall: a model of quaint, romanticworkmanship, full of intense, highly personalexperimentation. Living and working in the smalltown of Deinze, he toiled at canvases largeand small, often taking mundane sights in hisimmediate surroundings for inspiration. As theshow’s curator, Ulrich Loock, jokes during awalk-through, “The radius of his search for motifswas maybe 100 meters around his house.”Those motifs included things within the studio(a staircase, a gate, windowsill clasps) as wellas in the town: trees glimpsed through thewindow or the geometry of the local soccerfield. Because of this relationship to objectsactually observed, Loock has proposed a way ofapproaching De Keyser’s work that, he says,“does not enter the discourse between abstrac-tion and figuration.” These paintings are “almostalways referential”—even if the reference inquestion is to the picture plane, or to a previouspainting of his that the artist has chosen to recall.This selection of work ranges from the 1970sthrough 2012—De Keyser died in Octoberof that year, and a cluster of small paintings hemade in the months before his passing areinstalled here, exactly as they hung in the artist’s``````FROM TOP:Jake BerthotSometimesIt’s All IWant, 1995.Oil on linen,22 x 18 in.Raoul DeKeyserHayward 3,1993. Oil on canvas,21 x 12 in. FROM TOP: JAKE BERTHOT AND BETTY CUNINGHAM GALLERY; DAVID ZWIRNER