Nice Art If You Can Find It at New York’s Armory Show

It wasn’t the best show or the worst show — so let’s accentuate the positive.

A close friend, an art historian with good, catholic taste, sent me a text message from the high-end opening of the Armory Show. He knew I was planning to visit the next day. “Never saw so much 💩💩💩,” he wrote, the ultimate in succinct, accessible art criticism. I like an apt emoji, and “happy horsesh**” isn’t entirely inapt in describing this year’s show, which, with 240 dealers, is New York’s biggest. I’ve used a new one — 🫃🏻 (the pregnant man emoji, in case it’s not appearing on your device) — when a word like “insane” just doesn’t seem tough enough.

The pregnant man emoji is next to one for Tinker Bell, Peter Pan’s muse. Someone in Emoji Land has a sense of humor, or decorum. She signals toward him, or her, since men can’t get pregnant, as if to say “you silly ass” to those dumb, demented souls who believe otherwise.

There’s no butterfly-net emoji, and no straitjacket one, either, a shame when I’m looking for a visual for PC crazy. The marotte, the fool’s head staff carried by, well, fools, isn’t on my emoji roster, and neither is the inflated pig’s bladder nor the pinwheel, all constants in medieval art signaling folly, windbags, or brain death. Were more people nuttier then? How could that be possible?

It wasn’t the best Armory Show but I’ve seen worse. There were plenty of good things. I spent last Friday afternoon at the four-day fair and had to look harder for the good stuff than I remember. In covering art fairs, I accentuate the positive. I like art dealers. They’re the unhailed nobility of the art world.

I loved Matthew Pillsbury’s photography when I first saw it years ago. He was a young artist then. He uses long exposure time to shoot crowds in familiar though usually formal settings like museums. This technique blurs people, turning them ghostly. He shoots deep focus and in black-and-white, giving stationary objects like dinosaur bones in his scenes of London’s Natural History Museum a creepy vitality.

Edwynn Houk Gallery’s Pillsburys are in color and show iconic, people-pleasing places like the Unisphere in Queens and Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, which is decorated with murals of scenes from Madeline. They’re more fun than jarring but still challenge photography’s fame for freezing time. Blurred people propose a fading away, a coming-and-going, that’s the fate of us all. In the Bemelmans Bar photograph, a woman’s coat and the drinks on her table are crisp but she seems to dissolve before our eyes. It’s $18,000.

Jack Bell Gallery is London-based and specializes in the art of sub-Saharan Africa. I want to know more about art there since it’s not only very different but, let’s face it, Africa’s growing by bounds in population and economic prowess. The artists are young, as is the arts scene. Mix titanic change as well as strife, percolate, and we get high-octane art.

Bell is in a section for galleries no older than ten years. At the Armory Show, he devoted his space to Marc Padeu (b. 1990) from Cameroon, a messy place where 250 languages are spoken and tribal, French, and English culture both vie and mingle. Padeu paints family gatherings in rich color and contrasts in dark and bright. “History is my passion, and religious belief has always been present around me,” he says. Outside of America and Western Europe, art with a religious or family theme isn’t unusual, and grudge art’s rare, too.

Padeu’s a precise but fluid painter. This, his palette, and his scale — big but not behemoth — give his work a special energy. His paintings feel serious and monumental but also informal. I thought of Géricault or Gros. Bell’s booth was sold out, a big coup, and prices ran between $55,000 and $65,000. That’s smart and reasonable for a high-quality, new artist.

Bell’s space is in Mason’s Yard, off Jermyn Street. I’m looking forward to a visit next time I’m in London. He’s venturing into Brazilian art, too.

A few months ago, I reviewed an exhibition at the National Gallery on contemporary art in the Caribbean and South America. It’s another part of the world where we blinkered scholars of old New England and New York artists tend to know next to nothing. Almeida & Dale, based in São Paulo, specializes in big-shot Brazilian artists and introduced me to Hélio Melo (1926–2001).

Melo was a self-taught artist from Acre at the western edge of Brazil who worked as a rubber tapper when he was a young man. This drew me in part because we tap our maple trees, but mostly I was drawn to the quiet beauty of Celebration at the Rubber Plantation from 1993. It’s ink and pigment from leaves crushed by the artist and mixed with latex as a thickener. I suspect working on a rubber plantation in Amazon Brazil, day in, day out, makes a tougher, rougher man than sugaring in Norman Rockwell’s Vermont.

I’m a sucker for nocturnes, which are lush and mellow, suggestive and stealthy. Darkness obscures so there are different compositional challenges. Melo’s small picture depicts a celebration in a see-through pavilion in a cleared jungle setting so there’s an odd juxtaposition of human presence against thick nature. At the far left is a sitting, stooped figure, drunk or heart-broken. Melo often stages his scenes, and in this case he depicts a row of cropped foliage in the foreground, or a downstage apron.

Melo taught himself to paint while living and working on the plantation, so he’s very much an outsider artist. There’s a strong ecological theme in some of his work since rubber farming on an industrial scale is so destructive, but this picture, small and poignant, drew me by its beauty. It’s $50,000.

If he’s drawing from the theater, Guillaume Bresson (b. 1982) is positively cinematic. Bresson is from Toulouse in France but lives and works in New York. He does large-scale paintings that meld the story-telling drama of French history paintings, like the big Revolution and Napoleonic scenes at the Louvre, with the prosaic, intimate qualities of genre painting, or scenes from everyday life. His style is hyper-realistic. Nathalie Obadia, based in Paris and Brussels, devoted her booth to Bresson.

Bresson painted Untitled between 2020 and 2022 based on his experience as an artist in residence in 2020 at HOLA, or the Heart of Los Angeles, an after-school mentorship program for young people. He and his protégés staged the scene using photographs Bresson took on city streets and photomontages they made together. Kids were then models, with Bresson teaching the iconography of Old Master gesture and architectural setting. It’s $150,000. He’s a wonderful painter who channels Caravaggio and Guercino as he depicts a New York Ashcan-style street scene.

I saw two bewitching sets of watercolors. Rutger Brandt, the Amsterdam dealer, showed cryptic, black-and-white watercolors by Radenko Milak (b. 1980), who lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They’re Hitchcock-eerie nocturnes showing tiny people in modern city apartments seen through lit windows and somber street scenes. The dealer and, I suppose, the artist, say they question “the way governments worldwide reacted to the COVID-19 threat compared to the threat of climate change.” I’m told “there is no longer room for national politics in a globalized world.”

Why ruin great work with notions like these? Some dealers and artists think they need to be au courant to sell work. This trivializes what’s gorgeous, velvety, edgy art. Brandt’s booth was sold out. It also won the Armory Show’s best-booth award. Both are tributes to the quality of the art as art, not as polemic. Looking at it, no one except those with climate on the brain would think about controlling the weather, much less the Covid mass hysteria and farce.

Milak’s a fantastic artist. Let’s not make his work an illustration. Dancing with Shadows is small and sold for $3,500, the best deal ever. Black-and-white watercolors aren’t unique but they’re rare and counterintuitive.

I’ll end with women at a crossroad, under cross-fire, or just plain cross. Danae and the Parakeet, by Kyle Staver (b. 1953), was at Half Gallery. Staver specializes in mythological and Shakespearean scenes, most unusual for an artist today. Danae is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and an Old Master staple. A voluptuous young thing, she was imprisoned in a tower after her father, a Greek king, heard from an oracle that her son would one day kill him. There’s no sex in solitary confinement, King Smarty Pants thought, so no son.

He didn’t sense how tricky Zeus could be, and how legendary his daughter’s beauty. Zeus inseminates her through a blast of sunlight, though in some versions of Danae’s story he’s a shower of gold. Danae bears a son, Perseus, who kills the king, beheads Medusa, and founds Mycenae. Titian, Rembrandt, and many others tackled the story.

Staver’s picture, from 2009 and 53 by 63 inches, looks like a Bonnard, which means modern, which means free. Danae is beside herself in angularity and undaintily orgasmic. She and Zeus aren’t exactly high-school sweethearts who stay hitched for life. Rather, it’s a quick hookup that’s less about her pregnancy and more about her get-out-of-jail card. Hence the bright blue-and-white parakeet freed from its cage. The thing’s intense and painted con brio. It’s $32,000.

I’d never heard of AES+F, a collaborative of four Russian artists, all born in the mid 1950s and working together for 30 years. They come from architecture, graphic design, and fashion photography and create porcelain, videos, and drawings. Galeria Senda from Barcelona showed porcelain and paintings in their booth.

Inquisition, or Women’s Labor is part of a series of paintings by AES+F called Inverso Mundus, or “World Turned Upside Down.” Characters enact demented utopias where students punish teachers, pigs gut butchers, and high-brow women who look like they live on the Upper East Side give a man, well, his comeuppance, and in a torture chamber designed by IKEA. It’s $100,000. It’s campy and apocalyptic, very Russian, and is very much of our times.