Nonfigurative Maximalism in a Time of Multiplicity 

Those of you who read which I suspect is most you, may take a pause at this essay’s title, wondering where you’ve heard this phrase recently, or at least something very similar. You’d be correct of course. Hyperallergic recently published Geometric Abstraction in the Age of Disparity, a review of Lisa Corinne Davis’s newest work by the one and only John Yau.

Lisa has been hitting for a minute, and if you’re a fan of abstraction you can see why. Tight, right? I’m glad to admit that I dig artists that roll up their sleeves and really focus on high craft. No need to pretend like we don’t just. love. really sharp painting. I mean, look at these! She’s got chops, period.

Lisa also has a broad definition of practice, which I appreciate- in addition to making, she teaches, curates and writes. So we share that as a point of fact and no I’m not equating the success or rigor or importance of my practice to hers. And, regular readers also know what a huge John Yau fan I am (I’ve referenced his essays on this blog no less than 15 times). He (and Lisa) do, I think, an excellent job of recognizing the relevancy of openness and intentional rigor around identity while also making time in their practice to address ideas of universality of human experience. This is no mean feat- snaps all around.

With a set up like above, you know the “however” is coming, so, here it is. When I read things like “stretched the possibilities of painting into a territory defined by digital systems, algorithms, flow charts, and diagrams” I just smirk. Not laugh, more of a self-righteous grin. Those of you who know me irl can probably picture the left side of my smile creeping up. Thanks to everyone who says thank you for my words, here and in shorter format over on IG, which I will continue to enjoy giving away for the love of it*. And, a serious art writer has to put some smack down now and then because that is what criticism is. So, let’s try this serious thing on for size.

Put a pin in the notion that the medium of painting can meaningfully comment on “the digital” (and leave that pin in the wall, and never come back to it). Brass tacks- denizens of the capital “A” Art world pontificating about flow charts and diagrams is amusing if I’m feeling generous. If you can’t write a nested IF function in MS Excel or even change out the style on a flow chart in PowerPoint I think you’re out over your skis on the topics that have to do with the world of business, friend. I’ve never once been working on a project pro forma or critical milestones in a digital format and come across anything that in any way shares aesthetic with Lisa’s work. Never.

Geometry is, no doubt, a system of rules. And, Lisa is no doubt interested in systems and their semiotics and how that literally shapes the way we see the world (key word being “see”). I just… I just don’t buy the notion that Lisa’s work is “about” geometry, just because it has some straight lines and squares. Hyper graphic maximalism is more appropriate and that is all love, as I shared above. Keep cranking it out; also and, keep it real, folks.

Why do I like “multiplicity” better than “disparity”? Well let’s start with the fact that John admits multiplicity is present (“they welcome myriad narratives without ever settling into a single storyline“) and the gallery, Miles McEnery, points it out in the show statement (“her works are several things at once“). Disparity is “a noticeable and usually significant difference or dissimilarity.” I’m pretty certain that the cacophonous quality of Lisa’s work doesn’t really make one notice significant differences; maximalism is conflation as its most overpowering. Multiplicity, is, simply, the state of being various. Am I nitpicking? No, I think the distinction that these works aren’t “about” highlighting differences using geometry to comment on algorithms is worth a moment of thought for all of you. I think Lisa’s really well executed, thoughtful and engaging works capture this moment of the flattening of culture and the firehose that is digital media in a way that is eerily comforting. Like that uneasy but familiar feeling of being sucked into… whatever it is. Feeling resentful of something that has power over you is “several things at once.”

I think it all comes down to my gut feeling that when writers, even great writers like John, start describing artwork as being “about” anything, you simplify a piece of Art, reducing it to a mere container, at best a codex, a sort of proxy that only exists to give us a reason to congratulate ourselves for ideas that are more important than the work itself. I understand words are the writer’s bias. And, stop it.

*BTW, in the link above I referenced a prior essay where I shared thoughts about an essay by Hakim Bishara to whom I must offer congratulations, I know we all look forward to them taking on more responsibilities at Hyperallergic.

Paul Feeley

Sharon at Two Coats notes a major shift in Paul’s work evident in a (posthumous) exhibit at Garth Greenan. She notes that today when artists work freely across all mediums and platforms, “the measured boundary-crossing that Feeley undertook in the 1960s may seem quaint. Still, there is something durably refreshing about his conviction, then iconoclastic, that undulating lines and shapes could convey a robust sense of humanity, and that even hard-edge geometric shapes could convey emotional content.”

More and more

#paulfeeley

Conrad Marca-Relli

was an American artist who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists (he was part of the “downtown group”). Marca-Relli was among the 24 out of a total 256 New York School artists included in the Ninth Street Show and in all the following New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals from 1953 to 1957. These Annuals were important because the participants were chosen by the artists themselves.

#conradmarcarelli

Ana Claudia Almeida

is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Through material explorations with paper, fabric, plastic, oil pastels, and paint, Almeida investigates the tension between functionality and abstraction, interior and exterior, and the individual and the environment. Artsy notes she (like Suzanne and Teresa) is having a good moment.

#anaclaudiaalmeida

Expectations

This is not the first time I am writing about something personal. This is also not the first time I’ve tied personal challenges to broader social context.

Here we go… I am working backwards from estrangement from my family. I’m not alone (Fortesa Latifi in Cosmopolitan in ’23; Anna Russell in The New Yorker in 2024). But I’m uneasy about it.

I have a daughter who is trans, and I have evangelical parents. You almost definitely see where this is going, don’t you?

And maybe your expectations are not serving you. We are primed to react. I am not a scientist or even well read, so I won’t pretend to know the canon about evolution and human psychology. I also am not going out on the skinny branches to say that having a reaction to a situation is a survival reflex that all creatures have, and in some contexts it can save us, and, in 2025, with the quantity of complex situations that we encounter daily, maybe, just maybe, it’s (also) not serving us.

I’m wondering if we’ve forgotten how to pause and listen or read deeper since we all have the entirety of human existence, experience and history in our pocket, and it’s coming at us all. Day. Long. The algorithm also makes it near impossible not to get caught up in the culture war, even if it isn’t a super highway through the middle of your expectations about what family should be. The math that feeds the math of late Capitalism knows that the easiest food for attention is fear, anger, jealousy or some cocktail of all three. And yes I’ll acknowledge that it is totally an option to turn away from our phones and computers. I’ve been trying to do more of that and it seems silly not to acknowledge it as I sit at a computer to write this and, at some point later, you read it on your device.

I am trying to discard my expectations. I don’t know that I can work backward through the estrangement, which I won’t take time to explain because family business, any other way.

The most basic question that arises for me out this experience of living the culture war in the Southeast in real time is the one raised by Fortesa, Anna and I’m sure many others, about the misalignment of the societal obligation to except familial relations from, really, the requirement of basic decency, and the necessity that all good relationships have defined boundaries.

I. Do. Not. Take. This. Question. Lightly. 

It’s a contradiction for sure that our American ethos of individuality, which to be specific is, for most of us, an intense preoccupation with individuation, runs headlong into this cultural expectation for subordination to the nuclear family unit. Like many children of evangelical culture, my relationship with authority is complex and complicated. I certainly came out the other side of this childhood landscape with an aversion to groups that require correctly spoken purity tests and am often surprisingly and frustratingly demurring to strong willed authoritative language.

And… I’ve acknowledged many times in this forum that I plot myself left of center on our socio-political spectrum, so I tend towards the belief that the toxic aspects of hyper masculine, Judeo-Christian and white-centered ethnocentrism should not be allowed to continue for another generation. Yes, we’re going to skip right over the fact that I said I was averse to purity tests and virtue signaling and then said I was a progressive. Good for you for noticing.

I think we are in a cultural moment- have been for some time- where people across the spectrum of beliefs and values actually share the desire (I would say the need) to be around people who don’t hurt us. I’m not going to unpack the baggage and dishonesty inherent in my parent’s insistence that “my side” is, generously, inconsiderate of “other” values (yeah, it’s super weird to see that word come flying back this way). I am drawing the contours of this challenge and that one is real, for certain in the abstract, and because of that, I am filled with the entire range of human emotions. From grace for my birth family that often surprises everyone in my nuclear family, to a selfish desire to return hurt by severing relationships with people because they have hurt me and my family. 

My relationship with my parents gives me nothing but questions. They include:

  • I feel affection for my parents, and is this the same as love (I tend to describe love as absolute trust and that is missing, I think on both sides)?
  • I sincerely want to understand how we love another and expect nothing in return (you would think I’d understand this as a parent, but living it as a parent doesn’t require understanding it)?
  • How do you have a relationship with someone you violently disagree with without feeling the need to change their heart? Right?!?!?
  • How do you communicate with someone who has not just a different lived reality, but a totally separate set of “facts,” IE, when there is very little shared truth between the parties?

Asking questions means you have to be still and listen, without expectations. Fuck this is fucking hard.