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Mark Innerst at Paul Kasmin - New York

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Brooks Adams

Mark Innerst's new paintings offer strong doses of both culture and nature. The nature quotient in this show was a group of brooding forest scenes, made after 9/11 when the artist sought refuge at his house in the Pennsylvania woods. Better known for his edgy cityscapes and Rorschach-like industrial river views, Innerst bravely retrod old ground, with leitmotivs familiar from the Barbizon and Hudson River schools, in darkling studies of light effects on bark and leaves, with almost no patches of sky. In Joined Trees Divided, the largest work on view, a cancerous-looking arboreal stump in the foreground and a bright clearing in the distance are rendered as dots and small pools of acrylic paint, at once glassy and murky. Pastel-colored bleats of glaze render the bark luminous in an otherwise close-valued picture. Separation, a smaller study of the same motif, is more tightly cropped; no clearing here, just a glowering close-up of that weird fissured trunk, illumined by a bit of gold filament on the custom-made black neo-Dutch frame. I was reminded of German Romantic paintings of twisted trees as allegories of friendship and love rent asunder. Indeed, these treescapes can be seen as quietly inhabited, if only by the artist's quest for solace and escape.

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Long a valedictorian of skewed early modernist cityscapes, Innerst, in his 2000 show, depicted both street scenes with translucent American flags and ticker-tape parades showered with Malevich-like trapezoids. Now he has taken on the charged subject of Manhattan firefighters, seen from the rear and rendered as red patches with lost profiles in the diminutive Empire Hook & Ladder. He's also dilated on Times Square in a number of brimming, semi-abstracted compositions featuring gaseous streetlamps, geometric signage and emphatic, top-to-bottom cuts of l'heure bleue sky. The large horizontal Pageant, with its strong red, white and blue sign at upper left, its pileup of slightly bleeding blue-white rectangles and squares, and its bleary yellow and red traffic signs, is a kind of urban hallucination, a novel fusion of Munch and late Mondrian. The artist also continues to mine a rich vein of attenuated, vertical-format skyscraper paintings. In Portable Times Square, the sky becomes a flat cutout shape which paradoxically appears to dissolve the more solid forms of skyscrapers on either side.

Innerst sometimes seems like a time traveler, and indeed he first gained prominence in the appropriationist '80s, when his small, exquisitely crafted pictures could look a bit twee. Yet he has always been capable of delivering deadpan zingers in the absolute present tense. The best of these is Chelsea Piers, one in a series of paintings ostensibly depicting empty docks, bridges and boat slips. Here, the referent is more sly, though: a spectral depiction of an actual driving range, complete with soaring pylons, vertical netting and strange floating rectangles (part of the net?), with a wildly foreshortened skyline in the distance. In its precisionist rendering and wryly humorous choice of motif (the range is only minutes away from the West Chelsea galleries), Innerst has found a most apt signifier.

Mark Innerst at Paul Kasmin - New York

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Brooks Adams

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