Alex Katz at Marlborough and Brent Sikkema - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 2000 by Richard Kalina

Alex Katz is one of the few artists whose work and the response it generates can function as markers of the art world's evolving direction and tastes. Exhibited steadily since the early 1950s and exploring a somewhat circumscribed stylistic and thematic terrain, Katz's paintings seem to drift regularly in and out of fashion. The later '90s proved to be a particularly congenial time for him. One would like to say that a persevering talent was being given his due, but it is just as likely that the lack of a dominant discourse allowed his considerable pictorial skills to assert themselves unburdened by outside ideological or stylistic interference. In any case, realism these days, particularly painterly realism, has nothing to be defensive about, and for me Katz works the field of gestural landscape better than anyone else. (I am less enthusiastic about the figure paintings and portraits. When they click, it's because of the color. The bravura brushwork that enlivens the landscapes, depicting form while standing on its own as gesture, is missing in Katz's simpler and somewhat stiffer renderings of flesh and fabric.)

The Marlborough show featured around 20 recent landscapes. While there were a handful of paintings that might be categorized as easel paintings (albeit large ones), the bulk of the work was, of mural scale, some so big that they rested on the floor and barely missed grazing the gallery's ceiling. While heroically sized work can often be intimidating, Katz's isn't. As that which is depicted approaches its real-life size, a curious intimacy is created, reinforced by Katz's softened and blurred edges. The paintings exert an almost palpable pull, urging you closer. This is particularly true in the paintings of water, such as Marine 9 and Marine 11, where the entire painting consists of a continuous field of light and deep turquoise, touched here and there with white. The water is calm and slightly swelling, conducive to contemplation, but mercifully devoid of intimations of the sublime. Reflection and the play of light on the water's surface are handled with particular deftness in the "Piers" series. In these works, pale, elegant swipes of paint, stylistically suspended somewhere between late Monet and late de Kooning, resolve themselves into recognizable forms--sunlight marking the spacing of a dock's boards, the wobbly echo of a vertical piling--while still retaining their abstract identity.

Abstract pictorial concerns assert themselves in all of Katz's landscapes. The big paintings of groves of trees, Browns, Green Dusk or Moonlight 2, for example, seem to be opportunities to explore tonal and chromatic variation, the play of verticals against diagonals, and overall field composition as much as they are occasions for a terse, yet perfectly convincing, mimesis. Katz has operated in this area for a long time. In the drawing show at Brent Sikkema were accomplished ink-and-watercolor drawings from 1950 to '52 that also depict trees and deal with many of the same issues.

Among the most appealing of his works from the past few years are the urban nocturnal landscapes, such as West 2, where windows, knocked in with what appears to be a single pass of a wide, loaded brush, are set against the deep, undifferentiated purply black of the building's bulk. Katz manages to capture, with an almost insouciant skill, that fluorescent-lit emptiness (punctuated here and there with activity) of an office building late at night. The painting is cool and distanced, and yet all the more romantic for it. Here is an artist operating at the peak of his powers.