John Willenbecher at Five Myles and CUNY Graduate Center - New York

Art in America, March, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell

In the 1960s and '70s, John Willenbecher was known as a sculptor. In the mid-'70s the New York artist produced a series of structures of painted wood and plaster that draw on the forms of constellations and nebulae, often with the symmetrical schemata of mazes superimposed on their surfaces. He crafted installations of three-dimensional spheres, pyramids and cones made out of wood and Plexiglas painted with passages of galactic gases and stars scored with the lines and arcs of a geomancer. Willenbecher regularly exhibited at Feigen, both in New York and in Chicago, through the 1960s, and he was active in the work of Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School. Willenbecher last mounted solo exhibitions in New York, at Hamilton Gallery and at the Academy of Sciences, in the 1980s, by which time he had redirected his attention to painting. This two-part survey covered the years since, offering a selection of paintings in acrylic on the thinnest of wood-panel supports, shown in New York for the first time.

At Five Myles, the earliest painting shown, Sacred Lake (1984), was, at 6 by 5 feet, also the largest. It commemorates Willenbecher's visit to the site bearing that name at Karnak, Egypt. It is an artificial lake consisting of a large excavation cut into the desert, lined with courses of stone and fitted with staircases at its corners. He set out to interpret those blocks in paint to achieve the appearance of granite a shift in focus from the heavens to the earth. The painted blocks are arranged around the panel's open center like a frame, in a matrix of pinks and grays.

The smaller abstractions that followed are not, in fact, portraits of the naturally occurring patterns of marble sections. Their surfaces are accretions of controlled gestures, spatters of paint that lead from one stroke to another, singular and serial actions. Colmar (1987) consists of a marble-like field of grays, with seams of pale yellow, activated by stippling and feathering across the surface. From a distance, the complex arrangement of To Weimar! (1995) recalls an aerial photograph of a reeling landscape of blues intersected by a pale vertical vein of yellows, while Ornithology (2002) consists of swards of green on blue speckled with reds and yellow.

The exhibition at CUNY Graduate Center included recent, relatively intimate paintings Less than 12 inches on a side, in display cabinets along the gallery hall. They were arranged by palette, with groups of small paintings on narrow shelves, alternating with larger, vertical paintings up to 24 inches tall. These works ranged from swirling, meditative patterns of onyx and white to startling hues of lapis lazuli. While recalling the faux-marbre architecture of Paul Waldman's recent paintings, the illusionism of 19th-century architectural painting, and the columns and paving tiles of late medieval paintings, Willenbecher's works refer principally to themselves and to each other. Although they acknowledge the traditions of painted plaster and quarried stone through the ages, decor has nothing to do with it.