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James Bishop and Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Annemarie Verna
Art in America, June, 2003 by Mark Staff Brandl
Announced as a two-person retrospective, this show featured a selection of works plucked from the artists' respective oeuvres between the years 1969 and 2002. Most of Sylvia Plimack Mangold's paintings here are of trees near her home, The most straightforwardly representational work is Summer Pin Oak (1998, oil on canvas, 60 inches square). However, its cold blues, greens and browns made it more a study after Cezanne than one directly from nature. The most intriguing aspect of Mangold's work remains her oddly conceptual treatment of the edges of the rectangular images, where flat bands of color are wont to occur, quietly violating the central romantic naturalism. These areas often resemble masking tape, as in Locust Trees (1998, 60 by 80 inches). Utterly entrancing was a modest 20-by-15-inch oil-on-canvas titled Sunset Study. This work from 1980 focuses solely on an unbroken expanse of sky, strangely recognizable although, in effect, fully "abstract."
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The American painter James Bishop, long based in France, was represented by a selection of sensitively reductive paintings on canvas or paper, all untitled. Bishop is somewhat reclusive, and his works are too rarely seen, especially in America. This painter has been on the edge of several important developments through the many years of his career. For instance, he was living in Paris at the time of the Supports/Surfaces movement, with which he has been linked. Bishop is perhaps best known for his subtly hued, often mostly white paintings created through a unique process. He spreads thin coats of liquid paint on supports lying flat, slightly raising the canvas at one spot or another during the drying process. Seven small works of this nature were present here. All oil and crayon on paper, these delicate works feature windowpanelike structures in a range of sumptuous white tones.
Two large oil paintings on canvas from 1974 and 1975 dominated the show. At first glance, one (77 inches square) appeared completely brown, while the second (76 1/2 inches square) was horizontally divided, white over brown. Each eventually draws the viewer into lengthy close observation, slowly revealing underlying radical color variations and complex structures of crisscrossing bands, referring playfully to the stretcher frames beneath the surface. Best of all are the newest, and tiniest works, such as one oil and colored crayon on paper piece at only 4 by 3 1/2 inches. This painting, from 2002, has a gray band below a larger white square, through which one slowly espies misty blue divisional lines and small crosses. Bishop's painting is about taking time and about sensual appreciation. These are startling demands in art at this point in time.
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