Robert Kushner at DC Moore

One of a number of dissenters from the austerities of Minimalist and much Post-Minimalist art of the '70s, Robert Kushner played a key role in the Pattern and Decoration movement, exploring the suspect realm of sheer sensuous pleasure while drawing upon a wide variety of cultural sources. In this exhibition, multipaneled works functioned less as discrete paintings than as a series of decorative architectural friezes, their repetitive patterns and wide range of surfaces resembling metallic grounds or ceramic tiles more than paint on canvas.

In the works of the last several years, Kushner has overlaid grids formed by squares of metallic leaf and stepped vertical divisions with a proliferation of floral motifs. Gold and variously oxidized copper leaf, metallic glitter, flocking and a veritable Las Vegas of sparkly materials support masterful depictions of flowering plants. Kushner's interplays of abstraction and representation, architectonic geometry and organic description, solid surfaces and linear tracery allude directly to traditional Japanese screen painting. His fluent and unerring contour drawing recalls Japanese sumi-ink drawing. Among contemporaries, his erudite eclecticism, spontaneity of execution, and diversity of materials show closest affinity to the work of sculptor Betty Woodman.

Three Philodendron Monstera (2007), its three panels measuring 84 by 60 inches each, was the most boldly assertive work in the show. Here, as elsewhere, Kushner uses squares of gold and copper leaf, the latter oxidized in varying degrees, and deep matte black paint underpainted with a slightly irregular red grid. The three outsized philodendron leaves are powerfully established, both through drawn contour and as solid shapes changing color as they move across blocks of different surfaces. Spring Scatter Summation (2005) was designed as a series of separate panels specifically intended for the Neo-Classical interior of Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, Mass. (Catalogue reproductions of the work in situ show it perfectly complementing the marble interior.) Summation also functions, as it did at DC Moore, as a single, continuous 7-by-46-foot frieze. A seasonal progression of flowers virtually enacts time as the viewer's eye moves across its 10 panels, passing from early buds and blossoms through forsythia, dogwood, thistles and iris to an abundance of large chrysanthemums. The work was installed so as to turn a corner of the gallery, allowing the spring season, in effect, to wrap around the viewer.

With their grandeur and mandarin tone, Kushner's new paintings shift through a range of chromatic keys, as if exploring declensions of beauty. While Kushner avoids the usual deductive logic of minimalist grids, the measured cadence he maintains across each painted frieze lends the work a palpable gravitas, allowing us glimpses of an accord, as unexpected as it is welcome, between social order and nature's delirium.

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