By Jonathan T.D. Neil
I recall seeing an exhibition of Cheyney Thompson’s paintings at Andrew Kreps in 2009 and thinking the work, with its arch intellectual proclivities, was being made with a very specific audience in mind. It was “para-theoretical” painting, the kind of work that was calling to the editorial boards of certain favored academic journals or Tim-Griffin-era Artforum for inclusion in their pages. And, I confess, I thought it was great. It was a visual puzzle: it gestured at all the paradigms it was working through, all the problems it was staging for itself; it was an academic argument rendered visual and just poetic enough to cover its tracks.
So, yes, I liked it, but there was also an uneasy feeling about it being so self-conscious, so self-aware and obvious about its targets, and so much in the vein of a knowing, MFA-program era, one admittedly mixed with a Seth-Price-Reena-Spaulings-new-millennium-NYC-downtown cool that felt at once expansive and urgent but also claustrophobic (motto: “all the taste that can fit under a trucker hat”). It was a highly-educated insider’s art championed by agoraphobes.
There is a hint of all this in Lisa Jo’s paintings, but that’s probably on me. It’s not what Jo’s works are about. Her paintings are easily some of the smartest, most heady, most rigorous paintings that I have seen of late. There is a constant, almost relentless, push and pull between design (forms that have been thought out, planned, composed) and gesture (actions, marks, traces). But there are other tensions at work as well. All of the conditions with which painting today must contend — its status as image and decoration, its claims for autonomy, both on the part of the work and on the part of the worker, its imbrication within a deep but contingent and contested (art) history, its utter ubiquity as the default medium of “Art” in the social imagination — can be raised but then just as quickly shoved under the surface of what are otherwise highly appealing but hardly solicitous pictures.
As with any such paintings there will be strange echoes: the ones I hear are Roberto Matta (in the quality of certain lines and compositions), Thomas Scheibitz (for design and the challenge to it) and Neo Rauch (for palette and atmosphere). People attuned to other tones will hear something else no doubt. Jo worked for Charlene von Heyl, and claims to hear her often. I don’t. She is too obviously the offshoot of some Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter supergroup. That’s not a tour I see Jo having any part in.
A hesitancy: one gets the sense of Jo’s paintings that they issue so much — too much? — from her mind, which is not to think of them as merely intellectual (as Thompson’s works were and could be). They manifest affect (sensation, intensities, not yet fully codified “emotions”) in painting, but painting as a mode of thinking, not just embodiment, what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum once called an “upheaval of thought.” The paintings appear to hesitate before that upheaval. Perhaps that’s good, or necessary, because of what could be on the other side. Still, I want to see what’s over there; and I want to see it from Jo.
