Immersion Bender

“Laura paintings are fascinating excursions into a myriad and multi-textual world of childhood fantasies, formal painting tautologies and quotations from the history of painting.” This appraisal by the conceptual artist Charles Gaines was reproduced, grammatical infelicities lovingly intact, in the odd not-quite-a-catalogue published alongside Laura Owens’s 2017 Whitney retrospective. It’s the opening line of a mentor report from her time as a graduate student at CalArts; three decades on, it remains, as simple description, accurate enough regarding the work in Laura Owens at Matthew Marks, her return to New York after eight years away.

What Gaines gets right isn’t her style; it’s her sensibility. While certain formal elements recur—the drop shadow, the grid, impasto so cartoonishly thick it verges on sculpture, and, in the past fifteen years, increasingly complex layers of screen printing—there’s no easy way to sum up what an Owens picture looks like. And so it was at Laura Owens, where five canvases of cold, alien perfection anchored an installation that sprawled across the gallery’s adjacent addresses on Twenty-Second Street. Each painting is 130 inches tall (as always for Owens, these are untitled). Three slightly wider ones (ninety inches) show what might be landscapes at different degrees of reduction—the sort of constricted, vertical scenes of implied nature found in certain pictures by Mitchell or de Kooning. The most compelling has the look of a stacked array of cutouts on transparent material, the soft shadows that limn its shapes—shades of beige scribbled with digital charcoal, plus botanical flourishes in mint green, custard yellow, and robin’s-egg blue—introducing the illusion of atmosphere onto a surface that refuses to be anything but flat. Another arranges a set of plump, curved forms in soft, rich pastels into an allover opalescence; a third strands seven splotches of color in a casualist field of drawn lines. The remaining two are eighty inches wide. Owens’s parched fragmentation here shifts the relevant historical referents from cubist space and action painting toward the accumulative postabstraction of Rauschenberg and Twombly. The surfaces are marked with faint gray grids and strewn with objects: bits of classical décor (a pot, a frieze, a mosaic or tapestry); elegant, towering leaves; glimpses of text; what’s either a branch seen through a window or a drawing of the same.

While many of the show’s reviewers have looked for ways to attach this work to our miserable present—“Owens deploys painting to decimate stale narratives about hierarchies of taste, beauty, tradition and originality”; or “Might not their dense surfaces conceal something dark?”—I’ll insist that none of these canvases say anything other than that this is what Owens thinks a good painting looks like now. This gets us back to knowingness, to tautology and quotation. If Owens’s career began at a moment when history was supposed to be over, leaving artists with nothing to do but cleverly rearrange what tradition handed down to them, this, to state the obvious, isn’t where we find ourselves today. And so the question for art in general—but maybe most acutely for painting—is how it can face up to history in a way that opens the present to new possibilities. The two narrower canvases don’t quite succeed; their knowingness tips to just the wrong side of clever, their pathos takes the beauty of the ruin too much as a given. But the three wider ones are, I think, as compelling as any new paintings to arrive recently in New York. In restating the problems of modernist flatness in such a light, almost comic key, they figure something true about the texture of American life, about how remote seriousness can seem, and how gratifying it is to be surprised by its arrival. Flatness—thinness—means something other than it did in 1912 or 1955. Who, amid the image-thin spectacle of daily life, could think it’s a virtue? Owens acknowledges this but, with a hope against all reason, insists—particularly in the “transparency” picture—that there are still depths to be found within it. She’s after something other than discourse; she’s aiming for something that can only be shown.

That silent hopefulness was put into relief, movingly and maybe somewhat depressingly, by the rest of the show: a welcome desk fitted out with animatronic gadgets; a room of floor-to-ceiling wallpaper in too-dreamy greens, blues, purples, pinks, and oranges, embellished and enlivened with hand-painted elements in Owens’s signature goop (a designer mixture of safflower oil, aluminum stearate, vinyl, and oil paint cooked up for her by the New York paint chemist Robert Doak). This room led onto a further, tiny space containing Owens’s 2022 video, Crows, which sees a pair of puppet birds chattering away, discussing everything from ancient philosophy to how to score free pastries from Starbucks (while charming, it doesn’t indicate that the moving image is her métier) and to a gallery filled with five decorated suitcases containing objects both found and made (which itself opened onto a second immersive room, this one a hazy peach, tucked behind a door salvaged from a home that burned during the recent fires in Los Angeles).

Owens has long held an interest in the possibilities of installation, and she’s not to blame for the fact that our times have made “immersion” a tedious fact of visual culture. But what did she do with that here? The room-scale installations, including the aged trompe l’oeil wallpaper in the gallery that holds the five canvases, might be her most subtle instance yet (see the artist’s chintzy 2021 rehang of van Gogh in Arles) of using the material as a multivalent art-historical gag, bringing to mind Harold Rosenberg’s jibe about “apocalyptic wallpaper” as much as it does the pop diffidence of Warhol’s famous cows. More to the point, though, they seemed to queasily reflect the present trend of exhibiting blue-chip art in spaces other than white cubes (e.g., the untold exhibitions staged in European castles over the last few years or, closer to home, the ghastly gilded bank by McKim, Mead & White where Jack Shainman has recently taken up residence in Tribeca)—a tendency that attempts to reframe the gallery as more than a shop for high-end commodities at the same time as it reinscribes the gaudy homes of the contemporary aristocracy as art’s inevitable telos. So, yes, Owens is painfully aware of the waters she swims in (there’s a little scribble of someone reading “DAS KAPitAL” in one of the boxes, if you think this is fanciful), though taking room-size works to be a valid form of resistance to such commodification requires more optimism than I can muster. As for the boxes, it seems to me most productive to see them as little containers for the personal—for the market’s demand that the artist goes on expressing themselves—that sit beside, outside, the pictures, allowing the latter to remain silent. Given their obvious debt to Duchamp and his valises, maybe it’s telling that for the design on one, she’s traded his beloved chess set for a Go board: Making a good show of painting today involves an unfathomable number of choices.