At its heart, "Influence, Divergence, and the Evolution of an Idea" is an exhibition about the illusory properties of paint and the ability of artists Alex Couwenberg and Karl Benjamin to coax infinite depth from seemingly flat surfaces. The two artists are from notably different generations--Benjamin moved to Claremont in 1952, and was among the original "hard edge" painters, while Couwenberg was Benjamin's acolyte, though not his student, while attending graduate school at Claremont (he got his MFA in 1997). So the dialogue between them is anything but superficial.

In Lens Flare, Couwenberg tugs and pulls at linear geometric forms thereby transforming rectangles into sweeping, elegant shapes that inspire curiosity and mimic a viewfinder both of a camera and the mind's eye. As the shape multiplies at the center of the canvas, thick applications of acrylic paint create a texture of alternating primary surfaces. A band of white lines propels through the lens like a reel of film on a projector and draws the viewer deeper into a visual plane unnoticed from a distance. Positioned at the opposite end of the gallery, Karl Benjamin's rectangular canvases titled #4 and #7, rendered in oil presents a series of lines of complimentary tones subtly changing from dark purple to blue, orange and green. When standing still the large paintings appear to the viewer as a rigorous exercise in repetition, but when viewed in an oscillating motion, the lines transform into a single three-dimensional color bar. The dialogue of the "ideas" that echoes between the works of Couwenberg and his mentor Benjamin declares that the surface is a vehicle for exploration.

The "divergence" of the idea alluded to in the title appears in Couwenberg's Pulse (Blue-Violet Blue) and Benjamin's #1. Composed of 12 rectangular canvases Pulse extends across an entire wall as the colors shift from dark to light blue. The flat application of the paint highlights layers of high gloss acrylic formations of hexagons falling across multiple planes. The shapes unravel like origami and the "finish fetish" style is devoid of the artist's hand. Benjamin's #1 is two square canvases wherein a solid color frames an alternating tone inside the borders. Both artists use the color spectrum as a container of ideas: Couwenberg manipulates form to bring the viewer into the world of his complex layers, while Benjamin uses bold compositions to bring the viewer outside of the painted surface.

Pairing Alex Couwenberg & original hard-edge painter Karl Benjamin, Influence, Divergence & the Evolution of an Idea finally brings together master & pupil – except that Couwenberg (who in fact studied with Roland Reiss at Claremont University) wasn’t Benjamin’s student so much as his acolyte. The two are now fast friends, and the exhibition
demonstrates the power of elective affinity through aesthetic DNA (or vice versa). In his 60-year career Benjamin has rung numerous changes on the possibilities of geometric painting, from dynamic asymmetry to insistent patter, and the wealth of forms and strategies his ouevre features recurs in a fascinating way in Couwenberg’s own work. While
Benjamin tends to explore specific formulas deeply, in effect taking each apart and reassembling it with different color combinations or structural inversions, Couwenberg synthesizes such formulas into complex – and, compared to Benjamin’s featureless technique, painterly – compositions always on the verge of recomposing or even disappearing into themselves. Benjamin, principally concerned with the articulation of planar region, always blends towards minimalism (and, indeed, directly anticipated that trend in the early 60’s), while Couwnberg, preoccupied as much with line as with color, returns again to the asymmetric harmonies of pre-war constructivism. Benjamin grew
out of that aesthetic; some of his most handsome work recapitulates that almost choreographic dynamism. But by and large he sought a more neutral, open image, one that brought abstract expressionism’s meditative, all-over sense of field to geometric form. Couwenberg now seeks to re-introduce cubism’s facets and futurism’s kinesis into
Benjamin’s minimalist colorscape – with the senior painter’s blessing.
PETER FRANK - FABRIK 2012

Alex Couwenberg’s visions of the Southern California landscape mix the spatial ambiguity of cyberspace with the disorienting angularity of Cubo Futurism; they create a perception-bending universe in which it is impossible to situate yourself physically. Imagine a 2D version of, say, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator and you get some idea of how Couwenberg, using line and color to describe solid and transparent volumes, distorts our sense of balance and space.
The artist lives and works in Pomona, and like the region itself, he embraces its contradictions. The crazy-quilt of competing billboards, the clashing architectural motifs, the beauty and scale of the natural landscape and the blitheness with which Southern Californians accept its demise all converge in Couwenberg’s pictures to form a highly processed record of the artist’s perceptions.
Couwenberg, 43, has always attempted to include in his paintings, bits of every art-historical style he has ever admired. That list, as evidenced by the 13 paintings on view, is a long one. It includes Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Minimalism, mid-century LA architecture, graphic design and Finish Fetish, a style whose hallmarks – reflective surfaces, pinstripes and candy colors — are as much a part of the LA aesthetic now as they were in the hotrod and surf-crazed ‘60s. Judging from such titles as Poweflex, Joyride, Brodie, Accelerator and Ray Ban, it would be tempting to think that Couwenberg’s allegiances lay with the Finish Fetishists; but his paintings suggest closer affinities to early modernist styles and to the Hard Edge Los Angeles School painters Lorser Feitelson (1898 -1978) and Karl Benjamin, the latter of whom he studied with at Claremont Graduate University.
Couwenberg synthesizes these styles in exuberant, precisely organized canvases animated by bold oppositions. Bulbous buoy-like forms painted in bright, closely hued colors are stacked, one atop the other in semi-translucent layers — layers whose interpenetrating geometries merge to suggest other shapes. Out of them sprout curving antennae-like lines that are hard-edged and ragged, thick and thin, and have finishes that alternate between gloss and matte. In and around these contours the artist places rectangular slabs of pigment that have been raked with a hand tool to look embossed, their “fins” echoing the air filter-like textures of so many iconic LA-area buildings. All of this activity is set against large tracts of neutral color (olive drab, gun-metal gray, yellow ochre, taupe) that I can only assume are intended to reference the aerospace industry that dominated the local economy during the artist’s youth.
At a distance, the paintings, which reproductions don’t even begin to describe, appear to be graphic patterns that give off a faint surrealist tinge. Up close, they engulf you with their complex topographies. In Ray Ban, the largest picture in the show, so many different surface textures come into play, you feel as if you’re looking at collage built entirely of paint. Within it Couwenberg takes some fantastic liberties, like the splatter of pigment in the lower left-hand corner that looks like a smear of plum jelly and the amazing concatenations of thinly painted, interlocking shapes that float in a perfect state of equipoise.
This pictorial strategy places Couwenberg squarely in the neo-modernist camp. It’s a huge group that includes Linda Geary, Susan Frecon Xylor Jane, Ara Peterson, Alexander Kori Gerard, and Heather Gwen Martin to name but a few artists of diverse temperament who turn modernist mannerisms to their own ends.

Couwenberg, for his part, translates the psychic impact of his environment into the realm of the tangible, using the most basic of means — line and color — to disrupt our equilibrium. As such, his paintings aren’t just abstract representations of the landscape – they’re intimations of what it feels like to be fully inhabited by one’s surroundings.
–DAVID M. ROTH

I like to see complexity resolved. There’s a certain beauty in an intricately plotted mystery, a Baroque fugue, a Roman floor mosaic, a Dickens novel, anything that seems at first to be scattered and random, too filled with separate thoughts and contradictory impulses ever to come together—and then they do, they take what seemed to be chaos and turn it into pattern, they bring what seemed to be arbitrary and make it appear inevitable. That’s part of what I respond to most about the work of Alex Couwenberg, how his is a highly personal art of retrieval and reconciliation, how he skirts the edge of dissolution and wreaks it into hard-won harmony, how he shuffles it—whatever “it” is-- relentlessly to and fro, weighing and adjusting, calibrating and interrupting, a quick swivel here, an unexpected torque there, a whisper of the stability of line tested by a sudden tonal shift--well, you better bring your lunch, there’s nothing quick and easy about this work, you’re going to have to do some serious looking. If you’re a musician or a writer or a dancer you can take your audience through these acts of reconciliation in time, time gives you the thread you can follow from beginning to middle to end. But a painter! Time is collapsed all within one surface, one rectangle, only the artist knows the layers embedded beneath the final painting, remembers when everything seemed lost, the false steps and conundrums that needed to be rectified and solved, the pivotal moment where it began to come together, the rush of being when all the intricacies began to resolve themselves, that final sense when you were finished, that it was done. That’s how I imagine Alex Couwenberg works, that within his own idiom (and more on that in a bit) he does his version of the painter’s core archetypal thing: to do something on the surface of a painting that requires him to do another thing that calls for something else that means he has to do this other thing and so forth until he’s locked in the taut embrace of picture-making that only ends when the damn thing is done. Take, for example, Peep Show. Notice how rarely Couwenberg centers his imagery, it usually falls off somewhat to the right, as if it settles
somewhere on the composition where a lot of to-ing and fro-ing had to happen. (This reminds me a bit of how a Scrabble board gets played, sometimes one quadrant gets all the action and another seems immobile, frozen, what begins in the very center ends up meandering away as the game progresses.) And while there may be a tendency to privilege Couwenberg’s painterly and linear incident in these works, one should never overlook the color he initially lays down on these canvases. In Peep Show it’s a deep dark gray, a kind of Jasper Johns gray, a gravitas gray that seems solemn and determined, not like the spry tans or cool blues or creamy light yellows or rich browns or even the pale grays or off-whites he’ll use elsewhere. Somehow this first color is the first gesture for Couwenberg, the causal gesture, it provides the context for what will ensue, somehow this graphite gray from which he can go darker or lighter will motivate the next gesture he will make. Only Couwenberg knows what that next gesture was. It may not even be on the surface of Peep Show any longer, it’s probably not, that gesture itself perhaps effaced by his subsequent activities, the motival act buried beneath its many progeny. We’re left with the finished thing, the endgame, but only Couwenberg got to play it, there’s a process going on here but we don’t get to see it work itself out, we just get to see it resolved into a kind of hard won but inevitable perfection. But let me tell you how I go about looking at a painting by Alex Couwenberg. I stare at it for a while, and then try to find a fulcrum point in it, some smallish element somewhere that somehow seems the opening salvo to the whole composition, the little Rosetta Stone that decodes it, the spring lock, the tether, the string that you can pull on to unravel it all. In Peep Show for me it’s the little silhouette of 3/5 of a circle set within the orange field at the lower center part of the painting. I look at that thin circular line and suddenly everything starts to spin off it, sometimes logically, just as you would expect, but sometimes in riffs of such curious curvy inventiveness that it starts to careen about, into the vortex you go, up, down, left, right, solid, transparent, substance and schematic, flatness and texture, interpenetrating areas of positive and negative space that never seem to cease shuffling about. (OK, here are a few of my other tethers, in Lani it’s the little horizontal blue bar a bit to the right of the center, in Cadillac it’s the top of the gray cone at the bottom center, in Showist it’s the olive green area that seems to propel itself leftward, Hijack is a tough one, but I can’t take my eyes off that incredibly assertive small swath of orange that makes a mini arc at the right-center of the painting. Sometimes it’s a big thing, this tether, but often it’s a small element, sometimes a little child will lead them.) Tension and release, areas of tight energy then radiating and diffusing outward, almost centrifugal in nature, that’s a Couwenberg move, action and echo, a balance always achieved at last. But so much of the allure of Alex Couwenberg’s work resides in the stylistic idiom that his hand and eye and mind always gravitates toward, that is some reflexive part of his being, his way of ordering himself through the world. It’s an incredible communing with the fundamentals of a kind of so cool SoCal
Modernism, a here muted beckoning of a giddy California 1960s design, for sources it’s all woofers all the time, Philco TVs meet Valley burger joints, Jazz LP covers in a Ford Fairlane, TV antennas from the Brady Bunch house, funny-car decals, the curve and the swerve, like nothing exists but bulbous swivel chairs and sleek hi-fi components. None of those things actually appear in any of these paintings, but their aura everywhere does, Couwenberg’s got all this stamped in his DNA, if DNA was only a bit more oval and torqued. It’s not nostalgia, certainly not retro, or only marginally and obliquely so, it’s a visual manifestation of time and place, as connected to its context as European Cubism is to the staccato rhythms of early modern urbanism. Couwenberg summons the attentive optimism of SoCal design culture, its bold curves and upbeat rhythms, he layers and de- and reconstructs them, he channels them from function to pictorial language because it’s his vernacular culture, because it’s his. These new paintings, soberly and with exquisite control and attention to detail, appear to me to evoke these things and more. Let’s close with Alt (tether? For me it’s the small vertical greenish rectangle at the bottom center). It takes you for a skillful spin in and around itself, with thin lines and sweeping arcs releasing and resolving its density in several directions towards its edges, a taut image of great concentration then gently dissipating outward. Above all else what I appreciate in it and in the work of Alex Couwenberg is that balance of tension and release, of passages of such focus and hypersensitivity that I think they can never be escaped--and then suddenly they are, in images that always manage to negotiate their way through the seemingly contradictory zones of multiple interpenetrative attentiveness and the equanimity of resolution and calm. They’re complexity resolved.

James Yood

James Yood teaches modern and contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he also directs its New Arts Journalism program.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

for as long as we've been smearing paint on a surface, it's indeed rare to come across a young artist who (perhaps) labors over work that could be called singular. rare, but possible-- as exampled by alex couwenberg these last 10 years or so.

i'd like to think that the act of painting is one of discovery and daring. you can toss triumph, fear, loss, destruction, etc, into the mix as well... couwenberg toils along (as we all do) and he brings it together in a fresh, invigorating art. in doing so, he elevates this ancient form of communication that we humbly and passionately embrace...

his exhibition at Markel Fine Arts should not be missed.

Mark Zimmermann

Game On! Alex Couwenberg strikes a playful balance in his ‘Arcade’ paintings.

By Steven Biller

Standing in front of Continental — one of 14 paintings in the new “Arcade” series by Alex Couwenberg — viewers familiar with the artist’s oeuvre might need a minute, if that, to appreciate the smart direction in which he has taken his work. On this large canvas, the artist contained familiar elements — overlapping shapes, forms, colors, and pinstripes — mostly to the upper right-hand quadrant, and painted the rest of the canvas white with white pin-striping and bold lines stretching to the lower-left edge. At first look, these subtle, sometimes unfinished, lines draw you for closer inspection. However, with proper lighting, the varnished stripes and contours — a nod to 1970s California finish fetish — reveal the artist’s exploration of surface and space. It’s a dramatic change from his earlier paintings — one that, in this particular case, triggers a curiosity akin to that of the apes encountering the monolith in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. They jump up and down, excited about seeing something new and different, and wonder what will happen next. Viewers of Couwenberg’s new works want to get close and touch the rough, flat, and varnished surfaces. This is an artist on the move.
Couwenberg, whose neatly composed, midcentury-inspired paintings propelled his career for nearly 15 years, has begun exploring imperfection as passionately as he did hardedge precision. The earlier pieces remind us of a simpler time. Couwenberg had become renowned for filling canvases from edge to edge with a dynamic vocabulary of crisp, sleek, and meticulously crafted lines, shapes, colors, forms, and finishes — all gleaned from the California surf, skate, car culture and midcentury design that permeated his youth. Although the once-pristine lines now have some rough edges, the guts of the paintings remain true to Couwenberg’s biography. “The paintings continue to grow and the vocabulary is maturing,” he says. “But midcentury [modernism] and graphic design were part of my upbringing.” The new paintings include bold lines in addition to pinstripes, and continue to resonate the influence of his mentor, Karl Benjamin, and midcentury contemporaries Lorser Feitelson and Frederick Hammersley. The execution of the lines, however, blurs the line between the exacting idealism of modernist design and the freedom of painterly expressionism. The “Arcade” series — evidently named for the pinball machine-style flipper shapes that appear on some of the canvases — signals a new direction for Couwenberg. Paintings such as Party Popper — a small, olive-colored canvas, with explosive pin striping in bright yellow and orange — shows this dog is off his leash. The “Arcade” paintings emphasize loose gestures that take their cues from the New York School and action painters. A freer quality prevails, but the control gained through his hard-edge past retains a measure of order. In the new paintings, contrasting surfaces — he creates a ridged effect on some pieces by pulling a hard-bristled dust broom over the acrylic paint — accentuate what has worked for Couwenberg for so many years. “A lot goes back to basic design: placement and composition,” he says. “There’s something about midcentury that was right on: simple forms and color. As a painter and image-maker, I enjoy seeing how they balance out and contradict each other.” Now, Couwenberg sometimes uses varnish in negative space to highlight an embossed effect. “It’s very much intuitive,” Couwenberg says. “One color determines another. And the layered fragments of original shapes equal a union of shared space. [This] is new in the vocabulary. “I’ve learned to become a mechanic,” he continues. “I ask what’s working and I start over and paint by editing, and the layering and color and lines come together. … I like to look at [the paintings] like children. I give them what they need and they start to talk back. They have a personality. And I know when they’re ready to go out into the world.”

Under the Radar -- by George Melrod

At once handsome and crafty, the paintings created by Alex Couwenberg in his Claremont area studio may boast clean edges, but they smudge the boundaries of modernist and post-modernist practice. Couwenberg’s work culls loosely—and delectably—from the mid-century modernist lexicon, mixing in aspects of vernacular popular design, as a form of autobiographical sampling. The result is a swoony pastiche that invokes not just hard-edge abstraction, but also skateboard and surf culture, the finish fetish movement, and California car culture, blending them together with lyrical-if-fragmentary verve. Last year, he got a Joan Mitchell Award for his labors. (Notes the artist: “I’m a huge Joan Mitchell fan.”)

A native of the Claremont area, Couwenberg got his BFA from Art Center in 1995 and his MFA from Claremont. “About half way through I realized that I really liked to apply paint to a surface,” he recalls. “I wanted to find a middle ground between expressionism and hard-edge abstraction. I was really into laying down grounds of paint, leaving the hard raw edges but exposing the underpainting, revealing the history of the painting.” While at school, Couwenberg took a class with painter Karl Benjamin, known for his jazzy optical geometries, and Benjamin became his mentor. Yet beyond their superficial homage to the modernist tropes of half a century ago, Couwenberg’s work culls from a wide variety of sources rooted in colloquial design and SoCal popular culture. “I’m a product of Southern California,” he states. “I grew up skateboarding, surfing, around a car culture, I grew up in the 60s with that Southern California design aesthetic... At a certain point, it all clicked.” The influence extends beyond his formal vocabulary; his lacquer finishes often recall car finishes or the varnish finishes seen on surf-or-skateboards. Couwenberg’s surfaces vary dramatically, from loose painterly sweeps to flat matte color fields to elements that seem glossily translucent. All of these, impressively, are devised from acrylic paint, which he mixes in different ratios to attain different effects. His process is complex and non-linear: sanding back into a surface, masking it, adding flat sections with a sponge roller, then often remasking and revarnishing.

Couwenberg is a gleaner of shapes, savoring their implicit allusions and relationships, and he uses his canvasses as Petrie dishes, letting his forms interact with each other like microorganisms. Many of his paintings feature television or soap dish shapes, which he layers like theatrical scrims, to reveal previous stages of the works’ creation. His recent paintings are among his most sumptuous and refined, featuring forms that suggest lozenges, wedges, or flippers from pinball machines, arranged in dynamic asymmetries. (Another family of shapes his work implies: car taillights). The contrast of textures between these glossy windows and the spans of paint surrounding them can be riveting. In May Fair, Couwenberg’s overlapping lozenges are pushed to the bottom of the canvas by outlined flippers in a stark blood orange field. In Hanging Garden, the flippers congregate near the painting’s center, amid a field of twilight black, as larger forms cluster and push in around them. In these newer works, the artist has given more weight to lines, allowing them to delineate his geometric elements, an effect at once subtle and bold. As is typical with Couwenberg, the allusions spin off in contradictory directions, evoking the hard-edge work of Lorser Feitelson, but also automotive pin-striping and hot-rod detailing. (“I’m kind of nutty about getting line right,” he admits.) For all its seeming polish, Couwenberg’s work is a heartfelt hybrid, both in its spectrum of sources and in its technical balancing act, embracing both rigor and experimentation; despite its backward-looking inflections, his work is staunchly of the present.

ALEX COUWENBERG: ZEN AND THE ART OF IM-PERFECTION

By Peter Frank
March 2008

Supposedly devolved into its own conventions, abstract painting was dismissed almost half a century ago as irrelevant and decorative. But in fact, the modernist allegiance to visual language freed of conventional syntax, self-sustaining and evolving, threads its way unbroken between abstract expressionism and today, eclipsed but never eliminated by the subject-, motif- and medium-driven concerns of post-modernism. And now, however timely its appearance may be, a new generation of painters is emerging that seems more than superficially dedicated to the exploration of non-objective composition on a two dimensional plane.

Such “neo-modern” abstraction manifests with particular conviction in southern California – perhaps because such idealism (and idealism about idealism) flourishes best at a remove from primary commercial centers and/or in primary intellectual centers. (The Los Angeles area may have burgeoned as a gallery locus and home to mega-collectors, but it remains the largest concentration of art schools and art departments in the country.) As well, abstract form has always been regarded by southern Californians as, at worst, an armature available to those who would explore concept or perception – and at best a higher, even transcendent, experience in and of itself, a potentially meditative, decidedly reflective approach to the distinctive regional abundance of, yes, light and space. “Hard-edge” painting, after all, began in Los Angeles.

Actually, it began in Claremont, east of L.A. proper, in the cluster of colleges that have anchored academic discourse in the “southland” for over a century. Alex Couwenberg was raised in this part of Los Angeles County and went to school in the Claremont Colleges. With many of his classmates, he was encouraged to paint abstractly all the way through his studies – not forced, not urged, but simply encouraged, and given the technical tools and the historical exposure to evolve his own approach to formulating and distributing abstract forms across a plane. The poise and elegance of Couwenberg’s style, which would engender suspicion in a New York context, is seen as second nature – and “good chops” – in California, a natural byproduct of the “finish/fetish” trajectory that began in the military fabrication shops of World War II and took root in the region’s postwar surf and car cultures. Couwenberg, an accomplished surfer, grew up familiar with the designs and glossy finishes given surfboards, fiberglass or otherwise.

The reliance on line as a critical component of image, the exploration of color – especially close-hued colors placed near one another – and the meticulous, just barely articulated surface all bespeak Couwenberg’s comfort with the language of abstraction, especially one derived from the techniques and materials of the late-industrial (and, for that matter, early-digital) era. For him, non-objective painting is a commitment, but not an ideological stake, as it would have to be back east. Rather, it is an expression of sensibility formed by time and place, an exploitation, and finally reflection, of sensory input – input that includes the manual as well as the visual, the practical as well as the theoretical. Handicraft is not the subject of Couwenberg’s work, perception is. But handicraft is the experiential armature on which he has structured his perceptual arrangements; it is the characteristic that distinguishes his art as a product of a distinctive southern California art, and social, history.

Couwenberg’s painting is more than a mere souvenir of the “southland,” however. In its rhythms, its interplay of line and mass, its subtle illusions, and its engagement of a palette that seems to find an exact, knowing midpoint between the “good taste” of interior decoration and the raw taste of (outdoor) sport design, Couwenberg’s art is impelled by a highly tempered intuition and subtle wit. His approach is gently self-aware, slightly satiric but not mocking, and indulgent of its sources while rigorous in their translation to abstraction. Couwenberg distills his life and times into these paintings, as if they were diary pages recording his retinal and tactile observations and reflections. There isn’t the same one-to-one relationship of seen shape to rendered shape, environmental color to painted color that one witnesses in, say, Ellsworth Kelly’s work. Rather, like John McLaughlin’s meditations on the real, Couwenberg’s paintings make use of everything seen every day in the construction of a less cacophonous and dispersed reality. Couwenberg does not aspire to McLaughlin’s purity, but that contemplative state operates at the heart of the young painter’s approach to reality.

Finally, Alex Couwenberg seeks to calm the tumult of life without losing the vibrancy of that tumult. The sense of exquisite balance that shivers through his work comes from Couwenberg’s search for that exact midpoint between the mundane and the transcendent, the sensuous and the disembodied. Hitting that midpoint exactly is itself a zendo exercise, and may rarely be achieved; but in their ready appeal, graceful and antic, Couwenberg’s paintings – rather like those Indian weavings with deliberate flaws -- make an art of missing perfection by a hair.