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.