With the excitement of the art fairs behind us it’s time to take one look back at The Armory Show and note a couple artists to watch this year who clearly stood out in the whirlwind of that weekend.
Victoria Miro – Booth 106 solo Doron Langberg
Doron Langberg’s solo booth with Victoria Miro Gallery, presented luminous, humbly-scaled portraits and nature paintings. Langberg has become a prominent figure among rising young artists, his works have been shown at the Frick, Met, ICA Miami among other major institutions and he has received numerous awards and residencies. These intimate pieces feel like lyrical visual haikus, resonating in tender, and profoundly human elements. These works, brimming with immediacy, are painted from life in single sitting. His subjects are loved ones, family and friends.
Langberg is a painter of tenderness and emotion. His gestural brushwork is loose and expressive. The loving strokes of his mop brush seem to lovingly linger on the skin depiction of his subjects. There is little textural quality to his portraits, although his depictive brushtrokes map the emotional topography of his sitters. The paintings of natural entanglements and wild plants that share the walls with the portraits are depicted in a slightly different manner, truer to life, with representational colors.
Spontaneous color plays an essential role in Langberg’s paintings. His unrestricted palette remains fresh and clean. He often uses bright colors to serve as partial grounds, applied loosely on white canvas. These highly pigmented colors are not simply descriptive, they express temperament and sensual mood. The result is a surface that breathes and glows.
Langberg saturates the surface of his paintings with affection. He invites his viewer into moments of intimacy that are meant for the private eye. That emotional weight is embedded in the paint itself. He shows both his own vulnerability and his subjects which puts the viewer into a thrilling position of energy exchange. The works in the booth are all records of brief moments between the artist and the subject, whether a person or a tangle of plants, the summer breeze still palpable between the brushtrokes.
Radiating humanism, Doron Langberg’s personal world resonates universally. This year the overall display at the Armory Show was lukewarm, with booths ranging from commercial displays to furniture showrooms. Victoria Miro’s booth was a standout, showing smaller, deeply personal paintings, giving a glimpse into the artist’s process beyond his more known larger works.
Ronchini Gallery – Booth 445 solo Josh Raz
London based Ronchini Gallery showed 3 large scale paintings by Josh Raz, offering a more meditative, atmospheric experience. Raz, who is not shown in the United States frequently, has been represented by the gallery for multiple years. He has been shown widely internationally and won the prestigious London-based Hix Award for emerging artists. Dominated by a blue monochromatic palette, his large-format cityscapes unfold like quiet dreams or fragments of memory. These serene urban environments appear to be under the cover of night, displaying distant lights behind silhouettes of trees and park walkways.
The distinct emotional tone in Raz’s work is contemplative and melancholic, giving the work a surreal feel. His brushstrokes are light and suggestive, reminiscent of work by Vuillard, allowing the image to slowly manifest as one gazes for a period of time. Forms are implied, allowing the viewer’s eye to complete them. The atmospheric landscapes show off Raz’s handle on his use of color. There is a timelessness to these works which appear to exist in the space between memory and imagination. While they depict the real world, they resist specificity. Despite being specific places, the cityscapes and the landscape could be anywhere.
The delicate environments in Raz’s pieces are also heavily dependent on surface patterns that he creates. Anywhere from a mosaic-like application of strokes to spiraling patterns, the surface subtly vibrates and in some cases appears to move. His nuanced handling of color and light enhances the patterns and gives each canvas a ghostly luminosity.
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About the writer: Anna Shukeylo is an artist, writer, educator, and curator working and living in the New York Metropolitan area. She has written for Artcritical, Painters on Painting, and Art Spiel. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kean University, NJ, Manchester University, IN, and in group shows at Auxier/Kline, Equity Gallery, Stay Home Gallery, among others. @annashukeylo
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