While George Dunbar's urbane abstractions have often been described as minimal - even titled minimal by the artist in his ongoing "Minimal Series" - it's a designation that can be misleading. Dunbar, the grand homme of New Orleans painting, has always been very much in love with a certain kind of luxe, a certain elegance that is part of his Southerner's temperament and heritage. His production reflects, in its own mannered way, the lush bloom of the land and the embellished formality of traditional New Orleans architecture. Exquisitely, expertly crafted objects of varying dimensions and dimensionality that one hesitates to call simply paintings, Dunbar's art - almost from the beginning - has more in common with the beauty and refinement of courtly art - one that, however, is grounded in the history of late modernism and its aftermath -than to the rawer, process-driven, industrial look of the I970s minimalists. In this exhibition, the first solo that Dunbar has had in New York in many years although he shows extensively throughout the country, he is represented by a generous selection of his signature clay and metallic leaf paintings," all from the late 1990 to the present. He is also a notable sculptor, one example of this facet of his work which is included here. The paintings' clay medium - in a range of earth tones, water blues, burgundy to blood reds, moss to deep greens, vivid purples, deep blacks and milky whites-an abstract of pigmented alluvial mud, as it were, serves as a correlative to the actuality of land and is the support and point of departure for his geometric figures. These smooth, monochromatic fields, luxuriously leafed and etched in palladium, gold or silver, have been sandblasted, burnished to a high, well-tended gloss. The clay surfaces are seamless, taut as young skin, the physicality and sensuality of the materials accentuated and exploited. Dunbar began to use metal leaf in the 1960s, inspired by the rich gilding of the ornate altarpieces that he had seen and admired during his visits to Mexico and has used it ever since, often allowing the color of the clay beneath to break through the delicate layers of leafing. A range of the artist's characteristic images and techniques is on view, one that beautifully showcases Dunbar's brand of formalism which overlays the rigors of geometry with the sumptuousness of a baroque sensibility. From 1999 is a near 4-foot square of white clay and palladium leaf that consists of an overall grid of small squares crossed by X's. It seems to be a straight-forward, modernist abstraction but hints at the representation, a schematized architectural detail, say, of a wrought iron gate or fence. Another work from 1999 called Marshgrass is made of columns of clay laid down in rows against a smooth-as-cream ground. The raised, corrugated forms, leafed in palladium, transform the painting into a kind of bas-relief. Other meticulous, hand-produced constructions explore the same motif in seriated works that are sometimes separated by a number of years. Dunbar faithfully returns to his repertory of images, always finding something new in them, another riff, another register, another permutation. One such motif is "Coin du Lestin," the name of a street in Slidell, Louisiana, an area where he lives and works and refers to the wiry, interlaced quatrefoil shown here in a work from 1998 and a more elaborated version of it from two years later. The four-lobed, intricately interwoven pattern of circles and triangles is emblazoned in the center of the painting like a heraldic device drawn in a hard-line, art deco style, an updated version of an emblem widely used in architecture and illuminated manuscripts during the medieval period. Another motif is the heart, present in a work from 1999 which is flat, framed by a painted open square, a resplendent valentine in gold clay brushed with palladium leaf that hovers outward from the picture plane as if it were an aura or a memory. More recent versions are fancier, striped in diagonals and rimmed by a wide, soft-focus band, also suspended, here against a black monochromatic field; these hearts suggest a secularized interpretation of the sacred heart of Catholicism packaged as a box of candy; the ruddy heart of Cahoula, for instance, has a splash of red paint near it, as if it were bleeding. The thrust of the exhibition, however, is devoted to Dunbar's handsome "Minimal Series" and related works such as Bonfouca and Borgne, Louisiana place-names, a sequence that presents the artist's distinctive spin on minimalist tropes. They are almost all variants of an extended, gleaming metallic band with tattered edges like torn fabric, usually horizontal, sometimes divided in two, sometimes seemingly made with just a stroke of the brush. Most often, however, they are composed of incised narrow lines, interrupted occasionally by broader bands and are often situated in the upper section of the painting framed by irregularly edged, one or two silky colored layers against another contrasting shade or shades. The ensembles are of different degrees of complexities and suggest the iconic abstractions of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin. Another variation of this format is the tactile Phormisius which depicts a pepper-red, three-dimensional, crumpled, frieze-like stripe that recalls his early rag series. In this overview of his recent endeavors, Dunbar once again reveals - and revels in - the qualities that have long been his trademark: impeccable, even obsessive craftsmanship coupled with luxurious materials. It is an art for vision and touch that is, at times, a hybrid of painting and sculpture, with a touch of the referential - to architecture, place, the history of art - subtly inflected. They are also objects of astounding physicality and authority. George Dunbar, in his 50 years or so as an artist, has created a sophisticated and idiosyncratic - in the best sense - body of work, one that celebrates an art for art's sake as well as the viewer's. L I L L Y W E I is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes for several publications in the United States and abroad. A frequent contributor to Art in America, she also serves as a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific. |
