“Oliver Arms” at Ameringer/ McEnery/Yohe

By: Sarah Griffin

 

 

 

Oliver Arms, Cold Basement [1936], 2009, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm), signed verso. Courtesy of Ameringer ú McEnery ú Yohe.

 

I walked into the Oliver Arms show at Ameringer ú McEnery ú Yohe skeptical and critical.  To begin with, I’ve never been a huge fan of abstraction. Boding worse for the show, preliminarily paging through the images on the gallery’s website, many of the paintings looked the same to me: a one hit wonder, a one-note show.  The experience of the works in person could not have been more different.  This is the type of show that I could linger at for hours, the type of abstract painting that makes me wish I had tens of thousands of dollars to spend on art.

Oliver Arms deals in large, heavily worked canvases.  Over the course of months, he applies layers upon layers of oil paint, methodically building them up and scraping them down.  The result – a full spectrum of color intricately and sporadically weaving in and out through space – is captivating and the intensity of the deeply textured surfaces is mesmerizing.  These works feel lived in and worked through.  In the same way that an old butchers block or studio table tells the story of time, energy, blood, sweat and tears, Arms captures the passage of time in his canvases.  The effect is almost psychedelic; in allowing the works to flood your field of vision, the colors and shapes move as if the whole work is breathing.  The powerful illusion of depth he creates is disorienting, and as a viewer you become enmeshed and lost in the paint. 

The world Arms creates in these seemingly similar works is strikingly different from canvas to canvas.  While he employs the same technique with each work and all of the paintings have the eerie quality of poetically alluding to both a micro and macrocosm, each painting has an individual tone and feel.  For example, Tree = Drift feels almost like a snowstorm.  Gesturallly, the painting pulls downward, while the warm colors emerge from the field of darkness and patches of white painting overwhelm the canvas.  Alternatively, Cold Basement explodes in a field of warm hues, reflecting a sort of internal escape from an external reality.  While the words cold and basement conjure up images in grays and blues, the canvas reflects a reality tinged in orange and red, perhaps emphasizing the power of the mind, transporting the viewer – and the artist – to a sunnier reality. 

Examining the work of Oliver Arms on 22^nd street is a meditative experience in a fitting environment: a sort of urban, intellectual equivalent to yoga on a peaceful beach.   Though the paintings hang in the white box of a gallery, floor to ceiling windows looking out to 22^nd street provide an interesting counterpoint to Arms’ abstract paintings.  It is as if all the colors of the street were sucked onto the canvases in tiny pieces.  It is easy to get lost in these paintings, to let your mind and eye wander through the space, inhabiting territory that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. 

The paintings by Oliver Arms on display at Ameringer ú McEnery ú Yohe  provide the careful viewer with mental space for reflection.  Arms’ canvases create a beautiful and dynamic space to get lost in, both for the lover of abstraction and for the skeptic.

 

“Oliver Arms” at Ameringer ú McEnery ú Yohe runs through March 6th

Ameringer ú McEnery ú Yohe

525 W 22nd Street

Take the C or E train to 23^rd Street

Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 10 – 6

Exhibition Website: http://www.ameringer-yohe.com/?ex=34

Artist Website: http://www.oliverarms.com/main.html

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As both a lover of the abstractions of old and a skeptic of more contemporary attempts, it's nice to know the craft isn't lost to posterity. It sounds like Arms has an intense love affair with the medium, and your analysis definitely does that justice.

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