Spencer Lewis at Harper's
What a great thing it is to be, just a painting: free, true and unencumbered, serving no aim but its own.
Spencer Lewis
”Jacques (Pink and Purple Paintings For My Dad)”
June 30 - August 13
Harper’s
These are good paintings. The jute canvases have something of the gruff shop-floor utility of the burlap bags they evoke, but under Lewis’s brush they become alternately tight and refined and peach-fuzz soft. Each picture is new territory to explore, on and in which to discover infinite moments of the play of paint. Neon orange traverses murky yellow and sapphire blue only to be arrested by a deep green valley. A wisp of sunrise impasto tiptoes across a seam in the jute. The glint of a protruding staple animates a remote corner. Paint takes the form of smears, stains, gloops and blobs. Accident and intent are happy interlocutors. The marks tend toward the center of the large canvases, imploding in and exploding out in tenacious, competing gestures.
Beyond a nod to the artist’s father, Jacques, in the show’s title, there is no message or metaphor here (if there is, I don’t know it and don’t need to). Harper’s has done both artist and audience the dignity of refusing to submit the works to some overwrought appeal to identity or buzzy slogan. They are just paintings. Paintings about paintings. But what a great thing it is to be, just a painting: free, true and unencumbered, serving no aim but its own.
I first saw Lewis’ work at Harper’s in 2017, back when Harper’s was an art book store in the Hamptons with a chic little exhibition space in an Upper East Side apartment. Those paintings were less refined than the ones on display at Harper’s new Chelsea gallery (one of two in the neighborhood, with another in Los Angeles), which at times feel a bit too composed by comparison. Executed on bent and softened cardboard, they did not have the hesitation at the edges that the 2022 works have, and were screwed directly to the wall, with the holes and gashes from previous installations clustered at the corners.
I intended to review that show; I regret that I didn’t. I liked those paintings; I liked their wabi sabi imposition on the apartment gallery’s poncy crown molded walls. I liked looking at them. At the time I was writing about “political” art — particularly that of the Trump era — which was not very good. I insisted loudly and often that what it looks (or sounds, etc.) like is what matters in a work of art, not what values it espouses, causes it advances or identities it represents. But the reality is that the intrinsic, sensible qualities of a work of art are much harder to write about than the bullshit piled around it. And it’s not the stuff of likes and shares. Sorry.
The pictures are somewhat detached from time — from the present — by their strong visual analog to mid century abstraction (think Kline or de Kooning). They even have that generation’s swagger. But they’re far more colorful and more chaotic. Expressing without disclosing. Paintings arrested in the process of their own making less by completion than exhaustion. This isn’t the discovery of what is most essential to capital A Art, but the “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”1 fighting spirit of modernity in decline.
Autonomous art is cope. Absolute, self-referential autonomy is where art goes when the world has little need of it (or so it seems) and its self-evidence is lost. What evades notice is that the academy art of the biennials (and whatever the fuck is happening at Documenta) is the most hermetic of all, even as it stakes its legitimacy on the issue du jour. Art can be produced via immanent critique, but it has to be good. Institutional critique has historically borne some fruit, but it has to have an imagination beyond the institution is bad. Saying that something is bad is not criticism.
So ok, yes, Spencer Lewis makes abstract expressionist canvases that look nice and are very marketable (ew!) and would look lovely (and just the right amount of edgy) in a Tribeca loft. But that’s the audacity of it, is it not? Making pictures that live or die by their own qualities.
In the anemic life drained of the joy of discovery, Lewis occasions a bit of the nervous zeal of the adventurer. We need not ask art, the coy plenipotentiary of a better world, to tell us what is wrong with this one, only to demonstrate that a life otherwise lived remains possible.
Great article. I like the idea that a painting can just be about paint. This work reminds me of the work of Ying Li. I love the work of both of these painters.