Diana Guerrero-Maciá @ Secrist | Beach
Preface: Is it a dick move to rain on an exhibition’s parade the day it closes? Maybe. But I feel baffled by the praise this show received from nobodycritic on Instagram and Alan Pocaro in NewCity. Both reviews seem to have significantly inflated the value and novelty of the game Painting for the Birds is playing. I figured I would let this exhibition slide because I won’t disagree that it looks pleasing. But this review was written over a month ago and has eaten at me since. Cheers to disagreement and the concomitant joys that accompany.
Remember shabby-chic? The laboriously planned way of looking carelessly unplanned? That’s my impression of what is happening in Paintings for the Birds. Diana Guerrero-Maciá even has a term for these quaintly slapdash works on paper and canvas: “unpainted paintings”. But no matter how many negative prefixes you hitch to these compositions, neither the devil-may-care freedom, nor post-painterly negativity they aspire to can be achieved when they seem so pleased with themselves.
The work is ad hoc the same way a waterfront cottage in The World of Interiors might be; and to be honest, they’re just as devoid of tension as those photos tend to be. An overbearing middle-western politesse pervades the exhibition –– nothing here could possibly rub anyone the wrong way. Likewise, I see little possibility for it to rub anyone the right way. I’m prone to think of other artists who have operated under the aegis of similar formal or material considerations at differing points in their practices with aplomb – Michelle Grabner, Rosemarie Trockel, or even Heimo Zobernig for starters.
My biggest gripe is with the eponymous series of collages on paper : Paintings for the Birds. Double entendre aside, these simply seem too well mannered to dismiss or even benignly ironize the formal decisions they spring from. I won’t go too into detail about bafflingly on-the-nose sound-work that plays the call of migratory birds shuttling between the Midwest and Central America, but it’s presence was graciously negligible.
It would be both unfair and grossly incorrect to characterize Guerrero-Maciá as lacking in sensibility. Her chops are discernible in the tactile minutiae, which ends up carrying the works’ stronger moments. Cursory attention to the artist’s application of color and material will confirm this. Take for instance, Tree no.1, whose tartan, gingham and checkerboard patterns each pit a relatively analogous structural schema against one another. The conversation is further complicated with the introduction of floating black cruciforms that punctuate different points of the picture plane, cementing a syntax of perpendicularity with their staccato placement.
It is safe to say that there are certain material and compositional decisions apt to catching someone’s eye. It is also safe to say that these same decisions themselves drink from the Lethe as we turn away. The superimposition of a quilting grammar onto a painterly one ought to form a gestalt that veritably teems with ambivalence, but they’re too charmed by their own materials to yield the tension or detachment that might, as John Kelsey says of collage; “get to the bottom of impotence…extracting living dead gestures from information”. As such, retinal fascination can’t be expected to last beyond the inevitable discernment of their guilelessness – even when it concerns the more vaguely “deviant” gestures a la ripped up rags, driftwood and feather appliques. Paintings for the Birds is not asinine, but even at its best, it is decidedly anodyne.
Paintings for the Birds closes today at Secrist | Beach, I encourage you to see it for yourself if you can.