The verbiage surrounding Humphries’s large-scale abstract paintings—including the two series at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans (through February 28) of silver-pigmented works and canvases with ultraviolet paint that glows under black light—might lead you to believe that she’s an artist consumed by seductive special effects. “I think a painter’s first job is to get someone to look at a painting,” she notes in the press materials for this museum survey, in the city where she grew up. It’s a straightforward and honest statement, but one that implies that her paintings are somehow easy, when, in fact, their complicated surfaces deserve close-up attention beyond the initial visual interest they compel.Downstairs, works brought to mind the metallic glint of Warhol’s “Silver” works, the smudges of Christopher Wool, and the recent markmaking tendencies of Julie Mehretu. Humphries is acrobatic in her use of varying patterns and techniques. Visible throughout is a struggle between orderly, bounded geometries and wilder, more expressive marks, erasures, gouges, drips, and squeegee-like blurs. Color contrasts are stark, pitting black and shining silver against reds and purples. One work, ( ), 2015, is covered in a staticky pattern of crimson, like a hazy rain of blood falling down the painting’s surface. Elsewhere, Humphries’s compositions are filled with row upon row of hole punch–like black circles, which appear mathematically precise from a distance but, up close, are often irregular. O, 2015, is the standout in the room: Its grid of thick, tarlike circles is scratched and disrupted, and the background itself (predominantly a cloud of vaguely toxic green) is covered in densely repeated symbols—including what appear to be first-generation emoticons, like :) or :/.Upstairs, a gallery outfitted with black lights provides a coolly psychedelic environment for a series of canvases painted with ultraviolet enamel pigments. What might have been a nifty gimmick is instead an awe-inspiring, alien experience, bringing to mind everything from Gerhard Richter’s brash 1980s palette to the high-impact graphic nature of skateboard design and the fuzzy glow of one of James Turrell’s spaces. The colors here are thoroughly unnatural, the hues of Mountain Dew or Orange Crush. One canvas in a ghostly, ghastly green resembles a computer monitor that has imploded or blown out, left to emit a diffuse, swelling glow. With these works, Humphries shows the ways in which she’s influenced a younger generation of abstractionists, from Patrick Brennan to Keltie Ferris. These are paintings that indeed encourage and demand looking, but they move beyond the retinal into registers that are more sensual, and even physical.
↧