Bernd Naber, Yellow, n.d., acrylic on canvas Bernd Naber, Black. Bernd Naber, Red. Jamie Dalglish, Aspen Grove, 1996, acrylic & gold powder on birch plywood. Detail of Aspen Grove. Jamie Dalglish, God's Tooth Jamie Dalglish, Pyrne in a Gyre Maureen Dougherty, Silent Ideal, 1995, acrylic on linen Maureen Dougherty, The Power of Models 5 & 6, 1996, acrylic on linen Maureen Dougherty, Radical Mistakes, 1996, acrylic on linen Detail of Radical Mistakes.

jamie dalglish, maureen dougherty and bernd naber at ludmilla baczynsky by Walter Robinson There are few things that don't look more beautiful in the company of gold and silver and precious gems, a point most evident in this three-person exhibition, installed in the ground floor of a lovely brownstone on East 72nd Street. This new gallery of fine jewelry and objets d'art is operated by Ludmilla Baczynsky, a young Belgian aristocrat who is an art dealer as well as a jewelry designer and silversmith. To inaugurate the painting part of her enterprise she presents work by three well- known downtown abstract painters. I paid a recent visit to the gallery with the artist Jamie Dalglish, whose "levitating morphoglyphs," as he calls them, are on view in Ludmilla's intimate central gallery. Dalglish is a veteran New York painter, showing over the past 20 years at O.K. Harris, Barbara Braathen and other galleries. "In my painting, art is the art of becoming art," he said, with a convincing tone that didn't sound at all cryptic (I wish I could convey it to you via cyberspace!). I'd visited Jamie before in his lovely 8th Street Studio overlooking MacDougal Alley Mews in the Village, where he had showed me his morphoglyph series, huge square paintings, measuring 96 inches square, made up of 96 x 8 inch panels. Dalglish considers the 96-inch-square works as units as well, units that can be linked together into 16-foot-square quatrefoils or endless horizontal or vertical combinations in what he calls "a continuous, pulsating harmonic proportion." Jamie talks a good story, which is essential to artists today. In the front gallery he pointed out Bernd Naber's dense monochromes, with their "curious weight and quiet delicacy." Naber has nine works in the show, each its own color and size-- orange, black, white, yellow. The largest painting is red. He makes his works by piling on the paint and then sanding the surfaces down. Naber has for many years pursued what can be called the ultimate in monochrome painting. He is also a familiar figure on the Manhattan streets, which he navigates in a sanded-down gun-metal gray Impala convertible. In the large back space are about 12 paintings by Maureen Dougherty that "explore the space between Surrealism and abstraction, not unlike the kind of thing Arshile Gorky was after in his later work." Dougherty and Dalglish live together. She works at a movie production company (that produced the multi-part Ken Burns production, "The West") in a high-powered job as bookkeeper. There she also doodles on paper napkins, using a fountain pen or magic marker, drawing little abstractions, columns of numbers, spirals, flowers, seed pods, bird shapes. Back in the studio, she sets these drawings in gel, where the paper all but dissolves, and adheres them to raw linen, sometimes with white pigment pushed through from the back. The ink is a dense blue-black. "like a torch disappearing into the fog," Dalglish said. Some of the works present a single spiral image, made, Jamie told me, using a barbeque grill as a template. Others give the impression of a palimpsest, or of Leonardo's drawings of the deluge. The paintings are deployed in diptychs and quatrefoils. Jamie has a picture called God's Tooth, made of three panels in harmonic proportions (one to three), a white panel with blue green and yellow that glows with aftercolors and vibrates harmonically in "different tempos, rhythms, like music." God's Tooth is made with colors pressed through a screen--titanium white, gold powder, gloss acrylic gel medium--which oxidized and hardened into a celadon light blue. After it was dry, "I hit it again with cadmium red light, like a stone skipping over the surface." Jamie uses a squeegee, and also throws paint with a stick. And uses brushes. From the structure, he says, arises "a scintillating, bracing color. I try to achieve that bracing color in every work." Another painting, Pyrne in a Gyre, is named after a Yeats poem (and means "reel in a vortex," like a fisherman reeling in a catch). The work has sprocketing on the edge, suggesting frames per second, like a filmstrip in action. It's colors are raw and "abrasive like falling in a bicycle accident." The work Morphoglyph, which measures 38 x 96 inches, creates what Dalglish calls a Boschian cinematic time change, with cobalt blue, cerulean, gel, light green and gold powder, applied and then scraped off in one gesture. The impact is "like a big bang." The shapes suggest elongated creaturelike appendages or hallucinations of a scene in a primeval forest.Morphoglyph contains as well a white panel like a waterfall. "You can call that the tears of the unicorn," he says. All of Dalglish's paintings are made on wood and suspended on hanging cleats, flush with the wall, so that a certain amount of raw energy collects around the edges, which seem to levitate off the wall. "Not closed, but open--hovering on raw energy." One particularly alluring work by Dalglish is Aspen Grove, a 48-inch square made up of individual panels with harmonic proportions of one to 12. It's a shimmering vision of light green and black mass, a grove, up on the surface of a hill. The blacks are clear with no muddy overtones, the work sparkles with gold powder oxidized in the white. And the light green is the color of fall leaves. If museums did decent shows anymore they would do a big show of abstraction called "Aspen Grove" featuring works by Dalglish and other contemporary abstractions, like the new paintings by Gerhard Richter on view at Marian Goodman, Warhol's Rorschach paintings and some works by Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. Jamie Dalglish, Maureen Dougherty and Bernd Naber at Ludmilla Baczynsky Gallery, Aug. 31-Nov. 1, 1996, 58 East 79th Street, NYC, NY 10021. WALTER ROBINSON is editor of ArtNet Magazine. Back to Reviews 1996 Archives