Richard LaPresti's new show at the Bowery Gallery.

The LaPresti show opened yesterday. We went to the gallery a bit late because of other necessary appointments on Saturday. It is a large show. None of the paintings are much beyond 40 inches in the long dimension. Most are smaller. The subjects this time are still life, landscape, city scape, beach scene, seascape, a life class with posing models and many artists work. It is the broadest range of mastered motifs he has ever handled at one time. His brush is loose and used to develop the forming of each motif. Each painting was a pictorial challenge, I believe. One reason is that he did not know beforehand how he was going to realize the forms. There were lacks in the motif for compositional reasons, of which he was aware from the beginning. So he was quite ready when, after a while he saw a reflection across the water from in to out, leading straight down to the bottom edge of the canvas helped to realize the surface and the space at the same time. One of the paintings has two of them in perfect positions. They were, however improvised on the spot. The second time it happened, he was waiting for it and at the point in the day when it showed up he quickly got it down.

He has been painting beach scenes for decades. This time, for the first time, the plane of the beach was important to him. He tried to realize the sharp horizontally of that plane and not raise and lower it to rationalize the figures he worked into the composition which were always moving and agitating that plane in the past. The views of the insides of studios with a model or models posing for a group are a new motif. They do seem to have a related space and complex spatial movement which connects them to the beach scenes. They must be the equivalent of the beach scenes, only painted in the winter. In some respects they are easier for him to deal with than the beach scenes. Since everyone is painting or drawing the motif, there must be very little movement. Of course the same is true for the models. So he gets more time to think about relationships than at the beach. This does help him and the large paintings from this source are among the strongest in the show.

Now, I have not mentioned anything about his level of abstraction. He is not a realist. His work is on  a level of abstraction between Cezanne and someone who has been an analytic cubist but uses naturalistic color usually somewhat heightened. The major joys in the work are joys of construction , although mixed with some whimsical, and slightly odd references to the motif. We get opinions about the character of posing for a group of artists. The models are somewhat different creatures than the busily working artists. The differences are a part of the meaning of the painting.

There are some cityscapes which in a most informal and enjoyable hand try to make sense of a town in terms not distant from Cezanne. Actually while we all know Cezanne, and there have been innumerable artists who have tried to paint like him, there is very little painting which actually brings it off. LaPresti is not trying to paint like him. He is using his developed sensibility which was guided in his early years by a number of teachers who had a cezannist connection, and the formal impulse, which comes from those years becomes a part of his armament and shows up in a motif closest to Cezannes. Those teachers included Mercedes Matter, Charles Cajori and me. 

In his generation the work of someone who is immensely gifted in the kind of spatial read which in modern times found in Cezanne one of its first major figures can very well not seem an imitator, Because having gained his knowledge working from the motif with several different versions of the construction required, and from his own daily practice over the decades, as well as much more abstractly than Cezanne ever did, it could adhere to that sort of construction and not get so close to Cesanne that it is imitative. Besides, none of the cezannists ever got close to Cezanne's realization, and LaPresti does.

I will leave off talking about his color until another time.