William Staples: New Paintings at 65Grand

by Jeriah Hildwine

Skull

I’ll be the first to admit that my relationship with William Staples’ New Paintings was not one of love at first sight. On first glance they appear either faux-naieve or obstinately modernist: flat paint, bright colors, simple forms, and compositions that seem geometrically-arranged but rough-edged; a sort of Basquiat-cum-Mondrian, or Hans Hoffman meets Matisse. Not generally speaking my cup of tea, respectable in its historical context but not bearing repeating.

Untitled

It didn’t take long, however, to see that Staples is doing something new. It isn’t just his violation of the picture plane with holes cut in the canvas: Lucio Fontana first exhibited his slashed canvases in 1959, and last year Tokyo-born artist Peter MacDonald won the 25,000 pound John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize with his flat, cartoonish homage, “Fontana.” Rather, it is the way Staples uses these penetrations as compositional elements as well as conceptual devices, rather than for their own sake or to do things he could have done equally well with paint.

Light House

Instead, the orifices function invariably as portals into another layer of Staples’ world. In an angular skull somewhere between a Halloween cartoon and a study in cubsim, one eye gives way to reveal a darker, grimmer form within, which might be another skull, or a demonic face. A tree’s limbs puncture the canvas going not in, but out; pieces of cut twigs protrude from the canvas’ surface in line with the painted forms. A painted seascape features a lighthouse made of carefully selected pieces of scrap pine, its beacon a gash lined with gold, the moon a silver puncture. A vase of flowers is transformed into an insect-like head by its cut-out vase, replaced with a transparent backing painted with toothy green stripes.

65 Grand is an intimate space, nominally an apartment gallery but cleaner and better lit than most, a little off the beaten track but well worth a visit for this show.