Adding stencils to her arsenal of tools, Jacqueline Humphries superimposes repetitive patterns on Expressionist brushwork in a group of new magisterial abstract paintings titled as emoticons or other punctuation marks. In oo oo%, she interweaves sooty gestural strokes and areas of stenciled Xs and dots in matte black on one of the silvery backgrounds that have become her signature. Elsewhere in the same composition, an overlay of gridded dots in creamy yellows produces a wondrous illusion of green while also adding depth. The effect is both electric and melancholic, as if a Clyfford Still had been rendered by a vintage computer.
A nine-foot-tall canvas titled :) features an off-register pattern of the titular symbol stenciled in thick black oil stick atop an expanse of washy blue, like an Abstract Expressionist seascape seen through a smudgy scrim. An optical buzz results but also a curious sensation as your eyes try to focus, not always successfully, on the painting’s surface. The mechanically rendered pictograph interferes with your apprehension of the gestural marks that signify the artist’s emotive hand, conjuring the ways in which contemporary experience has become mediated by technology and social media. Yet the painterly conflation of genuine expression and trite convention makes :) a philosophical event as much as it is a visual one.
While Humphries’s paintings have obvious affinities with the efforts of artists like Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton, she outclasses them both in terms of sensual pleasure and, one suspects, intellectual heft.—Joseph R. Wolin