For more than three decades, Jonathan Lasker’s cartoony canvases have employed a pared-down set of motifs to poke fun at abstract painting. Somewhere along the way, however, parody became sustained inquiry. His new paintings add a hint of the digital to the mix.
In For John Hancock, rows of rectangular boxes containing identical doodly lines grow larger as they replicate down the canvas. The doodle itself reappears in thick paint, tinted with slightly off secondary colors, like a king-size clone made of cake frosting. While Lasker’s pictures may seem a little calculating and starchy, his feats of intellectual and painterly prowess impress.
The Plus Sign at Golgotha features a black grid sporting a cross-shaped form in bubblegum pink and baby blue rising from a blocky horizon line, as if Kazimir Malevich had essayed the crucifixion. Yet the cross sits empty, and the actors at its base consist of impastoed squiggles. It’s a funny image, less a tragedy repeated as farce than a burlesque, of modernist art’s spiritual aspirations. Moving the painting’s pieces around on the chessboard of the canvas, Lasker plays out a fascinating, quasi-religious endgame of its own.