Comfort Food for the Soul and Drunk on Pulp Fiction

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John Evans’s ‘The Queen and Her Court,’ 2015, is on view at Henoch. Photo: Gallery Henoch

John Evans

Henoch
555 W. 25th St., (917) 305-0003
Through March 28

The tasteful semiabstract paintings by Boston-based artist John Evans (b. 1945) bring to mind Matisse’s famous dictum that his own pictures should be considered “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” This particular series of 12 paintings was inspired by a visit to botanical gardens in Palm Beach, Fla., and features Mr. Evans’s considerable adeptness at using the brush, palette knife, or roller to apply oil paint, his crisply sensitive compositions, and his indirect but convincing manner of evoking the likes of water lilies and lotuses. Mr. Evans’s color—a lot of gray and sedate blues garnished with edible greens—is restrained and knowledgeable; he knows just where to place his hotter, bolder chromatic accents.

If his paintings were music, they might be called middle-of-the-road, which would be considered an insult by most denizens of the New York art world. But a good deal of serious contemporary painting and sculpture—made by very intelligent, talented and skilled artists—resides there, in a place between dig-in-your-heels realism and aggressively awkward and overbearing abstraction seeking to be “edgy” by being either visually hard to take or intellectually hard to fathom. Mr. Evans is emphatically in-between, conscientiously employing the consensus lessons of modern painting to produce something restful. Armchairs aren’t built to be exciting. Their forte is comfort and calm, which Mr. Evans furnishes in abundance.

Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art

Ricco/Maresca
529 W. 20th St., (212) 627-4819
Through March 14

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‘Untitled’ (Woman holding pig, cop in pursuit), c. 1960-75, is on view at Ricco/Maresca. Photo: Ricco/Maresca Gallery

“Pulp Drunk” is raucous proof of two things: 1. The great, gulping maw of the contemporary art world is in constant need of new material to market, and 2. Some genuine popular-culture phenomena are the equals, minus scale and pretense, of many celebrated high-end styles. Almost every example in this show—a few dozen tempera-on-cardboard cover illustrations for Mexican pulp novels and magazines, c. 1960-1975—has everything six-figure paintings from the New Leipzig School (e.g., Neo Rauch) have save large size, dreary color and paraded cerebral complexity.

The Mexican pulp paintings are mostly anonymous works for hire, at a pretty pedestrian level, but a few are signed “Dorantes,” “F Zavala” or “Delgadillo.” Many of the illustrations star buxom women threatened by everything from tiny bright green aliens, to a strangler-clown, to a gigantic purple carnivorous plant. My personal nomination for immortality features a policeman in pursuit of a bosomy lady who flees with a pig in her arms.

Connoisseurs of the Mexican mode observe that south-of-the-border pulp art is less besotted with sex than its norteamericano counterpart, and more surreal, even mystical. Big, out-of-scale faces looming in the background are a favorite device. Scholarly fans see in these pulp pictures unintentional but profound revelations about the Mexican attitude toward consumerism. Most of us, however, will probably have a hard time reading sweeping conclusions in such gallery tea leaves.

Still, regarding the show purely as delightful, wacky entertainment—like going to the International Banana Museum in Mecca, Calif.—doesn’t completely prevent stray deep thoughts about the nature of painting, particularly the New Leipzig School, from entering one’s cabeza.

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Hadieh Shafie’s ‘Transition 4,’ 2014, is on view at Leila Heller. Photo: Jason Fagan/Hadieh Shafie/Leila Heller Gallery, NY

Hadieh Shafie: Surfaced

Leila Heller
568 W. 25th St., (212) 249-7695
Through April 11

A lot of art is both eye-boggling and pretty. But not nearly as much art also conveys some kind of depth beyond its hyper-decoration. The labor-intensive wall objects of Iranian-born (1969) artist Hadieh Shafie manage that considerable feat. Or rather, the best pieces in the exhibition, along with parts of others, do.

Ms. Shafie constructs the central feature of her best work by beginning with an inch-wide strip of paper—whose thin outfacing edge is painted with bright color or black beforehand—wrapped around a dowel (which is ultimately removed). What she ends up with looks like a psychedelic geode. Ms. Shafie then glues hundreds of these rolls tightly together onto a backing inside a white frame of some non-rectangle configuration. The results possess the liveliness of what used to be called Op Art, but without any of the wincing that style used to cause. The outstanding work in the show is “Ghalb 7” (2014), a teardrop shape about a yard wide, with “Transition 4” (2014), a 5-foot-in-diameter tondo, not far behind. Both are rich meditations on visual pleasure.

There’s a catch, however. The strips of paper are each inscribed in Farsi with the word “eshgh,” which means love or passion, and that in turn is supposed to lend Ms. Shafie’s work some additional gravitas. To an outsider to Ms. Shafie’s culture such as I, the addition of a linguistic gambit is more a conceptual abstraction than heartfelt poetry. Such are the limitations of cross-cultural art criticism.

—Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.