n + 1
n+1 magazine asks you to consider writing about art, or, more precisely, about art that represents New York City. Here you have Roger White writing on the art of Marvin Gates:
The simplifications in Gates’s paintings don’t exactly simplify things. Instead, the starkness provides a way for ordinary things to be themselves and also mysteriously otherwise. Hydrants are sculptures, people are mannequins, and a skull has a personality. Like his ambiguous abbreviations for objects, Gates’s spatial shorthand disrupts easy reading. Receding planes tip toward the viewer, volumes empty out, and distances shrink and grow unpredictably. Gates invites the viewer in only to confront her with bizarre disjunctions and anomalies. He builds trapdoors in Renaissance space.
This quintessentially modernist tactic cools down the emotional heat of the subject, Death. The drama enacted in the paintings, in which a sneaker-clad reaper takes to the streets of New York and ultimately disembodies in a funeral parlor, is rendered in a visual language suggesting a goal of order and rationality in figurative art long absent from critical discourse. The series of four paintings is like a eulogy delivered in Esperanto.
