Perspectives: Chaos In East Hampton

Although curatorially light-years apart, two exhibitions in East Hampton share a common thread in that each focuses on elements of chaos.

Matthew Satz’s works at Harper’s Books addresses the chaos in painterly terms, while anarchy is present in more broadly sociological expressions in the current group show at the Eric Firestone Gallery.

In Matthew Satz’s “Selected Works” the emphasis is finding painterly organization out of an ethereal pandemonium of lines and colors. Reflecting M.C. Escher’s observation that artists “adore chaos because we like to produce order,” Mr. Satz’s pieces have continually stressed the creation of compositions that rely on the spontaneity of random technique. This is particularly evident in his “Strip” paintings, which formulate a loose and harmonically emotive structure.

In “Untitled Strip Painting with By-Product” (oil on canvas, 2009), for example, the flow of pigment in the work creates a dramatic vertical sensation that nevertheless, in the intermingling of streams of color, draws the eye across the canvas in a seamless meandering of hue and texture. This is also apparent in works such as “Untitled, Horizontal Strand Piece with By-Product” (oil-based enamel on linen, 2005) and “Untitled By-Product: 11.24.09” (oil-based enamel on paper, 2009). In “Bouquet: 11 Strands, Clear Coat” (oil-based enamel and gesso on linen, 2006), the impact is significantly more organic in a sort of “vegetables from outer space” kind of way.

Random order is also a significant factor in Mr. Satz’s series of “Smoke” paintings, while his grid works seem to literally shimmer like thousands of LED lights arranged in small rectangles of color whose placement and interrelationships seem simultaneously intentionally structured and haphazardly arbitrary.

At the Eric Firestone Gallery, the focus is on an extremely urban sensibility in both tenor and tone. The show reflects an atmosphere accentuated by the exhibition’s variety of approaches, styles and idioms, as well as by the effective juxtaposition of refined painterly modernism, frenetically energetic street art and furniture that melds both Bauhaus and industrial design principles.

The ambiance as a result becomes a snapshot reflection of those unique existential aspects of city life in which contrasting concepts and images that are, in and of themselves merely components in a chaotic landscape, become reconciled through their interaction; in essence, transforming the urban experience from a frenzied and cacophonous sensory overload of sound and movement into a more melodious and rhythmic visual backdrop that defines urban living and which the artist Nicoletta Baumeister described as a world “full of chaotic compositions.”

This is a sensation that is immediately apparent in the exhibition in the placement of works from dramatically different periods and styles in direct proximity that nevertheless develop areas of interaction and dialogue, despite their differences. The juxtaposition, for example, of works by early ground-breaking graffiti artists such as P.H.A.S.E. 2 (who is credited with inventing the bubble letter-style of tagging known as “softies”), alongside the Franz Kline-like calligraphic abstractions by Jorge Fick (who was actually a student of Mr. Kline at Black Mountain College), or Douglas Denniston’s 1950 geometric abstraction hanging near Henry Chalfant’s digital metallic prints of the explosively tagged subway cars I used to watch cruise through the 96th Street station in Manhattan.

Also of particular interest in the exhibition are works by Thomas Morin—including “Homage to David Smith Fine Sculpture” (foam vaporization cast aluminum, 1964) and “Iron Tower” (cast iron, 1965)—and, among the furniture, Max Gottschalk’s industrial-style “Chair and Ottoman” (leather and metal, 1970) and Cade Hayes’s “Bolt Lounges” (hemp and powder coated steel, 2010).

Matthew Satz’s “Selective Works” continues at Harpers Books in East Hampton through Tuesday, March 1. The “Winter Works” group exhibition continues at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton through Sunday, March 27.