Claire Sherman: Intuor

CLAIRE SHERMAN

CLAIRE SHERMAN

Essay by Barry Sch wab sky

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

AN AMBIGUOUS TRUTH The writers who impress me most are not poets or novelists or critics or journalists, but historians. I am always astonished by their ability—one not all of them share, of course, though all the really good ones do —to deploy and synthesize so many thousands of discrete facts, each one contributing its specific weight and character to the form and texture of the whole, without losing sight of the overall arc of a book’s argument or narrative. Every little piece of information seems to function like a single brush stroke on a vast canvas bearing a complex composition; you somehow feel you can see the separate marks and the whole picture at once. This feeling is really what we call comprehension.

Claire Sherman’s recent paintings are the kind of painting those historians’ works resemble, which is kind of funny since she is obviously nothing like what used to be called a history painter: no heroic events or world-altering actions are pictured in her works— in fact nothing that you’d normally call an event or action at all, since there are also no people. But still, her work does tell stories of a sort, about its human protagonist, the person who sees a certain reality and makes paintings, and about what she sees and depicts. But those are quiet or implicit stories, and rather elusive. Still, what I love about those paintings is how every mark this painter makes seems to be something like a fact, and for that matter, a true fact—or at least (since after all I can’t really verify the accuracy of anything I see in these paintings, can’t measure them against some “original”) they are facts I feel confident I can rely on, just like the facts adduced by a good historian.

Vines , 2022. Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

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Grass and Wildflowers, 2020 (opposite, detail). Oil on canvas, 60 x 54 inches

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What Sherman shows me, in other words, feels real, feels true, by which I mean, first of all that, thanks to the specificity of the facts that make up her paintings and their mutual consistency, it’s plausible that there must be a place somewhere in the world that has the features the painting describes, a place that, if I saw it in life, I should be able to recognize from its image in the painting, as I can recognize someone I’ve never met from their portrait.

In a surprising way, this sense of the paintings’ truthfulness is only re-emphasized by my understanding that recognition or identification of a particular place would be contrary to the artist’s intention—as if to be able to put a name on something were tantamount to no longer needing to see it. “It isn’t usually possible that someone can go and find the exact place that I painted from,” Sherman once explained, continuing, “I hope that the works are ambiguous, as I don’t want people to be able to say, ‘I went there on vacation last year.’”1 That was more than a decade ago, but I believe the same thing still remains true. And then it’s significant that, in her studio, Sherman takes her cues, not from drawings or color sketches made on site but rather from photographs that she takes there— which is really to say, I think, that she must use those images as triggers for imagination and memory, maybe even for dreaming, because the information snapshots can provide is so far removed from what can enter a painting. Photographs function merely what Sherman, in a statement for her 2019 exhibition New Pangaea described as “placeholders.” 2 A drawing would have connected the artist to the situation in which she’d made it—a corporeal connection comprehending eye, hand, and body—whereas a photograph separates them in the very process of offering mnemonic prompts; what the photograph really offers the painter is a kind of freedom, even a sort of irresponsibility to the source.

The artist herself has said that these recent works “are intentionally very romantic.” 3 It’s this freedom, this wildness really, that accounts for what some might see as the play in Sherman’s work between image and abstraction, but which I think was more discerningly described by Rob Colvin as the paintings’ way of working “in reference to (and in tension with) the landscape.” 4 In this referential tension or tense referentiality, the material characteristics of paint are always as evident as its incredible adaptability as a vehicle for description; as Sherman told Colvin, “The physical quality of paint is something I find very seductive. Paint has the ability to describe, fall apart, be chaotic, rigid, uncontrollable, fluid, and surprising all at once.” 5 I find something sweetly funny, to be honest, about the modesty with which the artist expresses herself, for the second

Vines, 2021. Oil on canvas, 78 x 66 inches

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Wildflowers, 2020. Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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Grass and Leaves, 2021. Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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sentence of that statement really ought to be rephrased like this: Sherman has the ability to make paint describe, fall apart, be chaotic, rigid, uncontrollable, fluid, and surprising all at once. Paint doesn’t do this—not for everyone, anyway.

In any case, the paintings’ aura of veracity is not exactly representational, but rather, what I’d call phenomenal (in the sense that it is based on perceptual experience). That is, because the painter has paid attention to the way the light falls at particular moments and to the shadows that light and things working in concert produce—yes, this sky, this atmosphere, this light, these shadows— the work testifies with credibility to an origin in lived experience. But notice, by the way, that while light and atmosphere and sky occur in the singular, shadows come in the plural. That reminds me of one of the remarkable things about Sherman’s paintings, which is how the shadowy areas in them are never more or less one thing, one tone, one shadow. There is as much to see in these shadowy areas, as many details, as in the most brightly illuminated parts of the composition, maybe even more so. They are just a little harder to see. But that difficulty has a reward: You can see into those shadows and see into them, without ever feeling that you might start running out of things to see.

All in all, it sounds like I’ve been talking about the work of a realist painter.

And yes, I suppose this work does bear some significant relation to whatever it is that people mean when they talk about realism in art. And there’s a quality of earnestness here that I particularly associate with the best kind of realism: I mean, a sense that the artist has seriously endeavored to subordinate what might even be an outsized capacity for fantasy, play, or sheer performative gusto to the necessary task, the incredibly detailed job of adumbrating, bit by bit, a circumstance known or felt or believed to be a veridical truth about the world, a truth that cannot with honor be faked or fudged. In that sense, the artist commits to submitting herself to the reality of what she paints, making herself its servant rather than its master, and no fooling around. I suddenly remember some lines by Wallace Stevens: “Look, realist, not knowing what you expect. / The green falls on you as you look.” 6 And yet in Sherman’s paintings there is in fact tremendous fantasy, play, and gusto. Plenty of wit and affection. Bravura too. But she always keeps those aspects up her sleeve. They’re extra. Or are they? Maybe not, since the more I look at these paintings the more essential the extras start to seem. It’s more

Grass and Wildflowers , 2021. Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

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Wildflowers , 2020. Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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Grass and Leaves , 2021. Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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that all these subjective and, as it were, whimsical aspects of the work are in fact the underside of its objectivity, its discipline, even its plainness.

Sherman’s imagination seems most evident in her color choices, which may on the face of it seem less adventurous than they really are. After all, she is no fauve or expressionist reveling in blazing yellow skies over bright blue trees and red people. Hers is a naturalist palette. A tangle of foliage will be green or, depending on the season, maybe a reddish brown. And yet, these overall color impressions are far from the whole story. Such a range of distinct and unexpected nuances resides with those broad zones of close colors. Particularly telling is her way of handling interactions between warm and cool tones. For examples of this, I could point to almost any one of the recent medium-sized paintings she’s titled Wildflowers, with their glorious spangles of bright petalcolored dabs scattered across fields (the word functions as a sort of natural and unavoidable pun here—field as a plot of land and as a color zone) dense with tones of tawny ochers and umbers or cool, shadowy greens. Some periwinkles (as I imagine them to be) flashing against a massed choir of warm autumnal tones, for instance, leap out as if blue rather than red were the hot hue that advances to meet the eye. In another painting, some similarly colored little flowers against a multitude of greens humbly recede, acting more as points of rest than of excitation. These are subtle effects, but in either case, the eye, sensitive to the pictorial use of color, cannot help being astonished by them, perhaps even before one notices how they’ve been produced.

Equally powerful in impact is Sherman’s use of luminosity and shadow. Look at how, in one of the paintings titled Grass and Wildflowers (pg. 11), for instance, sunlight seems to be striking the foliage at the very top center of the composition while leaving much of the surrounding area in darkness. The strong contrast is reminiscent of certain Baroque painting—closer to Georges de la Tour, probably, than to Caravaggio, rapt rather than dramatically dynamic. But notice, too, how the bright light that’s settled at the top of the canvas seems, as it were, to slide down and back up the composition in the lines of golden grasses and the little yellow flowers that float about amidst these currents of illumination—I couldn’t help thinking of those tiny blossoms as something like the shower of gold coins pouring down on some Danaë.

Sherman invites you to get lost in such painterly details. Just as she beguiles with color that is more richly inflected than it might at first seem, so too with line she keeps surprises at the ready. In the painting I’ve just been talking about, Grass and Wildflowers, the grasses show themselves mainly as a multitude of

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Trees and Vines , 2021. Oil on canvas, 96 x 234 inches

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Grass and Ferns, 2021 (opposite, detail). Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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vertical marks that curve off to the side a bit toward the top while at the bottom lay a mass of more or less horizontal ones representing grasses matted down on the ground. But what gives the image its depth and power are a small number of bright lines in the foreground that are neither basically horizontal nor vertical but cut across the picture plane at angles: grasses that are neither growing upward nor pressed down but shooting off like fireworks on their own arcs. That in a painting composed of so many discrete marks—I wouldn’t know how to begin counting them but they must number in the thousands— just a few can affect the whole so powerfully is evidence of an artist in complete control of her means.

Speaking of that throng of individual marks that work together to form each painting’s image content, it is extraordinary to realize that most of them will have been set down in a single session of up to fifteen hours of work. Those must be days of great intensity. However well-prepared the painter might be, no matter how well she has thought out the painting she intends to make, it takes considerable bravado to face down the risks of addressing a large canvas in so short a time in order to preserve a freshness and candor of aspects that might be lost in a longer work process allowing for continual rethinking and revision.

Sherman’s are not, generally, the light and elegant touches of an Alex Katz, nor the moody, uneasily meditative strokes of a Luc Tuymans—to name two elders who, like Sherman, prefer to paint wet-on-wet in single continuous sessions.

They are more declarative, one might even say more objective, for all that is ambiguous about their relation to any specific source. And that frankness of expression is why, when I encounter these paintings, I feel implicitly that they bear truths that concern me.

B A R R Y S C H WA B S K Y notes 1.Christopher Lowrance, “Q & A with Claire Sherman,” MW Capacity, March 2, 2010, https://mwcapacity. wordpress.com/2010/03/02/q-a-withclaire-sherman/.

2. Claire Sherman,“Artist Statement,” 2019.

3. Claire Sherman,“Artist Statement,” 2019.

4. Rob Colvin, “Artists Pick Artists: Claire Sherman,” Hyperallergic, February 11, 2014, https://hyperallergic.com/107612/artists-pick-artistsclaire-sherman/.

5. Ibid.

6. Wallace Stevens, “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: Corrected Edition, ed. by John N. Serio and Chris Beyers (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), p. 284.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His books of art criticism include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2019); His new collection of poetry is Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, 2022).

Trees and Shore , 2021. Oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches

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Trees and Shore , 2022. Oil on canvas, 66 x 84 inches

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Cave , 2021. Oil on canvas, 60 x 52 inches

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Crevice , 2021. Oil on canvas, 96 x 78 inches

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INTUOR My last exhibition at DC Moore Gallery, New Pangaea, borrowed its title from a chapter in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction. In recent work, I continue to examine a new state in our environment caused by globalism and increases in worldwide trade and travel. This current mode, one in which human intervention creates a new supercontinent, is one in which invasive species and plants are forced into a new existence together. The dense, tangled, and undulating forms of spaces and plants in my recent work address some of these complicated new environments we are creating, full of both worry and hope. As I reflect from our current perspective, one that is deep in the throes of a global pandemic caused by similar elements of globalization, I am even more dedicated to these new directions that are evolving in my work. And lately, I have been drawn to the Latin word intuor, which means to look, to consider or to inspect.

I have focused these past several years on singular forms of wildflowers, tangles of grasses, and vines draped on trees. I spent the last eight years researching and hiking locations in Northern California and Oregon, many of which were consumed by the fires in 2020 and 2021. The subject of wildflowers, one of the first plants to return after a forest fire, feels urgent. Wildflowers are resilient—existing both in forests and next to highways. Although these paintings are intentionally very romantic, they are also simple, straightforward, and focused. They are concise and analytic, representing a single piece of ground. As is the case in much of my work, the paintings ride a line between abstraction and representation, coming together as an image while falling apart at the same time. My hope is that the works relate to our current moment. Their scale requires closer looking and the subjects ask the viewer to consider what is nearby. In a moment that has forced many of us to be distant from each other, the proximity of the familiar environment depicted in these paintings is deliberate.

C. S.

Claire Sherman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Seoul, and Turin. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Yaddo, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Sherman earned her BA from The University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005.

Wildflowers and Grass , 2020. Oil on canvas, 60 x 54 inches

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Wildflowers , 2021. Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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Wildflowers, 2020. Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches

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DC M O O R E G A L L E R Y 535 West 22 Street New York, New York 10011 212 247.2111 dcmooregallery.com

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition

Claire Sherman: Intuor DC Moore Gallery May 5 – June 4, 2022

Catalogue © DC Moore Gallery, 2022 An Ambiguous Truth © Barry Schwabsky, 2022 isbn: 978-0-9993167-7-1

Catalogue Managers : Edward De Luca & Sabeena Khosla Design: Joseph Guglietti Photography © Peter Mauney

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Printing: Brilliant

cover: Grass and Wildflowers, 2020 ( detail). Oil on canvas, 60 x 54 inches opposite: Tree and Vines , 2021 (detail). Oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches