Milhazes in the Window

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Lately it seems as if the James Cohan Gallery is showing all Milhazes all the time. I'm not complaining. The work is joyful and visually intoxicating. I tried to photograph the installation in the small window-facing gallery, but some guy with a giant head was chatting up a collector type--blah, blah, blah--and they just wouldn't budge from their spot in front of the work. So I shot above their heads to get the two pics you see here.



Then I went to the gallery website and found a nice installation shot, which I have taken the liberty of reproducing here. I guess more than anything else I've seen in the past few weeks, this work personifies the new season--well, the season that arrived but has been in hiding for the past few days. Spring!

Gamboa, 2008, iron and mixed media, 27.6 in tall x 45.7 in diameter
Image from the gallery website

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Beatriz Milhazes and Tomma Abts

Both Beatriz Milhazes at James Cohan and Tomma Abts at David Zwirner presented spare shows. Milhazes offered one large painting per wall; Abts, several small paintings per each very large wall. Size aside, they couldn’t have been more opposite.

Study in contrasts: Milhazes is hot and expansive; Abts is cold and tight

Milhazes kaleidoscopes the grid, geometry, Carnaval, textile design, folk art and botany into a throbbing samba of up-against-the-picture-plane abstraction. Her paintings are a non-pharmacological high. They’re big, joyous, warm, physically expressive, wilfully chromatic, unabashedly beautiful. The work is so richly detailed that every visual toke—er, detail—offers something big and fabulous; even her paintings have paintings!

Milhazes: Sinfonia Nordestina, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 96 7/8 x 144 7/8 inches

Detail below

Milhazes: Popeye, 2008 acrylic on canvas, 78 3/8 x 54 3/4 inches

Milhazes: Mulatinho, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 97 5/6 x 97 5/8

Two (very different) details below

Milhazes: Carambola, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 54 7/8 a 50 5/8

Detail below

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Against this extravagantly saturated tropicalismo it’s probably unfair to make comparisons, but I found Tomma Abts’s paintings stingy and tight, like the kid in school who encircles his paper with his left arm to make sure no one can catch a glimpse of what he’s writing. I liked her recent show at the New Museum well enough, and I can appreciate the intellectual rigor of the work here, but in this show her coolness struck me as cold and, well,withholding. The tonal hues seemed too gray, the geometry too quirky, too labored. There are layers and layers of paintings under the surface—Abts’ process is to let the work grow intuitively from this mulch, so to speak—but I left feeling that while she might have planted plum tomatoes, she ended up with radishes.

Abts, clockwise from top left: Nesche, Bilte, Teite, Lurro; all 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 x 15 inches. All full-view images from the gallery website

Abts: Isko, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 19 x 15 inches

Detail below, hinting at the layers of painting underneath the surface