Continuing through November 30, 2013
Like the late Alden Mason, Gaylen Hansen, now 92, is outliving many of his dealers and critics. Having retired from university art teaching at age 62, he proceeded to build on successful New York gallery and museum shows that were repeatedly praised by big-name critics and curators such as John Russell, Carter Ratcliff, Gerrit Henry and Marcia Tucker, the latter of whom could be given credit for “discovering” Hansen in her 1979 New Museum show “Sustained Visions.” A highly sophisticated ex-academic often mistaken in those days for a visionary folk artist, Hansen inadvertently reinforced New York stereotypes about isolated regional artists. Simplified animal and human imagery was crudely painted on unstretched canvases. His alter ego of the Kernal posited another folk-art element, the artist as character in his own world.
Along with the new paintings, this exhibition includes a beautiful survey of seven drawings from 2007 to the present. Most feature the Kernal in various absurd settings; they create microcosms for the painter, who was educated at USC (where he was a student of Francis de Erdely) after earlier studies at Otis and in Utah. Considering the vigorous brushwork, cartoonish figures and ongoing, enigmatic narratives, Hansen echoes late-period Philip Guston. Another analogy that might have struck the New Yorkers is that of late-period Milton Resnick. After long periods of abstract expressionism, all three became narrative-figurative painters of the highest order. Hansen’s scale, however, has always been smaller, more intimate, and the current show contains some of his smallest and best paintings yet.
Nature is always atavistic and troubled in Hansen. “Yellow Dog on Red Ground” (19 x 23 inches) is vicious and undoubtedly diseased, but lovable. Hansen’s empathetic identification with animals and fish is part of his power and charm. Similarly, “White Green-Eyed Dog” and “Cat Looking Out” are terrifying and feral, but averaging 20 inches square, they double as someone’s beloved family pet portraits.
There was a smooth, thinly painted monochrome background in Hansen’s early work that offset the crazy shenanigans of the Kernal and his cohort. Now the walls, fields, and skies are highly variegated and the brushwork is closer to Resnick: anxious, painterly stabs. This activates each work brilliantly, intensifying moments of fear and premonitions of natural catastrophe. “Pack” arranges nine attack dogs ready to pounce. Nearly eight feet wide, “Pack” is a late-period masterpiece. So is “Fish Migration” (1996), a crowded salmon run so polluted and poisonous that the fish are already seeping blood and slime. Each time, the Utah native balances increasingly horrific eco-crises with gentle humor and gorgeous, pure color. Of course, blue, red and orange dogs could co-exist with black ad brown ones, as in another group, “Walking Dogs.” Wagging their sturdily erect tails at eye level, sexual puns that leaven the gloom are not far behind either.
An urgent spontaneity is creeping into Hansen’s new work, like “time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” in the British poet and politician Andrew Marvell’s words. The reduced black and white palette of “Three Dog Heads, White Faces” makes the snarling trio jump out at the viewer, a conceit repeated in “Three Black White-Faced Dogs,” with its sunny orange background. When some dogs age, their facial hair turns white. Hansen is surely commenting on old age. In dog years, he would be 644. With such riches herein, I will settle for his long, endlessly creative, human years.
