Dialogue underpins and circumscribes Counterparts [Contemporary Art Center of Virginia; June 29— September 23, 20071.

A joint project of the art center’s exhibitions and education areas, this ambitious exhibition pairs the work of eight contemporary American painters with that of their self-identified influences. It includes the combinations of Laylah Ali -i- Ida Applebroog, Kevin Appel + Philip Gustori, Judith Fisler + Richard Prince, Inka Essenhigh + Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Barnaby Furnas + Carroll Dunham, Laura Owens + Mary Heilmann, Kanishka Raja + Kerry James Marshall, and George Rush + Fairfield Porter. Discourse operates at numerous points throughout the project: at its inception when museum colleagues were asked to contribute ideas; in the exhibition catalog that includes an essay by Thomas Lawson, a lengthy interview with the curator, Ragan Cole- Cunningham, and email interviews with each artist; between paintings, through a variety of aesthetic and conceptual lattices; and, of course, between the viewer and the art. The two galleries that contain the work are filled with exchange, arid a relaxed earnestness drives the exhibition.

Although Counterparts explores painting’s nonverbal expression through networks of verbalization and theory, a streamlined and assured empiricism lies at its core. The exhibition is installed as a series of asymmetrical couplings, a sequencing that has the effect of being both instructive and curiously inhibiting in ifs foregrounding of a specific context for the work of the younger artists. This framework can trap us, narrowing our efforts to scrutinize work and make connections, yielding a kind of myopia that impedes deeper and broader views of the paintings. On the other hand, the relational insistence can lead to unexpected links arid enlightening narratives of process. In this sense, Counterparts is a hyper-structuralist exhibition: if channels viewing and builds meaning outwardly through painting-to-painting and artist-to-artist relationships. Moving from analysis and interpretation to the creative process, one is left with the conclusion that creativity in general, and art making in particular, evolves through structuralist means of perceiving and thinking. As Guston once said when talking about [he influences of Renaissance painting and Picasso on an early work of his, “.. you have to come from somewhere—you don’t come out of the sky.

Much of the exhibition’s success resides in the quality and diversity of the paintings. The curator opted to invite contemporary painters who work on traditional supports, excluding those who rely on post-painting or post-studio strategies. This lends cohesiveness to the show and makes its aesthetic range all the more remarkable. However, the limited number of works by their “counterparts” constitutes, perhaps inevitably, a flaw. For six of the eight younger painters, there is only one such work on view—a piece that may or may not exemplify the forms and/or chemistry of influence. As a result, Counterparts is an exhibition of signs, or perhaps glances, of influence.
There are three remarkable paintings in the Appel_Guston coupling: two from 2006 by Appel and Guston’s Painter’s Forms II, 1978—the crazy mouth-legs-horizon painting that is extreme Guston. This astounding juxtaposition of paintings about the architecture of clusters recasts Appel’s work, with its characteristic riffing on fabric patterns and the planes of wood grain, as a sublime neo-cubist sanitization of Guston’s rumpled, beer-swilling expressionism. It is as if Guston’s painting, in its big-gut clunkiness, had been rriade-over by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. On a more serious note, Appel’s paintings reveal the effect of Guston’s resiliency, love of the medium, and deep respect for tradition.
Though their imagery is very dissimilar, Laura Owens and Mary Heilmann approach surface and brushwork somewhat similarly. This correspondence originates differently but ends in proximity. For Heilmann, it is a supernal casualness that simultaneously embraces and transcends physicality. Her paint is always alive, constantly in process, perhaps even winged, without pretense, it always just shows up. For Owens, it is a gliding, unselfconscious approach to figuration that allows her subjects to transmigrate between the imagination and concrete reality. Her informal approach to form enlivens her narratives. Heilmann’s forms, as quietly sure as they are, are enlivened by the viewer’s narratives.
Influence is a complex, multi-faceted concept. Its election as the central focus of the show unavoidably leads to questions about inspiration, originality, tradition, generational matters, the effect of different social- historical contexts, and the contemporary condition of painting. Comparing the younger artists’ work to that of their respective counterparts raises issues of correspondence, difference, fidelity, independence, inversion, subversion, reflection, accretion, and advance all of which can occur in the particularities of a medium, style, and content. Counterparts is an exhibition but also a laboratory and classroom. It makes the viewer work.
—Dinah Ryan + Paul Ryan