ESSAY BY DONALD KUSPIT

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#777777" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>BARRY</B></div> <div> <B>MASTELLER</B></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <A HREF="paintings.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Paintings"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">PAINTINGS</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="artist_statement.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Artist Statement"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ARTIST STATEMENT</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="biography___upcoming_exhibitions.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Biography / Upcoming Exhibitions"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">BIOGRAPHY / UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ESSAY BY DONALD KUSPIT</B></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="essay_by_dominique_nahas.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Essay by Dominique Nahas"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ESSAY BY DOMINIQUE NAHAS</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="essay_by_kathleen_moody.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Essay by Kathleen Moody"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ESSAY BY KATHLEEN MOODY</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="essay_by_marcelle_polednik.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Essay By Marcelle Polednik"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ESSAY BY MARCELLE POLEDNIK</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="artworks_magazine_article.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="ArtWorks Magazine Article"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ArtWorks MAGAZINE ARTICLE 2008</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="archives.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Archives"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ARCHIVES</B></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="biography___upcoming_exhibitions.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Biography / Upcoming Exhibitions"><B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">CONTACT</B></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" width="100%" BGCOLOR="#777777" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Enigmatic Urbanscapes: Barry Masteller¹s Boulevards</B></div> <div> <B>by Donald Kuspit</B></div> <bR> <div>  Is there a precedent for Barry Masteller's beautiful, haunting</div> <div> boulevards?  We see the same moody elegance in Gustave Caillebotte's Paris,</div> <div> the Place de l'Europe on a Rainy Day, 1877--the same brooding isolation, the</div> <div> same grandly empty spaces, for all the figures that inhabit them.</div> <div> Masteller's cities are 21st century New York and San Francisco, and his</div> <div> lights and darks are more cunningly balanced than Caillebotte's--the dark</div> <div> clothing of his 19th century figures hardly makes a dent in the hazy</div> <div> luminosity, while the strong radiation from Masteller's luminous windows</div> <div> locks horns with the darkness (their interaction conveys the tension of the</div> <div> city, hidden by its deceptively bland geometry)--but they have the same</div> <div> strange spaciousness:  a peculiar mix of seemingly infinitely extending</div> <div> straight streets and the claustophobic intersections--deceptively broad,</div> <div> open spaces--where they converge.</div> <bR> <div>   Caillebotte's place and Masteller's boulevards are equally grand, but</div> <div> the boulevards are much more complex--not to say dramatic and</div> <div> disturbing--than the place. The Parisian buildings and umbrellas are</div> <div> curved, fluid structures, with an ornamental flair, the American buildings</div> <div> are bleakly rational--facilely functional rectangles, with the wrap-around</div> <div> Bauhaus-style windows that confirm their basicness.  Whatever curves</div> <div> appear, as in the sidewalk of Boulevard 53 and the pipes of Boulevard 54,</div> <div> both 2005, or ornamental patterns, as in Boulevard 46 and Boulevard 47,</div> <div> both 2005, seem incidental to the matter of fact look of the scene.</div> <div> Masteller's light softens hard American cities, more the products of</div> <div> mechanical engineering than imagination, while Caillebotte's light brings</div> <div> out the softness of the Parisian surfaces, giving them an imaginative</div> <div> expressiveness.</div> <bR> <div>   But in the end Masteller's New York City and San Francisco are much more</div> <div> uncanny and fantastic than Caillebotte's place CityParis.  Caillebotte observes a</div> <div> scene, but Masteller invents his scenes: his pictures are abstract</div> <div> constructions that convey the strangeness and alienation of urban life even</div> <div> as they suggest the larger enigma of representation, hinting at its</div> <div> problematic, uncertain character. Masteller is a conceptual painter: he</div> <div> unites fragments of the urban environment--carefully chosen from a</div> <div> repertoire of photographs--to create a kind of picture puzzle, that is, a</div> <div> representation that conveys the unreal look of every convincing</div> <div> representation even as it precisely realizes reality.  The empirical is</div> <div> subsumed in the enigmatic, making for a sense of uncanny truthfulness,</div> <div> however factually bizarre the picture finally seems. Boulevard 44 and</div> <div> Boulevard 45, both 2004 convey this doubleness--the sense of the</div> <div> unfathomableness of reality that emerges from excruciating attention to its</div> <div> detail. What Masteller finally represents is the uncanniness immanent in</div> <div> space--space whose uncanniness becomes manifest because Masteller has lived</div> <div> its contradictions. These are evident in the at-oddness of the buildings</div> <div> and streets, and above all in the clash of light and dark. There is a hint</div> <div> of latent violence in Masteller's Boulevards, for all their apparent calm.</div> <bR> <div>   I think Masteller's urbanscapes are a breakthrough. He has previously</div> <div> been known for landscapes, influenced by Monet, as he has acknowledged. His</div> <div> trees have a glowing intensity, his clouds a peculiar impenetrability, for</div> <div> all their ephemerality. Masteller is clearly a master observer of</div> <div> atmosphere, light and dark, natural form, and their interplay. The results</div> <div> are solemnly harmonious pictures. But in the urbanscapes this facade of</div> <div> harmony is broken, nature is no longer the scene, and there is a sense of</div> <div> disruptive, even demonic power. Perhaps Masteller has discovered himself</div> <div> through his experience of the city. The innocence of the landscape has</div> <div> certainly disappeared.</div> <bR> <div> No apologies for haunting beauty; it remains credible, despite the attacks</div> <div> on it by different modernists, among them Duchamp and Newman. Beauty</div> <div> conveys the esthetic conviction that is the core of art at its most</div> <div> intimate. </div> <bR> <div> Donald Kuspit  2006</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Donald Kuspit</B> is an art critic and a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Kuspit is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture,and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism, and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div>  All text and images contained on this site copyright Barry Masteller 2008</div> <bR> <bR> <div>      <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? 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