Art Reviews
Mague's Exhibition, Kate Oh Gallery,
New York, 16 - 27 May 2023
Mague Brewer's Greenbergian Odyssey: A Modern Tribute to Medium and Perception
"Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye."
Now, should you find yourself at the intersection of Madison Avenue and E72nd Street this week, a visit to the Kate Oh Gallery will plunge you into Mague Brewer’s vivid tableau – an odyssey brimming with color and form. In an intimate exhibition space on the floor floor, these canvases throb with vitality, whilst their abstract contours and strokes weave a visual dialect that communicates directly with the senses, which are more than fitting for the title of this show: Tactile Effects. Hence, as one navigates through Brewer’s physical creations, it shall be impossible to overlook the heartfelt invitation to touch the very medium of painting that lies at the heart of her creations.
Clement Greenberg, a towering figure in the world of art criticism and an ardent advocate of Modernism, once opined, “the essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Brewer’s latest works subtly embody this philosophy, employing a diverse arsenal of techniques that probe the core essence of painting, while simultaneously emphasizing its intrinsic qualities—flatness, color, and the canvas’s rectangular shape.
In the exhibit, which will be on view for only a few weeks, Brewer’s application of paint appears as a celebration of the materiality of her chosen medium. The symphony of color, traversing the spectrum from azure-topaz blues to cerulean greens, engenders a phenomenological experience in the viewer, inciting a depth of feeling rather than a mere visual perception. So remember this: Instead of jarring the viewer’s experience, these elements serve to enrich it. These components hum with life, their irregular shapes resonating against the canvas, coaxing the viewer into a realm of perceptual riddles.
Greenberg asserted, rather presciently, that “the task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.” Brewer’s work is a luminous testament to this principle. Her paintings, whether they skew towards the abstract or the figurative, and often pendulating between the two like a gyroscopic experiment, are wholly self-referential. They refrain from imitation or borrowing from other mediums, instead, they exalt in the inherent qualities of painting’s surface.
Brewer’s chief contribution resides in her ability to manipulate color to evoke a tactile sensation. This aspect of her work aligns seamlessly with Greenbergian principles. It ought to be pointed out that the critic once noted, “Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.” Brewer’s works ensnare the viewer, their colors and forms initiating a visual journey of exploration.
Among the intimate works on view at the Kate Oh Gallery, the works “Dunstable” and “We All Deserve Our Own Garden,” specifically, constitute typical testaments to her growth as an artist, embodying in a lyrical way the principles of Modernism and Greenberg’s theories. Indeed, her quintessential ability to manipulate color to create a sense of tactility and depth adheres to the Modernist notion that the illusion created by the artist is one that the viewer can only travel through with the eye.
Mague Brewer’s art is a vibrant homage to painting, a colorful expedition through form and hue that both challenges and enthralls the viewer. Her work stands as a quiet witness to the potency of her chosen medium, as if resulting in a nautical exploration of the inherent qualities of Modernism itself. To both the novice and the connoisseur, her artistic journey, spanning continents and decades, is an adventure. From her birthplace in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to her artistic awakening in Russia, to her stylistic evolution in London and New York, Brewer’s work is imbued with a richness and complexity that invites exploration.
B. Su Alexander, PhD
Review: Exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery New York 16-27 May 2023
Mague's Tactile Effects
In works like “The Chord” (El Cordon De Plata) and Whenever and Wherever, Mague is at her most effective —suggesting uneven horizontal and vertical constituents of the pictureplane that bleed and float. The act of suggestion, not pointing, is here more pronounced than those works where straightforward silhouettes come to the fore (e.g., Mague’s outlines of overlapped faces or straightforward orbular eyes with penetrating gazes).
With Mague’s abstractions, we are held in abeyance, such that the materiality of the linen canvas bubbles and brews. In Wherever and Whenever, the vertical towers are turned ninety degrees and primed into ten hoary-tipped lines that fade into a dot. This is an act of directing the stage into perspectival fading. One can readily see how parcels of sheen-slated white reflect like the sun flitting over glossed paper or glass; but this slating-effect occurs in horizontal and vertical stripes that also prime the viewer’s to the canvas at hand. The hatched lattices of the linen complement the vertical-and-horizontal ambiguous blocks that I have suggested as doors-without-knobs and windows-without-locks; one need not pursue the Jungian symbolism here, just the canonization of experience.
That is Mague’s great modernist move, looking backwards at Greenbergian considerations of the canvas-as-object, of that which is intrinsic to painting as such. This is somewhat anachronistic pursuit — especially so if we consider the putative post-historical era of art inaugurated by Dadaists like Duchamp but reaching its apotheosis with Warhol, where the Romantic-cum-post-modernist conceit of the verbal-discursive idea of art had overtaken the endeavor of perceptually discernibles.
The dreamscape miasma feels too easy an anchor, and there is something much more formal at play here; like the Abstract Expressionists of yore, the Surrealist inclination is here rejected, though parcels of Matta-esque automatism are retained. It is in Mague’s color that her illusory method reaches it great tactile effect. Instead of the graying of color that recedes into the distance, — which, in his unfinished manuscript, “The Artist’s Reality” (discovered among his papers in 1988), Rothko identified with the “illusory painters” —Mague is a tactile painter who achieves the quality of tactility through color value. It is this manipulation of color value that Mague wholeheartedly lays claim to, twisting and mending it along two pursuits: one sharp and realist, the other clouded and abstract.