Judith Belzer
Judith Belzer Selected in Huffington Post:
The Northwest's Top Ten Exhibition Picks for 2010
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Judith Belzer
At George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, California
Review by Dewitt Cheng
Judith Belzer, ''The Order of Magnitude #2,'' 2010, oil on canvas, 38 x 42''
The natural world was not so long ago considered the criterion by which we judged art: during the nineteenth century, fidelity to observable Creation paid homage to God’s creation (with God hiding behind the clouds, listening in); during most of the twentieth, the creation of personal mythologies would serve as surrogates for lost faith. In recent years, contemporary art’s embrace of new technology, of the commercial art market, and of literary-philosophical theories concerned with cultural symbols led to the general disappearance of nature from galleries. Naturally, there were artist-dissenters, like Berkeley’s Judith Belzer. Her last series of polyptychs was entitled “The Inner Life of Trees;” in the current show of oils and watercolors entitled “Order of Magnitude,” she continues painting the natural world at a remove, finding micro and macro structures equivalent regardless of scale.
Gallery owner George Lawson describes Belzer’s goals and methods: “She moves freely from aerial to crystalline and cellular perspectives in her bid for intimacy with the natural order.” Through painting, that combined form of seeing, thinking, feeling and recording, she explores “the underpinning structures and porous surfaces of the world.” By magnifying what looks like tree bark by several orders of magnitude, she creates craggy, fissured geological landscapes that combine scientific naturalism with expressionist abstraction. They also pack, in the current climate of oil spills and gas explosions, something of an ecological punch, especially here the quaky Bay Area.
Some of the paintings resemble panoramic aerial photographs as readily as they do plant structures, with a deliberate ambiguity. To my eye the works are more emotional than previous reviews have suggested. With their white backgrounds, colored-pencil palette, and zippy graphic energy, the oils resemble colored pencil drawings made by lapsed Impressionists suffering from a certain Expressionist anxiety — like Van Gogh or Munch. With their high vantage points, the landscapes become all-over fields of energy in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. With their nervous evocation of fraught inner worlds, they suggest postwar European artists like Henri Michaux and Wolfgang Schulze. A few examples:
“Order of Magnitude #1,” the first of the series, is a large oil presenting an aerial view of flat farmland, the boundary lines receding toward an invisible vanishing point above and outside the painting. The unusual vertical format defies the comfortable spectator conventions of landscape by placing us high above ground, as in a flying dream, rushing headlong “downhill” to the sunlit top of the image, where the incline flattens out; Belzer has declared that she is “interested in nature, not as a remote romantic idea, but something that’s related to our everyday life.” But this landscape is anything but humdrum: it’s heightened and distorted by adrenaline, like Munch’s agoraphobic (and tourist-unfriendly) beach scenes.
“Order of Magnitude #2” is a smaller painting, and without the rush into perspective space of the earlier work. It possesses its own odd subtext however. Depicting a cliff or dam topped by what appear to be fog-laden planted fields, and mirrored by still waters below, it would seem idyllic but for the cold light and the crevasses hinting and erosion and crumbling — and the toothlike boulders separated by dark filaments, like nerves. There is also a hint of the archaeological about this work for anyone who has looked at engraved illustrations of pre-Columbian Mexico; a hint of Romantic ruins to anyone who has looked at THomas Cole or Anselm Kiefer.
“Order of Magnitude #11” depicts tree bark subdivided into a loose grid of plates that irresistibly suggests an aerial view of an urban landscape, of blocks and subdivisions and expressways. The fissures that have opened between the blocks of “buildings” suggest light wells in some human beehive of the future (like those painted by Irving Norman) that has somehow become petrified.
“Order of Magnitude #3” and “Order of Things #4” (named after Foucault, not Lucretius) are smaller landscapes of the now-familiar fractured bark, here traversed by long, vermicular (or scarlike) rift valleys, possibly filled with water reflecting the white sky. Curiously, the topographies are filled with patches of abstract marks that suggest the glyphs that Chuck Close uses in his huge facial-landscape paintings, and the whitish scars might almost be primed gesso from which the paint has peeled, seen microscopically by a restorer. Art may be longer than life, but it’s also brief.
Review: Judith Belzer/Valerie Carberry Gallery
New City Art, May 17th, 2010
During the Middle Ages, links between things based on appearances were codified by the Doctrine of Signatures. Walnuts, for instance looked like, or carried the "signature" of, brains. Much later "The Order of Things" was the name of a late-twentieth-century book by Michel Foucault that likewise found epistemological coherence, that is, investigated the underlying connections between the manner in which social structures frame our perceptions and shape representations and habits of mind. Judith Belzer also conducts her inquiry, using paint and other graphic materials, into the order of things—how natural processes create patterns that, once exposed, speak of the underlying and connective structures of life.
Several paintings from a sequence titled "Cracks and Fissures" take deterioration in horizontal (lateral) sections of tree trunks as their source. The subject of these works seems for a moment to have something to do with their resemblance to landforms and the organic patterns that appear in maps of cities. Tree rings evoke time. Despite these connotations, the paintings work because they don’t become symbols of something else. The visual associations hover and shift but don’t ever take over Belzer’s studies of the patterns produced by rain, sun, insects and microorganisms on wood.
She records her observations with deft, industrious brush strokes, using oils like watercolors to sketch out her subjects in a range of sienna, sepias, umbers and ochre undercut with various blues. Her compositions are as faultless as the qualities of her hand: she works close to the subject leaving out edges and context so the cracks and fissures arc off into the upper right of the canvases. Ink drawings looking like very simple topographic maps link her work with the mapping of natural processes in Maya Lin’s recent exhibition at the Arts Club. (Janina Ciezadlo)
Through June 5 at Valerie Carberry Gallery, 875 N. Michigan.
Judith Belzer gets to the root of 'Trees Inside Out'
Los Angeles Times | Arts | Culture Monster
by Sachi Cunningham, June 2009
Judith Belzer at dosa818
By Guillaume Wolf | April 8, 2009 . 11:22 pm
WHITEWALL: Judith, tell me more about “Trees, Inside Out.”
JUDITH BELZER: This project started when Christina [Kim, the owner of dosa818] came to me and said that she was interested in doing a project for this space. Her spring line was somehow inspired by my work that she had seen in my studio. And she said that she wanted me to do something that would surprise her clients and her, as well. Because the space is so large and there’s so much light, because really I do two-dimensional work on the wall, I wanted to come up with an idea that would be both respectful of the space and present the work in an interesting way. I’ve been working towards an interest in creating a sense of being inside nature and this provided an opportunity to develop an idea that allowed experience of trees and nature, both from the exterior from the outside and travelling to the inside of trees.
WW: We have two plywood casings and the paintings are integrated inside the boxes.
JB: The couple of paintings on the outside are set into the plane of the outside and are referring to bark and the outside of trees. Then you step up into the structure and they are paintings about the inside of trees. It’s about the inner life of trees and our experience when you walk up to them, trying to project what’s going on inside of nature, and that it’s not an inert thing. It’s a constantly moving, dynamic experience in our every day lives.
I was very interested in using plywood to build the structures because, first of all, it’s from the core of trees and it’s a very urban setting. And I wanted to have a juxtaposition of images taken from my memory of walking outside and juxtapose it with the everyday, mundane material and making a relationship between the construction materials and the painting. I’m interested in nature, not as a remote romantic idea, but something that’s related to our everyday life. Plywood is equally involved in our everyday life as a tree outside our door. This is not a special view of nature it’s about an everyday view of nature and trying to establish a much closer relationship.
I wanted the two structures to have a different feel. One is square and closer to the ground and has larger paintings. This box is taller, sort of more elevated, and the paintings on the outside are verticals and I’ve broken it up into small pieces on the inside. So the boxes have different characters. That was the idea.
WW: Does this installation reflect on, “What’s your connection with ecology?” Is it a new consciousness? Is it overplayed?
JB: I don’t think it’s overplayed. I’m not that interested in work that’s around that has to do with the environment. It seems like people could just write an article. It’s not related to the actual visual experience. I’m interested in giving an opportunity for people to make a relationship with nature so that they can hopefully think beyond all the things that we’ve done to create all the ecological problems. It seems like the first step to think about what to do is to actually have a relationship with nature and see that we’re apart of it and it’s part of our everyday life, hopefully bringing it closer to us and engaging with nature so that we can sort of really think about the issues we have in front of us.
The Inner Life of Trees
What Is Most Deep
When Judith Belzer agreed to open the inaugural show in the room for painting, I had the sense that everything else in the gallery would just come together. Her painting epitomizes the approach and the values I hope to bring to the program. The first time I visited her studio, I was struck by the poise of her work. Belzer manages to balance a relentless laser focus on her motif with a willingness in her handling of it to just let paint do what it does best, an abeyance of contradiction that seems as natural to her as her subject matter. Nature. I am reminded of Jackson Pollock’s oft-quoted retort to Hans Hoffman when the other painter asked him why he didn’t paint from nature. “I am nature,” he said. Judith Belzer does paint from nature, and for the same reason. I can’t think of another painter working today, with the possible exception of Brice Marden, who so naturally couples linear drawing with the radiant aspects of color-light.
These paintings oblige us to reconsider the term realism. Much will be made of their subject matter, fitting since Judith’s title for the series, The Inner Life of Trees, begs this consideration. They are accurate and revealing renderings of their motif, not just trees but the cracking, open bark of trees, at once surface and core. For all their descriptive detail, however, they achieve a level of clarity in their execution that is even more intimate. Here another pronouncement comes to mind, Paul Valéry’s, “What is most deep is the skin.” The work is nothing if not real, profoundly layered, and remarkable in the depth of its parallel exploration of both nature and painting.
Belzer has not only found a working narrative, a thresold for her entry into the visual world; she has hit on a metaphor for the discipline of painting, itself: a surface life that gets at the depths. More fundamentally, she has found a way to act on painting, to do the deed. The mother lode of her exploration, her true image, is in her paint. The fact she has kept the buttery stuff that comes out of the tube so close to its source while at the same time coaxing stubborn secrets from what she observes is the true mystery of these works.
One of the lasting appeals of painting as a medium in an age of technological imagery is how anthropomorphic it is. Paintings have bones and skin and blush. They are physically vulnerable, and frontal in their aspect. They are like us. Judith has taken this anthro-centrism and expanded it to the natural world, where nothing lives in isolation but always within a wider system. She underscores this inter-dependency, another fact of nature, in her decision to complete an image through a contiguous hanging of grouped canvases, like eco-pockets that cross fertilize one another. Almost every painting in the series is comprised of multiple panels.
Among other formal advantages, the polyptych format helps to extend the painting’s color-light out into the room. For all this expansion, they remain terse in their statement. Judith Belzer’s economy of means is evident in the restricted palette from which she seems to manage such a wide chromatic range. Scanning across the individual canvases tips the perceptual weight of the image to the physical facts, a shift over the iconic focus a single, contained picture would wield. Judith Belzer’s sense of balance is the balance of nature, and of her own nature. The resulting grouping is more than the sum of its parts; the compound image congeals into an expansive and integrated whole, and the bond between the panels strengthens with the familiarity of extended viewing.
Becoming familiar with this series is a rare pleasure. In preparing this exhibit, I’ve had the chance to absorb Belzer’s work as through osmosis, and the more time I have with these paintings, the more convinced I am of how successfully she has tapped into the inherent potential of the medium. Nothing but such deftly realized paint could quite achieve what I’ve described as an abeyance of contradiction, at once image and object, reference and primary experience. Belzer seems to understand in her painter’s bones what a swinging gate the nature that surrounds us is. She understands our integral part in it. Her paintings serve to affirm our place in that continuum, where our inner life is shared, even with the trees, through surfaces that run deeper than we can imagine.
George Lawson, Director
room for painting room for paper