GARY LANG at ACE GALLERY CIRCLES / WORDS
by Joshua TRILIEGI
Gary Lang's Press kit tells us that he was born in Los Angeles in 1950, Lang
attended the California Institute of the Arts. He received an MFA from Yale
University in 1975, and a Fulbright/Hayes Travel & Research Grant to live in
Barcelona for two years prior to settling in New York City. Lang has had more
than seventy solo exhibitions in the United States, Austria, France, Japan, The
Netherlands, and Spain. He lives & works in Southern California.
Matt Gleason, One of L.A.'s Independent Art critics sites that, " Painter Gary Lang
has enjoyed a celebrated career worthy of his keen talent. Free of the burden of
conceptual angst that plagues most artists of our era, he penetrates optical space
in his large circular paintings that defy the nihilism of both Duchamp's mechanical
spinning wheels and Jasper Johns' targets. Far from mechanized, these are exercises
in concentration and close inspection sees an ever-present hand in the almost precise
brushstrokes."
Ah yes, very well put my compadre. In other words, this is cool art! I like IT! Bravo!
" The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be
surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something
without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. "
- Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803–1882).
Yes, even Waldo agrees, that is, if you can find Waldo. We were looking to interview
Mr. Lang, but like Waldo, he was unavailable for comment.
" A circle is a simple shape of Euclidean geometry that is the set of all points in a plane
that are at a given distance from a given point, the centre. " - Wikipedia
I see, I see, o.k . Were getting somewhere.
circle ˈsərkəl| (abbr.: cir. or circ. ) noun 1. a round plane figure whose boundary
(the circumference) consists of points equidistant from a fixed point (the center).
- Webster's Dictionary
Yes, Yes, that's all true, but what about the art ?
" You have noticed that everything an Indian does in a circle and that is because
the Power of the World always works in circles and everything tries to be round. "
- Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux 1863-1950
We have gathered that Gary Lang was born in 1950, the year that Black Elk
moved past this world and yet, there is a small connection here, let's continue.
"When you are excited about something," Lang says, "I think you should take
that very seriously." Mr Lang stated to Art Ltd Magazine in an interview from
his Ojai Studio last year. I agree, that is why you will find his work & show at
ACE Gallery in Beverly Hills on The Cover of this months BUREAU of ARTS +
CULTURE Magazine on line.
If you want to belong to the Art Mafia on the West Coast, You go to Cal Arts &
indeed Gary Lang is a made man, so to speak. He's been in the game a very long
time, working with lateral lines, triangles and circles for some amount of time.
Visit the ACE Gallery and their site for visual examples. The Circle works are
indeed powerful, inspiring, sometimes very exacting and other times loose, allowing
for us to see the actual brushstrokes. As, Janet Koplos, my senior art critic from Art
in America mentioned in 2010, "… each line is composed of pulses of color that reveal
the depletion and reloading of his brush." Yes, that too, is very true.
Please Joshua, you say to yourself, tells us about the art, explain as you so often
do what it means, think for us, please, pretty please. Tell us what to think, tells us what
you think, ruminate on how and why it is important, give us something we can smile
about. Help us sell this stuff. Contribute to the canon of great Art critics who all agree
that Gary Lang is brilliant. We did that already, he's on the cover. And yes, of course
he is brilliant, but so are you, so am I. We are brilliant and life is good. So, then why
did Gary Lang get the cover ? And here is the part where I give in & describe his, my
own and yours too: Brilliance.
Because Gary Lang is focused, because he is disciplined, because he has been doing this
thing we call ART for decades and mostly, to be honest, because I like the ART. This
current work does have a relationship with those I have quoted & many I have not quoted.
Circles are what we live on, well, spheres anyway. Some believe that within each being,
each human, you will find an area of energy commonly called a CHAKRA. A sort of zone
or area that often correlates with an ephemeral energy within each person. I believe, without
speaking in depth with Mr Lang, that he has tapped into a fine representation of what we
might call a chakra with his ongoing CIRCLE Series. View the books by Leadbeater
of the 1930's, to see what I mean. Standing alone in the gallery, in front of a Gary Lang
Circle can seem dizzying. The works are alive, they throb, they orb, they breath in and
out. Not like a silly optical art experiment, but organically, they move. The retina of
ones eye [ not a reference to ONE the group, just 'one's' as in yours ] actually has to
do some serious work to deal with the amount of color information that the viewer is
dealing with. Mr. Lang has done this with lateral stripes and again with triangles, but
the circles, take the cake, as it were. Years ago, I recall standing in front of a medium
sized painting [8 foot] as compared to say his eleven foot paintings currently on view.
The effect was nothing less than mesmerizing. His current works are iconic to the degree
that, like the work of BUREAU Artist Ron Riehel, they are so lovingly crafted, they could
substitute for 'religious icons from another planet', to steal a line from my own description
of Mr. Riehel's show from 1996. Artists today, must find something they are very serious
about and be excited about it, to flip Mr. Lang's advice. He has done just that with this Art.
Which brings us back to circles. Native Americans, Mathematicians, Scientists,
and if there is a god, which there might be & I don't want to turn off any readers
that don't believe there is a god, whoever and whatever contributed to the great
creation of this planet and indeed the universe, somehow, wether out of design or
out of convenience or out of necessity, utilized the sphere/circle to make it happen.
So did Gary Lang, Jasper Johns, Richard Long, Newell Harry and me and you and
just about everyone that we know has drawn a circle and enjoyed doing it. Kepler
obsessed over circles in his search to define the orbits of the planets, which led to
Newton, which led to Einstein, its endless, the work we do, based on the work
somebody else has done. So then, what is this thing called ART ? Why do we do it ?
I cant answer for Gary Lang, he was unavailable for comment prior to my deadline.
I will say this, Art: painting, sculpture printmaking, the application and craft of
expressing ones self is something we humans need to do, it feels good to do it,
and if we did it correctly, it makes others either feel good, or at least understand
what it was we were feeling, and in some cases, the effect is sorrow, pain, sadness,
because that is the life's experience, that is the human experience, that is the gamut
of emotions we go through on this planet, this very round planet that from a distance,
looks like a circle. This particular example of creating Circles is much more than cool,
it is partially undefinable in text. In other words, I can't actually tell you how damn
cool this stuff is, you have to visit the Art Gallery yourself, see it for yourself. The
great New York Painter and World Class Filmmaker Julian Schnabel derives often,
the need to see the work in person, so true, so true, in this case especially true. Art
is kinda weird like that, so are those that make the stuff, that's why we do it, because,
were never quite sure how it is going to end up upon completion. Not unlike this
extremely weird and unorthodox art essay. Which is clearly not as pretty as a Gary Lang
painting. Not as focused as a Richard Long Sculpture, Totally missed the bulls eye that
Jasper Johns painted so vividly. Clearly, not as funny as a Newell Harry piece of neon.
Possibly, just as confusing as an Eienstien Theory. Though through it all, I took Mr
Lang's very solid advice, " When you are excited about something, I think you should
take that very seriously." End of discussion. End of Essay. As Shakespeare's King Lear
might say, " The Wheel has turned full circle." See The Exhibit at ACE before April.
http://www.acegallery.net
