Alexander Couwenberg

painting and conceptualizing

 

ALEXANDER COUWENBERG

July 21 - August 25, 2007 at d.e.n. contemporary, Culver City

by Mat Gleason

Some stereotypes of mid-century Modernism have become barriers, retarding innovation within the visual vocabulary of this style. The loose mid-century look defined an era of freedom, hope and boundless optimism. Over the years, the clean geometry that once symbolized possibility has been lumped in with hard-edged abstraction and reductive design. The mid-century, gestural Modern style was almost the opposite of the formal totalitarianism of the taped-off stripe and minimal concrete square. Somehow, the notion that one needs to be crisp, clean and have an anal-retentive approach to design that borders on the neurotically fastidious arose out of the once liberal approach to picture making.
 
Painter Alexander Couwenberg makes sure to scrap the needless perfection out of the mid-century canon, improvising along the way on many a Modernist idea, as he helps shepherd this great American style into the 21st century. Like a jazzman feeling out a long-idle trumpet, his paintings offer countless new riffs on old favorites. Not content to replicate, he uses the forms and colors of Eames-era design and hard-edge masterpieces as points of departure for masterful abstractions that develop counterintuitive ideas across this untitled series. To wit, Couwenberg gluts his pictures with layered forms upon layered forms to bring about an orchestral majesty from apparent chaos. What initially appears to be a tense juxtaposition becomes a lyrical passage. This is an intelligent response to an era—our era--where inundation of images without substance is what ails us.
 
The exhibit’s paintings are all acrylic on birch panel, and this wood surface is exploited for all its mid-century potency. The wood tone has that fleshy, natural feel that warms the coolest geometry. In many of these works, the artist stacks abstract forms upon the raw panel like a collapsed house of cards. These shapes then splay into patterns of chaotic beauty that utterly defy the very geometric structure their form implies.

Far be it for beautiful abstraction to be political, but the composition of a work reflects its time, and the current upswing of chaos in the world yields chaotic artworks. Couwenberg’s mastery is to make order from this chaos, to juxtapose and then harmonize out of what ought to have been a cacophony. The opaque layerings of this work may anticipate what will soon come to pass, or conversely what has just left the buildings of our consciousness. The early 21st century has challenged us all to hold to memories of what was last month, let alone last year, let alone in our childhood. Couwenberg’s work captures the grace of this frenzy.
 
The soft poetry of asking where we have been and where we are going is contrasted with absolutes of line and hard-edge; the distinction of Couwenberg’s new work is that neither the wistful beauty nor the politburo formalism ever completely dominates a picture. The spirit is of a democracy of ideas, each vying for visual primacy. When the viewer pulls back to see the entire picture, the tension of this conglomeration transforms into a patternless, complex engagement . It is not sentimental work, but it is not a comrade of the unsentimental either. Couwenberg’s Millenial Modernism depicts the frenzy of making a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The artist succeeds in this endeavor with style and aplomb.

 

A TEN-YEAR EVOLUTION: ALEX COUWENBERG COMPOSES HIMSELF

By Peter Frank

Over the past decade, as he has refined his painterly practice, Alex Couwenberg has maintained his balancing act between two kinds of composition, visual composition – the disposition of forms on a plane – and material composition – the substances used to comprise those forms. Couwenberg’s concern – his “obsession,” as he calls it – with process drives his practice; but he has always offset this concern with an equally keen interest in shape and color. Just as his involvement with process links him with his late- and post-modern predecessors, from the abstract expressionists of the 1950s to the post-minimalist painters and even the performance artists of the 1970s and `80s, Couwenberg’s purely formal interests evince the heritage of earlier predecessors, specifically the abstract painters of the early 20th century – and their direct inheritors, the “hard-edge” geometric artists of the 1960s.

   In his latest work, in fact, Couwenberg fairly embraces the tradition of geometric art that courses through the last century. Partially of Dutch extraction, the painter has always had a predilection for the clarity and rectitude we associate with painters such as Mondrian. But Couwenberg’s palette, vivid as it is, has not been limited to Mondrian’s formula of primaries; rather, the young American painter has acknowledged the aesthetically and emotionally affective power of color; the example of van Gogh looms, of course, but so does the yet more complicated example of de Kooning, a Dutch immigrant to these shores whose sensibility became a touchstone of American painting. Furthermore, in its intricate interplay of large and small, regular and irregular forms, all created from the interplay of traditional (e.g. oil) and new (e.g. enamel) medium, Couwenberg’s previous work echoes the bumptious, sinewy lines and forms for which de Kooning’s work, early and late alike, is so well known. 

   We can describe de Kooning’s example in this context as “complicated” not only because of the Rotterdam-born painter’s dual acculturation, but because of the fact that, in the early 21st century, he appears to us Americans one of the models of abstract painting. However direct or indirect de Kooning’s influence has been on Couwenberg, it has profoundly impacted how we view abstraction. De Kooning’s gestural expansiveness has suffused throughout abstract painting, especially in America; as clear and finely honed as Couwenberg’s art has been, it owes its breadth and its lush palette in part to his abstract expressionist forebear’s.

   Couwenberg himself was born in southern California and has lived nowhere else. He professes a relationship notably closer to the “hard-edge” painters who historically succeeded de Kooning’s generation than to that generation itself. Among those geometric painters who emerged at the end of the 1950s, of course, were New York artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella; but the tendency’s presence was no less marked, and appeared no later, in southern California. Indeed, it was only a few miles from Couwenberg’s birthplace – and a few yards from his graduate studio – that the first exhibition of “hard-edge” painting, “Four Abstract Classicists,” had been formulated in 1959. The work of Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, Karl Benjamin, and John McLaughlin – and other “abstract classicists” such as Helen Lundeberg and Jules Engel – has served ever since as a beacon for Los Angeles-area abstractionists, encouraging a spare and lucid formal vocabulary, a brilliant range of color, and a bold approach to new as well as traditional media. Couwenberg (who is personally close to Benjamin) willfully manifests all these characteristics, and sees himself as an inheritor and perpetuator of this recent but distinct tradition.

   The eccentricities that enliven Couwenberg’s painterly formulae, even the relatively rectilinear formulae that characterize his latest work, derive from the same extra-artistic sources that have spurred many other southern California artists. He dotes on the detailing (especially the pin-striping) and high finish associated with the customizing of those two quintessentially Southland modes of transport, the car and the surfboard. (Not incidentally, Couwenberg is an accomplished surfer.) We might deduce that his work capitalizes not only on these techniques of surface finishing, but on the speed and grace such techniques are designed to exteriorize and amplify. Just as the high gloss and reflectivity of a latex finish infer the easy and rapid passage of a vehicle through its course, so does it emphasize the smooth visual kinesis of Couwenberg’s forms – the forms in his earlier work that slide and burgeon against one another (as in Feitelson and Kelly – and, in a different manner, de Kooning) and that now seem to pass like films or windows across each other’s planes (as in McLaughlin – and, not dissimilarly, Mondrian). 

   Couwenberg’s technique, as he attests, may gratify his working method, but from our vantage it finally serves to underscore, to make fully visible, the sense of light and motion the paintings convey to us. The composition of the paintings’ materials thus substantiates the composition of the paintings’ forms, at once binding them and getting them moving. The resulting “composed compositions” seem to be perfectly balanced and yet in a state of flux, their orbs and bubbles, panes and panels apparently only captured at a moment of particular poise. Couwenberg’s is a delicately choreographed dance of shapes, everything on point, ready for the next note of music, as it were. The paintings (and works on paper – which are not studies for the paintings, but “paintings” in their own right) can also be regarded as tenuous balancing acts between great and tiny forms that are themselves inanimate, but on which gravity is acting with furious insistence. Like desert rocks about to avalanche, huge boulders are held in place by the merest of pebbles – which on second glance seem part of those very boulders.

   The result, then, of Couwenberg’s compositions of compositions is a remarkably tense but remarkably resolved composure. We see in these paintings the imminence of change, but – despite all the dramatic asymmetry – not of cataclysm. The change inferred by these painterly structures takes place in geologic or cosmic, not meteorologic or human, time. In this, Couwenberg’s art inheres another characteristic of the southern California ethos, the meditative serenity (if not quite the quality of meditation itself) associated with east Asian religion-philosophies. Here, too, the examples of McLaughlin and Feitelson, and de Kooning and Mondrian, affirm Couwenberg’s own aesthetic. Like them, he finds in the radiant present the inevitability of change, and thus the beauty of the fleeting moment. It could be the moment of a tubular wave or the glint off a passing hot rod, and it is certainly the moment in the studio when the artist is in perfect sync with his work; but it is our moment, too, the moment in which we see the composition as it de- and re-composes.

Los Angeles

December 2006

 

An Introduction:  Alex Couwenberg

by Diana Daniels

Crocker Art Museum

 

Alex Couwenberg paints lush essays that revel upon the sensuous properties of materials. A protégé of Southern California abstractionist Karl Benjamin, Couwenberg engages in a dialogue on color, line, and shape. This conversation reduces form to an iconic distillation that references the arc of painting’s development over the last century. That such abstraction has not yet been exhausted is to many critics a surprise. How is it that a painting by Alex Couwenberg can so articulately invigorate our understanding and appreciation of abstraction?

 

Couwenberg’s turn to nonrepresentational painting was not realized in a vacuum. Raised in Southern California, Couwenberg is the inheritor of the vast array of cultural artifacts realized with far greater bravado, or peculiarity, here in California than in other regions of the U.S.  Surf culture, Quonset huts, soaring cantilevered gas stations, and avocado kitchen appliances along with space-age optimism’s slide into a suburban malaise and after-school specials. As each decade evolves into the next these cultural values become equated with the fashions that define the period’s aesthetic experience.  

 

Accordingly, the rhetoric that has sought to proclaim painting’s moral substance wafts in the air alongside mundane interactions and reactions to the tangible artifacts of culture. High-brow and low-brow expression meet, mix, and animate one another, and thus artists such as Couwenberg view the entire material and social range of the era, post-war America, without the rebellion, turmoil, or outmoded ideals that have long been the prerogative of a dominant generation.

 

Enter into this wonderment the advent of a new mode of communication—the internet. The World Wide Web called for strong graphic content with bright colors and broad shapes to snare browsers’ attention while maximizing the initially limited design capabilities of the software that designers used to build the look of graphic content. Not only was the urgency created for talented artists able to exploit this new medium, but a new way of seeing was conceived.  Whether fully aware or not of their plunge, artists, designers, and consumers once more fell in love with mid-century modernism.  

 

The iconic strength of geometries so evident on glowing pc screens seems to have tickled our consciousness of flatness, medium, support, and optical effect once again. The investigation of the basic tenets of art—line, shape, and color—now stimulates artistic imagination with a reinvigorated respect for the iconic power of the graphic arts. Rather than throwing down their brushes and pots of paint, artists such as Alex Couwenberg are more than ever attracted to the immediacy of abstracted forms and the primacy of materials and painting processes.

 

Alex Couwenberg is more conscious of this cultural current than most. At the encouragement of his family, Couwenberg, who enjoyed art in high school, became serious about his interest in art in 1990.  He attended Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design and earned his M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate School.  His education was both practical and academic. The practical allowed Couwenberg to support himself as a freelance designer. His entire range of experience—from his suburban upbringing to a catalogue of past and present advertising imagery to an appreciation for the discipline of artists such as Roland Reiss, Karl Benjamin, David Amico, and John Millei—was waiting to inform his mature vision.

 

Couwenberg’s compositions are architectural in structure. The presence of the grid is clear, but its dominance sublimated by shifting forms adrift on color fields.  There is the sophisticated blending of color and design offered in homage to modernist ad copy, interior décor, and fine art precedents. A nod to Los Angeles popular culture also strikes a chord, imbued in the sporty lines inspired by hot rod detailing—an expression of movement, speed, and “masculinity”—that energetically connect the modish shapes. His abstractions are serious and informed, but also unabashedly playful, showing that there is much to investigate in the intersection of the graphic arts with painting.

 

And Couwenberg is clearly drawn to painting. His materials are unexpected in their variety, ranging from Mylar to acrylic and even melted wax. Surfaces are sanded down to reveal weathered effects inspired by dilapidated buildings in the So Cal environment surrounding him. Matte finishes contrast with the slick effects offered by acrylic dragged across Mylar’s resistant surface. Distressed surfaces are juxtaposed with the highly polished, providing textural richness that evokes freeform association.  

 

In many of Couwenberg’s paintings there is the evocative pulse of growth that brings to mind the late abstractions of Arthur Dove, while the quadrants of his grids, flat as aerial photographs of the landscape, speak to the enduring influence of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series. Couwenberg, however, strives for tonal harmonies that slyly tap into a collective memory of avocado, chocolate, mushroom, and cream mod-inspired palettes with orange striping, red stencil-perfect lines, and shifting blue highlights. The artist’s preoccupation with surface is an expression of his regard for process.

 

Participating in a wider return to process by artists in California and beyond, Couwenberg also establishes that painting is a skill, studied and nurtured. Abstraction is not merely a gestalt release, but an engagement with the act of applying pigment to canvas. It is also an intellectual give and take from which compositions evolve. Such abstractions may be physically beautiful, but are not mere decoration. While the immediacy of the artist’s individual experience is no longer the question, the gut reaction of the viewer is more important than ever.  Individual exploration is the spirit of the times, and Couwenberg’s ambiguous recessed spaces and flattened planes engage our desire to join him on this journey of discovery.

 

Diana Daniels

Assistant Curator

Crocker Art Museum
“Though there are many paths that lead up a mountain,
there is but one moon to be seen by those who achieve its summit.”
An anonymous Chinese proverb

In any creative process, there is the gamble of choice-- the discrimination and selection that conveys the artist's intended forum of meaning; their individual path up the mountain, if you will. This selection rests within the angst of Kierkegaard's “despair of the aesthetic...” And as the broken heart may illicit verse of profound and universal depth, the saga of painterly dilemma moves to a vivid and sonorous conclusion with the final realization of a completed painting. For a painter working within the traditions of the abstract arena, the choices made during the practice of their art take on an immeasurable quality of impact, due in part, to the infinite variety of options available; options that arise in pursuit of the whole.

Abstract painting takes many guises-- the industrial, the poetic, the terse and emotive. In conveying this array of possibilities, the artist at some point achieves their mature stylistic identity and communicates the esotericism of their personal vision with a certain consistency of technique. The artists featured in the exhibition, Abstract Los Angeles, each convey a stark individuality of application and resolution. With the work of Jimi Gleason, we find an artist investigating the nature and mysteries of space, while mining an elegant stoicism. With this work, Gleason marks himself not only an inventive colorist, but also an artist of unwavering focus. Barbara Kerwin's encaustic grids bring along a more temporal feel; her austere offerings elicit the romance of finely wrought artifacts, presenting their own sense of history and temperament. Though far from similar in ocular effect, the paintings of Robert Kingston echo the historic feel of Kerwin's layered armatures, reflecting an artist enamored with both his medium and the culture surrounding it. From hermetic gesture to his most geometric inquisitions, Kingston has pushed his art into areas of warmth that touch on a most collective state of awareness. The mysteries of Alexander Couwenberg's elliptical dynamics come at us from a far different vein of art tradition. As with Gleason's labors, there is the sheer honesty of spatial harmonies and a taciturn sense of purpose. The difference lies in Couwenberg's urgent exertion of line-- a line that escapes the tyranny of the modernist grid, spiraling off into unmapped frontiers.

Creators have abstracted since the first hand print on a Gallic cave wall. From the regal ink renderings of the 17th century swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, to the grandeur of Wagner, the abstraction of reality has sped us along towards our understandings and our longings. It must be stated, in the harshest tongue, that artistic endeavor of such extremity of intent cannot be calibrated on the same cultural scale as states of fashion or, indeed, marketing. Even with the nutrition of centuries behind us, our frame of reference can easily be twisted into the finery of such trends and democracies. Decades into a self-inflicted “post-modernism,” we stand at a point of circular momentum... Having arrived at the apex of rebellion as dogma, the whispers of tradition and sincerity now beckon... Painting of a true and contemplative nature stands outside that thin sheet of contemporanea choked by media imagery and vicarious experience. Its merits and failures come with immediate and gratifying encounters-- aligning those involved with emotion, legend and the epic cycle of fine art.

Mark Zimmermann
Encino, California



Harold B. Nelson, Director
Long Beach Museum of Art
Long Beach, California


Alexander Couwenberg is among the finest young artists active in the greater Los Angeles area today. His paintings, which consist of a complex layering of seemingly transparent planes or “veils” of color, are both formally rich and sensuous. The numerous arching forms and ellipses in his work play with, and against, one another in a richly dense structural counterpoint. These forms appeal to Couwenberg because they simultaneously represent pure, perfect shapes and oblique allusions to the natural world.

His palette ranges from lush, vibrant hues to more subtle tonalities as the titles of his works - Cocktail, Waitress, Mantis, Flipper, and Stiletto - refer to the various subjects which inspire him, including aspects of popular culture, design, and nature.

Couwenberg creates richly varied, tactile surfaces in his paintings through both reductive and additive processes. He cuts into, gouges, and scrapes the surface of the wood panels on which he typically works and then uses a variety of pigments from enamels, polyurethane, auto paints, gels and varnishes to create a densely layered surface.

Participating in a long-standing tradition of abstract painting, originating in the early years of the 20th century in the work of artist such as Vasily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and continuing in the work of California Modernist painters Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin, Couwenberg advances the formalist aesthetic while creating extraordinarily evocative new work for the 21st century.


Harold B. Nelson, Director
Long Beach Museum of Art
Long Beach, California