Amy Sillman Essay

It is pleasing to think of Sylvan Lionni standing there in a bodega in his Brooklyn Italian neighborhood like a Damon Runyon character, a biggish regular guy in a beige raincoat with a half-smoked-down cigarette, squinting at the row of plastic bins that hold lottery tickets. Here is a man with absolutely no outward signs of transcendence, giving off no inkling of his epiphany. He simply stands there transfixed by the perfectness of the little red and white lotto grid and its implications as a sign for yearning, hope, and desire.

Lionni is private. Lionni is canny. His kind of transcendence cuts sideways across the everyday, moving horizontally across lunch counters and supermarket aisles, through the streets of the city and in and out of the corridors of art history: Sassetta; Morandi; Blinky Palermo; baseball; lottery tickets; stickers; wall paper; carpet patterns; a Jewish star; an icon; a sign.

His paintings are neither pictures, nor primary structures, nor allusions. But often they are all those things. These are works crafted in paradox, in the presence of which we are both present and absent, lost in thought and absolutely concretely there, as Lionni is when he makes them. While slow, they are fast. While fleet and associative, they are dense and absorptive. While complicated to make, they look simple and can be seen at a glance. They turn at each fixed point; they refuse to stay where you put them, moving mercurially around the field of inquiry. Lionni’s paintings slide laterally like sailboats, tilted on a thin plane of the everyday, buoyed up underneath by the heft of an invisible mechanism.

How are they even made? Are they fabricated, designed by computers, taped off, stenciled? At first it’s puzzling to understand. The answer is that though computers are involved in their design, they are painstakingly and resolutely handmade, absurdly and lovingly laborious, sexy in the extreme preciousness of their surfaces (Don’t touch!), deluxe in their construction. Innumerable veils of thin, milky paint make up their luster. The six paintings in this show are a year’s work, and on my visit Lionni says he’s still not finished with them.

For this show, he is making a series of medium-sized paintings based on the seating plans of various football stadiums. Though fairly intimate in scale, Lionni’s new paintings are stuffed with the ambition to portray our society itself, to chart democracy and class structure by its leisure events, and to coax the entire social organism out of the flat serenity of a seating chart. But it’s not just a seating chart. As always, Lionni here employs a paradoxical presence and cunning kind of questioning that pushes the work and its viewers into funny positions. Time, space, location and subject all shimmer indefinitely, whispering that things are not the way they seem. Representation is entirely elastic and shape shifting. Just as he previously ballooned small Lotto tickets into immensities, now he shrinks giant arenas into concise charts of our culture’s consciousness. You look at the dry primary and secondary colors, the sticker-like quality, and then it dawns on you that these paintings are also glowing icons of eccentric baroque geometries, like god’s perfect mahjong board, like radiant wheels of fortune. And then they become essential signs of our collective hopes and ideas. And then they shift back again, in Lionni’s sly hands, back into the insistent forms that they started out as, stickers or stadiums or some other ordinary thing, like paintings.

Unpacking the Boxes, Cleaning the Carpet

Pegging the start of abstraction to Wassili Kandinsky is as dicey as crediting the midwifing of rock 'n' roll to Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. But whether you go with the Blaue Reiter or look back further to, say, the nocturnes of Whistler, abstraction has been, for one wing of modernists, a process of extracting an image from the visible world, often from nature--or at least of ascribing an image to natural inspiration after the fact. But at almost the same time Kandinsky made his first steps, there arose another strain of abstraction, spiritually not far removed from him and best represented by his former countryman Kasimir Malevich. The Non-Objective World, as the title of Malevich's 1927 book had it, was populated with ideals that could be made visible only through geometric forms. Palpable stuff, no matter how unrecognizably it was rendered, was out of bounds.

The two camps have often overlapped. For much of his career, Piet Mondrian dwelled in two Cartesian dimensions, among black, white, and three primary colors, and with nary a diagonal in sight. But his journey into the abstract had started with oceans and piers and branching trees, and would end in Manhattan's rectilinear rush, the impulse behind Broadway Boogie Woogie. And self-proclaimed child of Mondrian and the video arcade, New York--based painter Sylvan Lionni, who currently has a solo show at Fusebox, sees no need to choose between actuality and geometry. He abstracts his images from fragments of the real, stripping away any extraneous details that would impinge on their hard, lean beauty. Yet he starts with sources that are themselves already representations of abstract geometries made to suit the mundane purposes of daily life. He has, for instance, painted a netless pingpong table actual size, keeping the name the manufacturer gave it: Butterfly Europa.

In Chromophilia, a group show hosted by Fusebox last winter, Lionni was represented by paintings of sheets of yard-sale or clearance-rack stickers, having settled on their orderly, wordless grids of colored dots after rejecting the busy, conspicuously branded Twister board that first caught his eye. If those canvases found Lionni playing the parodist, reducing hard-edge abstraction to meaningless essentials, in a new series of paintings he refines an image so he can expand its metaphorical options.

Four pictures in the gallery's front room are blow-ups of the bubble-sheet bet slips used to purchase lottery tickets. Arrays of boxes are grouped into boards, one per play; black ticks along the edges serve some mysterious purpose, likely having to do with mechanical reading of the form; arrows indicate the direction of insertion into the machine. Although the fundamental structure of the slips is unaltered, there's no trace of the alphanumerics that customarily act as a go-between, allowing the player to address the computer in his own language. By deleting the numerals that cause each identical bubble to represent a unique choice, Lionni enforces an equivalence among them, leading them to read as windows. The only difference between Row 3, Column 7 and Row 10, Column 2 is the schlep from the sidewalk; they're both cells in the same grid, apartments in the same building. And nearby buildings are all stuck in the same hard-luck locale.

Lionni was first drawn to the lottery slips by the board/building equation, a visual rhyme carrying social implications that veteran video-gamers will be sure to spot. The row of red tenements in an untitled 2002 painting reminded me of Crazy Climber, Nichibutsu's Spider-Man--inspired 1980 outing in which the player scuttled up the side of one residential tower after another, dodging dropped flowerpots and slipping his fingers out of the path of slamming windows. Lionni himself was reminded of Elevator Action, Taito's equally frenetic 1983 cloak-and-dagger fest wherein the red-booted hero must thwart the black-clad spies attempting to do him in. If the former is all about lifting oneself from the ground to the roof deck, in a literalization of social climbing beyond the reach of one's boorish neighbors, the latter is about getting into and back out of a trap, with the protagonist first alighting on the roof via grapnel and cable, then slipping past the agents of dark forces to the safety of the street. Both games are obsessive escape fantasies pointedly given unremarkable urban settings, and in each, freedom taunts the player like an unclaimed birthright, though chances of attaining it are slim.

Not bad for a quarter per go, and it costs only a little more to play for real. Whether you consider the lottery a state-imposed penalty for innumeracy or a dollar-a-dance diversion from workaday life, taken up in full awareness of long odds, this voluntary tax is also a regressive one. On society's lowest rungs, hope for the big score thrives in the face of statistical evidence to the contrary, making the most attractive version of the American Dream the one you don't have to do anything to get--other than stand in line and drop your change. Effort aside, the situation isn't all that different from that of the young artist looking to ride the art world's ever-shortening waves of renown.

Besides implying the unseen schemes that arrange our fates into the easily dismissed sequences of the also-ran, the (literal) lottery serves as an indicator of the social division between the art world and the down-market neighborhoods it's always pushing into. Fusebox director Sarah Finlay admits that she's never played the lottery, but when I asked her where I might find actual bet slips for comparison with Lionni's, I received directions to the liquor store next door, a place I'd never been. The quizzically accommodating proprietor seemed almost unaware of the adjacent gallery, having considered it, as had I, a box separate from his own.

Two decades ago, in a socially conscious reaction to the high-flown rhetoric of past masters, Neo-Geo artist Peter Halley announced another reconfiguring of abstraction. The first three of the seven points in 1982's Notes on the Paintings bear repeating here:

1. These are paintings of prisons, cells, and walls.
2. Here, the idealist square becomes the prison. Geometry is revealed as confinement.
3. The cell is a reminder of the apartment house, the hospital bed, the school desk—the isolated endpoints of industrial structure."

The irony, of course, is that Halley's cell motif eventually imprisoned the artist himself, to the point that at least one critic has thought it best to consider him a kind of graphic designer, working myriad subtle variations on a fixed signature style. Perhaps the problem is that Halley's ideal, however humanistic, has become an idee fixe. By drawing not from a program but from his improvised experience of popular culture, Lionni promises to skirt this pitfall.

A looming wall painting and an intimate canvas, both named Shine, take as their source a swatch of geometrically patterned carpeting seen in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. In the second-floor hallway of the film's empty Overlook Hotel, an interlocking hexagonal design in red, orange, and chocolate brown serves as a racetrack for the tricycle of young Danny Torrance. Inside Room 237 are visions that both lure and terrify him, rooted in the demons of his vicious, alcoholic writer father, Jack.

One struggles to know how far to read Lionni's autobiography into his work. Although he doesn't dine out on his heritage, his grandfather is Leo Lionni, the picture-book titan whose fables of artistic vision and collective action (Frederick, Swimmy) remain story-time standards. The elder Lionni was also a graphic artist, for more than a decade the art director of Fortune magazine. For a famous 1960 cover, he arranged colored letters in rows, each of which spelled out "New York"; with missing letters as darkened rooms, the design suggested the pattern of interior lights in a skyscraper at nightfall--a possible precedent for his grandson's bet-slip buildings.

For Shine, the temptation is to look to the painter's father, Paolo Lionni, a poet who died of lung cancer in 1985, when his son was 12. According to Leo's autobiography, Between Worlds, Paolo had beaten a heroin addiction. Sylvan claims to have selected the carpet pattern for a variety of reasons, big and small, but mainly for its period appeal and "graphic interest." "I loved how much of-the-time it was and also how it was a constant backdrop to this horrific thing," he says. He does also, however, "think of the floor as a memento mori."

In her reading of The Shining, Pauline Kael found fault with what she saw as Kubrick's "metaphysical" theme that "man is a murderer, throughout eternity." But the dodgy cycle of recurrence, whereby the father always kills his family, or at least endeavors to, is perhaps better viewed through the lens of substance abuse. Genetic proclivities are passed down, bad habits and behaviors, too, and a pattern of familial devastation emerges. In Lionni's family, heroin was fortunately an anomaly, yet Shine, based on an image that persisted in the painter's memory after the rest of The Shining had faded, can be seen as being about breaking with the past, even as it continues to haunt the present. The shot Lionni chose from the film views Danny from a high angle, as he runs toy trucks and cars along the roads he imagines in the rug; a tennis ball, seen earlier being hurled furiously by Jack against a wall, inexplicably rolls to a stop in front of the boy, a visible sign, seemingly from nowhere, of his father's growing mania. Lionni has excised the child and all the props from the frame, retaining only the precise, brilliant ornament of the ominous color field beneath him.

As richly resonant as Lionni's paintings are, it should be said that such thoughts seldom intrude upon their actual viewing. Almost insanely obdurate and clean, built to a seamless matte finish from layers of acrylic, they hold you at arm's length. Only when you draw close do they give up signs of their making: the rare brush stroke, the nicks in the windows of a lottery picture such as Take Five, artifacts of the right-handed artist's peeling, from top right to bottom left, the custom-made Avery labels he uses to tape off his colors. And only when you're back home mulling over what you've seen do the pictures explode with implication. His pristine paintings subliminally dirtied with the stuff of life, Lionni has directed himself toward a geometric abstraction ever more impure.

Stephen Westfall Essay

Sylvan Lionni’s paintings are part of the casebook for a developing theme in contemporary painting: the hybridization of Pop and abstraction. In his case, the emphasis is towards a voluptuous rigor wherein the banal graphic face of everyday transactions is edited and embodied by a devotionally labor-intensive development of the painted surface into a pristine flatness and even density. A close scrutiny of Lionni’s surfaces reveals that the even dispersal of the paint could only be achieved by a patient buildup of fluid washes of color into an optical solidity as metaphysically infinite in their “presentness” (to borrow Michael Fried’s astonishing term) as the flat backgrounds of symbolic color, divine light, in a Byzantine icon.

Fried was talking about an opticality and residue of craft that seems to always address viewers as they move around an abstract work, a quality that finds a resonance in Walter Benjamin’s elegiac use of “aura” to describe the appeal and “cult value” of the handmade art object. Lionni’s paintings depict the industrially and technologically fabricated two dimensional world, the world of contemporary sign, but their craft is handmade and their “real” subject could be held to be the persistence of aura within painting. Nothing, for instance, could inspire us less than the image of a lotto game, an image of greedy hope and lost chances. Besides the convenient manner in which his images literally fill out the rectangle, punning the image and the object, Lionni seems to be attracted to the challenge of wringing aura from this least likely of subjects.

In Lionni’s hands a lotto game card becomes a meditation on mauve and puce atmospheres, the modularity of the grid, and the degree of self restraint required to make touch disappear into form while retaining at an almost subliminal level those qualities that remind us that these paintings are material re-embodiments of something run off on gigantic commercial printers. The humor lies in the antithetical nature of this process to the get rich quick ethos of the game card and its easy manufacture. But Lionni’s process also transcends irony, introducing us to beauty in unexpected places.

Shine is a spatial rendering of the hallway carpet in Kubrick’s great horror film, The Shining. The perspectival sweep backwards of the carpet pattern is something new in Lionni’s paintings but there’s a continuity, too. The image. after all, is taken from the screen, not real life, so we are still looking at an image sourced in two dimensions, rather than three. Even the spatial illusion is a transfer from a two- rather than three-dimensional source from the life-world. But Lionni’s immaculate technique demonstrates the tangibility of painting’s version of two dimensions. Because the painted surface must be built up to an even consistency that fills in and smoothes over the tooth of the canvas in order to absorb and hide the brush stroke, the resulting image is at an optimal state of clarity within the limits of painting even as it approaches an optimal state of physical identity. The carpet is moving under the wheels of a child’s tricycle in the movie, or rushing under the feet of any of the other protagonists, but in the painting the image is held. a seamless material accretion, precisely controlled.

"Pure" abstraction seems almost an impossibility at this moment. This is in part because abstraction really can’t compete with the life-world’s infinite inventory of forms and, in fact, has joined that inventory as a cultural sign. But to comment on this fact by treating painting and the cultural soup it bobs around in as mere signage fatally ignores the expressive range of painting’s plasticity and the power of the process itself to transform a visual idea into something considerably more, i.e., the continual address within “presentness.” This is something other than a reductive art. Lionni re-embodies signs and fragments of signs as vehicles for meditation on the deep structures of painterly perception and form-giving.