ART-PRESENTATION: Joe Andoe-Jubilee City
Joe Andoe’s paintings are instantly recognizable. Best known for his reductive depictions of mundane subjects, such as horns, wreaths, horses, and dogs, he paints in a single hue, outlines the subject, and then wipes the paint away. The result reveals the dyed grain of the canvas underneath, instead of allowing the pigment to create any sort of dimension; an enigmatic and textural minimalism.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
After arriving in New York Joe Andoe soon won attention for lean, roughly poetic paintings of horses and winding roads. A survey of 20 paintings spanning several decades of Joe Andoe’s career are on presentation at his solo exhibition “Jubilee City” at Almine Rech Gallery in New York. The title of the exhibition refers to his autobiography “Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed” published in 2007. The exhibition offers a much-needed reminder of the breadth of his achievements and his startling relevance to the current scene. Andoe usually works in monochrome, especially ivory black or mars black, and many of his paintings have the tonality of vintage photographs. When he paints a picture of a horse – or for that matter, of quadrupeds including wolves, dogs and buffaloes – he isn’t working from life. Rather, his usual practice is to find photographs online and print them out and transfer them freehand onto canvas. His use of found photographs allows him to operate at an obvious distance from his subjects, and leaves his work unencumbered by a suggestion of nature worship or other forms of transcendence. As for his themes the artist says “Since the late ‘70s I have fancied myself a landscape painter, and a painter of the things that hang around on the landscape”. His painting technique is almost comically casual. Using his hands, or paper towels, he starts with a pigment-covered canvas and wipes paint off of his surface, bringing images out of darkness. Some of his scenes can remind you of Vija Celmins’s nighttime skies, except they’re much greasier. It is probably relevant that “oil,” for Andoe, describes not only his preferred painting substance but the sought-after prize of countless prayers in his home state. Joe Andoe grew up in Tulsa and received an M.F.A. from the University of Oklahoma. In 1982, the year after he graduated, he moved to New York, which continues to be his home. He is part of the generation that came of age after the dominance of Minimalism, which, as everyone knows, fetishized geometric forms and sleek surfaces and practically outlawed the sensual medium of oil-on-canvas. Andoe, officially, is a post-Minimalist whose work can at times resemble that of the New Image painters (such as Susan Rothenberg and Robert Moskowitz) who emerged in the ‘70s and returned figuration to painting. Andoe has fused post-modern figuration with views rooted in the Old West. His paintings can evoke the days when cowboys and their loyal horses flashed across the big screen at the drive-in, and the world was still black and white. Andoe is not an ironic artist, and he isn’t satirizing the old days. To the contrary, he can’t stop thinking about them. The strong, predominantly female faces of wolves and horses that gaze directly at him as he coaxes them to life on canvas are both here and not here. That is where the poignancy resides in his work, in his pursuit of an absence.
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 5/3-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com
