“I come out of a dual background in illustration and abstract painting and have long sought ways to make figurative paintings that honor the aspirations of modernist abstraction,” artist and critic Franklin Einspruch writes of his exhibition “Tangibilia,” which was on view at There gallery in New York from June 1 to 8, 2024. “Mostly that meant using high volumes of paint to make pictures from observation, sort of a greatly magnified Impressionism.”
But after Einspruch moved from Boston to five wooded acres in Hillsborough, in southern New Hampshire, in 2022, he shifted his approach as he created images of people shoveling snow, browsing a bookstore, preparing dinner, tending a garden, having sex. There’s also a self-portrait depicting him painting his self-portrait.
“Informed about equally by some favorite alternative comics and the Milton Avery exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2022, I started rendering scenes using outlined shapes in an aggressively flattened space,” Einspruch writes. “They are wholly invented and synthetic, with slight concessions to naturalism and nearly none to observation. The physicality of the paint remains important but I’m trying to achieve a sense of visual pressure through facture rather than sheer quantity. These shifts in emphasis allowed for some experiments in printmaking.”
The exhibition title, Einspruch writes, “is a coinage of Philip Guston’s that appears in a few places in the compilation of his talks and conversations titled ‘I Paint What I Want to See.’ He used it to describe the common objects that began to interest him after his turn away from abstraction: ‘a shoe, a book, a hand.’ Doing so struck him as ‘an even greater enigma’ than abstraction, ‘Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity.’ He echoed Giorgio Morandi: ‘Nothing is more abstract than reality.’”
Einspruch adds, “The images coalesced around scenarios in which touch plays a meaningful role: gardening, knitting, lovemaking, the act of painting itself. ‘Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing,’ wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ‘But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.’ That fabric is tangibilia, and I’m interested in art that relishes contact with it.”
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