Henry Taylor at Blum& Poe/Untitled (L.A. in N.Y.)

To Be Titled—most all of Taylor’s work is titled this way, which made for an especially ironic conversation when set in the Lower East Side gallery’s name, or lack thereof—a 58 x 69″ painting from 2015, portrays a cowboy hatted man, atop a horse, in a flatly bucolic, western landscape. This piece struck me the hardest, and seemed to aptly serve up Taylor’s iconic essence. The man’s cockeyed face wears a look that is simultaneously indignant and concerned. This plurality is reflected in the half brown/ half white, make-up like quality of the man’s complexion: as if color were smeared onto his face by the character himself (which color is natural and which is dabbed on remains a mystery). Matisse surfaces in the conversation here with Taylor’s desire to release color from description, and liberate it instead into a force of it’s own: both literally and perhaps, racially. This sophisticated and intricate chromic grasp defends the more general notion that a direct unpacking of cultural themes would not do justice to the complicated visual questions Taylor is posing. To put it simply, the work urges a more dialogical reading than can be addressed by quick review.

Similarly puzzling to Taylor’s use of color is his spatial rapport. What Taylor has created is oxymoronic: deep flatness. Figures expand and collapse into space using only shape and color as means. This is best exemplified in To Be Titled (2014),in which a figure clad in an oversized white shirt at the paintings left side stands in front of a deep, indigo blue horse. The only thing keeping the figure in front of the steed is the color choice, and—as strange as it may sound—it is damn near magical to see in person.

On the paintings right side, two unfinished faces emerge, one in front of the other. A hand stretches out forward from the furthest back, yet somehow still foregrounds the horse. The painterly quality of the figures on the right indicates a disinterest in the trickery of surrealism, urging instead a championing of straightforward painting technique.

This was reiterated in the aforementioned large and figure filled canvas at the very back of Untitled’s space. At the paintings apex-where the space begins to breathe-there is a Gober-esque moment in which a small slice of cake floats centrally above the crowd. These strange spatial relations afford Taylor’s work an indescribable, emotional flood that buzzes about but is never nailed down.

Henry Taylor, to some is synonymous with the most straightforward of painters, and in my opinion, that is a grand compliment. So much work these days is clouded by superfluous ideas that tend only to wa- ter down the essence. It’s important to remember that being good at one thing al- lows one to say everything.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 1.

Henry Taylor, Untitled (1992). Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 29 1/2 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Plum & Poe, New York. 

Henry Taylor, Untitled (2014). Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, New York.