The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Many
people say he was an outsider artist, but, as the show at David Zwirner
Uptown, on view through Oct. 26, makes clear, Jon Serl (1894–1993)
certainly was a sophisticated painter who knew art. His quirky and
tender figures, created by layers of paint that seem to emerge from deep
within his heart, along with unusual color, mysterious textures, and
felt orchestration, express the warmth of a deeply vulnerable human
being. Growing up in a family of vaudeville entertainers, Serl
shifted from childhood actor to Hollywood screenwriter, from voiceover
artist for silent films to forest guard and other odd jobs, often giving
himself a new pseudonym for each new identity, and obsessively painting
throughout most of it. Serl’s paintings, which drew on his nomadic
life, generally depicted tableaux such as an artist in the studio, a
procession of chapel attendees, a couple waltzing, that are reminiscent
of stage sets and his early acting profession, and also suggest the peronality of each charater. Working in oils on
board, he globbed paint straight out the tube, and, building up thick
impastos, expressed a love of human interconnection, and perhaps a
nostalgia for the camaraderie of his youthful theatrical ensembles.
Even the painting of a single fish, or the cockfight that feels more
like an agitated dance, express an anthropomorphic need for human
contact and acceptance. Curator Sam Messer, who met Serl in 1989 and
has been on a mission to promote the older painter ever since, has
interspersed Serl’s work with artwork from contemporary artists
Katherine Bradford, Louis Fratino, Brook Hsu, Andy Robert, Dana Schutz,
Josh Smith and himself, as, according to Messer, these artists were
either directly influenced by Serl, or provide greater context for
viewing his work. But the quality and force of Serl’s paintings need no
support from other artists. His are passionate, profoundly personal
statements that blend memory with imagination, experimentation with
knowledge, intense feeling with intuitive image-making, and deserve the
close viewing this show provides.