Malcolm Mooney, Devine Recline, 2024
ARTFORUM
Malcolm Mooney
Tilton Gallery
By Barry Schwabsky
December 1, 2024
The sixteen paintings on paper, board, and canvas that make up Malcolm Mooney’s exhibition “Artifacts, Rituals, and Trespasses” represent three distinct periods: 1970–74, 1986–87, and 2019–20. It would be difficult, however, to distinguish between the early and late works without consulting the checklist. But then, Mooney does not seem concerned with chronology, or so I gathered from the show’s press release, which mentioned that he worked as a studio assistant to Ed Clark from 2007 to 2010, occupying the kind of role an artist usually takes at the start of his career, not in his mid-sixties. (Mooney was born in 1944.)
The selection here demonstrates that Mooney is willing to try almost anything that can be accommodated within the broad field of abstract painting: grids, spontaneous gesturalism, biomorphic form, whatever. And he doesn’t mind a bit of understated figuration either: Devine Recline, 2020, is a construction of meshed shapes à la Thomas Nozkowski, but it is also a generalized picture of someone sitting with their legs up. And in case you missed that, his shoes are collaged-in photographic images. Collaged, too, is the sideways slip of poetry that seems to have dropped down from the reclining figure’s outstretched hand: the last stanza of Federico García Lorca’s 1920 poem “The Interrupted Concert”: THE WIND HAS SETTLED IN THE HOLLOWS / OF THE DARK MOUNTAIN, / AND A SOLITARY BLACK-POPLAR, THE PYTHAGORAS / OF THE CHASTE PLAIN, / IS TRYING, WITH ITS AGE-OLD HAND, / TO SLAP THE MOON IN THE FACE.
The visual language of that painting is not far removed from that of the acrylic-on-rice-
paper Tomorrow . . . When I was in Germany, 1972, whose title may refer to Mooney’s early stint, ca. 1968–70, as lead singer for the legendary krautrock band Can. (“His surrealist mantras and unhinged energy played a major role in shaping the group’s sound,” according to AllMusic’s Paul Simpson.) Here, interlocking black outlines limn a complex of oblique positive and negative shapes that to my eye suggest a still life—the leftmost entity, in browns and oranges, might be read as a sculptural head. While Mooney’s bio lists a BFA (from Boston University in 1979) and an MFA (from California State University in 1987), such works make it evident that his visual sophistication long preceded those episodes.
Several works from the 1970s (Zig Zag, 1970; Harlem Angel, 1973; and P.E.M., 1974) seem very much of their time, with their rhythmic arrays of colored marks across grids; I wondered if he was looking at Alfred Jensen, but it’s also easy to think of him as a contemporary of, say, Jennifer Bartlett and Howardena Pindell. The grid reappears in a number of his pieces from 1986, but not as an ordering device delineating the placement of chromatic marks. Instead, the structure has been layered over and under autonomous concatenations of form, both geometrical and organic. In two of them, Black Float from Above and White Float from Above, the grid is at a forty-five-degree angle, further emphasizing that it functions as a kind of screen through which one glimpses the other pictorial goings-on, but not necessarily affecting them.
Despite its chronological range, this exhibition hardly offers a clear overview of Mooney’s project as a painter. Still, it convincingly shows him to be an artist with a singular and unconstrained approach to some of the familiar formal issues of his time—one whose work deserves much deeper investigation.