Mirages in the Desert of Painting

In an art landscape populated by chalky paintings made by people who don't care enough about their medium to learn how to use it, crowded alongside paintings based on photos by people who think paintings are just images, it shouldn't be surprising that the gallery-going masses are titillated by a painting with a nice surface. Indeed, a little gloss from globbed oil, a little texture from built up brushstrokes, seems to promise what most other paintings today clearly lack, namely, meaning. In a bleak environment like this, a buttery brush stroke, incorporated in a field of others, sparkles like a mirage, a seeming promise that painting is not lost. Alas, no. At least not inherently, and certainly not in the case of Jacob Littlejohn's latest paintings on view at Karma, nor in the case of Claudia Keep's cityscapes at MARCH, nor Maxwell Sykes’ paintings of the New York Life building at Entrance Gallery, which, though of different sizes and subjects, all prove to be false oases in the barren desert of painting of New York City: each as empty of significance as their surfaces are seemingly full of paint.

To say upon hearing my complaints, "At least the brushstrokes are nice," or, as a dear friend whose judgment I trust on such matters, “At least they’re paintings and not bricolage," amounts to saying: “At least the tepid “poems” that the MTA (too often) slips into the ad frames in the subway cars are in rhyme instead of free verse.” The whole truth is: they are bad. Neither rhyme nor its absence, neither paint (buttery or chalky) nor hodge-podge, guarantees an artwork's significance or lack thereof. It is not the medium, the individual strokes, or the resulting image, simply, that produces the artwork’s meaning. It is, rather, their interrelation and resulting whole. Only a structural whole provides us sustenance and respite on our forced trek through the inferno of the same, that neoliberal, late capitalist hell, described by Byung-Chul Han, of seemingly infinite newness and diversity that collapses into our actually experienced emptiness and despair — an apt description of a night of gallery hopping in Tribeca (where, for some reason, there is less and less alcohol to dull the pain).

Jacob Littlejohn, Dead Mountain Mouth of Carious Teeth That Cannot Spit, 2024–25. Oil on canvas, 83⅛ × 94 in. Courtesy of the artist and Karma.

In a sense, paintings by the aforementioned painters are bricolage, despite appearing to belong to the convention of painting: each merely a miscellaneous collection of accumulated detritus. Take Littlejohn's painting Dead Mountain Mouth of Carious Teeth That Cannot Spit, an oil painting measuring 83⅛ × 94 inches, on view in his show What the Thunder Said at Karma. Its textured surface is a collection of loaded brushstrokes of browns and reds—nice, I suppose, if one has forgotten what paint out of the tube looks like. But we could go to Blick and squeeze out Van Dyke Brown and Cadmium Red Deep if all we wanted of art was a demonstration of material properties. And we may as well have the fun of schmearing around paint ourselves, since Littlejohn’s painting remains on the level of mere paint on a surface suggesting an ambiguous landscape, punctuated with a few flourishes calculated to persuade us it is more than just that. Ultimately, the painting comes to nothing. But not the nothingness realized in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, lines from which title numerous paintings in the show. More like the nothingness of a screensaver, which leaves us wondering why someone spent their time making such an empty thing—especially someone who seems to be truly interested in paint and its possibilities, like Littlejohn, who may have the potential to make a truly good painting.

An artwork must come to something, become something more than its parts. In our time of fragmentation and fried focus, this is near impossible a task. And the problems attendant to this task are certainly not solvable with a “bespoke artist frame” painted to match the color scheme of the painting within, such as those around most of Claudia Keep’s cityscapes in her show New York on view at MARCH. A gallery is not an Etsy shop in 2014 and paintings need not be framed (whether bespokely or straight off the conveyor belt) unless they need be—that is, unless the painting requires a frame to complete the whole it's trying to become. In Keep’s painting Central Park in the Snow, the baby blue frame functions as an apology for the accumulation of brushstrokes that ultimately comes to nought, as nice as the relatively thick, impasto-ed brushstrokes may at first seem in contrast to the chalkiness and photographic tendencies we’re accustomed to. But its tasteful color and lazy brushstrokes made with a single brush come to nothing. Why another painting of Central Park, if no material inquiry, no struggle toward a whole motivates its becoming? Much like Littlejohn’s painterly flourishes, Keep’s frame insists on the wholeness of the painting within, its ability to stand alone, but, in its insistence, highlights its insufficiency.

Claudia Keep, Central Park in the Snow, 2025. Oil on Masonite panel, bespoke artist frame 10 x12 in. Courtesy of the artist and MARCH.

Bespoke artist frames (one assumes by their craftsmanship, or lack thereof) also vainly try to hold together Maxwell Sykes’ paintings of the New York Life building, on view in his show at Entrance Gallery. The repetition of the motif of the building’s facade seems to want to function as an excuse for the manipulation of paint and color, in the way that one might say Mondrian’s early paintings of trees were excuses for the formal interests that became explicit in his later abstractions. But the obsession (with the building, with paint, and color) is pretend. There is no real inquiry in these paintings. Taking the worst of Littlejohn’s romantic ethos and Keep’s tasteful futzing, Sykes’ paintings hold no interest beyond a nice—but not that nice—buttery (but not that buttery) brushstroke, a nice juxtaposition of complementary colors straight of an undergrad color theory course.   

What unites all of these paintings is the sense that, with just a few tweaks, they might have become something worth looking at. The paintings display some degree of skilled paint manipulation, some sensitivity to the accidents that arise from it, some interest in the relation between mere paint and image. These qualities are all necessary to bring a good painting into being. But motivating these partial requirements must be a drive to wholeness. Of the three painters mentioned (perhaps of all of the artists whose work I encountered this month) Littlejohn’s paintings alone may have the germ of wholeness. But they will need to radically change: to leave behind the safety of accumulation and ambiguity, of romanticism and indeterminacy, for form and, if the pull between material and image is vital, determinate ambivalence.

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Maxwell Sykes, Untitled (Butter), 2025, Oil on canvas, artist frame, 48.5 x 36.5 1.25 in. Courtesy of the artist and Entrance Gallery.