Franz Ackerman and Richard Jackson at Otero-Plassart

Saturday, Feb 21st, 2009 was a big night for openings. The highlight of my night was the Franz Ackerman and Richard Jackson opening at Otero-Plassart Gallery on Fairfax. According to what I read for his most recent show at Hauser & Wirth in London, Richard Jackson believes that "Paint is liquid and libidinal, unruly and projectile; the spurting lifeblood of an overly cultivated art form and a fluid to be funnelled, pumped and squirted. Since the 1970s the West Coast American artist has mounted an intensely visceral humorous interrogation of painting that combines the heroic and the slapstick, systematised procedure and extreme disorder. He has expanded the activity of painting, abandoning its conventional tools for machines such as pumps, vehicles and even rifles to make the work." Franz Ackerman's work is almost the opposite. Ackerman's abstraction work is intentional in its organic and expansiveness in taking over a gallery or public space. In the Otero Plassart gallery space, Ackerman takes over three walls of the space with an installation entitled "Your City is Really Almost Mine." It is as if Ackerman is searching for order in a chaotic space. Jackson's work, entitled "The Kid's Table," is a dinner table connected with hoses and paint cans that spirt paints of blue, green, red, and yellow. The splatter covers the entire table. Looking at these works I realized that opposites attract and converse in art. Jackson's humorous spontaneity is the foil to Ackerman's abstraction. I liked this show. It is bold and funny. The showing is an odd couple sharing the artistic space with each other. One splattering paint across the kitchen table, the other creating an organic, structured world in abstraction. Go see.
Open until April 18, 2009.
www.oteroplassart.com