Tag: Ai Weiwei

A selection of paintings by Greg Lindquist on view at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. demonstrates how an artist may prevail over the challenges of fitting an aesthetic sensibility to the requirements of a political issue without sacrificing one for the other. In a static medium like painting, the aesthetic and the forensic will inevitably compete for that medium’s limited conceptual space. Typically, attempts to bring both art and message to maximum effectiveness end with either an aesthetically weak but effective political message (see Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat), or a visually compelling work that expresses little polemic nuance beyond commonly held postures (as in any of Robert Motherwell’s elegies to the Spanish Republic). Many artists willing to assume this most difficult of studio ambitions end up producing one or the other. And though I might hold a minority view regarding the significance of keeping the two in balance — admittedly, much political art draws accolades on the merits of its position alone — the success of an artist in keeping both art and argument vital in a single work is a rare accomplishment worthy of note. In addressing the issue of air and water pollution from coal-powered plant emissions, Lindquist offers images addressing environmental concerns that work on several levels beyond the project’s symbolic mixing of coal ash into the paint. The work Lindquist shows in this exhibition is absorbed in stages, the first related to aspects of the landscape that surrounds power plants. Viewers are made immediately aware of the unflattering viewpoints from which he composes his scenes. In the smaller paintings, his approach is conventional but for the color. The second group of canvases on view consists of larger, strangely decorative paintings that direct one’s gaze to the ground rather than the horizon.