Gail Wight. Homage to the Wind (video still), 2012; HD video; 16:09. Courtesy of Gail Wight.

On my bookshelf is a dog-eared and ragged copy of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, the “revised pocket edition” from Yale University Press. I picked up this small paperback at a second-hand store in Boston in 1986. It came with a tiny packet of colored paper chips and a few loose leaves for comparing colors. I’ve always loved this little treasure.

The original version was published in 1963 as a glorious set of one hundred fifty silk-screens, with die-cut overlaid pages and accompanying text, all within a slipcase. Yale describes it as “a masterwork in art education.” It’s been in print ever since, and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2013 with a beautiful, clothbound, two-volume edition.

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Matt Phillips, House of Hands,  mixed media on canvas, 54” x 66”, 2013 / Courtesy of the artist

Phillips is a visiting artist at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts and a founding member of the nonprofit TSA gallery in Bushwick, where he remains a vital presence on the pop up scene. His current show at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects—Phillips’ first solo exhibition in New York—features a selection of his most recent works.

Installation, 2013 / Courtesy of the artist

“The show kind of ended up sorting itself out based on the space and the kind of internal relationships between the paintings,” Phillips said in a phone interview. “I didn’t know exactly what works were going to be included until I got into the space.”

The interaction between the art and the space is particularly affecting in this show. While many galleries have frosted windows or restrict exhibitions to inner rooms, isolating them from the street, Steven Harvey has a floor-to-ceiling window in front, which generates a dialogue between the world outside and the paintings on display. The play of shadows across the surface of Revolverator, a large-scale work done in vibrant pinks, greens, and blues, created new lines on the triangles of the canvas that shifted with the moving sun. Somehow, even the teenagers playing basketball across the street in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and the woman walking by in a seafoam fur coat, seemed to be reflections of Phillips’ vacillating, playful paintings.

Matt Phillips, Revolverlator (for M.L.), mixed media on canvas, 54” x 66,” 2013

The exhibition’s title refers to Phillips’ interest in the relationship between the fixed, stable quality of finished artworks and the active, immediate way in which the viewer processes them.

“It’s the way that I think a good painting works,” Phillips said. “When you first encounter it, it is a purely static object. But then a good painting starts to do something else—it starts to unfold in time and to remake itself. I’m fascinated by that shift from a static object to a temporal experience.”

Phillips’ works underscore our craving for narrative familiarity and our insistence on transforming abstract lines into recognizable objects and forms. The wash of blue squares and the orange diagonals of Canadian Sunset evoke the seashore, while the interlocking yellow shapes in Form Out of Water resemble a honeycomb. For Phillips, the challenge of communicating organic, real-world subject matter through a limited, geometric formal vocabulary is endlessly intriguing.

“Sometimes my paintings evoke really familiar still-life objects, kinds of spaces or even just abstract forms that have a familiar sense of weight or volume. Those are the visual ways that they evoke the known, the everyday, the natural world. . . . As a painter, I have a pretty wide net that is definitely rooted in geometric abstraction, but also in textiles, patterns, quilts and still life painting. I like the idea that painting can go in multiple directions at the same time.”

Bill Armstrong, "Untitled (Film Noir #1433)," 2012. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the Artist and ClampArt, New York City.

Such is the effect of Film Noir, Armstrong’s latest exhibition at Chelsea’s ClampArt gallery. A continuation of the artist’s Infinity series, Film Noir represents a further distillation and deepening of the artist’s singular aesthetic. In the manner of his prior series Renaissance and Mandalas, Film Noir is characterized by dense, saturated color and blurred, suggestive form. The series also elucidates the expressive potential of Armstrong’s distinct approach to image making. Appropriating and collaging images from sources high and low, contemporary and historical, Armstrong re-photographs his material in extreme close-up, with his camera lens set at infinity. The effect is heady, surreal, yet paradoxically contingent on the materials’ of-the-world physicality.

Armstrong has written that “the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed” enables a kind of spiritual liberation and sensory receptivity that “frees us to respond emotionally” to a given work. His images induce this very confusion even as they envelop the viewer in a visceral realm of the senses; in his photographs, an impenetrable uncertainty dissolves the bonds of reason and leaves the viewer disoriented but thrillingly unfettered.

In its reiteration of these dynamics, Film Noir is a continuation of Armstrong’s earlier work; however, in its overt allusion to a cinematic world of obscurity and shadow, the series hints at a subliminal darkness absent from prior series like Mandala. Given this context, the artist’s signature use of color is particularly fascinating. In Mandala, abstractions of vibrant color and concentric form channel the aesthetics and themes of Buddhist painting; color evinces a sensorial purity that induces in the viewer a sense of experiential suspension, a state of being-in-the-moment that displaces worldly awareness.

Bill Armstrong, "Untitled (Film Noir #1414)," 2011. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the Artist and ClampArt, New York City.

In contrast, Film Noir conjures existentially stark, spiritually ambivalent terrain; otherworldly yet vaguely familiar, these images seem to visualize the dark shadings and unsettling shapes of the viewer’s own subconscious. Color, richly deployed, acquires a newly ambiguous cast, and vivid hues intimate a newly fraught uncertainty. Amid bleeding pools of color, distorted human forms appear as dislocated specters—haunted, anonymous, lost. Plunged into a saturated chromatic world, they register as dematerialized, melancholic; they become, themselves, abstractions—vulnerable, fragile forms within a relentless existential blur.

Manifesting a concomitant sense of aesthetic vitality and existential enervation, Film Noir evokes the ever-shifting rapport between and among vision, sensation, and emotion. A deepening of the artist’s implicit, ongoing inquiry into being and consciousness, the series is, for the viewer, a full-on immersion in the enigma of human experience.

“Bill Armstrong: Film Noir” is on view at ClampArt in New York from February 21 to April 6, 2013.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Ornament, 2010. Building decorations, emulsion, conservator

Bean Gilsdorf: Some of your projects respond to Modernism. How did that part of your work begin?

Katarzyna Przezwanska: I think it was natural because in Poland there are a lot of Modernist buildings, it’s our natural environment. It’s also disappearing and underrated.

BG: And for one of your projects, you worked with your own space, your own apartment.

KP: Yes, I designed it to be a space that is functional, by using visual divisions done with color. It’s an artwork, but it’s alive. It’s not fixed or finished, so when I need to change something, I do it. It’s an open project. In my work, the colors usually come from the surroundings of the project. In every project each color has a meaning or a story. It’s not always necessary that the viewer has to know why, but when I know it, it works better.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Desk, 2010. Aluminum, blockboard, enamel, acrylic paint.

BG: You made a fountain for the exhibition Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity, now exhibited in the lobby of the Centrum Kultury in Moscice. Is that work site specific or could it go anywhere?

KP: No, I wouldn’t put it anywhere, I wanted it to be in a space that people use. Initially I wanted to put it outside, but it wouldn’t work because of the wind and other things. Before the [Centrum Kultury] building was renovated there were some nice pools outside, so I thought it would be good to bring water back to that space. The building has very big windows, so I used some of the ochre and green colors that you see in the surrounding area, a synthesis of the environment.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Fountain, 2011. Concrete, polyurethane paint, water.

BG: Your projects involve color, design and function. In their initial conception, do you think only about the visual aspects, or do you think about the materials? Do you conceive of projects in terms of craft, or just in terms of their visual nature, or are those things together for you?

KP: I think about these things together, but it’s hard for me because I didn’t study these subjects in school. For example when I was designing the desk for myself I had to check and re-check every measurement, every dimension, to make sure it would be comfortable to use.

BG: And do you think of yourself as a Polish artist, as a global artist, or do you not think about it at all?

KP: I don’t think about it at all, but I do think only a Polish audience or people who know the specific aesthetic of Eastern Europe might pick up on some things in my work. It’s not of central importance that you get those things, but the understandings of my work might differ, other people will get other things from my work…not everything that I planned, but it’s always like that.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Bench, 2009. Pallet, emulsion paint, garbage bags, hay.

BG: What’s in your future?

KP: In the future I would like to do more projects that are useful. For example I would like to work with architects to make things that are less pure artwork created for the gallery and more like creating a city landscape, or a building interior, or furniture or clothes. Things that are closer to use. I consider the art world to be a bit too hermetic.