Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving.  Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next.  In discussion and in reproduction the paintings are terribly banal but in person they have a fizzy charisma.  My favorite of all the ones in the three New York City galleries is a six-foot-tall square canvas with four-inch-diameter spots at the 24th Street gallery.  The proportions make for a special dynamism.  But the installation at the 21st Street gallery is spectacular.  Here the enormous single space is given over to the paintings.  They’re at crazily different scales, from tablet-sized canvases with millimeter-wide dots to TV-sized ones with single dots.  The gallery feels like a giant candy shop.

It’s easy to say that the work, and the Gagosian’s around-the-world installation, are gimmicks.  But the Spot Paintings are all about painting.  The fields are a dry, flat white and the the hand-stenciled spots are a luscious gloss, with the ones at the perimeter kissing the edge of the stretched surface of the canvas.  Conventional painterly subjects – depth, figuration, technique – have been brilliantly excised so that’s all that’s left is paint and canvas.  The format is so formulaic that even graphics and composition seem irrelevant.   When you look at a painting for more than one moment your eyes scan for figures, semi-automatically linking similar-colored spots that might make a larger shape.  But the spots are random and no figure emerges.  Your eye flickers excitedly from one color to the next (from almost-cupric-blues, to almost-crayon-reds, to almost chocolate-browns) with no success.  And then the eye settles, finally, on the figure of the white field.  Because this is the real subject of the paintings, and of painting.  Each one is an ecstatic field of possibility.

Image credit:

© Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 

Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Sabina Speilrein was a famous early twentieth century analyst and analysand who was treated by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and who is rumored to have had an affair with Jung.  In A Dangerous Method she’s portrayed, probably incorrectly, as a romantic figure.  She’s played by Keira Knightley, who’s dressed in impossibly slim white maxi skirts and dresses.  In the first scenes, when Speilrein is a teenager being treated for hysteria at the sanatorium at Burgholzli, she wears a series of impeccable, gauzy, white ankle-length dresses.  They set off Knightley’s slender frame perfectly, and give off a whiff of pre-sexual Victorian innocence.

I’m spill-prone and can’t wear all-white; it simply won’t work.  But this movie turned me on to the possibilities of the full-length all-white dress.  It’s simple and dramatic, and so much fresher than the LBD.  The only caveat is to select one with an informal, body-conscious profile so that it doesn’t look like a nightdress or a wedding gown.  The fitted white Alexander McQueen dress Pippa Middleton wore at this summer’s royal wedding, with tiny buttons running all the way up her spine, was so winning because it didn’t look at all like a bridesmaid dress, which is basically what it was.  But the white dress of my dreams is the spectacularly simple one John Galliano designed for Givenchy haute couture in the fall of 1996.  It’s got an empire waist and puffed cap sleeves, and stays close to the body all the way down.  Both in print (above) and on the runway, the very ladylike dress was accessorized with a plumed gladiatrix helmet.  It’s a perfect pairing.

The title of Agnes Martin’s show at Pace Gallery, “The 80’s: Grey Paintings,” sounds less like an art exhibit than a SNL skit about a super-annoying former art star.  In reality Martin’s paintings have a fragile, personal quality that makes them hard to pin down, both in terms of time and place.  Martin came of age with the great minimalist and abstract expressionist New York painters of the 1960’s, but ran away to New Mexico and stopped painting altogether for a while.  Looking at her paintings today, they seem to get at the fundamental conundrum that a painting is both its own new world and a canvas covered with paint.

The works at Pace, all six-by-six-feet squares, have been carefully gridded with graphite and filled with washes of white and light grey paint.  They are delicate – one needs to step right in front of them to see them – and they are luminous and musical.  I’m reminded of Robert Ryman, who also painted mesmerizing all-white squares.  But Ryman’s canvases are highly fetishized objects, all about the richness of the surface.  In contrast Martin’s canvases seem ideal, like fields of possibility.