DONALD KUSPIT Dissecting Space: Nathan Walsh’s Urban Architecture for Whitehot Magazine December 2024
Review of ‘Echoes - Nathan Walsh’ at Friedrichs Pontone Gallery NYC 2024
A master draftsman and painter, working with obsessive zeal to document and analyze the complexity of urban space, sometimes emphasizing one aspect of it at the expense of the others, Nathan Walsh conveys the contradictions not to say absurdity of the urban environment, and its peculiar inhumanity, its indifference to its inhabitants. “He photographs specific areas of the city that he chooses to paint,” leading him to be called a photorealist, but the bizarreness not to say absurdity of the architectural drawings, all in pencil, he makes from the photographs and the final painting he makes from the drawings leads me to call him a mannerist, all the more so because of the peculiar artificiality, asymmetry, and bizarre elegance of his paintings. Their intellectual sophistication and dramatic character—their ironical theatricality—are quintessentially mannerist. They are above all artificial constructions—and irrational deconstructions—of space, as the drawing of Depot, 2023, an architectural work peculiarly evocative of Piranesi’s fictitious dungeons, makes clear. With greater spatial complexity not to say contradictoriness, 900 Windows, 2022 is even more ingeniously absurd. Strange as it may seem to say so it has its precedent in Piranesi’s Colosseum, 1776, as its numerous openings suggest.
But Walsh is a master of the modern city, not of traditional Rome. He is a vedutista, but the vedute he draws and paints are not antiquated. His city has electricity, as the hanging lights in Aida, 2023 make clear. It has subways and traffic signals like those in Morning in Vienna, 2023, an old city that has been modernized, accepted the passing of time unlike the eternal city of Rome. Everyday people appear in Walsh’s works—the distant man crossing a street in Morning in Vienna, the close-up of a young woman reading a newspaper in Aida--but they seem more like transient markers of space rather than meaningful in themselves. It is the construction of space that is meaningful to Walsh not the people who inhabit it—seemingly incidentally. They are not rooted in it, not necessary to it—they are few and far between in his paintings. They do not define it as the buildings do. Walsh’s space is radically impersonal not to say anonymous—arrogantly anonymous, I would say, not to say pompously indifferent to whomever happens to be in it, passing through it—transiently, for it is a public space, a restaurant space, or a church space, as in Transfiguration, 2024. There are no private spaces in Walsh’s drawings and paintings: they unwittingly suggest a society in an existential crisis.
All of Walsh’s urban spaces are insistently impersonal and peculiarly uninhabitable. The buildings seem hermetically sealed. No human beings are reflected in the windows of Monarchs Drift, 2022 or in Hudson Yards, 2020 or in Mandarin Oriental, 2021 or in Rockefeller, 2012 or in Salon De Ning, 2022. When people do appear, they are merely token presences—certainly they do not have the presence let alone grandeur and complexity of the buildings—as the anonymous figures with umbrellas in Bryant Park, 2020 make clear. Walsh’s trivialized people are clearly no match for the grand figures with umbrellas in Gustave Caillelbotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, another brilliant earlier painter of the urban environment.
Walsh’s penchant for steep perspective, evident in 59st Bridge, 2016 and View From The Highline, 2020, is reminiscent of the steep perspective in Caillbotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe, 1881-1882. But as the flow of people across Caillibotte’s bridge suggests, 19th century Paris is more hospitable and humane and habitable than 20th century New York. People are prominent in Caillbotte’s paintings, if still secondary to the abstract structure of the city, but they have all but disappeared from Walsh’s paintings, for they are beside the point of the grandeur of the city. Its skyscrapers will outlast its inhabitants, who are meaningless compared to them, all the more so because they have more presence and are more complicated and important than them. After all, real estate is more important and valuable then people in New York. Whether Walsh realizes it or not, his urban paintings have a social critical edge, and a certain existential poignancy, for his buildings are more essential than his people, few and far between in his paintings.
Does Walsh worship the buildings? The drawing Transfiguration and the painting NHM, both 2024 suggest he does. NHM is a tour de force that celebrates religion, more particularly Christianity, even more particularly Catholicism. And, even more particularly, it celebrates traditional painting—pictorial paintings rather than abstract paintings, paintings of objects rather than non-objective paintings. Walsh’s buildings read as geometrical abstractions, but their urban context gives them a hesitant humanity. That Walsh’s paintings have a humanistic purpose, however inhumane they seem, is made clear by the people hesitantly associated with them. At the same time, Walsh deconstructs them in the act of constructing them, implying they form a kind of Potemkin’s village of facades. They are not geometric abstractions in pictorial disguise, but modern urban vedute, worthy of those by Canaletto, if not as openly morbid and melancholy, but as memorable. WM