Finding Humor at VOLTA New York 2020

VOLTA New York this year felt like it was geared toward the taste and sensibilities of Upper East Side and Jersey collectors. Its overall vibe was one of settled, comfortable respectability. In comparison to SPRING/BREAK Art Show, a fair that somehow manages to do something different and exciting year after year, VOLTA was a slog to get through—like going to church or taking a walk through the Oculus. Some of the work on display at Metropolitan West felt like window dressing: flashy, slick, visually striking to a fault, fashionable, over-branded and, to some extent, gratingly commercial.

This was particularly the case with Rinus van Hall’s The Fake Surface series of cotton candy sweet, self-consciously posed, bad boy gender-bending Snapchat selfie paintings at Kyas Art Salon. It also applies to Yigal Ozeri’s Untitled hyper-realistic series of paintings of New York City scenes, one with a resting bitch faced blonde against a blurred crowd, shown at Rutger Brandt Gallery’s booth. These works, like a good deal of the fair, seemed too easily read and too reliant on virtuoso technique.

Yigal Ozeri, Untitled; New York, Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of Rutger Brandt Gallery.

There was, however, still a good deal to like at VOLTA, as well a number of standouts. Among them was the solo presentation of Ayako Rokkaku’s work at Gallery Delaive’s booth. Rokkaku is a self-taught Japanese pop artist who makes big, cartoonish, delightfully bright, joyful paintings. Her work has a childlike intensity and is layered and dense with psychological content and associations. On opening night, the artist was present at the booth working on a large painting. There were a number of Golden acrylics piled up on a piece of canvas laid out on the floor where Rokkaku stood working in blue jeans like she was in her studio. She worked quickly, adeptly, confidently and directly with her hands. She was doing live-action finger painting at VOLTA and it was marvelous.  

Ayako Rokkaku, Untitled, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 51.2 x 51.2 inches. Image courtesy of Gallery Delaive.

David Surman is a painter showing with Sim Smith whose work draws from images of childhood. Surman, a British artist, makes paintings of frogs, mushrooms and horses. Like Rokkaku, the materiality of the paint, and his direct engagement with it, is important to his process. He pours thinned-out oil paint directly onto unprimed canvas. This can be seen in his lively painting of a pony, Guardian of the Pyramid (Suffolk Punch). While Surman’s work calls to mind artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Warhol, Susan Rothenberg, and Franz Marc, the light touch and humor in his work feels contemporary. 

David Surman, Guardian of the Pyramid (Suffolk Punch), 2020, oil on unprimed canvas, 63 x 55 inches. Image courtesy of Sim Smith.

A wicked sense of humor is also at play in the paintings of Ashley Norwood Cooper and Bradley Wood, two American artists who paint interior scenes. In Cooper’s boldly colored painting Blinds, shown with Zinc Contemporary, a woman sits brooding pensively next to a window—the blinding sunlight coming through the half-drawn blinds seems comically aggressive for her solitary mood. In another painting, Inhale, a woman lies on a bed engrossed in a book while her partner casually undresses in front of her at the foot of her bed. John Wolf’s booth is in a slightly different register: Brash and intense violets, magentas, pinks and burgundy set the mood in Bradley Woods’s paintings. He depicts racy domestic scenes where nude ladies and couples lounge languidly like odalisques next to decadent cakes in impossibly opulent rooms, as in his paintings Larchmont Feast and Lounging with Desert.  

Ashley Norwood Cooper, Blinds, oil on panel, 20 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of Zinc Contemporary.

While VOLTA did seem a bit too ostentatiously commercial for my tastes, it’s still worthwhile in a kale salad kind of way. If you’re planning to hit the fairs, Volta might be worth the trek to Metropolitan West depending on what you want to see. That being said, I found SPRING/BREAK to be the more interesting fair this year, but it’s hard to compare the two. While VOLTA is like having a kale salad for lunch, SPRING/BREAK is more like a full dinner at the Balthazar.

Bradley Woods, Larchmont Feast, 2020, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of John Wolf Fine Art.

VOLTA New York
March 4 to 8, 2020
Metropolitan West
639 West 46th Street (at 12th Avenue)

Cover Image: Ayako Rokkaku, Untitled, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 55.1 x 70.9 inches. Image courtesy of Gallery Delaive.