Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Recent Paintings and Drawings, an exhibition by New York-based artist Robert Feintuch. This exhibition is the artist’s first presentation with the gallery and will be installed in our Viewing Room from February 11–March 11, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, February 11 from 6–8pm.

As one hand points, another strikes, and a third offers flimsy assistance amid disaster. Across Robert Feintuch’s recent paintings and drawings, the gestures of- and objects in- the hand become subjects, selves, and surrogates. Through learned and assumed symbolisms—pointing a finger up suggests a bestowal of wisdom, a la the toga-clad philosopher, while a gripped club portends cartoonish threat, a la The Flintstones—Feintuch uses humor and self-deprecation to prod at painting’s lofty aspirations. 

Are these the hands of some unseen, would-be hero, like a Hercules, a He-Man, or a god? Or are they self-contained and finite–attributes absent the attributed? In Pontiff, the artist gives us a simplified shoulder and a graying head hunched in front of a lecturing hand but stops short of a face. Is the hand he genuflects in front of in a painting or out the window? Resisting narrative, Feintuch’s works elevate ambiguity and anonymity, positioning the latter as a site of historical and formal freedom. Long Fire implies danger without identifying it, promising a fire bucket, but not necessarily water; Long Pontiff parodies authority while seeming to offer the trappings of a eureka moment left unspoken. 

For Feintuch, these considerations extend to materials and processes: he achieves a classicizing, fresco-like luminosity by layering thin polymer emulsion on prepared aluminum-faced honeycomb panels. Delicately feathered and lightly applied, his surfaces sit on solid, sculptural substrates. Echoes of Renaissance and Gothic figurative traditions confront the material legacies of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, fastening ethereality to industry.  

It's this very alloy–history, gesture, material, form–that propels Feintuch’s work toward a deflation of grandiosity altogether, an understanding of artmaking (and life) as defined by missed cues and fuckups. Seductive surfaces and sleek panels deliver scrawny arms and bad posture. For all they might offer by way of convenience, our present codes and symbols often prove facile and flaccid. And surely the past wasn’t much different: even Hercules, often depicted standing naked, was exposed.