Having visited “Then & Now: 1970–2024”, a selection of paintings by the artist Jeff Way, I was struck by the physicality present in the art and the exhibition. First, there is a palpable sense of history in the space. The gallery, Storage, sits a few stories above the crowd of cars and pedestrians that populate busy Walker Street in TriBeCa—which has experienced a renaissance as a hot spot in the New York art scene. Accessed by a tiny elevator, the loft space, is furnished with craftsman-like furniture, and creaking floors. It eschews the veneer of a white cube and provides an atmosphere that reminds a visitor that there was an important moment in art, pre-Chelsea, when this then moribund part of Manhattan became the gritty home to artists who would define the end of the twentieth century. The atmosphere of Storage is an authentic and physical reminder of this history, while Jeff Way is a direct artistic link to that past.

        Among today’s luxury shopping, elegant hotels, and, yes, the nearby, newly white-cubed galleries, Way still works and resides decades later. He builds his paintings, for the most part, on the grid. In his most recent work, his process made visible. Way starts with a colored pencil drawing of a grid that has been built up in sections. Each section is created by repetitious small strokes that are diagonal to the overall grid. And each consists of twin bars of color with an unfilled space between them. This empty space then contains a tidy line in the same color as the bars. The bars are joined at each end in a soft ovular point. These composed sections abut each other to form two square compositions, one vertical and one horizontal, which are overlaid to form the grid. Each grid is made of a collection of colors in an arbitrary arrangement. The overlay creates an undulating display of color variations. The unfilled areas of each section also intersect to create their own dot grid that almost appears to twinkle. Eccentric Squares Study 3/30/2020 is a beautiful example of this.

        These drawings are used to plot out larger scale paintings. The essential compositional elements remain intact as the paintings replicate the mark making from the drawing. The artist uses paper tape to mask the canvas and create a guide to maintain the integrity of the grid. The acrylic paint has an out-of-the-tube purity of color but as the paint varies from slight dab to smooth layer to slightest whisper, and as one color overlays another, rich new visual effects are created in a style that almost evokes Seurat. The mood of each painting is dependent on the combination of colors the artist chooses. Eccentric Squares 27 evoked the scent and crackle of a fireside chat in the deep of winter—vibrant red, cerulean, plum. Eccentric Squares 42 (Diamond) which as the name suggests, is tilted a quirky 45º, reminds me of Easter–bulbs sending up tulips, suddenly warm rays of sunlight on lengthening days, spring green, lemon yellow, lilac.

 

        In another interesting maneuver, Way preserves the strips of tape that are used to make the paintings and then weaves them together into new works on paper. Waste Not 8/2/2021.is one of these. These pieces feel less regimented and more whimsical than the paintings. They also reveal something quite interesting about the paintings and initial drawings. The tape is not laid down in an ordinal fashion; rather Way makes thoughtful decisions about where one strip will overlay another. He avoids patterns. He almost scatters the intersections of lines. The choices being made in the process humanize the grid. One may then realize that this same process is always active in Way’s paintings. When you look closely you see that the segments of color in the painting could not have been made in one fell swoop. Instead, they appear to have been made bit by bit–as a single segment of color will randomly move from the top layer to the bottom layer, as if woven in the same way the strips of tape are. This realization evokes a respect for the labor, thought, and thoroughness of the artist’s process.

Waste Not 8/2/2021, 2021. Paper tape on paper 30 x 22 inches. Photo courtesy Storage.

        This process, starting with the colored pencil drawing, then making the painting, then making the tape on paper piece, very much covers the “now” part of the show. The “then” part of the show is represented by a selection of paintings all made around 1970. This was an important time for Way. He was included in the 1971 Whitney Biennial, and his painting Ivy’s Gas was acquired by the Whitney. A sister painting to Ivy’s Gas, Untitled is a major part of the exhibition at Storage. In this painting, the grid, as it were, is reduced to its horizontal marks, which recede and emerge throughout the large picture. The surface of the painting is consistent, somewhere between a sand drawing and a citrus rind. The painting was made with the canvas flat on the floor, and the compositional elements have the feeling of blossoms falling from a tree, or one scattering salt on the sidewalk. The pigment appears to be tossed or sprinkled across the plain and fixed in place by the acrylic medium. The rich yellowy green is speckled with constellations of violet, rust, blue, and gold. It has a mood that is dancerly. The painting suggests an air of remembrance of a sacred moment.

Untitled, 1969–1970. Powdered pigment and acrylic medium on canvas, 84 x 143 inches. Photo courtesy Storage.

 

An interesting jump further into the grid is apparent in his 1973 painting, Primary Variations VIII. In this painting, the grid is boldly laid out in an orderly blue, red, and yellow pattern. The lines have plenty of space around them and appear to glow like neon. In the spaces between the lines there are accumulations of pigment that may have been poured or brushed into place. These accumulations appear ghostly, like some electric residue, like a cyber-lichen—something nature produced where something manmade once was. The painting literally radiates a kind of joy while at the same time acknowledging the transience of all things. The painting is the physical manifestation of a human desire to create order, to dream of a universal ideal, and of the tension that is created when that impulse rubs against the proclivity things have to weather, to fall apart, to age, to become beautiful. That idea, that tension, is the nature, I think, of this show.

Paul Moreno is an artist, designer, and writer working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founder and organizer of the New York Queer Zine Fair. His work can be found on Instagram @ bathedinaftherthought. He is the New York City editor of the New Art Examiner.