In 1953, Mark Rothko completed an untitled painting which would some 33 years later be gifted to The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. by the artist’s estate. At the end of the last century this painting would become the iconic cover of the catalogue for the National Gallery’s Rothko exhibition that would travel to New York and Paris. I still frequently notice this elegant book on the shelves of art lovers. It in fact pulls my attention every time I see it as an item in the living room set of the TV show, Frazier. The painting itself was one of the earliest paintings to use the vivid fuchsia that would recur in his later work. It also represents an increasingly forceful reduction of compositional elements in Rothko’s work and his simultaneous deepening of color complexity and manipulation of actual light. The New York painter Nicolas Bermeo has decided to add his own chapter to the legacy of Rothko’s Untitled, 1953. Bermeo’s Untitled, 2024 is a sort of remix of the Rothko. It turns the composition on its side, the colors are re-ordered enough to be new but not so much as to lose Rothko’s tune. It adds a couple of new references such as Barnett Newman and Callum Innes. The floating quality of the original is a bit more four-on-the-floor in the Bermeo painting. The ethereal orange line in the Rothko becomes acidic, the original’s glowing light becomes unctuous, glossy.

        Bermeo’s Untitled was, to my eye, the star of his debut exhibition, “Nicolas Bermeo’s “Playing in Reality” at King’s Leap in New York. The exhibition seems to be a brief examination of, maybe a quick homage to, painting from Ab-Ex to the turn of the millennium abstraction. Besides Rothko, Bermeo also conjures Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Jonathan Lasker, Wade Guyton, the Support/Surfaces movement, and The Washington Color School. These allusions are made as casually as I just alluded to them now, and I assume that the artist is very aware that the references are being made.

        I think the artist is maybe making a little intellectual joke about abstraction vs. non-objective painting. The joke is this: Rothko takes representation and reduces it down to a pure abstraction, down to formal elements that can exist on their own independent of subject. An artist like Robert Ryman takes the tools of Rothko and makes pure paintings that forego the “represented subject” altogether to create a non-objective work of art. Then, and this is the funny part, Bermeo makes an abstract painting wherein the “represent subject” is Ryman’s non-objective work. Such is the case in two of Bermeo’s paintings. They are both called Untitled. One is an 8” x 8” white canvas with a few large light brush marks of translucent aqua paint. One is an 8” x 8” white canvas outlined with an occasionally frosting-like gray paint and then a few more gray marks crossing it. These appear to be attempting to point to the occasional bits of color or the incidental shadows one finds in Ryman’s rich, largely white, paintings. Bermeo’s canvases, also quite rich in white, without a viewer’s heavy lifting of contextualization, lack much other content.

        The other best effort in the show is a large canvas also called Untitled. This work consists of seven horizontal bands of color, the uppermost and the fourth from the top are washes of pale pink and the other five are pale peach. The bands of color are separated by lines of black. The bottommost is a thin elegant line. The others are rougher and thicker, made up of two loose and thin parallel borders with the space in between mostly filled in using multiple small gestures, some of which appear to be made by spraying. Left to right the painting, if folded in half, would be an approximate mirror of itself, but it would not be a mirror of itself if folded top to bottom. This compositional device is frequently found in the paintings of Agnes Martin, and Bermeo’s painting cannot help but be seen as a take on her iconic work. How Bermeo steps away from this reference is that he does not employ the purity of color, the patient layering of paint, or the meticulous commitment to mark making that referencing Martin makes me crave. Where Martin’s canvases contain a quality of deceptive effortlessness, Bermeo’s just seems to be a little lacking in effort.

        The exhibition is accompanied by a rather opaque press release that traces some musings of the artist, but it nonetheless demonstrates something about the show. Nicolas Bermeo seems to have many points of reference, and he also seems to have aesthetic ideas and the ability to make interesting connections in his mind. Paintings, however, are more than ideas; paintings exist outside the mind. They are sent out into the world on their own and, when placed in a commercial gallery, are thrust into the conversation about art making. They are only imbued with what their creator has put into them. In a press package for the show the gallery provides a more useful explanation of the show. I quote it here: “Bermeo speaks of the potential to ‘catch a vibe,’ arriving at novel solutions through minimal and quick means.” My response is that I do see a vibe or, more accurately, an attitude. But I see nothing novel here. I see responses but not solutions. I see that what the artist attempts to imbue into these pictures is handled too minimally and too quickly. I see pictures that are instantly “Instagrammable” but that lose their luster in person. Where these pictures might aspire to pay homage, they simply mock. Still, the directors of King’s Leap see something in the work and my heart is warmed by knowing there is a community of young artists and gallerists supporting each other and taking risks. It is commendable and I think there is something in Bermeo to be nurtured if he wants to try. Making art is not easy though.

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.