Elliott Green: AutoRevisionism at Pamela Salisbury Gallery

I have a longstanding obsession with Elliott Green’s paintings. They live somewhere between landscape and abstraction, constantly shifting between different planes and viewpoints. I’m fascinated by the swirling forms and contrast of geometry with washes of color. It was a pleasant surprise to see that Green’s current exhibition AutoRevisionism features small paintings on paper, along with one larger painting, Elevator, from 2017. The show is on view at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson through Sunday, April 4.

This is Green’s first show with the gallery and is concurrent with a solo exhibition of works on paper by Gregory Amenoff in the garden level gallery. The pairing came about because Pamela Salisbury was interested in the conversation between the two artists, who are both masters of color and shape.

Elliott Green’s new works in AutoRevisionism use older drawings as the starting point. In the catalogue for the show, Green writes that he was addicted to drawing from the age of twenty to forty-five. At a certain point he stopped using pencils and started to work with a mixture of graphite powder and oil paint on linen, a process that opened his work up to other possibilities. For years, drawing was integral to Green’s practice, and he relished the immediacy and authenticity of the medium. However, his pencil drawings on paper accumulated over time and were mostly forgotten until a few years ago. Green comments that the earlier drawings “came to be reformed under some excess paint remaining on an overloaded palette. The overlay of paint lets me revise and solidify the unresolved compositions that were originated by my younger self.” Green covers the parts he doesn’t like and leaves the parts of the drawings that are still interesting to him, although some nicer parts of the drawings can get buried beneath his gestures as he paints. The history of the pencil drawings is embedded below the paint, but it remains as the subconscious character of the overall work.

In many works, you can see evidence of the drawings below, but in others, the pencil lines are mostly obscured. I was curious to know how the original drawings determined the painted image, and if there was a strong relationship or dialogue between the two. Green says that most of his responses were intuitive. “I mirrored or elaborated or removed elements that were there in front of me, without heavy thinking.  I admired what seemed to me interesting now (and tried to keep that in) and painted over what seemed out of place or in the wrong place, or just clumsy and awful. I came back to them as a very different person and made those decisions and judgements with the advantageous perspective of experience and added maturity.”

I asked Green if the fragility of the paper leads to a more spontaneous intuitive process. He responded “I’ve found ways to advance through levels of correction. If something feels conclusive in a simple form, I stop there. Otherwise, I continue it on to further stages, and those added episodes add complexity. Some of these pictures I’ve repainted so many times that the paper is as heavy as leather, and there is such an accretion of impasto that it becomes something else entirely. And there were some, a few, I threw out in absolute frustration.”

In a similar manner, Green occasionally reworks older paintings. Sometimes after working for a while on a painting, he may feel that there is some minor flaw. Correcting it might risk the destruction of the entire balance of the painting, so he will put it aside for a few years. After time, if that little part still bothers him, he can see more objectively how to take it out or amend it. When asked about how these new works on paper relate to his paintings, Green commented: “They are spin-offs of my paintings and are a good opportunity to explore and discover new scenarios and ways to let paint speak more freely and easily, with less equipment. They each exist in themselves–they will never be depicted on a larger scale, but I have made some bigger versions of some of the tools I used, in order to apply similar gestures to the larger canvases.”

Gallery owner Pamela Salisbury has spent several weeks with Green’s work during the course of the exhibition. She says that “Elliott’s work is much more spatially complicated–confounding really–than I first understood. They invite a very, very long look. We are nearing the end of the exhibition and I still haven’t spent enough time with them.”

Elliott Green: AutoRevisionism and Gregory Amenoff: Solid State: Woodblock Prints (Editions & Variations) are on view at Pamela Salisbury Gallery through April 4, 2021.