Exhibitions of the Week with V.S. Gaitonde at the Guggenheim, Chris Ofili at the New Museum

V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life at the Guggenheim Museum (Until February 11)

Educated in the early days of Indian independence and guided by the tenets of European modernism, Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde is much more than the sum of his influences. But even were he not, what influences they are--Zen Buddhism, Japanese calligraphy, Abstract Expressionism, Paul Klee. These interests and inspirations found their synthesis in the austere yet affirmative abstractions that Gaitonde created from the late 1950s almost until his death in 2001, and that form the core of V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life. As staged by the Guggenheim Museum and curated by Sandhini Poddar, the exhibition envelopes you in Gaitonde's art. His paintings aren't easy to talk about--considering their subtleties of depth and texture, and considering the thorough absence of titles. Yet once seen, his output is impossible not to remember.

The forty-five canvases and works on paper in Painting as Process, Painting as Life reveal Gaitonde taking rudimentary shapes and monochrome color schemes places that they logically shouldn't go. His work is always concentrated, and often transcendant. The Guggenheim brushes right past Gaitonde's precious, Klee-inflected output of the early to mid 1950s, a choice that turns out for the best; he has Klee's quirkiness but none of Klee's fun or feeling here, and seems in any case to be straining for something more grandiose. Gaitonde reached that something by deploying rollers, palette knives, and earth-tone paints, while continuing to enlist jittery outlines and simple shapes. (Some of his abstractions from the 1970s feature small circles of golden yellow and phantom black, each one posed to underscore the total symmetry and regularity of each composition.) Occasionally billed as an "Indian Mark Rothko," Gaitonde may be closer to an artist like Clyfford Still or Barnett Newman; like these two, he knew how to take an expanse of color, create a few small yet consequential ruptures, and end up with a new, more intriguing unity.

For his part, Gaitonde lived in ultimate simplicity, shunned publicity, and only produced a handful of works each year. He existed, in other words, under the same conditions chosen by plenty of painfully minor artists with delusions of "integrity" and "inspiration"--and that is part of what makes his escape from minor status so amazing. He was never better than when he worked in hard reds and dying greens, color choices that resulted in canvases at once layered, impersonal, and lyrical. Any painter would do well to add Gaitonde to his or her list of influences.

Chris Ofili: Night and Day at the New Museum (Until January 25)

Chris Ofili is a blindingly smart colorist and a ferociously adept sculptor--nervy, cosmopolitan, and unafraid of challenging his viewers. These positive attributes need a little emphasizing, since he is perhaps most widely known for an idiotic controversy inspired by one of his least impressive works. (On your own time, search "Ofili," "Rudy Giuliani," and "elephant dung," and let's keep going with this review.) Fortunately, Chris Ofili: Night and Day at the New Museum succeeds in putting such nonsense out of mind. There is simply too much else to think about in this mid-career survey of all things Ofili. At 49, the London-born and Trinidad-based artist has accumulated all the awards and all the recognition he will ever need, yet his paintings--like those of J.M.W. Turner, whom Ofili can match in formal viciousness and coloristic daring--seem perpetually unwilling to settle.

It would be ridiculous to pretend that Night and Day is an easy pleasure of an exhibition. It doesn't operate on such terms. Too frequently, Ofili reaches for loaded allusions--Greek mythology, Renaissance painting, the Pan-African flag--that don't add enough meaning or any meaning to his canvases. By the fourth or fifth such gambit, his efforts can really start to grate. There is also a "this is outstanding, but it's giving me a headache" effect that you should be warned against--an effect that reaches its zenith in Ofili's luscious, violent Blue Rider paintings, executed in barely-separable shades of blue that I couldn't tear myself away from and that I never want to see again. Yet within the three floors of paintings, sculptures, and objects that the New Museum has assembled, there are moments of such fearsome harmony that all reservations slide away--the abstract Afro Margin drawings, with their clusters upon clusters of scalloped curves; the painting Ovid-Desire, with its gaudy, troubled pastel pinks and teals; the brown metal Saint Sebastian, which roars past the usual allusions to become an embodiment of rusty, contorted, spike-covered torment. No artist can stay young and controversial forever, but even an artist of Ofili's visibility can, and I hope will, stay exciting.