Bascha Mon’s personal cosmopolis

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Tappeto Volante Gallery in Gowanus is audaciously hosting a condensed retrospective spanning decades of Bascha Mon’s art practice. Her more recent work dominates the gallery’s anterior space, with paintings from the 1970s – which remain integral to her ongoing inquiry – populating the rear room.

The front gallery is notably welcoming, boldly presenting two hotly colored paintings – one surrounded by smaller related works on paper, the other capped with a half-dozen casually resting smaller paintings. While this mode of hanging is unorthodox, it is also sensitive and revelatory, so the risk pays off. As Mon intuits, the two big paintings need smaller company, and the pieces she has placed in their respective orbits reinforce their overall impact. She seems to be something of a master builder as an artist, and everything she makes expands a personal cosmopolis. If Tangerine – A Song for Aunt Riva’s Uncomfy Couch is a kind of domestic altarpiece, then Mon’s row of six smaller paintings placed above operates like a predella, though running above rather than below. They also seem to constitute a kind of abstracted rebus.

Many of Mon’s paintings from the ‘70s are painted on Homasote – a brand of rumpled wallboard that predates sheetrock. It has a soft surface, easily pinned, and is often still installed on account of that quality. Back in the day, Mon also used Perlite, an amorphous volcanic glass with an infinite range of commercial applications. The combination of the two materials lends the works an especially dry, desaturated look that imparts age, notionally adding centuries to Mon’s universe. This is not to say that the paintings look or feel industrial. Quite the opposite: she sensitively tended them, apparently using a back-and-forth sponging technique like the one Robert Natkin employed to build his intimate forms. It’s a pleasure surrendering to Mon’s intricacies.

Mon’s paintings are also bear comparison to the late work of Pierre Bonnard, as both artists seem prone to endless readjustment. Maps + Games is particularly Bonnard-like, summoning the late School of Paris with heartfelt, complex, and endless layering that simultaneously reveals and obscures. A key difference is that Mon’s palette has an urban flavor reminiscent of the Social Realist set-up of the Soyer brothers: Raphael, Moses, and Isaac.

Mon’s subjects are not figurative, but they are urbane, and they embed soulful sentiment by way of color choice. Color, form, and technique all happily conspire to create a particular worldview, one worth exploring and pondering.

“Bascha Mon: A Celebratory Retrospective of an Artist’s Life and Journey of Dreaming, Perseverance, Activism, & Unconscious Expression,” Tappeto Volante Gallery, 126 13th Street, Brooklyn, NY. Through October 27, 2024.

About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.

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