Warren Isensee | Whitehot Magazine

Warren Isensee’s current exhibition of paintings and small colored pencil drawings at Miles McEnery Gallery is a master class in the art of aging gracefully. At 66, Isensee’s process remains as precise and exacting as ever. Each surface is caressed with a smooth, meticulous, handmade perfection which at first glance appears to be utterly seamless. Only upon closer inspection, one begins to notice subtle disturbances to the paint surfaces revealed by reflected light as marks begin to pulse and undulate with the delicate currents of shifting brushstrokes.

For years, Isensee has strung together or erected taut, linear compositions often by stacking rectangles as a foundation. In his current exhibition, the only true 90-degree angles are offered up by outside forces; the straightedge of a ruler to map a border or the joining of stretcher bars to create a literal one. Together these right angles function as an invisible fence to wrangle in the buoyant, bouncy, biomorphic compositions inside.  

Yet, for all their precision, the shadow of old age has slowly begun to creep across these surfaces. Not the result of a trembling hand or weakened eyesight, but in the implied loss of elasticity to Isensees’s line. The slack becomes a symbol of old age and the passage of time.  Channels of cursive lines and shapes ripple, fold, and jiggle like aging skin or drooping muscles. Reinforcing the human connection is a subtle shift in Isensee’s palette. His high-keyed, saturated color of the past begins to lower its temperature in tints of more subdued shades: warm flesh tones, charcoal grays, and flush, earthy reds. The spring previously seen in Isensee’s stepped paintings, with their muscular repetition of right angles, has shifted to the rise and fall of a looping, circuitous, organic symmetry made up of painted visual palindromes.