Nikko Mueller: I’m OK, You’re OK

Josef Albers ascribed a mortal character to color when he claimed it “behaves like man.” Believing that the relationships between colors are analogous to human behavior, he viewed the interaction of color as an ethical andaesthetic phenomenon, a perception-based form of “color action” where visual experience is active and transactional. Like Albers’ seminal color studies, the paintings and sculptural works that comprise Nikko Mueller’s exhibition I’m OK, You’re OKinvestigate the relational potential of geometric abstraction and the sentient nature of color.

In Mueller’s work, color is both medium and subject, text and character. Hallmarks of Greenbergian modernism are present in his paintings—an emphasis on formal properties, the assertion of the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, and self-referentiality. Yet, instead of playing along with Greenberg’s formalist theory, Mueller throws a wrench into things: he disrupts and deforms the sanctified flatness of the painting ground by folding the canvas. It is here, upon manipulated folds of linen, canvas and burlap, that Mueller’s abstracted, highly colored shapes and forms “act”—doubling, intersecting, overlapping, vying for space, trying to sit quietly—on a painting surface that refuses to behave.

Mueller’s disruption of the painting support and emphasis on the physicality of his painting’s stretchers and canvases bring to mind the Supports/Surfaces group, a short-lived, loosely knit collective of French artists who, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, deconstructed painting by stripping it down to its intrinsic elements and foregrounding its materiality—its object-ness. Mueller assumes a similar approach in Wooden Leg, a freestanding sculpture sited directly on the floor in the center of the gallery. The core of the work is an open grid armature constructed from painted white pine that brings to mind Sol Lewitt’s seminal, modular balsa wood sculptures. Scaled to human height, one side of the wood framework supports a folded and slumping length of unprimed canvas that is imprinted with a brightly colored, loosely painted grid pattern that mimics, as the work’s title suggests, its wooden “leg.” Here Mueller dismantles and demystifies painting by transforming it into an image-object that lays bare its component parts: support, and surface.

The cheeky, passive-aggressive titles of some of Mueller’s paintings—See What You Made Me Do, Look How Hard I Was Trying—are taken directly from psychiatrist Eric Berne’s 1964 book Games People Play, a bestselling pop psychology text that introduced transactional analysis as a way of explaining human behavior. Applying game theory to social interactions, Berne outlined a series of “mind games” that people play with each other, consciously or not, that typically lead to counterproductive outcomes.

In Mueller’s paintings, the human protagonists of Berne’s transactional dramas are replaced by geometric forms—perky circles, sumptuous ellipses, spiky triangles, and drooping, bifurcated squares—that coexist and interact, oftentimes uneasily, within the confines of the picture plane. Mueller’s folded canvases serve as stages for the compositional machinations carried out by these anthropomorphized forms—they jostle, converge, isolate, enfold, conceal and kanoodle, a cast of characters whose personalities and interactions are framed within the dynamics and structures of abstraction.

While Mueller’s paintings openly engage in their two-dimensional power plays on the gallery walls, his conjoined and painted “weeded” books quietly punctuate the space. Their titles—Big Long Shot/Little Hedges, Problems, Decisions/Mask Magic, Irregular People/Structural Handbook—are eponymous expressions of their literal couplings, and also recall William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method, a form of literary collage in which a written text is disassembled and rearranged to create a new text. Placed singly and in groups on a series of plinths and pedestals, they are microcosms of their larger painted cousins, intimately-scaled Rauschenberg-esque combines that conflate written language and the language of abstraction.

In our socially and politically fraught moment, when disruption, division and distortion shape and frame our daily experience, the perpetual question on our collective lips is, “can’t we all just get along?” Through the lens of abstraction, Nikko Mueller’s paintings and objects suggest how relationships can adapt, persist, transform and, sometimes, evolve, in the face of profound change and destabilization. Taking in his exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library provides a temporary respite from existential mayhem, and affords us the opportunity—the gift—of losing ourselves, if only for a moment, in the unadulterated delight of visual experience.