Travis Diehl: "What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in July"

This week in Newly Reviewed, Travis Diehl covers the playful “Tabula Rasa,” Malcolm Morley’s Superrealist paintings and the group show “Material World.”

'Tabula Rasa'

This arch and playful show gathers 23 contemporary artists for whom photography isn’t a medium so much as a method. The title work, “Tabula Rasa,” a pivotal 1981 piece by the photo-based conceptualist Sarah Charlesworth, is a cream silk-screen print on white paper that reproduces one of the earliest photographs ever made: a blotchy image of a table setting by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce from 1829. The piece announces a way of appropriating and rephotographing — a chain of references and riffs — which the network of teachers and collaborators here all followed.

The photograph, by its nature, is a translation of its subject, and these artists take that logic as a conceptual method. A photo collage by Sara VanDerBeek, titled “Tabula Rasa II,” includes a postcard of “Tabula Rasa” from a 1997 Charlesworth retrospective. Deana Lawson studied with Charlesworth at the School of Visual Art — in her portrait of a resting woman and baby, the beige den, the snake-patterned fleece blanket and a microsuede couch seem like a setting for the rose-gold pop of the infant’s puffy onesie.

Christopher Williams, who shared Charlesworth’s mentor, Douglas Huebler, is especially meticulous in selecting his subjects. His photograph of a wooden bin of spent pucks of espresso displays an almost fragrant tonal richness to the print — the minute gradations between browns and grays and golds, the shocking highlight of the drawer’s metal handle. Three photographs of still lifes by Luciano Perna (another Huebler student) hang nearby; six scattered lemons and four plants in pots, shot against a velvet black backdrop, waft a sort of reverence for photography itself — whatever profundity resides in these objects for the artist, the intensity of their craft conveys it.

— Travis Diehl