David Nolan Gallery has moved uptown to a space once occupied by the legendary Bykert Gallery, which launched the careers of such pivotal modern artists as Dorothea Rockburne, Chuck Close, and Barry Le Va. Townhouse elegant, the gallery provides a sense of intimacy that allows viewers to see individual works both up close and together—that is, as an environment. It works particularly well with this show, titled The State of Play, since it involves, as Jorinde Voigt’s work often does, an excursion through a drawn landscape, allowing for motion and reflection, seeing the ending in the beginning and back again.

For the past decade, Jorinde Voigt has been creating large-scale drawings on paper, using traditional materials such as ink, oil stick, pencil, watercolor, and, more recently, collage. In the drawings that she did before incorporating collage, the artist combined line and text to diagram both factual and fictive activities, such as the flight of eagles, geographical directions, wind patterns, rotations, shifting horizon lines, top-ten pop charts, kisses, and electrical currents. Whirling across the paper, the sinuous patterns of lines and arrows—some of which may overlap—mark relentless change as well as convey the potential for chaos and ecstasy that resides within any system. Classification and pandemonium are inseparable. It is on the porous border of this vast abyss—what is called “infinity”—that Voigt investigates the caesuras between perception and knowledge, form and dissolution. One of the guiding principles behind the drawings is the application of rigorous procedures: algorithms to decide the direction of a line or the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of lines branching off the initial one. Chance and persistence are essential. The turbulent networks of lines transform the paper into both the artist’s imaginative space and a visual map of the movements of various elements in time.

One of the best stands is that of David Nolan, who is dedicated solely to the work of Jorinde Voigt. Starting with the lineargraphic graphic and gestural approaches of the learned musician to Beethoven's sonatas, the small retrospective extends to the golden and midnight blue shimmering images of 2018 and a cycle of works, the Roland Barthes "fragments of a language of love" in ciphers, patterns, Dynamograms, transmits things and signs: One sees in these works the emergence of a very own, eigenwelt language, from which one can only read fragments, whose forms one still understands as pictures of order, dissolution, hesitation, Accelerate, shrink, calculate, attractiveness. The beauty of harmonious parallel lines meets the beauty of a completely knotted chaos, heating the form to break-ins of deadly coldness, expeditionary troops of figures and drawings and notes marching through mental landscapes, diagrams turn into hilly landscapes, half-spoken words disappear in a stream of lines and numbers in particular, lines run as high-voltage lines over threedimensional shapes reminiscent of extraterrestrial body parts.

David Nolan Gallery
Galleries Section, Booth 707
With works by Jorinde Voigt

The prolific Berlin-based artist Jorinde Voigt holds the title for most chromatically pleasing works at the fair. To achieve the effervescent turmeric yellow of her Immersive Integral Firm Radiance V (2018–19)—a painting-drawing hybrid that incorporates gold leaf, pastel, and graphite—Voigt submerged the entire sheet of paper in a dish of India ink. The work’s “immersive color,” as David Nolan Gallery director George Newall described it, is an effect enhanced not only by the artist’s painted frame, but also by the gallery’s decision to decorate the booth in a soothing teal color. This and similarly energetic, abstract compositions are on offer for $60,000, while a larger showstopper like Immersive Integral Zenith XVII (2018), which seems indebted to the mysterious symbolism of Hilma af Klint, goes for $105,000. These powerful colors add another compelling and strangely spiritual dimension to Voigt’s expansive explorations of drawing, which seek to “map ethereal phenomena,” Newall said. Drawings of this ilk from the early aughts round out the presentation, and seem to presage the more recent works.

Berlin-based artist Jorinde Voigt is recognized for the luminosity of her cerebral, abstract drawings, which feature mathematical equations and annotations that explore her hermetic belief systems.

In Integral, the conclusions she draws are of a decidedly more physical nature. The form of a torus—a wide, ring shape similar to a life preserver—is a repeating motif throughout many of the works on view and a shape that suggests infinity.