Of Fields And Fences At Madoo

“The field was tended and cherished like any object of vertu. Unlike porcelain, however, whose pieces may be glued, the field is valueless and irreclaimable, the light of centuries of harvest snuffed.” — Robert Dash, “Notes from Madoo.”

Prior to his death in 2013, writer, artist and gardener Robert Dash could frequently be found holding court on various passions at Madoo Conservancy, the ever changing, horticulturally diverse garden he established in 1967 in Sagaponack.

Last week Madoo, which celebrates its 25th anniversary as a public garden in 2019, opened “Fields and Fences: Paintings 1998-99,” a selection of works by Mr. Dash. The exhibition will be on view through October 12 at Madoo and is free and open to the public.

During his time at Madoo, Mr. Dash witnessed the transformation of Sagaponack as development took hold, and his paintings speak of a pastoral landscape that is now largely gone. As seen in this series, the expanse pushing past fences trying in vain to divide and contain it is also present in one of Mr. Dash’s earlier paintings from nearly 40 years prior, “Untitled,” 1961, which is also included in the exhibition.

By the late ’80s, Dash’s fields have moved beyond representation and are made not of earth, but of paint. Vibrant orange and yellow, pink and red, laid down with brush strokes alternately fluid and harsh, pushing past the now ambiguous forms (fence or phallus?) carefully scrawled in dark gestural lines of charcoal.

While they retain elements of their precursors and anticipate their successors, these works mark a definitive departure into the world of expressionism and abstraction, a return to the scene of de Kooning at the Cedar Bar, leaving behind the intellectual and tangible influences of his close friends Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz.

Rural scenes composed of flat expanses of color were replaced by an explicit personal iconography and the emphatic brush stroke served as record, mirroring and revealing a psychological and emotional inner life both turbulent and sophisticated.

This exhibition introduces a wider audience to the work Mr. Dash created during the late ’90s, and is one of several bodies of work that bridge the gap between his early Sagaponack scenes and the later Florilegium paintings shown in New York at ACA Gallery in 2001 and the series Sagg Main from 2007, his last major paintings, exhibited in 2015 at the Parrish Art Museum.

While much of his work speaks of a Sagaponack that no longer exists, Mr. Dash, himself, was not overly emotional about the matter, as was evident in another passage from “Notes from Madoo:”

"Of course, there are the paintings of the field, but I am not interested much in paintings of vanished landscapes, and I loathe nostalgia."