Josh Smith has a sly, slippery persona in both his statements and his art. Fittingly, his double exhibition at Luhring Augustine shows him moving in two seemingly opposite directions, toward the sacrosanct and the trashy. Unsurprisingly, he does trashy much better.
Sacrosanct prevails at the gallery’s Chelsea space, where Mr. Smith upends the modernist monochrome and its tendency toward reverential fetishization. The 19 large slapdash oil paintings, 5-by-4-foot canvases, seem to have been covered as quickly as possible, using a wide brush and one of a spectrum of apparently from-the-tube bright or drab colors. Some surfaces and colors are better than others, but it is clearly speed and the ensemble effect that count. This show is a new version of Mr. Smith as sardonic conceptual-installation-painter, but with the usual result: It is hard to imagine any of these paintings separate from the pack.
The 19 paintings at Luhring Augustine’s Brooklyn outpost are considerably better. Each canvas (also 5 by 4 feet) consists of bands of lurid tropical sunset colors — blues, purples, oranges and yellows, with occasional reds and pinks — against which are silhouetted one to three spindly black-over-green palm trees. Here again, a formula is carried with a dispatch that might almost be described as automatist. Mr. Smith seems to paint in fast, slurry gestures with his mind elsewhere, as if to see which art historical references heave up from painting’s collective unconsciousness. Here, we get riffs on the 20th century’s various Expressionisms — German, Abstract and Neo — along with David Hockney, tourist art and Richard Prince’s forgotten travel-poster photo-appropriations. These are some of the best, least cerebral paintings Mr. Smith has yet churned out. The absurdly strong, clear colors are especially welcome. The prospect of seeing the works individually is, for once, attractive. The sculptures consisting of shelves of generic artist ceramics are busywork, fun but inconsequential.