Celebrating the artist-gallerist dynamic
I knocked on the side alley entrance window of Eugene Binder Gallery. Through the glass, I could see the owner and gallery director, Gene Binder, working on something. He seemed mildly frustrated to have been interrupted, but then shifted with brightness to congeniality.
Coincidentally, he was putting the finishing touches on the installation of his new exhibit. The new group show at Eugene Binder Gallery (open by appointment only) offers the viewer a subtle exercise in pictorial arts, with eight of nine artists consistently shown by the gallery across different spans of its 40 year history: Carl Fudge, Eugene Basualdo, William Wood, Jennifer Kobylarz, Jack Boynton, Dick Wray, Rachel Stine, Mark Cole and Jeff Elrod. The current exhibition represents an informal culmination, marking the 40th anniversary of the gallery, which Binder started in Dallas in 1986, moved to Cologne, Germany, in 1988, New York City in 1995, and finally landed in Marfa in 2000. It quietly celebrates four decades of relationship-building between the gallerist and his stable of artists.
Eugene Binder is a one-man operation, and his dry, laconic point of view on art feels as grounded as the particular works he champions. This is a must-see experience for diehard fans of that certain character of post-New York school painters, of which Eugene Binder might be recognized as a most passionate adherent. I imagine the commitment to a set of aesthetic principles demonstrated as comparable to a monk’s deep resolve to maintain the elaborate logic of their own unique sect. The spirit of devotion to pictorialism as an instrument of a kind of ineffable absolute is practically palpable in the air of the physical space itself.
Those who reside in Marfa might be drawn to see the work of the local painter of international renown, Jeff Elrod. The inclusion of Elrod’s work is the anomaly in that his relationship to Binder is a local connection of neighborly colleagues, rather than one of gallerist and artist built over time, which characterizes Binder’s relationship to the other artists on view here.
Binder explains to me that Elrod’s large work, Burnban (2017), is titled after a local fire in 2011 that spanned Marfa, Alpine and Fort Davis. Elrod has a tremendous flair for transposing the aura of digital drawing aesthetics to the sensual scale of large-scale painting. A meticulous dot matrices in reddish orange is wonderfully rough-hewn at close viewing. I sense the repetitive marks of the painterly matrices enacted, intentionally avoiding the macro/micro structure of the fractal as a trope of digitality and its implied continuity across nested scales. I ask myself if the fractal becomes present in this painting by Elrod, from a committed abstention from it. Up close, one notices the central form of a meandering white line, so precise in its digital register from a distance, is apparently a taped form, in a “just so” manner as to precisely bleed and produce a broken edge.
Multiple works by Carl Fudge, a pioneering artist of digital imagery, are interspersed throughout the show. As the exhibit is untitled, I joked to myself that I might suggest as a title, “Carl Fudge and Friends,” as that would capture both the importance of Carl Fudge as a defining presence within the curation, and the sense of the exhibition logic as cohering in part according to a spirit of fellowship and fraternity between galleries and artists. A small bookending work, by Fudge (Everyone has a Theory as to Why I, 2002) on the far left by the garage door entrance, captures some of the phantasmagoria, I imagine, that must have been felt when Fudge first started exploring digital motifs and printing methods in the early 1990s. In contrast to Elrod, this work delights in an invocation of recursive pattern, in ways that suggest the innocence of a magic carpet ride at the dawn of a new epoch, an artifactual resonance that it leaves behind for us as a trace in the present. While an interplay of the finite and infinite is also native to picture-making more generally, I propose it is worth taking note of Fudge and Elrod’s seemingly contrasting approaches to digital imagery, as anchors of a larger exhibition logic that traffics acutely in pictorial system-building.
In addition, I recommend prolonged study of William Wood’s elaborate formal modeling in three works, all sharing the medium of encaustic, and a meticulous approach to striated light and formal invention. These are explicitly invented formal worlds rendered painstakingly: discover upside-down bowl forms which hang together solemnly both together and apart. Or a corkscrew-like form of an entirely singular morphological identity, transitioning slyly from convex to concave.
I might also draw your attention to the opposing side of the gallery, towards an installation of three works by Rachel Stine, in which a taxonomy of pictorial system-building of its own logic is hard at play. Gradient patches of dragged paint assert themselves as characters beside pictograms with a disarming sweetness and simplicity, such as flower petals in one work, heart and droplet pictographs in another. An explicit theater of invented light spans all three of Stine’s paintings on view.
At the far wall, I also suggest spending time with a larger-scale work by Carl Fudge, Deer (2007), which sets up a beautiful interpretive riddle with its simple title. This painting first appears as merely a meditation on camouflage as a pictorial motif. Once its title registered, the image undergoes a transformative shift in tenor, as deer forms hidden in the camo imagery appear, with warm tones of red—invoking a palette of internal organs under a cartoon light. Some loose animistic reversal might be invoked in the viewer’s own mind’s eye, an interpretive wild goose chase I found utterly believable in the dynamic moment of relation.
I returned to the Eugene Binder Gallery for multiple viewings, feeling like an erstwhile bumbling detective, like Peter Seller’s Inspector Jacques Clouseau from The Pink Panther, tripping over my own pretenses and inferences. Binder is a character in his own right, like an actor who says more in their silences than in their capitulations to an interviewer’s queries. If the intention is to disappear so that only the works speak, I might propose that the intention backfired. While Binder declined to respond much to queries regarding painting and whether he had a soft spot to the exclusion of other arts, forthrightly monosyllabic: he insisted he didn’t. In contrast, he was much more open to discussions of the stoicism required for gallerists to maintain the fortitude to continue to operate and present new exhibitions for the public when the local market of fine art sales couldn’t be relied on from a business point of view to reinforce operations. Binder has a dark sense of humor regarding the business side of exhibition-making.
I inquired whether Binder could imagine ideal business conditions to support independent exhibition-making ever existing in Marfa’s future as a horizon that art galleries here might collectively rally to reinforce and instantiate together. Binder demurred, “It had once been more than it is now.” I sensed that he had come to take a certain amount of pleasure in the difficulties, as if in reality, he wouldn’t trade in the business conditions of operating in Marfa for the steady stream of inputs and outputs of his New York haydays. On my pad, I scribbled, “Conditions are what they are; the art of it is to be adaptive to any conditions.” I read my paraphrased statement back to Binder, and he concurred, finishing the thought: “Negative responses are never helpful.” Truth be told, I actually felt somewhat guilty, as if Binder was a mythical sphinx and somehow my erstwhile detective had set in motion a release of once-guarded secrets.
Suddenly, Binder was talking at length about Queen’s Gambit, a show he admires on Netflix. He recalls an anecdotal line that lifts his spirit regarding the existential quandary of the art business. In the scene, the mother tells her chess prodigy daughter that her father has been “indefinitely detained.” Bingo. Suddenly I am convinced I outsmarted the strategic silence of the gallerist, as his practical philosophy of small-town art business survival was, more importantly to me, a crucial keystone into the aesthetic logic of the exhibition. Pictorialism isn’t just a set of moves between infinite and finite spatial enframement. There is a temporal dimension, where difficulties enrich all actions achieved within time’s boundaries. I entreat you to go forth and visit Eugene Binder Gallery and be your own judge, in a state of stoic pleasure indefinitely, with a diehard fellowship of pictorial system-builders as your only company.
Special exhibition: Fred Sandback at Chinati
Across town, another expression of exceedingly dynamic pictorialism is on view. Although Sandback’s installation is not at all bound by the constraints of traditional pictures as such, I would suggest that sustaining a pictorial frame of mind will reward its visitors.
Fred Sandback: Sculpture (on view from October 11, 2025–June 2026) is actually an exact reconstruction of Sandback’s installation exhibition at Chinati in 2001, not so long before Sandback’s tragic death in 2003. It employs the everyday material of colored yarn to draw and redraw the physical spaces in which the installations take place, linking architectural and experiential modes together. Moving through the current exhibit, I found my eye focusing on the fiber of the yarn itself, trying to identify the exact color. Dark maroon yarn noticed in one instance felt familiar to a previous set of vertical delineations of black yarn, causing me to return over and over again to the spaces I had already passed through.
Interspersed along three continuous room-sized installations, small, intimate reliefs on wood echoed the gridded lines of the poured concrete floors. Upon first entering the north side, a triangular volume spatially incised in a cream-colored yarn bisects the cramped rectilinearity of the actual space, as if to open it to the light from the east. The pleasures of advanced pictorial system building with Sandback’s most modest vocabulary of materials extend throughout the entire trajectory of the U-shaped progression.
Apparently, Sandback was a kind of protege to Donald Judd, and seeing Sandback’s work in person, one can sense how significant that relationship might be as a steward of the work’s power. While Sandback has, over time, secured a place in the art historical canon, one can almost feel as a kind of fact that the fiber of real relationships pervades over all else.
The critical detail of Judd and Sandback’s supportive friendship was fleshed out for me in discussion with Chinati visitor services docent Prepney Torres. Prepney delighted in a statement by Sandback where he celebrated the regular everydayness of his material’s source: the big box store behemoth Walmart! These details felt crucial to viewing this work in person; this is not work made in a vacuum but set in balance according to the deep, almost melancholic, reality of materials and real human relationships.
I propose that such an attitude of sensitivity might be of stupendous benefit to this installation’s viewers; to really see the work, which I urge you to do quickly, at your earliest convenience. Like Judd’s 100 works in mill aluminum, and Irwin’s Dawn until Dusk, Sandback’s installation will likely greatly transform according to the quality of light, so one would be lucky to glimpse it in the morning, in the late afternoon at the peak of brightness, or under the most subdued, cloudy sky.