Illusion, allusion painting fusion
I often decry that there is not much good painting being done, however what I think is actually true is that it is easy to underestimate the quantity of good painting in the plethora of, often sensationalist, media being exhibited in galleries these days. One very exciting, and expertly curated, show of paintings just came down at Tracy Williams, titled Broken/Window/Plane. Organized by the poet and critic John Yau, the selections all call attention to the ways that painters stretch, and find ways to undermine what we are told painting should be. From the statement by Yau; “Might not a more challenging goal be to bring everything back into play- from discredited illusionism and the figure/ground problem to allusiveness and association- without being nostalgic, sentimental, or coy?” And about the artists; “They don’t recognize the borders separating abstraction from observation. They are free spirits.” ( For the full statement go to this site ).
Catherine Murphy is an artist I’ve admired since I first saw her work in the early 80’s. In this exhibit she is represented by an image of a frosted or fogged window with the word Cathy scrawled backwards, YHTAC, into the not quite white glass. I was initially fooled into believing I might have been looking at the work of a conceptual artist until I got closer and noticed the bits of a winter wooded landscape at the edges of the canvas and revealed by the lettering. It appears that Murphy may have entirely painted the wooded scene before covering it with the whitish fog-scumble, an audacious act that both denies the painting as window into the world while reasserting the illusion of the window pane as a subject. Murphy takes the humor further in the way she has denied her hand with the overpainting while calling attention to it in the focal image of her finger-written name. It’s not really a joke, but an acknowledgement of the concurrence of destruction and creation inherent in the act of painting. One more layer is added by the fact that the viewer automatically reads correctly the backwards-written name, underlining the Magrittean nature of the word-as-image trope.
On the other end of the color and paint handling spectrum from Murphy’s very muted and meticulous piece is the work of a young artist not long out of school, Paul DeMuro. De Muro’s piece titled Handy Man, a not-quite square 34.5 x 32 inches, also addresses the notion of the artist’s mark, literally, in the form of a many times repeated hand-print motif. Employed as a negative stencil (except for one hand that is built up out of a heavy impasto) each hand reveals the deepest strata of the canvas; its thinly applied yellow, ochre and olive green ground. Around the hands are thick striations in cold blue and white forming a pattern I can only describe as an asterisk-star, and below it four profiled black humps, like a child-drawn mountain range, and rimmed in a thick pink toothpaste-like line. Towards the edges, corners and even on the sides of the canvas accrue even greater and more delicious mounds and bold linear squeezes of paint disrupting any notion that the central image of a painting should be its most worked. The entire piece convolutes ideas about geometric abstraction and kindergartener’s art; sophistication and irreverence and the grand painting tradition with what I call (apologies here for any perceived condescension) “what the kids are doing.” The fact is that DeMuro’s pictorially inventive canvases more than hold their own among the works of the older and more established artists in this show.
To see these and other works from the exhibit go to this site ).
