January 24, 2004
"The New Romantics" at Greene Naftali Gallery
No Internet access at home means fewer updates here. I'm still working, of course. Here's proof: an Artforum.com review of a group exhibition currently at Greene Naftali. The link will die two months from now, so here is the text:
Critic Jerry Saltz recently deplored contemporary painters' tendency to faithfully re-create the perspective and spatial depth of their photographic sources. This show, which features five artists who create idiosyncratic imaginary spaces, offers numerous counterexamples. Blake Rayne's two paintings of a statue of James Fenimore Cooper impose shifting pastel planes onto modulated gray surroundings—one wonders if this is how clairvoyants see auras—while Lesley Vance, in her first New York appearance, presents a tour de force: The allover composition of her twelve-foot-wide Foliage, Berries, Moss, 2003, a mélange of human derrieres and verdure, is simultaneously sucked back toward a mysterious light source and seemingly pulled down the canvas by gravity. Nick Mauss's drawings on handmade marbleized paper document his Europhilia as filtered through musical references (London Calling, Stiff Little Fingers) and Jugendstil flourishes. At their best, his works are as delicate as the floral motifs of his Art Nouveau forebears, to whom he is also connected by a sculpture of an oversize peacock feather. And Christian Ward's kitschy, brightly colored paintings of caves might push bad taste just far enough to qualify as pretty good.