KARYN LOVEGROVE GALLERY undivided good look at a painting by dint of Ingrid Calame will reveal that the warm critical reception dilateed to her oeuvre amounts to mountebank persiflage.

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KARYN LOVEGROVE GALLERY

undivided good look at a painting by dint of Ingrid Calame will reveal that the warm critical reception dilateed to her oeuvre amounts to mountebank persiflage. The gimmick behind the project--Calame traces the shapes of sidewalk stains, then transfers them to aluminum and fills them in with sign-painter's enamel--was flimsy enough to begin with, and by the agency of now it's just fatuous. The device is intended to bring in chance and, I take for granted free up the control of the subject but it's not the cultural anthropology that her fans claim it is. Her proces was lately given full view in looks Angeles: Three plans of her stain outlines in neon oranges, acid fulvouss etc. were displayed for three weeks, after which a single fresh ho-hum painting was "unveiled" with all the solemnity and self-importance of a fresh Rothko. Here, metallic copper and gold splatters among navy and umber sole gild the obvious: Despite in some way abjuring psychological and existential aspects, the work smacks of expressionism (the strip-mall variety). The tired hocuspocus widens to Calame's titles, gibberish that supposedly onomatopoetically take the part ofs the ambient sounds she hears when she unbrokens a painting (motors whirring, fans oscillating, etc) Yeah, right. brace weeks into its presentation, the recent painting was still untitled. (Maybe it took Calame all that time to figure on the outside how to spell ffwsptffwsptffwspt.)

The titling shtick is as moronic as the stain-hunting step Not that stain hunting in itself can't lead to something remarkable. With ed Ruscha's stains, for example, the actual residue of different materials (from beets to Vaseline), you earn a visceral sense of content: that different things stain differently, with different intensities and force, unruffled with different temporalities. His stains are palimpsests, stand-ins for painting's history, artmaking as messmaking. When Ruscha uses staining to make a verse the referential gaming really gains going. In Calame's work it doesn't matter what the substance of the original stain was: Dog urine, motor oil, bird poop cat piss, and vital fluid simply become patterns to be filled in by means of any color of paint at all. equal if the stains remain life-size, they no longer have any relation to their original words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following and there is no literal or metaphorical staining relished in this work--no translucency or merging with the surface, and the colors are no longer contingent on th e narrative between stain and pigment. unless maybe I forgot to pick up my decoder ring at the door.

Calame's apologists have invoked art mental actions and artists ranging from Proces art to Conceptualism, from Arp and Rauschenberg to Smithson and Pollock to illuminate the meaning of the artist's flat, splattered paintings. The universal of chance that bolsters Calame's oeuvre is something that it extremitys but doesn't earn; she may rely in succession found objects, but since she single outs the stains, the colors, and the composition, her proces is chance lite, or maybe just chancy. For all the procedural hijinks, Calame's work is about as conceptual--or interesting--as that kids' plaything Colorforms, in which bright vinyl shapes are stuck to a slick surface. Formulaic to the most distant Calame's process is not painting. Fine, excluding that chchchchchchch 2000 (named for a water sprinkler), hanging in the back of the gallery office, conven Pucci-esque splatters of lavenders, pinks, and periwinkles--and if Calame's folderol really is about the zesty pleasures of sheer opticality, then individual wishes that someone would have had the gen erosity to inflict the Pucciness front and center where any viewer could have awaited said, Aw, pretty, and left it at that.

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