CYNTHIA BROAN GALLERY In "Little Corner of the World.

CYNTHIA BROAN GALLERY

In "Little Corner of the World," his first solo display in New York, Jonathan Feldschuh exhibited twelve canvases, varying in size nevertheless consistent in their mixture of cartoonish sci-fi and romantic force A product of the Harvard physics department, Feldschuh has a nice be moved for the fine line between microscopic and cosmic conceptions of space and worthy instincts for the salutary force of elegance on silliness (and vice versa).

Feldschuh alternates layers of acrylic paint with thick coats of clear medium, thus that the final image reads as a series of laminated tissues, each common at once obscuring and revealing those lying beneath. Tightly drawn, faintly figurative elements--root regularitys or ganglia? robotic pods?--hover near the picture plane, seeming to float onward the outer stratum of free color washes and glassy medium. Feldschuh balms the forms here and there by the agency of sanding the layers of dried acrylic (the canvases are stretched across panels to support this punishment). The be the effect is reminiscent of a digital riddle with its crystalline false space, or of superimposed transparent pages in a medical textbook

like direct play of flatness and central part runs the risk of metaphorical portentousness, suggesting self-conscious make comments [i]or[/i] remarks about painting as a historical phenomenon--the materiality of the allover abstract surface pitted against the illusion of animated pixellation and baroque fantasy. still this particular version of art's pitched battle got funnier as it became more literal. Feldschuh doesn't mind showing us that he is working forward very basic problems posed by dint of paint, like how to make it lie down upon or jump out from a canvas--and in these innocent inquiries, he assumes to be having a really useful time. The paintings are one as well as the other unapologetically goofy and unapologetically excellent Color is laid down as if the artist were constantly consulting a painter's encyclopedia of possible gestures: Virile AbEx spatters and comic-book explosions interweave with elegant, calligraphic lines like those of Brice Marden; Feldschuh's nervously articulated biomechanical forms, meanwhile, owe something to Inka Essenhigh or Alex Ros In spit e of the shallow, plasticky be excited imparted by the acrylic laminations, the paintings remain preoccupied with landscape, always returning to the fundamental organizing principles of foreground, middle loam and background. There are passages suggestive of Hudson River seminary sunsets and cloudy blobs a la Tiepolo.

A appellation so heavily dependent on pastiche posts the risk of a cute soullessnes There is a forced quality in Feldschuh's titles--A wondrous Buy in a Wraparound Sky; As admitting to Breathe Were Life--that hints he may be trying to do too many things at formerly attempting to force more meaning into the paintings than they intrinsically warrant. The [i]clavis[/i] to "Little Corner of the World" lay in its exuberant physicality. Like a twelve-year-old lad who draws the same muscled superhero above and over, Feldschuh uses his sinewy doodles to expres the power of mark-making. He knows so power is nonsensical, and also that nonsense has a sublime brink; beginning [i]or[/i] end But such fun won't last without continually challenging itself. For the paintings to make more grave Feldschuh might ask himself a question rarely pos in comics (or philosophy): What happens when a superhero evolves? When vitality and absurdity engage in their dialectic, what forms emerge?

Frances Richard

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