ALDRICH MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART "Glee"? solitary in the wake of 13.

ALDRICH MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

"Glee"? solitary in the wake of 13,000-plus stock-market averages would of the like kind a title be imaginable. Optimism, confidence, and merriment are the watchwords here, and the curators, Amy Cappellazzo (of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, where the exhibition will travel next) and the Aldrich's Jessica hamstring are pretty open about the fact that these twenty artists "skirt weighty enthrall matter or politicized content." The exhibit is premised on the idea that painting exists with more conviction now that it has been forced to shed one of its worn conventions and historical baggage in order to survive alongside recent digital technologies. Might as well call the present to view "Easy."

Indeed, common would have to try bonny hard not to enjoy a haphazard of what's there. Much of the work is, of course, "gleeful": neo-abstract, bright in color, and unashamedly betraying an impulse toward "beauty" (as in Sharon Ellis's humorsome Symbolist-inspired landscapes) or a willfully messy party-crashing aesthetic (like the extremely unlovely work of Albert Oehlen) The modernist stash has been freely raided by means of just about everyone in "Glee" mainly with good results; here you have Color Field (Ingrid Calame, Monique Prieto), the Grid (Wayne Gonzales, Sarah Morris, Peter Halley), and the Decorative (Carl fabricate Jim Isermann). But such appropriation does not lead to an absence of originality here: "Glee" includes any of the better painting being made right now. The twinkling of an eyes where the conventions of the medium are cleverly ed stand out as some of the show's best. Linda Besemer makes compositions of vertical or horizontal stripes in acrylic upon glass, achieving enough density likewise that the sheets of paint can be remov ed from their temporary supports and hung fabriclike athwart metal rods. Besemer's "folds" are optically seductive (there is a potent temptation to test their pliability by dint of touching) as well as theoretically engaging in their failure to match up to preconceived formal categories. Alex Blau also intrust with an agencys additive means, preserving brightly colored airbrushed patterns (borrowed from snack-food packaging) in many layers of clear acrylic lacquer. The resulting small round-edg squares acquire the extent and the density of glass arrests sculpture built solely with a painter's arsenal.

Other artists in the point out to use technological methods to achieve visual pleasure, like John F Simon Jr whose computer painting program operates forward a slim computer screen affixed to the wall. Alex Brown's Port Gentil, 1996 fragments (or "pixellates") images from build photographs into Y-shaped graphic vital airs Jeff Elrod uses the mouse instead of a brush for works like Wicked Ass, 1998-2000 a large-scale pastiche of a Matisse cutout in which a white Icarus-like figure floats against a sapphirine background. A weird mix of hubris and homage, Elrod's piece becomes emblematic of the exhibition as a whole. The idea that painting examines back as well as forward (as "Glee" constantly reminds us) is not just discovered nor is it particularly useful now as the clew to restaking some kind of painterly territory in the digital age; painting has proven its resilience and adaptability in the face of strange technologies since the advent of photography and is showing no signs of giving up now. Furthermore, the narrative of "glee" is largely irrelevant to the work upon view, which, fortunately, is firm enough to obviate this weak curatorial premise.

...

Home