print May 1966

Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle’s show at the Dwan Gallery consists of just two large polychrome sculptures, but has ample satisfaction for all this limitation. His recent work is a move away from the attenuated whittled volumes of his former style to an exclusive concern with huge planes of simple configuration bent and sprung through space. The traditional preoccupations of sculpture with the disposition of massy volumes is no longer a part of Doyle’s approach. The smooth colored surfaces he favors are flung billowing out grandly or flopped across struts to remain poised or slack, expressing energies and states

print May 1966

Robert Keyser

At Paul Rosenberg and Co. Robert Keyser shows fifteen visionary landscapes and interiors of a highly specific order. These fantasies are not concerned with the tidy transcription of inner emotional experiences but with the ambiguities of our analogical visual structurings of reality. The strange atmosphere of these oils comes not from the dream-made-vivid practice of orthodox Surrealism but from the apparent contradictions that arise when a picture contains, inextricably mingled, more than a single visual system.

The perils of this approach have of course defeated many artists who, from the time

print May 1966

Mary Frank

Mary Frank’s new exhibition at the Stephen Radich Gallery gives a very full idea of the range and variety of her art. Her sculpture (both reliefs and free-standing pieces) in wood and bronze are conclusive demonstrations of a rare ability, that of being able to double-clutch smoothly and with no loss of momentum from modeling to carving along a single course of imagery and expressive concerns. Stirred by a personal vision rather troubling in its grave poetry and sustained by a firm, developed craft, Mrs. Frank’s work is the statement of an artist who hasn’t hustled her development, but let it

print April 1966

Mark Di Suvero and David Novros

Downtown at the Park Place Gallery a two man show offers sculpture by Mark Di Suvero and paintings by David Novros. Di Suvero’s work is now sufficiently good that the inclusion of two rather playful pieces here does not detract from the essential gravity of his accomplishments. His New York Dawn: For Lorca is a massy accretion of “experienced” wood, beams, and bolts, cramped together in preservation of their sense of other, past functions and identities. Set lightly atop unobtrusive slender beams of black steel, two such elements warily approach one another. A thin steel pole topped with the

print April 1966

Lester Johnson

Lester Johnson’s show of “the Milford paintings” at the Martha Jackson Gallery consists of both figure pieces which continue and enlarge upon the big and simple statements of his last exhibition, and a group of still-lifes that essay new but not altogether unrelated painting questions. The figure paintings aim at a classical monumentality that would seem, on the surface of things, to be hopelessly at odds with his marled pigment, splattered and dribbled upon in the course of its manipulation with the knife. However, it is not a classical form which Johnson tries to construct, but rather a

print April 1966

Cply

At the Alexander Iolas Gallery Cply (William Copley) has a biggish show of paintings under the heading “Projects for Monuments to the Unknown Whore.” The pictures are all fantastic projections of erotic imaginings flavored agreeably with mild fetishistic elements. With one or two exceptions the compositions are scenes in which the artist’s personages (a blank-faced Kurvy Kutie with Bardot hair and an equally faceless gent in a herringbone tweed suit and a bowler) enact some tender drama. These gentle encounters, so nostalgically amorous, allow the observer to savor voyeuristically bordello idylls

print April 1966

Barbro Ostlihn

Barbro Ostlihn at Tibor de Nagy Gallery shows a group of meticulous symmetrically composed oils slightly obsessive in their treatment of recognizable objects in an unlikely scale and fiercely anal-compulsive in their elaborately titty-pooed renderings.

Dahlia presents a huge image of this flower, hovering just clear of the limits of a square canvas. The countless scarlet petals glow to yellow at the edges, suggesting a scorching blossom of incandescent steel floating in its field of blue. 91 Allen Street has a Sheeleresque rendering of a complex hydrant-like form that elaborates itself into the

print April 1966

Julio Le Parc

At the Howard Wise Gallery Julio Le Parc makes his solo debut in America after an earlier appearance here with the “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel.” His present showing is a series of mobiles and constructions that makes much use of mechanization and intricate lighting effects. These works depend to varying degrees on random movements produced by the intermittent action of a motorized element on different kinds of movable parts. Several of the pieces suggest gadget-games like vertical Japanese pinball machines. Jeu Visuel: Rouge-Bleu is a circular wall-mounted box containing two ping-pong

print March 1966

Dubuffet

At the Saidenberg Gallery is a group of Dubuffet oils from 1963–65 which the artist groups under the provocative nonsense title of “L’Hourloupe.” More unified in style and approach than gallery exhibitions of this artist often are in America, this show reconstitutes by its coherence the pointed brilliance and magical wit of Dubuffet’s inventiveness at its best.

Each painting is a mosaic of striped and solid forms outlined in red and black which either cover the whole field of the canvas or make up complicated beings, his familiar personages, relieved against grounds of solid black. The “field”

print March 1966

Peter Agostini

At Stephen Radich Peter Agostini shows a new group of large sculptures which recovers with a bonus the ground he seemed to have lost in his last one-man show here. Having worked out of his system the impulse that led him to take a pratfall on the field of literal imagery last time around, Agostini’s current offering injects that ebullience into a series of plasters descriptively called “Swells.” These pieces are cast from negative molds made from clusters of herniated inner tubes of different sizes, piled up and ligatured in bulbous heaps. The forms are more directly organic, or rather visceral,

print March 1966

Gene Davis

Gene Davis, the Washington color painter, has a show at Poindexter consisting of four enormous (10' x 20') horizontal canvases. Each painting is evenly striped top to bottom with bands of intense colors, which, however, are not the same width in each painting. The colors are juxtaposed in no apparent order, but so as to hype up the optical bounce of each as much as possible. So, the regular stripes seem to bulge and press sideways against one another. The vast horizontal extent of each work weakens one’s fix on external references. Attempting to “rectify” one’s vision by focusing on a single

print March 1966

Dean Fleming and Anthony Magar

Downtown, the second show at the handsome new Park Place Gallery on West Broadway is a two-man effort of paintings by Dean Fleming and sculpture by Anthony Magar. Fleming’s paintings are orthodox expositions of the now over familiar hard edge geometric schemata. Just about everything one might expect is included: color reversals on fields of identical form, suggestions of foreshortening that isn’t, and skinny rhombs that project or recede as Fancy dictates. Classical optical illusions, particularly the Ambiguous Cube so dear to Antiochene mosaicists, show up in several handsome small paintings

Dennis Adrian