print November 1985

Kristen Jones and Andrew Ginzel

Before this collaboration with Andrew Ginzel, Kristin Jones’ individual work has always made reference to natural phenomena; ambiguous celestial landscapes, icy spaces, tempests, and desert mirages have been recurrent motifs. In this installation the complexity of the phenomena became more concrete than in earlier pieces. If, on the one hand, the contribution of Ginzel’s technical abilities was fundamental to the project’s practical realization, it is also true that Jones’ interest in cartographic representation played a key role in the visualization of this particular “small world.” The

print October 1985

Robert Ryman

Stand in front of a painting by Robert Ryman and try to avoid the question, What am I looking at? You can’t. I tend toward a pragmatic interpretation of his work. His paintings are the true representation of “a square painted white,” and don’t allow the projection of symbols or metaphors. Ryman’s white is pure evidence, the most extreme perceptual experience.

In these recent works Ryman uses his customary materials: white paint, supports of varying depths, aluminum bands of varying sizes. He combines the different textures of these basic elements to create variations of format and of luminosity.

print September 1985

Komar and Melamid

The works in this show could be interpreted as the frames of a film. The installation itself suggested as much, with the works arranged linearly at eye level, running the full length of the gallery walls with little space between each piece. The only exceptions were several works in the second room, arranged on two or more levels to give an effect of multivisioned projection.

We know the name of the film’s two “directors” but who are the characters and what is the plot? The characters are the stereotypes of 20th-century painting, and the plot hinges upon a juxtaposition that is amusing, mysterious,

print Summer 1985

“Terrae Motus”

“Terrae. Motus” commemorated the earthquake that devastated the city of Naples and its surroundings in November 1980. The disaster inflicted social wounds that have not yet healed, and the show pointed these out in vivid fashion. Its selection of works by 25 artists is to become the nucleus for a museum of contemporary art in Naples; the exhibition was born through the unbounded enthusiasm of dealer Lucio Amelio, and in the summer of 1985 a second group of work will be presented to the public under the same title.

Harsh, painful, and altogether obvious contrasts exist between “Terrae Motus”—an

print May 1985

Alberto Savinio

These 42 drawings by Alberto Savinio, for the most part unpublished, date from the years 1925–32, when the artist and his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, lived in Paris. Savinio’s graphic production from these years has been poorly documented up to now, and the discovery of 25 drawings and two collages in a private collection in Paris helps to reconstruct his development during the period in which he grew accomplished in the field of painting, as he had already become in music, literature, and theater.

The iconographic themes in these drawings vary little from those of Savinio’s paintings of the

print April 1985

Bruno Ceccobelli

In Bruno Ceccobelli’s painting I always find something new and something old, something banal and something smart. A skillful wider of allusions, who draws the viewer in with a bait of double meanings, he reveals himself through disclosure. I understand his sly intellectual game, and I usually fall for it, but not always. Ceccobelli has considerable technical skill, a spiritual depth, and high level of culture, but to often hi work is intellectual to the point where it seems closed off, coconut. It’s fluff meanings and countermeanings, messages and canceled messages, and even when the image;s

print March 1985

Carl Andre

This show marked Carl Andre’s return to the Rome gallery scene after an absence of some years, and in it he showed a single sculpture, Massicciata, 1984. It is his first work in travertine, a common stone in the architecture and sculpture of this city, to which he thus seemed to pay homage. A visit by Andre to Tivoli, not far from Rome, provided inspiration for the piece; the road to Tivoli passes by several travertine quarries, and in one of these the sculpture was realized. Travertine is distinctive in that it is both hard and porous; it has a ridged, irregular surface, pocked with veinlike

print March 1985

Toti Scialoja

In 1982 Toti Scialoja’s work was known for the way he dealt with surface, using subtle washes of watercolor, fluid but veiled whites, and progressive erasures to convey an intimate, private, nearly hidden emotionality. That same year, in Madrid, he saw Goya’s devastating paintings in the Quinta del Sordo. Now he seems to have absorbed Goya’s furious, dark gesture—antinaturalistic and derived from the baroque, but pushed toward decomposition through its almost excessive lucidity and obsessive, searing truth. It would not be inappropriate to use the word “enlightenment,” in its prophetic sense,

print February 1985

James Brown

The images in James Brown’s earlier work were surrounded by a sand-gray background; most of the pieces here, however, show images scratched into black surfaces. One has to search out the form within the blackness—uniform, impenetrable, yet vibrant with a tension between the shiny and the opaque. The blackness extends over the entire canvas and hides in its messy shelter a swarm of signs, neither drawn nor painted, but incised into the thick, compact paint as though into wax. Cracks and scars appear as faces and figures, an arabesque of images in the negative. And these negative forms reveal that

print December 1984

Keith Haring

Entwined black-outlined figures proliferate against multicolored luminescent backgrounds as if according to some genetic code gone mad. The works show no perspective, but rather a swarming superficiality; no suggestion of passing time, but rather an atemporality which freezes the bodies in their ascent and fall; no narrative, but rather a convulsive interpenetration of undifferentiated figures which mime a hymn to orgy—an asexualized orgy. Sex, however, appears everywhere in its most obvious characteristics. Every imaginable species and object, phallus erect, shows off a grotesque sexuality:

print November 1984

Jean Charles Blais

Jean Charles Blais’ giants hide their small heads in their hands, the swollen hands of peasants or drunks. All these sad creatures’ activity is purely physical; like workers leaving factory shifts, they seem to have no thoughts. Big footed, with overdeveloped muscles and heavy shoes, these grotesque, outsized figures are cumbersome, tired, dumb, and impassive. Filling their scenes with their bodies, they inspire no sympathy.

The shapes of these hybrid characters are halfway between a deformation of comic-strip vocabulary and the graphics of a certain, particularly odious, French advertising. (

print October 1984

Robert Mapplethorpe

Whether nude or clothed, the body as photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe combines evocations of classicism with animal like sensuality, the marvels of the freakish. The poses are static, blocked; the bodies are bathed in artificial light as though to emphasize their fictive significance, even to guarantee it. This keeps the nudes from becoming morbid. That their sex is exposed matters little, for Mapplethorpe can perceive sex in the same way as a horizon, a landscape, or a still life.

I don’t think Mapplethorpe can be seen as a voyeur. The voyeur is restricted psychologically by impotence and

Ida Panicelli