print December 1990

Ian Davenport

Clement Greenberg made no bones about the fact that he considered Jules Olitski to be the best painter alive. Judging by the reception of Ian Davenport’s first show, one might be led to believe that Olitski has a new contender on this side of the Atlantic. Davenport’s rise to prominence in the space of one year has been meteoric by any standard. The question is whether the star will turn to dust—whether these suave, curiously impenetrable gray and black paintings are the ghosts of energies past, or the trajectories of an as yet unfamiliar life whose body may not yet be fully formed but is already

print Summer 1990

John Murphy

These are strange paintings—rude, sacred, fearsome. How could they be otherwise when they bear, in whole or in part, the image of the donkey, holy beast of burden? From the cruciform figured by its hide to its lovingly rendered hairy asshole, the donkey is alluded to in various ways. Painted along the lower edges of these works a text reads “The image . . . has nothing to resemble . . . and fascination is passion for the image.” We are transfixed by a torture of matter and made giddy by stroke upon stroke of seething paint. Shades of gray, white and the palest brown are applied to a barely

print May 1990

Thérèse Oulton

Someone wrote a piece on Thérèse Oulton and titled it Fairy Craft; there have been others in a like vein: Painted Dreams, Marketing Magic, In the Dark Wood. No one, let alone a babe, could possibly find a path through the metaphorical thickets, the choked vegetative folds of Oulton’s painterly world. They would die for lack of air. Ambitious early works like Space for Leda, 1983, and Old Gold, 1984, were fit for the gods, or rather goddesses. The kind of thing a latter-day Artemesia Gentilleschi might have painted were she not compelled to do Judith topping Holofernes. Since then Oulton seems

print March 1990

Anish Kapoor

On the sunken floor of the gallery rested 16 large sandstone blocks in five rows: Void Field (all works, 1989). Each is rough-hewn, varies in shape and size, and has a smallish black hole in the top. The igneous, pinkish-red rocks were like furnaces drawing in the space around and above them and, indeed, the gallery seemed very hot. No other work yet has so completely taken over this place and made it so strange and unfamiliar. This sense of dislocation was compounded in the anteroom by a long, flattish piece of ridged slate transformed into a human-size wing and painted a luminous blue. The

Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton