Susan R. Snyder

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  print Summer 1966

  Robert Thomas

  Robert Thomas’s recent work is a group of bronze and wood sculptures, the majority of which are painted. The wood pieces are most successful, full of a whimsical fantasy. These wood pieces are painted with an obvious desire for a rough crudeness, in keeping with the artist’s handling of carved woods. Most entertaining and playful about these pieces are their interchangeable, movable parts, mostly balanced and mounted on some form of tastefully integrated stand. The complexity of these parts becomes so profuse that one is left wishing the artist would simplify his configurations. As they are,

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  print Summer 1966

  Lee Chapman

  Lee Chapman’s work consists of humorous figure paintings in oil glazes over a lightly textured gesso surface, which is already beginning to crack. The subject matter in Mr. Chapman’s painting deals with current, popular images in taste and fashion as well as contemporary variations on such themes as the Pope. In most cases the paintings become like large posters patterned after comic greeting cards.

  —Susan R. Snyder_

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  print Summer 1966

  Group Show

  This recently-opened cooperative gallery will present a series of three-man group shows. Featured in the present show are Allen Ruppersberg, Frank Malcom, and Douglas Edge. Working their way from students to professionals, the young men show different directions in painting, sculpture, and graphics.

  —Susan R. Snyder.

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  print May 1966

  Joe Goode

  In his past work, Joe Goode has consistently combined a purist formal stance with common-object subject matter, producing an ambiguous, sidelong rather than head-on confrontation with the problems of contemporary art. The ambiguities attendant upon this combination reach critical proportions in his current exhibition of staircase-like constructions. The mute installation of six of these constructions, varnished, lovingly finished with sensually pleasing rugs tinges with Surrealism a brilliant game between formalism and realism.

  The constructions do not parody the ready-made, for had Goode sought

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  print May 1966

  Vija Celmins

  Vija Celmins in her first one-man show has produced a series of small, grey paintings of sudden moments caught by a camera, but there is a sense of something lost in the transition from photograph to painted picture. For the most part her images are of a direct kind (frozen rhinoceros, plane in midair, a second in a bombing), all of which seems to call for an equally direct technique. However, she paints with a softened, romantic stroke, which creates a sensitive surface inconsistent with the shock qualities of her realism. The greyed palette seems logical, but the painting technique does not.

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  print May 1966

  Tony Pastor

  This show consists of a series of abstract images dealing with nature, a concern not only in the artist’s imagery, but also in his use of color and paint. He chooses an earthen palette of greens, browns and ochres applied in a heavy gesso technique of glazes and light black lines. The paintings treat of humus- like surfaces and rock- like forms. His larger canvases are much more accomplished, as forms become stronger and more self-confident.

  —Susan R. Snyder

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  print April 1966

  David Gray

  David Gray’s recent work at the Ferus Gallery juxtaposes truncated and oblique chrome cylinders with white lacquered cubes. These steel pieces are well crafted, achieving the elegance of tastefully designed jewelry or furniture, but they demonstrate a physical continuity devoid of conceptual unity. L.A. #6 forms a two dimensional cylindrical square resting upon a white cube. This juxtaposition should create some unity between two separate entities but it does not. The negative space produced by the cylindrical configuration is devoid of a possible relation to the cube. The fact that each element

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  print April 1966

  “Art of Argentina”

  Noteworthy among a large group of Argentina artists is the works of Juan Manuel Sanchez and Juana Elena Diz, which stand out in this show not because of their uniqueness but because of their strength. Reminiscent of the Mexican mural painters, Sanchez and Diz use the large bold shapes native to Mexican and Spanish folk art.

  Like almost all of the artists in the show, Sanchez and Diz are figurative painters, with social overtones. Sanchez portrays workers with industrial, stylized buildings in the background, and Diz portrays the common daily rituals of living. Sanchez employs strong, bold, black

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  print April 1966

  “Young French Painters”

  Shown at Galerie Juarez is a group of painters supposedly from the “School of Paris,” a title which, in many galleries, has, rather amusingly, come to refer to any painting with a Frenchy signature. Charon is the most interesting of the group, painting stylized, coloristic landscapes of the French provinces. Bisiaux is also worth mentioning, as he paints with an understanding of Utrillo’s landscapes, portraying moody weather and provincial landscapes.

  —Susan R. Snyder

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  print March 1966

  “Comedy through the Ages”

  Pop art in general, and Roy Lichtenstein in particular, have thrown enough doubt on the status of the comic strip so that an exhibition devoted to it could have been of much value. It was, however, hard to take this “comic strip” show seriously; a generalized disorder, resulting, undoubtedly, from the desire to orient the exhibition toward the delight of children, made viewing, and thought, difficult. A festive decor, glittering with colored papers and the like set up an antagonism between the two purposes of a professionally installed art exhibition on the one hand and a Pop holiday on the

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  print March 1966

  Robert I. Russin

  Sentimental romanticism is symbolized in the sweetness of fine marble, mahogany, and bronze work of Robert I. Russin. The love of Jean Arp and well-crafted traditional values are well reflected. These expressions of lost lyrical softness seem foreign to the hard demands of much contemporary art.

  ––Susan R. Snyder

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  print March 1966

  Bernard Casey

  Bernard Casey, talented Negro football player, favors working with decorative washes of figure symbolism. Woven in and out of his many-colored canvases are personal expressions of love, death, and reverence for the church. His pleasure in his work is very apparent, as is a sentimental attachment to the technics of Mark Rothko. There is an overall higher quality in his drawing than in his painting.

  ––Susan R. Snyder