print Summer 1986

Dorothea Rockburne

The custom of terming the altered focus of an artist’s recent output a “new body” (of work) serves as an exceptionally apposite description for the latest developments in Dorothea Rockburne’s shaped canvases. The intensified radiance of these outwardly geometric compositions, their robust swaths of overlaid hues and their layered angles, catalyze a newly expressionistic physicality within her highly cerebral oeuvre that could easily bedazzle one into focusing on their formal novelty. They assimilate the emotional immediacy of the recent artistic zeitgeist yet provide a timely bridge to the

print May 1986

Roberto Juarez

Most of Roberto Juarez’s large, lushly painted abstractions of vegetative abundance evoke an earthy fertility. Some, with which Juarez seems to have been more intimately connected, also project a more profound sense of fecundity, and the artist’s robust assurance in his own creative—and procreative—powers. These vital compositions appear to have emerged from what Lewis Hyde has called the “gifted state,” in which “the imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: Juarez’s pictures especially recall Hyde’s syntheses because Hyde views the

print April 1986

Irving Norman

The fact that this show was organized at all is laudable. Whereas so much new art is a novice rendition of the familiar, Irving Norman’s paintings evince a genuine oddness that even exaggerates this art center’s identification as the “alternative” museum. Furthermore, this unknown artist is aged, not youthful; lives on the West Coast, not the East River; and secludes himself in a rural cottage outside a metropolitan art community. Nevertheless, he has gained the support of urban art professionals on both coasts, including the cocurators of this exhibition,writer and arts administrator Michael

print March 1986

Scot Borofsky

Faint, garbled, yet pervasively discernible in Scot Borofsky’s painting and sculpture is a mystical impulse striving to find a contemporary voice. This urge is un usual to current urban culture, and strikingly so when the work is examined with in its immediate context—the East Village, with its often youthfully cynical or callow esthetic, and its literal environment of residential ruins, which one must pass to reach this new gallery at the eastern edge of Manhattan. Borofsky’s previous major work (and the genre with which he is most strongly associated ) was a group of 20 murals on the Lower

print February 1986

Raymundo Sesma

Amid a continuing glut of apocalyptic shrieking—or merely lurid brushwork—by nth-generation expressionists, Raymundo Sesma’s paintings are immediately appealing if only for their subduedness. With their subtle tonalities, finely veined or mottled surfaces, and merger of naturalistic and nonobjective forms, the works’ presence is a reserved one. Inevitably, although seemingly without a dialectical intention, they serve as a counterpoint to the louder personalities of current painting. Yet the artist, a native of Chaitas, Mexico, and a resident of Milan, does acknowledge his works’ spirit by

print January 1986

Robert Yarber

If in the last decade artists have rediscovered painting as a projective screen for personal stories, those works that sustain attention transfigure the narratives into larger-than-(private)-life metaphysical discourses. Robert Yarber’s paintings derive from the realms of fantasy and illusion; they share the fantastic dislocations of figurative imagery that are intrinsic to dreams. Yarber’s theme, repeated obsessively over the past few years and amplified by a flourishing lushness, is a fascination with the “Other” side of quotidian consciousness, where heightened desires, fears, and hostilities

books December 1985

Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–80: An Illustrated History.

By Thomas Albright, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985, 349 pp., 118 black and white and 115 color illustrations.

THOMAS ALBRIGHT CAME to his role of documenting the postwar history of Bay Area art with all the advantages and impediments of a man writing a biography of his own family: he was intimately informed as well as profoundly opinionated. This history evokes Albright’s personal relationship to local art from the period a few years prior to his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956 (with a Phi Beta Kappa in journalism and art history)

print December 1985

Stuart Lehrman

Stuart Lehrman’s work is provocative in its flamboyant hedonism. His wood sculptures are not only polychrome but multifaceted, and each razor-edged plane is handled with such fetishistic finesse that material sleekness could be construed as emotional slickness. In a period dominated by expressions of “down” moods in “dirty” painterliness, Lehrman’s work suggests the upbeat vivacity of an obsessive Mr. Clean. The sheer delectability of the textural effects—both visual and tactile—can appear deceptively as infatuation with the purely visual. In fact, the sculptures’ rich sensuality easily polarizes

print November 1985

Milton Komisar

Milton Komisar’s adaptation of traditional forms is so indirect, his experimentation so flamboyantly original, that his medium evades exact definition. In a period when art is dominated by “historical” materials of oil paint, bronze, wood, and marble, while popular culture is pervaded by rapidly evolving electronics—particularly computers Komisar merges high art with high tech in his computer-programmed light sculpture. His work is admirable simply for attempting to grapple with new technologies in order to discover expressive means that are intimately of our time. His use of the computer in

print October 1985

William T. Wiley

With his well-known persona—the faux naïf from the lotusland of Marin County—and his relentlessly esoteric references, William Wiley seems like a spiritualist who doesn’t want to take himself too seriously. He frequently masks his reverence with a veneer of wackiness in order to remain one of the northern-California good-time boys—along with Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, Robert Arneson, and Roy DeForest—who make crazy constructions. He obscures his metaphysical concerns by cramming the canvas or paper surface with his signature febrile charcoal line which describes a personal repertoire of symbols,

print October 1985

Charles Arnoldi

Charles Arnoldi engages in “wood play,” as filled with double entendres as it is with sticks, chunks, and panels of wood. The au naturel branches act as asynecdoche for nature itself. Yet the tumble of dark sticks across the surface also suggests the turbulence of heavy brush-strokes, epitomizing the action painting of postwar culture. Updated via mixed media constructions, this Los Angeles artist’s reliefs and sculptures could be considered the West Coast’s answer to New York School painterly abstraction of the ’50s, with actual branches substituting for branched brush-strokes. But the ephemerality

print Summer 1985

John Roloff

The long process of generating John Roloff’s large-scale outdoor sculpture has substantially stabilized, though it will never be finished, since it incorporates the slow crawl of flowering vines over the latticework of one of its two “ships.” But it is more complete than in May last year, when, during a public gathering at sunset on a bare slope in the grounds of the Victorian mansion that houses this Marin County arts center, Roloff dramatically catalyzed the second, ceramic ship through his characteristic procedure of a lengthy and nocturnal firing in a correspondingly shaped on-site kiln.

Suzaan Boettger