This is an important exhibition. A year ago Villa’s paintings were quite powerful, even as they almost totally recapitulated an aspect of Frank Lobdell’s imagery and painterly quality. Villa’s current paintings are on the way to a mature and independent vision. The use of a biomorphic hunk in its heavily worked space has given way to a more original and complex spacial ambiguity. The sculpture of William Geis amply demonstrates that there is vital work being done and to be done in the three dimensional area of abstract expressionism, taken as a convenient term. Geis has the chance of becoming one of the important new American sculptors to make colour and surface quality serve, rather than embellish form and volume displacement. FOOTNOTE: Commentary upon the recent death of novelist William Faulkner significantly reminded us that aggressive, even brutal bad taste as a quality of art in no way precludes a quality of deeply felt human concern. I mean to praise, not bury the young Villa and Geis, when I say, however inadequately, their work is impressively ugly and rugged.
––Walter Hopps
