In the past year Ippolito has executed a large number of very striking abstract collages. These were an investigation into the creative act, directly worked, ripped, altered, over-pasted and torn —the image emerging immediately from the process, but continuously subjected to dissolution and re-creation at will. Executed in black and white with the ambiguous quality of the gray, blurred newsprint, they have an extraordinary sense of scale and presence. The paintings shown do not contain the same excitement or vibrancy, except perhaps Lenox Avenue, the largest of the lot. Harold Paris exhibits a violent and nightmarish imagery; shredded and exploded human remains, attached to vitrified chairs and remnants of things, almost as if exhumed after some terrible catastrophe. The brilliant manganese bronze in which some of these pieces are cast conflicts with their imagery and destroy their plastic qualities. Other pieces are cast in iron. Paris responds to this material with images of greater simplicity and plastic effect, but it is very obvious that his large, fired clay wall, Mem II, directly worked without transference into another material by casting, retains the charged emotionalism of direct and powerful handling without loss of feeling or substance.

—John Coplans