MANUEL NERI’s recent work continues to reflect ideas which the artist has pursued for 20 years or so, ever since he gave up his connection with the Bay Area figurative painters and turned to constructing and extracting expressionist human forms from plaster. The connection has not been totally abandoned because Neri still applies paint to his figures in such a way that one would never think of them as painted figures, but rather as plaster figures to which different colors of paint have been desultorily applied.

Neri’s color is brushed on in fragments. Some of his figures are fragments, some of

Navigation, A Visual Theatre Performance by SUZANNE HELLMUTH and JOCK REYNOLDS, provided a bona fide contender for the type of reminiscences upon which performance art, by its temporary nature, must rely heavily for the creation of its own mythology. For about 25 minutes. Then, as do so many performance pieces, Navigation overworked a potentially good but rather single-minded idea (neatly encapsulated in the title, so there really weren’t any surprises) and, unlike the paintings it so often resembled, gave the weary viewer no chance to escape until the nearly ad nauseam, wavy end.

Navigation,