Helmut Dorner
Brooke Alexander
Helmut Dorner’s work is post-Modern painting at its most masterful and convincing: an ironic, hybrid reprise of Modernist modes handled as measured nuances. The uncanny urgency that seems to lie just beneath the lacquer-slick surfaces suggests a smothered eruption or the threat of explosion. In Dorner’s work, appropriation has just the right touch of anxiety, of uncertainty within knowing self-consciousness. He has mastered Modernist formalism in all its preciousness, yet rendered it with a staccato syntax that makes it seem fresh and irksome, and somehow no longer quite Modern. The result is