Selected Reviews
Chicago/ Andrew Young, Lys Martin, Joan Livingstone
Art Issues, December/January 1991
- Buzz Spector
|
Chicago -
Andrew Young, Lys Martin, Joan Livingstone Things are blowing hot and cold in the galleries of the Windy city. Andrew Young’s egg tempera paintings on panel at Betsy Rosenfield were hot—or at least humid. His series of abstracted still-lives shares something of the faux-Old Master attitude of Joan Nelson’s little atmospheric details. Young distresses the surfaces of his paintings, making stains, blemishes, cracks and scratches into compositional elements, and like Nelson, he paints an indeterminate, ungrounded space within which biomorphic elements float like plush flotsam. A few splashes of ivory yellow become a floral garland in Sentinel (1990), and a lozenge shape in chocolate brown appears in several works, suggesting both a portal and an Artschwager blp. Young may intend such ambiguities to read as ruined motifs, but the fussed-over look of his surfaces subtly contradicts the strategic decrepitude of the scenes. |
Détente, 1990
Egg tempera on wood panel, 30 x 24 in. |
Lys Martin’s photographs at Wade Wilson also traffic in hothouse historization. She has re-photographed various black-and-white images from Robert Mapplethorpe—mostly floral studies as well as a couple of figures and a macabre skull—as color Polaroids, replacing their icy polish with a sumptuous and fleshy brownish-rose tint. Martin’s transformations are much smaller than Mapplethorpe’s originals, and slightly out-of-focus, which has the effect of drawing the viewer closer to the photographs in the attempt to identify their subjects. This act of deciphering functions as a kind of “undressing” of the image: the viewer’s recognition recuperates these subjects from their blurred fields. Martin’s work, consequently, ends up being more about the nature of scrutiny than about scrutinizing Mapplethorpe. Her Polaroids replace Mapplethorpe’s grandeur and rhetorical edge with a miniaturized preciosity that is unnecessarily reiterated by the “Son of Greene and Greene”-style moldings and wide creamy mats in which they’ve been framed.
Sentinel, 1990
Egg tempera on wood panel, 28 x 23 in. |
The resinated felt sculptures in Joan Livingstone’s exhibition at Artemisia, on the other hand, were coolly voluptuous. Ranging in size from 18 inches to more than 12 feet, this selection of pod-like forms evokes erotic references. The bulbous gray flanges of Eden (all 1990), for example, suggest the movement of a tongue during a kiss, and the chalky ochre folds of Whorl have a faintly testicular look. More often, Livingstone’s work derives from vital forms of nature. Furies is a row of five stylized seeds on a wall mounted shelf. Four of them rest on rounded bases, their pointed tips leaning against the wall. The fifth seed has been upended, precariously balanced on its tip. Livingstone has reinforced her felt shapes with epoxy resin, creating a sense of unexpected density. Her work fluctuates between metaphors of growth and desire, realized with a poise and formal composure as placed as a Lake Michigan breeze.
|