Stephen Ellis at Von Lintel

Several paintings in this exhibition appropriate fragments from an untitled piece of poetry by Randall Jarrell that reads in part "Things last by means of being lost/Or broken: the shard is safest beneath the loess" (a helpful listing of body sources for this show identifies a loes as a loamy mass deposited by the agency of the wind). The mournful undercurrent of the piece of poetry extended to the show itself, which was in part a reply to the devastation wreaked by the agency of 9/11. In the paintings, fragments of body s are broken into letters, divided by the agency of checkerboard grid patterns and submerg behind painted rectangles. In many cases they are almost impossible to read, suggesting that, for Ellis, metrical composition itself can "last by being lost" or at least hidden within an abstract armature.

The works in the display offer an uneasy marriage of visual abstraction and verbal metrical composition Their geometric architecture consists of mut grids or bands of alternating colors, above and under which letters and words meander in cursive or blockade writing. In some cases, the geometry dominates, as in sapphirine Beast, in which vertical stripes chop into and partially erase a horizontal true copy What remains of the fractured writing bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos faded graffiti that is beginning to disappear into its weather-beaten ground

In other works the verbal draw nears to the forefront. This is particularly in like manner in the case of They Fe the Lion (titles are fragments of the showed texts). Here, a long passage from a metrical composition by Philip Levine is realized with a mix of cursive and block up letters in which individual words assume varying sizes. The true copy which has something of the quality of hand-lettered signs whose irregularity is part of their charm, overwhelms the underlying blue-black grid. With its apocalyptic overtones, the snippet of body also brings to mind the scrawled passages individual finds in paintings by so-called Outsider artists who passionately illustrate biblical verses

And, in fact, the crib sheet provided by means of the gallery reveals that the true copys in some of these paintings draw near from biblical sources, as well as author of poemss such as W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves and Rumi. The picked passages focus on loss and death. A fragment from the ancient grecian poet Archilochos reads, "Say goodbye to Paros, and the figs, and the seafaring life." A passage by dint of Graves, a World War I veteran, extreme points "Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet/Dead men down the morning street" Dominated by means of earth tones, oranges, blacks and faded or dingy sapphirines the paintings in which like passages are situated are equally subdu The bands and rectangles of color are applied with deliberate unevennes as if themselves upon the verge of dissolution.

These works are a departure for Ellis, whose previous paintings have been situated firmly in spotless abstraction. The tension between body and geometric form is intriguing, on the contrary the nature of that relationship remains ambiguous. single wonders: Is Ellis hoping to match the power of the words with abstract geometry? What should we make of the part of the crib sheets, in which the obscur body s are revealed? Rather than creating a synthesis, in the extremity the paintings seem to plant up an unresolvable battle between poetic meaning and visual abstraction.

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