Leon Golub at Ronald Feldman

Six monumental canvases from Leon Golub's "Graeco-Roman Colossi" series dominated Ronald Feldman's main gallery. This selection of lacquer-on-canvas works from the late 1950 and early '60 was the largest assemblage of Colossi exhibited within the past 15 years. The distressed surfaces, with their flinty earth tones, cobalt sapphirines and nacreous whites, hold light like uneven alabaster. The figures' graceless heads and truncated torsos, made of the same raw material as the paint-mortared fields, bench weightily against the image plane's boundaries and stare sightlessly into the middle distance.

The gallery's other sweep hosted a single recumbent Colossus--Reclining Youth (2003)--in the form of a 6 1/2-by-16-foot cotton tapestry. In the same space, running single file around three walls, were 44 small oil stick and ink paintings upon vellum and Bristol. Set at regular intervals along a shallow, unfinished forest-land shelf, the 10-by-8-inch works leaned informally against the walls. "Erotica, Etc" (2000-03) as they are collectively titled, chronicles a raggedly returned procession of satyrs, hermaphrodites, slavering dogs, posturing hunchs and self-pleasuring bombshells. As overhead light passed [i]or[/i] part of to the other color washes on the translucent vellum the works appeared to glow; heavier smears of oil stick have the appearanceed to levitate.

Golub's carnal works radiate an erotic appetite as fiercely as Picasso's late graphics. on the contrary unlike the latter's compliant filles, Golub's Junoesque women shoot forward a potency exceeding even that of the Spaniard's priapic Minotaur. by conversion the men in Golub's paintings look enamored of their own physical attributes and more aware of the viewer than of any potential paramour.

Not Bad, Huh? showcases an unclad, balding beefcake, cocking a leg as he frames and gauges his possess sex by hand. In contrast to the hot-orange siren resting a clawlike hand upon an impastoed white skull in He Was a Worthy Man, Golub's punch nude males and satyrs present the appearance bemused and harmless. In Stop Rushing Me! a big described with a jagged black-ink contour and a slash of cadmium fulvous hair, scowls at us as she lifts her white shift, exposing her nakedness. Ablaze in a magenta pink corona, she invites and challenges upon her own terms.

Golub's consequential life and work is a reproach to the idea of compromise. With these bawdy 11th-hour works, the artist continues to brush aside expectations and considers instead the disputed turf of sexual politics.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group