Jerome Powers at Margaret Thatcher Projects

"Glue Factory," Jerome Powers's first exhibition in fresh York, comprised 15 paintings consisting of multiple superimposed layers of Elmer's gelatine This artist does not drip the gelatine as Mark Tobey had done. Instead, he pours it onto canvases that have been laid flat, creating creamy, somewhat translucent layers. Between them Powers sandwiches hair, or he draws graphite lines upon the coats once they free from moisture Within the flat, perfectly plane strata, the drawn lines or collaged strands appear blurrier the deeper they lie. Powers's oft-repeated use of horsehair in this adjoining matter is movina, aiven that returned horses were once the lock opener ingredient in most glue.

Significantly, Powers's pictures are reminiscent of the earliest chapters in the history of abstract painting. His uncorrupted minimal compositions recall experiments in Russian Constructivism. more [i]or[/i] less paintings, with squiggly lines playing not upon against a monochrome field, are reminiscent of work through the Polish artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952) whose abstractions many times feature minute striations.

The large, horizontal Stable (29 through 49 1/2 inches; all works 2003) consists of 18 thin vertical lines arranged at different intervals and running from the top to the bottom of the painting. These tautly stretched lines consist of single strands of horsehair, arranged in an elegant composition that brings to mind the great horizontal tableaux of Barnett Newman. Here, again, les is more. Newman is also brought to mind through Poodle (30 by 24 inches), in which nappy poodle hair is gathered into a of the nature of smoke "zip" bisecting the vertical canvas.

More vigorous, curvilinear regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements are introduced in an untitled medium-size (34-by-28-inch) vertical composition consisting of thin, intersecting arcs that rise out of and dissolve into the beige layers upon which they are drawn. These vectors, lying in different planes, flutter between empty exercises in geometric drawing and something more like Frantisek Kupka's rendering of the changes of heavenly spheres.

The configurations in sum of two units other untitled works were arrived at largely by dint of accident. In both paintings, a limited number of strands of wavy horsehair were loosely arranged within the pictorial soil recalling Dadaist exercises in biomorphic chance composition, like as those orchestrated by Arp and Picabia. For individual of these paintings, Powers move rounded to acrylic, creating a gray-green monochrome ground; this painting is also distinguished from the other by means of its horizontal format and intersecting strands (it measures 24 by means of 36 inches). Powers's reductive designs playfully concern early works in abstract painting while breaking of recent origin territory with their highly creative use of materials.

--Michael Amy

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