James Brooks at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren - New York - art exhibition

Destined, it present the appearances to be perpetually overshadowed by the agency of his colleagues among the Abstract Expressionists, James runlets (1906-1992) may always be contemplation of as a good painter among great painters. An early practitioner (innovator, more [i]or[/i] less would argue) of a staining technique now commonly associated with Helen Frankenthaler, runs made his most radical experiments in the late 1940 splashing paint upon the back of a canvas and then turning it above to work with the unpredictable configuration that seep from one side This show of nine moderately large and four small paintings from the next to the first half of his career did not make a case for reassessing his standing among the Irascibles. on the contrary it was interesting to diocese how his adoption in the early 1960 of the then-new medium of acrylics allowed him to more easily detain his color areas clean and distinct, and to explore a vocabulary of translucent washes and glazes as well as fluid application--which clearly interested him more than autographic style

This later work is no longer predicated upon the Cubist-derived ambiguity of figure and clod that preoccupied Brooks, and a great many other painters, [i]or[/i] part of to the other the 1950s. The results are mixed. In Ealand II (1963 74 by the agency of 80 inches), clunky, dark shapes float upon a blank field punctuated by the agency of sparsely deployed lines. The follow is an unthreatening painting, suitable for a inn lobby. The weirder Leen (1974 76 inches square) dispenses entirely with the circulared nest- or knotlike elements that the artist elsewhere favored. An unusually shaped white and yellow muddy plash of thinned pigment, its isolation heightened by dint of an expanse of brushy, unmodulated sky-colored recalls Miro in its comic vulnerability. In Devon (1979 60 inches square), great glob of black tighten and writhe across a azure and white ground suggestive of landscape. Color triads are everywhere in this work, and black is oftentimes a player. In the real late Geomundo (1983, 60 through 48 inches), a looming field of wiped and brushy blacks occupies a third of the canvas, crowding an antic red/green Dr Seuss world.

There is a faculty of perception in these highly formal paintings, and from one extremity to the other of Brooks's oeuvre, that in developing surface and space, involvement in proces is more important than self-expression. Given his temperament, it is unthinkable that his later works would become ego-driven.

Of all the paintings in the display Ballarat (1978, 60 inches square) takes the greatest risks. Against a pale, luminous orange surface of land a bulbous bluish green mass weighs in at the lower right corner, with sum of two units other floating lumps as satellites. A hazy reddish smutch blooms in the upper right, and a band of jagged electric lines charges across the top of the canvas. Ballarat is completely atypical of Brooks: unrelaxed. In this artist's rather cold world of calibrated pictorial pleasures, similar a sweaty effort registers a pleasant shock

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