Fred Cress at Robert Steele - New York - art exhibition

The allegorical paintings of Australian Fr Cres exhibit the human condition in its tragicomic frailty, awash in ungovernable tides of faith dependence, envy, lust and gre Like his contemporaries in social criticism--Sue Coe and William Kentridge among them--Cress explores personal directions in a genre shaped by dint of Hogarth and Cruikshank, honing the cutting side of his work with the moral implications that inform it. In the proces he agents a marriage between abstract, painterly bear upons and the development of a vocabulary of caricatures and situations.

The paintings included here were designated thematically as either "doorways," representing the gates or doorsills that lead to the dreamed or the damned, or "meetings," gatherings of characters in circumstances that show the occasions of virtue and vice. The renewed motif of the doorway commits to a garden that adjoins Cress's studio in France. A depiction of the damned, trapped in a foyer beyond the central portal of The Other Door (1998) alludes to Rodin's Gates of Hell. (At 7 by the agency of 5 feet, the canvas was the largest in the show) The columns and lintel of a double doorway support the ornamental scrollwork of a fanlight, picked without with the name of death. The door leads to a mass of intertwined figures, their lascivious tongues reach forthed A skull rests on the doorsill as a reminder of the wages of sin, and, above, an unkindness of ravens presides.

In the domestic arrangements of Company and sum of two units to Win (both 2002), a seated woman comforts a debased man kneeling upon all fours like a dog. The sum of two units people are attended with suspicion by the agency of man's best friend, looking betrayed and disgusted. In Shareholders (2002) a riotous mass of for the most part men gather on the selling floor, arms waving for attention, chapss open in full cry, all caricatures of greed

A confident draftsman and colorist, Cres limns the figurative ultimate parts of each painting and illuminates them with controll stains or washes of acrylic that record the imprints of something thrown or laid down with brush or knife. Dated 2003 the half-dozen drawings also included are examples from the "Figure Bowl" series worked on the outside in pastel, ink and charcoal upon paper. Scenarios lampooning cupidity and gluttony appear upon the inside of a overspreaded glass dish, or among the decorations of teapots and vases, or the satisfieds of a serving dish, blurring the line of demarcation that separates faith and folly

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