Stephen Wolfe at Luhring Augustine - New York - art exhibition

There's a gee-whiz factor with trompe l'oeil, of course, on the contrary the shock of exactitude to literal scale in representational painting and plastic art can quickly give way to skepticism and plane boredom unless it is leavened by dint of a sense of metaphysical urgency: that what is for a like reason tangibly there implicates some grander design than the artist's virtuosity. Stephen Wolfe's painted plastic arts of books and record albums summon forth an era among a particular subculture that of a grad learner in the humanities in the 1960 and '70 They are almost insanely thorough and persuasive illusions of the original volumes mostly paperbacks (and, in a not many cases, the commercial cardboard liquor cartons the volumes have been stored and carried around in), on the other hand they really "represent" a sentimental education more than a station of objects. The books have shaped Wolfe's cultural watch and suggest an attitude of ironic introspection married to a certain esthetic rigor. The plastic arts convey a love of the culturally mediated "double" that exists as a mirror of consciousness.

The authors upon hand can all be mapped in Wolfe's sensibility: Beckett's comic existentialism provides a counterweight to Sartre's more devoutly ironic philosophical stance. There's Nabokov's Pale Fire and Speak Memory, and all seven turns of the Moncrieff translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And more: Gertrude Stein upon Picasso, MOMA's Machine Art, plus monographs upon Magritte, Duchamp, Mondrian, Warhol (but of course) and Nauman. Each work is meticulously re-created as an object/painting upon shaped wood. Wolfe isn't a technical purist; he is not timid about exploiting printing techniques along with painting. His discreet works, in their splendid, iconic isolation upon a white wall, feel imbued with tendernes the outcomes of a monkish devotion.

In her essay, The Aesthetics of Silence, before she declares "in the late era, one of the greatest in quantity active metaphors for the spiritual throw out is 'art,'" Susan Sontag defines the "project" of spirituality as " plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence." without doubt praise is one path to of that kind resolutions, and Wolfe's work certainly exists as homage, a form of praise.

In his fine catalogue essay, Edmund White writes that Wolfe's labor and material strategies invested in his facts are methods of "sacralizing them as fetishes and thus separating them from the myriad competing artifacts of the period." This unmutilateds right, but Wolfe is performing a transcendent step of patient noticing and sway that leaves even the titled object-as-subject behind. His refabrication of Speak Memory is depicted falling not upon its nail, its sanded and painted overspread peeling further down the wall than the work The cover flutters a bit if a viewer hurries past. The piece is individual of many showstoppers, but consider the expos nail which is not a nail at all, rather a concoction of oil, modeling paste and balsa timber-land Wolfe's "doubled" objects praise not single their subjects but also the art that made them.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group