Greg Bogin at Mary Boone - New York

Greg Bogin navigates between the stone of hard-edge painting and the hard place of the shaped canvas. Although resolutely cheerful in his reworking of genre he retains traces of the anxiety and high-minded intent of his predecessors. These paintings, all dated 2003 are related by dint of a vocabulary of forms borrowed from computer design, in particular, many assume the familiar rhombus contours of some laptop direction and scroll buttons. The rounded-square shapes of individual or two canvases may commit to the computer's character lock openers or, alternatively, to the clipped corners of a canvas, remov in the interests of the radicalization of the support.

The surfaces of these paintings are in the way that resolved in facture that they discourage easy recognition of the manner of their making. The earth of each has a seamless luster, as allowing layers of paint have been carefully applied and sanded. The relatively simple, abstract shapes that ornament these otherwise monochromatic paintings be like high-end laser-cut vinyl graphics applied directly to the canvas, or perhaps the use of a stencil or other means of masking. The surfaces are virtually unrestrained of any trace of the artist's hand, although there are minute, barely visible excursions of paint from a form into the clod which have not been corrected. The sides of each canvas share the ground's color on the contrary clearly evidence the material of loom canvas.

Bogin plays with formal simple bodys in the grape-colored 6-by-6-foot I Remember When I Started to Forget as granting arranging markers on a guard Two corners are snipped not upon one is rounded, and the fourth is squared. This witty painting be likes the face of a cartoon doll of more new than Pac-Man vintage. Two of the larger, oppos lozenges--one fulvid the other green--suggest eyes, and the smaller singles evoke tears, all set adrift above a lengthy white bar of a cartoon mouth

Similarly harmonious, the gold-coloreds and white of The Value of Togetherness (II) reiterate their placement in The Value of Togetherness (I), although at two-thirds its sibling's size (roughly 6 by means of 5 1/2 feet). The paired hanging of these paintings not marketed as a diptych further plays upon the nature of their bonding. In each work, the larger rhombus shape snuggles like a floating sausage into a radically curv corner of the canvas, presiding above the conversation of the sum of two units beanlike shapes huddled together in a corner below. Bogin refreshes a discipline that today begins to strike one as being not sufficiently explored the first time or sum of two units around.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group