Philip Taaffe: found abstraction: drawing on sources from Art Nouveau to Abstract Expressionism to Op art, Taaffe produces a lush brand of pattern-based painting that is equal parts historicist satire and formal homage - Brief Article

Philip Taaffe continues to make beautiful abstract paintings. His ambition has always been big: to build solid, architectonic wall decorations. That his more new works often include clearly legible imagery, as well as the more ambiguous forms of esoteric flora and fauna, should not distract us from seeing the paintings as a novel form of ground abstraction. Like many members of his generation (Peter Halley, Richmond Burton and Beatriz Milhazes among them), Taaffe uses appropriation, with varying steps of referentiality and nonreferentiality, to newly resonant extreme points As an impressive show in Paris revealed, Taaffe's shoot forward remains remarkably consistent, even as his arsenal has become notably more diversified.

Taaffe came upon the scene in the mid-`80s with to-scale renditions, at any time so lightly skewed, of signature works by the agency of Barnett Newman and Bridget Riley. His intentions at that time appeared both puckish and oddly and he also learned a doom from the classical academic practice of imitation. From Ab Ex he inherited heroic scale and allover movement; from Op art he learned in what way to make abstract images burst and sizzle, both graphically and by dint of means of color. There has always been a molten fiery-furnace quality to his work, and now, with a certain number of historical distance, it becomes clear that there is also a theatrical illusionism that is essentially different from the sequential buildup of his proces This remains labor-intensive in the utmost involving many layers of hand-printing, collage and overpainting. Now more than at any time Taaffe's exquisitely crafted abstractions, with their great baths of color and rich surfaces, transcend their facture to become of recent origin sites for revisionist thinking.

To find his imagery, the painter has lengthy mined several fields of abstract ornament, including Islamic architecture, Art Nouveau decoration and early botanical photography. Taaffe's novel form of abstract orientalism was the lusty suit in his exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac. Toccata (2001) was the show's coloristic knockout, with its lay open grille-work of top-to-bottom lozenges screening a vista of orange, violet and virid forms mixed with jostling gold-colored crescent shapes which may or may not recall the token of the Ottoman Empire. Damascus (2001) as we learn from the first-rate catalogue essay by Michel Bulteau (a French specialist in American Beat poetry) is an unabashed homage to the 8th-century Ummayad mahometan temple in that city, which the artist has visited. The close and thickly worked canvas can also be seen as an old-fashioned visual chronicle (like the Bayeux tapestry), a deliberate journey for the eye by dint of means of fatly undulant shivered paint strokes meandering through a muddied white field, embedded with forms that include tree silhouettes and repeating pink diaper shapes. Taaffe take an account ofs a tale through duplicating forms and subtly changing scales. The painted fact of a buried rank of stenciled trees near the top of the composition brings up the whole issue of excavation. We always strike one as being to be digging through the layers of Taaffe's paintings for of recent origin meanings, here evidenced by a novel looseness and painterliness.

Art Nouveau was explicitly addressed in sum of two units works, Frieze (1991-2001), with its white decorative motif seemingly lifted from a Guimard subway design, and Lunapark (2001) This last title, we learn from Bulteau, leaves to a Giacomo Balla painting of an amusement park, which Taaffe prizes as an early depiction of electrical illumination at night. In fact, Taaffe's double-height canvas is like more [i]or[/i] less stupendous Art Nouveau billboard. Its robust black and white arcing lines may well hark back to his early Riley relations but its faded, smudgy palimpsest-like pale ceruleans greens and yellows, and its additional images of pinwheels and floral forms all collaged in translucent Japanese Gampi paper, considerably mist any single reading.

Nature illustration is perhaps the greatest in quantity varied source of Taaffe's imagery, ranging from the rest arabesques of ferns and snakes that have coursed through a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the recent work to the more startling homegrown snapshot portraits of sum of two units roosters that used to live upon the artist's midtown Manhattan rooftop garden in Apocrypha (2000-01) With its composition of repeating discharges of the two cocks bathed in swaths of pink and fulvous this canvas looks very Warholian and significantly les worked than a certain quantity of of the other paintings upon view.

Hung downstairs in the gallery's basement, Apocrypha was a weird and lurid surprise: the painter momentarily dropping his guard and committing to uncomplicated imagery. on the other hand as we have learned above the last few years, this is alone one pole of Taaffe's varied approach: the other, more transformational, course could be seen across the compass in Terpsichore (2000-01), with its pattern of animal craniums and overlapping lace collars all pay backed in the most delicate shades of pale pink, golden and gold, like some Warholian society-portrait-cum-vanitas. Either way, explicit or ambiguous, these paintings continue to excite the greatest in quantity diverse responses. While many cogitation the works in the downstairs gallery should have been left without of the show, others--like myself--continue to diocese them as new keys to the unfolding Taaffean mysteries.