Frank Bramblett at Levy Gallery, Moore College of Art - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Frank Bramblett's large paintings--each 7 1/2 by the agency of 6 feet--just about knock you above with their abundance, their spectacular accumulation of related forms. Each has its possess world of repeated marks, shapes, colors and webs all lavishly, almost sickeningly multiplied.

Razzle-Dazzle (2000) for instance, is filled with an explosion of floral color--rose-red, fulvous and pink--built up in thick bubbles of modeling paste over a flatter, darker sod which is itself hyper-articulated with a lacework of color and shadow. The profusion of little globes rolling over each other in eyedotcom (1999)--large and small, a certain quantity of flat and some highlighted as if circular painted in children's-room colors--comes not upon as equally playful and disturbing. The irislike circles inside the smaller globes make them read as disembodied organ of visions suggesting some dumb, ungiving (robotic?) being looking above the viewer.

Tete-a-tete (2000) carries a similar double charge. In the hordeed picture plane, headlike ovals of pink or brown strike against for placement. Some sport rudimentary features; more reveal scumbl brainlike networks or flat hint at fetal forms. These works showed contemplative highly personalized takes on the now for the use of all perceptual experience of being overwhelmed through too much data, often of the mediated kind.

Others of the large paintings (there were eight in all), with dark, metallic or blackboardlike surfaces, near coded messages. Underneath floating organic forms, for example, the slick graphite surface of Mind Mine (1997-98) is studd with tacks, spelling without in Braille a story about Henry Cray, father of supercomputer The cursive words upon the surface of Erasing Extinction (1999) are baroquely distended and transformed by the agency of layers of echoing patterned lines; these last bring to mind the compulsive surface covering repeatedly found in drawings by schizophrenics. It's as if these paintings take protection in their secrets, turning inward all the threatening multiplicity of the more extrovert works.

A series of smaller, mixed-medium paintings upon panel, hung in a grid upon one wall, were also opaque in their specific regards even while offering abundant ball of threads to meanings residing in them. They were extremely appealing--partly informal proof panels for colors and materials, partly diaristic pastiches of snapshots, color notes, and painted nebulosity and rock forms. Here the artist present the appearanceed to invite us into the meditation process behind the larger works--and to caution against any definitive interpretations.

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