Jan Frank and Robert Stanley at Steven Vail - Brief Article

At first, glance, a exhibit of paintings by Jan Frank and Robert Stanley appears an unlikely coupling: heavily worked, jesuitical abstractions versus brassy, photo-realist undresseds It turns out, however, that these sum of two units artists share a certain fascination with the female body

Working directly from naked models, Frank creates sensuous, quasi-abstract evocations of the female material part through curving lines and fragmented marks. His paintings are filled of erasures, redrawn lines and hits partially covered with translucent white paint. For the careful on-looker they offer a whole world of pentimenti. In contrast to his previous paintings, which were done upon plywood or corrugated cardboard, Frank's new works are painted on finely woven linen primed with a gesso that is intended to change color above time. As the ground goe from subdu white to a warm gray above the next decade, this change, says the artist, will have an enormous issue on the look of the paintings. As the turf darkens, the effect of the successive layers of drawn lines and overlaid transparencies will become more pronounced. For all their sensuousness, these oblique evocations of the female material substance come across as emotionally removed: somewhat cold detached, voyeuristic even.

In Stanley's work, the theme of voyeurism is more evident. When he emerg in the early 1960 with works similar as his high-contrast, photo-based paintings of Beatles plots he was grouped with clap artists. In his later years, Stanley, who died in 1997 many times painted highly sensual, vividly colored female uncovereds A feminist reading of his later work, which sometimes walks a fine line between high-art traditions and commercial Playboy-style imagery, might consider these portraits of exposed young women as the voyeuristic fantasies of an aging male painter. Indeed, there is something shocking at first in the over-the-top sensuality of these passionately painted women individual suspects that Stanley knew in what manner objectionable these paintings might be to a certain quantity of viewers, and that the impressive painterly virtuosity he brought to them was partly meant to forestall of that kind criticism.

Despite the interesting, unexpect affinities between these sum of two units artists' works, the bravado of Stanley's paintings keeped to overpower Frank's smaller, more wily canvases. But the show was effective in affirming the continuing importance of--and varied approaches to--the unclothed in contemporary art.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group