Simon Frost at Peter Blum - Brief Article

of recent origin YORK

A of recent origin York resident since the late 1980 British artist Simon hoar-frost works almost exclusively in the domain of drawing, laboring painstakingly and meticulously for month at a time upon individual works. For his first one-person exhibition in his adopted city, white-frost covered the gallery walls with 19 drawings, a certain quantity of deeply colored, most gossamer-light. They date from the last eight years--nearly his entire output from that period. The tiniest is barely 4 1/2 inches high, the largest nearly 10 times taller. Quiet on the other hand arresting, programmatic yet eccentric, Frost's oeuvre embraces an astonishing formal and expressive range, a feat all the more impressive for the fact that the reiteration of a single motif supervises the progress of each drawing.

pay backed on paper and vellum in graphite, gouache, watercolor and ink, Frost's intricate patterns move woven textiles, translucent draperies, swirling cosmic landscapes, snowflake accumulations and spreading foliage. The drawings are the harvest of a fundamentally systematic approach, single that engages Frost in rhythmically repeating straight and curving lines, sometimes superimposing them above lightly drawn grids. But slowly and with delight, the viewer collisions irregularities and idiosyncratic events--a compact buildup of marks beside a les concentrated section, areas of radiant, interior light nearest to a quieter passage of relative darkness--that one as well as the other enhance and undermine the combination of parts to form a whole Untitled #13 (1996) is a wonderfully manifold arrangement of delicate silverpoint marks that call forth the movement of butterfly wings or a cascade of tangled hair. Based upon a graceful gesture that is repeated across and down the sheet, the drawing required a filled year to complete. What begins as a whisper with a feathery touch at the top ripples [i]or[/i] part of to the other the composition and concludes in a crescendo of larger, more distinct marks at the bottom.

In an inspired and effective pairing, nearly three dozen terra-cotta Bura statuarys were installed on platforms from one extremity to the other of the gallery. The anthropomorphic and phallic shapes and linear surface ornamentation of the 1,000-year-old West African funerary utensils complemented Frost's elegantly obsessive graphic works.

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