Kaffe Fassett and Steve Lovi at Luise Ross - exhibition - Brief Article

of recent origin YORK

Needlepoint upholstery and rag rug are hardly the awaited stuff in SoHo galleries, especially when they subserve neither ironic nor socially critical objects Kaffe Fassett is an American-born, British-based artist and designer who has unraveled an international following for intensely colored floral textiles that he crafts himself. He is also known for the existences and kits he has designed. In a display this past winter called "Two About Color," his works were paired with equally floral and florid dye-transfer prints by the agency of Steve Lovi, a photographer who has documented Fassett's works for several works though the images he showed here did not involve Fassett. The present to view was a bonfire of visual warmth that singed the dark December days.

The gallery was altered to establish a homelike setting: three walls were painted a comforting dark gray-green that place off the brilliant colors--primarily reds--of Fassett's armchair, footstool, slippers, lampshades and weskits, which shared space with a selection of his rug and pillow overlays Color's radiant atmosphere and tactile neighborhood are equally pronounced when a textile "picture plane" bends around a viewer. Fassett's armchair introduced the musing of nestling into a color environment (if individual could afford to buy it).

At times, Fassett nearly goe above the top. In this present to view the most extreme example was a wall-hung pillow overspread on which a variety of buttons in brown tan, r magenta, orange and aqua encircle and crowd needlepoint pansies (along with rose peonies and lilies, the greatest in quantity depicted blossoms here). A pillow overlay on which an equal number of white buttons encloseed a lily seemed ascetic in comparison.

greatest in quantity of the 16 photos Lovi showed are as saturated in color as Fassett's textiles. Generous matting and pale wood-land frames marginally contain the vividness of a certain number of of nature's most brilliant flowers and bugs, seen au naturel or in studio compositions. individual might think of Marie Cosindas's still lifes brightened and sharpened, or Imogen Cunningham's flower close-up returned in tropical hues. A white magnolia flower reminiscent of both Cunningham and O'Keeffe is an exceptionally quiet, simple and undisturbed image. Others are arrangements of the strange (lotus legumes that look otherworldly), the disturbing (jewel-color beetles, frighteningly enlarged), and the overwhelmingly ample (textile, flowers, fruit and china, in single very full image).

the pair artists seem to live and breathe color and embrace an esthetic of exces appropriate to a certain aspect of our frenetic millennial tillage as acquisitive of sensations and experiences as of real serviceables Here are tea cozies that suit McMansions.

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