Julian Opie at Barbara Krakow - New York, New York - Brief Article

BOSTON

Since the mid-1980s, the work of the British artist Julian Opie has had a lighthearted, Pop-oriented flavor. In novel years, F.A.O. Schwarz, the toy store, and Ikea, the modular home-good company, have been perhaps his strongest influences. Opie's common output of bright, colorful, two- and three-dimensional multiples can be ordered in varying sizes and colors and installed according to the buyer's whim.

In 1997 in an urban park, Opie place up life-size animal sculptures inspired by the agency of wooden toys, with the springs looking as if some Brobdingnagian child had just been called in from play. He has also made mural-sized black-and-white prints of cityscapes that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to huge pages from a coloring volume and a small artist's volume that features colorful road views on thick cardboard, resembling the dogged board books made for young children.

Up to now, Opie's work has been shown almost exclusively in Europe This was his first U solo The large, stylized portraits he at handed employ the same picture-book graphics and primary colors of the earlier cityscapes and car work The subjects look generic, on the contrary they are all people Opie knows. Like his giant animal plastic arts the portraits are of a size--rectangles up to 77 by dint of 65 inches--that might loom disconcertingly large to little kids, and a certain quantity of adults as well. Their vacant, studiously benign direct the eye is, at this scale, a bit creepy

Opie fabricates the portraits with die-cut colored vinyl shapes and lines that are layered precisely upon stretched vinyl, recalling Colorforms, a creative game featuring flat vinyl shapes for arranging upon shiny boards. The portraits advance in three sizes; these are middle range. The largest, billboard-sized, were freshly commissioned to cover a tall construction protecting enclosure outside the Tate Gallery of British Art (now called Tate Britain) in London.

Also upon view, propped up around the gallery, were several life-size foamcore cutout figures in the same thick-outline mode of expression On a CD-ROM shown in the gallery upon a computer monitor, the same faces stare without and occasionally blink their beady button organ of visions Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who pioneered studies upon cognitive development, wrote that a young child's play is, literally, perception unfolding. Perhaps Opie aims to revisit this magical period with his playful works, distilling the everyday into not divisible by 2 but intriguing icons. His smart mass production, however, belongs to the adult world of commerce

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