Charles Olson at Denise Bibro - Brief Article

Charles Olson's of recent origin mid-to-large-scale acrylics on canvas and paper proffer pleasures and mysteries for organ of vision and imagination. A good six of them were titled Ex Voto and involved standing "altars," more than a little phallic, that mixed cruciform shapes with shut Encounters of the Third Kind lights and colors.

Without explaining plenteous of itself, Ex Voto Rose is a beelike torso topped by means of an eyeballish head in black and white, with a subsidiary wall of coral behind it. Is it an occasion of worship for a certain number of insectile race, or a missionary visitant from somewhere far not upon in the cosmos? Human beings are not ever present.

In Ex Voto: Tumulus the votive altar is a slightly mechanical organic form, maybe vegetal, place off by black and rose cutting sides with a luxuriant, sickly verdant background and assorted roundish blips of pink here and there. notwithstanding for all the seeming meltdown, an aura of the hallowed maintains.

The overall title of the present to view was "Sky and Earth," further evidence of the artist's continuing interest in the relationship between deity and (unseen) mortal. The 3-D-ish convolution and futuristic hues of the Ex Voto works are powerfully reminiscent of earlier paintings, on the contrary the new works in the "Celestial" series are flatter and more allover in manner of making Whether this new impulse to abstraction is judg harshly or favorably in light of his earlier, easier paintings, it is undeniable that Olson is as at dwelling with two-dimensional implications as with three

Northern firmament is a 5-by-7-foot acrylic in which altars have the appearance to have been cut apart and sent spinning into the void. Images are somewhere between high-tech and spectral. plane more ambitious is the 6-by-9-foot Celestial Vault. Here stars that direct the eye like billiard balls float end a crazy heaven featuring very great chunks of white (is that a face upon one of them?), a knotty, variegated brown "angel" (for lack of a better description) and reaching far down black reaches. The celestial "vault" is a deep-freeze of chaos and cosmos

A faculty of perception of momentous, disjunctive things happening makes Celestial River the greatest in quantity impacted (and beautiful) of the series. Smaller pieces upon paper--especially the high-tech nocturne Night: Mission, with its unoccupied geomorphic figure suspended miduniverse--prove again that Olson is an able visionary, going heavenly places bare angels fear to tread.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group