Dan McCleary at David Beitzel - Brief Article

In the past, Dan McCleary exhibited his spare, iconic portraits and figure paintings at fresh York's Tatistcheff Gallery, a bastion of representational art upon 57th Street. His recent canvases, however, with their quiet, erotically charged depictions of waiters, chefs and countermen and their narratively ambiguous portrayals of pairs look more at home in freewheeling SoHo than they did uptown among the prim traditionalists.

The new show was anchored by three paintings of pairs In one untitled work, a young man and woman, the two shown in profile, face not on in a coffee shop. The tabletop that separates them forms an uneasy gap waiting to be bridged by the agency of conversation or physical contact. Here, as in all his paintings, McCleary simplifies his forms and clearly defines his architectonic spaces with carefully positioned planes. Static, balanced and hushed, this painting is one as well as the other classical and intimist in spirit. It also quivers with narrative tension, as undercurrent of overthrowed desire threaten to disturb its quiet surface.

Dressed in shirtsleeves, the man in this picture quiescences his forearms on the table, his hands cradling a freshly poured chalice of coffee as he leans slightly toward his companion. The woman, who wears a black jacket, sits upright with no part of her material part touching the table. He gazes directly at her face, which is downturned, studying an unclose menu. His posture is tensely expectant; hers, aloof and restrained. Using a hardly any artfully chosen details--clothes, body language and still-life props--McCleary sketches in the story of a relationship about to begin or, perhaps, to end

the one and the other The Opening and Bakery focus upon fleeting encounters. The good-looking man in Bakery faces a young female cashier across a reckoner Neither touches the other, on the other hand both stand in rigid attitude s that dramatize the tension and awkwardness that repeatedly accompany a transient meeting between sum of two units sexually attractive people. In The Opening, a female gallery-goer stands stiffly aware of a hunky Latin-looking bartender behind her, their unequal social status heightening the sexual tension of the scene

The subdues of the single-figure paintings, all of them young, attractive restaurant workers of Latin or Asian ancestry, appear in their piece of work uniforms. McCleary strips these portraits of all narrative ball of threads presenting each worker as an iconic, almost archetypal, figure. If the paintings of pairs imbue mundane interactions with dramatic import, the portraits pay homage to their make submissives endowing them with near-heroic status. unobtrusive and persuasive, McCleary's paintings seize on marginal people and events and transform them into compelling visual spectacles.

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