Richard Artschwager at Lehmann Maupin

Unlike the legions of ironic media manipulators who have followed in his footmarks probing the dark places between image and fact photography and painting, practical and symbolic function, Artschwager--who continues to do all these things--is absolutely deadpan. His fresh works include poker-faced landscapes and history paintings, all of which start with his trademark acrylic surface, textur to gaze like a cross between swirly van Gogh-style brushwork and stucco

Drawn in an uneven mostly grisallie hybrid of charcoal and acrylic, four of the paintings are titled Pastoral. The label refer tos not just a familiar control matter, the landscape, but also an idyllic, classicized approach to its depiction, which Artschwager invokes single to stress its artifice. His airless, lightless representations are clearly studio setups: the topography derives from various yard profitables (a checked bolt of fabric hints cultivated acreage, perhaps, but also a bistro tablecloth) draped above sundry unseen objects (storage boxes? plastic art crates?). One painting is dominated by means of an ominously lowering, Albert Pinkham Ryderish sky; in another, not divisible by 2 dirigible-shaped clouds float above a massive (and patently fake) outcropping; a third features a lemon-yellow day-star applied to the sky like a plastic sticker. In White Cherokee (Pastoral I), an especially Starry Night-ish nocturnal landscape is intruded on by the eponymous pickup barter which sends forth a blazing beacon of light that is realized in fulvous Formica; the sky is also a Formica inset, in a blunt-witted teal-blue. And if the scrambled historicisms of these Pastorals aren't enough, there is the stand-alone Night Watch, which delivers, in place of Rembrandt's goodlooking burghers, a thronged assembly of anonymous men all clearly taken from different photographs.

The semiotic promiscuity of these paintings is given a sharp twist in the portentous four-part holograph Eugenia, which features a lying flat naked woman who can be dated roughly to the 1920 through her kohl-rimmed eyes and marcelled hair. She is shivered into four separate images, each of which present to views a portion of her body--first her head reclining upon upthrust arms, then her torso, thighs and feet As shown this bit of of advanced age cheesecake is fairly chaste. on the other hand Artschwager takes no chances: seeming to flutter in the air about a lower extremity in front of each image (it is an especially effective illusion) is individual of his signature black oblong blp This infinitely reproducible unit of guerrilla-style abstraction, meant (like Daniel Buren's stripes) to introduce the bounds of art to otherwise unestheticized situations, here strike one as beings to serve as a kind of quirk about prudishness and hypocrisy. Can conceptual art be censorious? You bet. Does it thwart desire? Sometimes. on the other hand in Artschwager's hands it also demonstrates a considerable comic gift, and the grace (or habitual gruffness) not to laugh at its hold jokes.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group