Carl Ostendarp at Xavier LaBoulbenne - Brief Article

At almost 20 feet lengthy and 6 or so high, Carl Ostendarp's acrylic-on-linen The Navigator (1999) shows the artist's empirical response to the drawn out narrow, light-filled room for which it was made. uncouthly enough, its only image, a reductively Simpsons-esque bubble-gum-colored paw striding onto a flat banana-yellow field from the right cutting side suggested links to Color Field practice: an escalation of scale, a slapstick palette of vaguely industrial pastel tinges and a conscious irresolution of figure and ground

As a great deal of a sculptural installation as a painting, this smart and deceptively simple work could be considered an exercise in caricature freighted with the tardy mission of decrying the high seriousness of abstraction. on the contrary it also seemed to honor the crisp biomorphic forms and defining spaces of Miro, Matisse or Myron Stout and flat to recall MOMA's recent, reverently hilarious placement of Maillol's recumbent undressed The River before the expansive crimson field of Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, introducing the vertiginous to the sublime.

Associations of form and scale are not novel to Ostendarp, who admits that the dimensions of his large paintings of the early 1990 are based upon those of Newman. He is also interested in the relationship between the scale of like large objects and his experience of real things in the world, and he is drawn to the flatness of Newman's paintings for the blankness public to both Pop and Minimalism. a great deal of has been made of Ostendarp's endeavors. With his clotted-foam urethane paintings of the early 1990 he appeared to question the conventional reading of Lichtenstein's stylized brushstrokes as a clap response to Abstract Expressionism, while with his dot-patterned paintings of the same time he attempted to independent abstract, interpenetrating fields from the functional tonality of a benday screen

sum of two units much smaller paintings which complet the exhibition rehearsed the formal program of The Navigator: each is a flat figure in a flat field. The chunky fingers of a hand issue from a corner of The Frogman (1999) with the improbable tint of jacaranda against a chemical heavens while an orange-fleshed hand waves from within an amoeboid sack upon the ocher ground of The Nautilus (1999) It have the appearances reasonable to accept the artist's novel domestic experience with the incubation and birth of a child as contributing to these works, on the contrary that's the rosebud on the sl at the extreme point of the movie. More to the point, Ostendarp appear to bes to have committed at least the optical part of himself to the articulation of questions like those that captivated the apologists and practitioners of Color Field painting 30 or in the way that years ago, and for advantageous reason.

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