Tom Wolf and Raquel Rabinovich at Trans Hudson - Brief Article

The nine pieces in Tom Wolf's present to view "Boys and Television," are laser prints mountained or images painted on the undersides of pieces of Plexiglas. The invert surface of the Plexiglas (that is, the forehead of each work) is treated with an alchemy of colored acrylic glazes, which proceeds in a hazy depth, as if single were looking at something caught in a glacier. The images are based upon photographs Wolf took of his family, sometimes intimate views of his children, that now appear to be encased in plastic. This elaborate combination of parts to form a whole of suggested preservation creates an almost devotional or talismanic quality, especially when Wolf uses disks of colored glazes to pinpoint details (for example, the mother's hands in Shoe Tying, individual supporting her child, the other holding his laces), and in the pieces where a larger-than-life image of a male child has been superimposed so that it strike one as beings to float over a sea- or landscape.

The coated surfaces are different in each work, now plain and iridescent, now matte and almost grainy, and they introduce a craftiness that the images themselves oftentimes lack, overly precious as they can be. Wolf is not a master draftsman. The painted figures, which are traced from projections, can be awkward, saved alone by the exquisite effects of the glazes that transform them into enigmatic icons.

Eight of recent origin drawings by the Argentinean artist Raquel Rabinovich were also upon display in a show called "Enfold Darkness." Rabinovich revisits the themes that absorbed her 35 years ago, when she showed a series of paintings called "The Dark Is Light Enough" in Buenos Aires. Using pastel, charcoal and manganese pulverized substance on 30-by-40-inch rectangles of thick paper, Rabinovich builds up fields of markings that become with equal reason concentrated that on first glance the drawing may gaze impenetrable.

The result is similar to when one's organ of sights are adjusting to the dark: what at first appears to be a solid blackness approachs to be made up of an infinity of details. The longer individual looks, the more emerges from that darkness, including the stenciled alphabetic characters of Rabinovich's cryptic messages. Indeed, individual has to crouch down and gaze up at the drawings at an angle in order to make on the outside the letters at all. "If single can see in the dark," single message reads, "one can diocese everything." Her work recalls that of her friend, the blind writer Jorge Luis Borges, who turn rounded the punishment of darkness into a gift of vision.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group