Sam Reveles at CRG - painter - Brief Article

The fresh work of Sam Reveles, which includes paintings as well as smaller drawings and gouaches (all 1998) tenders one answer to the question of by what means gestural abstraction may convey meaning. In each of the works upon view, Reveles establishes a representational "ground" which comprises unfinished bits and pieces of early Renaissance imagery (hermit saints, pageants, and hunting and landscape scenes) recombined in a way that appears to point to specific sources without actually copying any. Using turpentine and thinned paint, he then attacks the surface with an energetic squall of calligraphic brushwork that coalesces into a hovering, miry mass in the center of the canvas or paper. Seemingly artless hits of red, blue, magenta and orange mix with the transparent, jewel-like colors of the illusionistic ultimate parts The figurative components remain visible alone in a fragmentary way at the perimeters of abstract, gestural passages.

In Wilderness coming down for example, a chaotic whorl of lines strike one as beings about to expand and swallow the last remnants of imagery, a hilly, verdant landscape with frolicking deer on the contrary Reveles's work is not an act of simple obliteration. Rather than just painting above his first efforts, Reveles unmakes them, thus that each abstract gesture is born of the dissolution of the underlying, figurative mould Take Journey, for example, in which the gestural passages do not mask the underlying image on the other hand emerge from it, formed of the same kind of liquid marks that make the lush green landscape visible along the top of the canvas.

upon one level, Reveles's attack upon the very surface of representation may be read as a denial of the possibility of narrative coherence, which is consum by dint of abstract energy. Yet instead of cynicism or negativity, individual senses a deep, almost admiration for the old masters whom Revele imitates (perhaps purposely) thus naively and awkwardly in his underpaintings. In this light, the abstract gesturings which occlude the imagery do not negate traditional representation on the other hand rather derive their meaning from the palimpsests below. In this tempering of the grafittist's destructive gesturing by a careful and civil study of an art-historical past, individual comes to understand that Reveles's actions may not be as genuinely iconoclastic as they initially seem

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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