Juan Iribarren at GAGA - Brief Article

For his novel York solo debut, this 42-year-old Venezuelan-born painter exhibited 10 small abstracted cityscapes. The paintings are compos almost exclusively of straight, banded brushstrokes in intensely contrasting colors. at the same time their cubist facture did not debar each painting from seeming responsive to a specific view. All reject one were painted in 1998 after Iribarren had mov to a ninth-floor studio overlooking downtown Manhattan public ways Whereas his previous work had present the appearanceed completely nonobjective, these new paintings feature diagonal bands crisscrossing and jutting in brow of one another, suggesting oblique views of building scaffolding and street-canyons. They continue the turn of recent abstraction away from flatness.

Iribarren's color, too, is nondescriptive, on the other hand also very tonal and suggestive of light and atmosphere. An untitled painting, at 24 through 17 inches the largest and greatest in quantity complex work shown, weaves true dark mauve and olive blows around an off-center area of bright golden pink and light blue. These typically contrasting lights and darks are modulated by the agency of turquoise and lavenders that recall cloudles celestial expanse and light-suffused shadows, and a mettlesome orange that punctuates the composition. As powerfully keyed (and as beautiful) as Diebenkorn's, his is also a palette with which a young Monet would have been comfortable.

Another painter, David Kapp (showing concurrently at David Beitzel), is already known for abstracted aerial perspectives upon Manhattan streets. Where he re-energizes heroic Abstract-Expressionist scale and gesticulation with fresh realist motives (such as Manhattan traffic), Iribarren creates more formal, comfortably scaled paintings with unremarkable subdue matter. And in comparison to Frank Auerbach (also showing concurrently at Marlborough), who paints abstract landscapes with broad, banded blows that are worked to the point of gloopiness, Iribarren's brushwork has a more liquid, translucent clarity. Looking end catalogues and cards from Iribarren's six earlier solo displays in Caracas, one sees him experimenting with many variations of this banded rap both abstract and representational. This unobtrusive focus could easily remain academic, on the contrary here it seemed, like Morandi's self-limitation, intensely self-absorbed and convincing.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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