Irving Petlin at Jan Krugier

In Irving Petlin's novel images of Paris, home and studio are sites of memory and belonging, and the city becomes a template from one side which he imagines his place in the world. Paris (Desert) a charcoal-and-pencil drawing of the Parisian skyline as seen from one side the window of the artist's Latin Quarter studio, depicts the city's covers curiously homogenized and regular, its distinctive memorials barely indicated through the almost gridlike composition. This same view of Paris, now framed by dint of the open studio window, forms the large pastel-and-charcoal-on-canvas images titled Papon (Rouge) and Papon (Noir), the central works of the exhibit A plethora of "objects" appears upon the windowsill underneath: a simple studio still life of paint-brushes, destitute of contents cans and loaves of bread which morph strangely into landscapes and figures--people getting into a boat to plant out on a journey, for example, in Papon (Noir). The duality of these images--a duality which put in mind ofs the operation of the poetic sign in language, the both-things-at-one-timeness of a poetic symbol--obtains upon the level of meaning, as well: this is an exploration of one's place in the world and at the same time a journey, a searching self-examination and an embrace of the city outside.

Continuing this theme of the voyage in a series of smaller pastels upon canvas titled Ulysses, Petlin now call forths a poetic mood without any obvious transmutation of the motif. Depicting the lengthy alley that leads from the road to the buildings in which his apartment and studio are housed, the image allude tos at once an interiority and a journey. The title consigns to the Homeric hero who travels the world in search of his homeland (the Jew's similar plight is a recurring theme in Petlin's work); it consigns too, to the more prosaic fact that James Joyce lived at this address at single time. Petlin allows his pencil to pick without details in Ulysses (White), while pastel the couple defines and obliterates the image, providing a veiled and transparent color as well as opaque "stains" upon the surface of the canvas.

The neighborhood in the studio still lifes of the upside-down head of Maurice Papon, the French civil servant who was tried last year for his character in the wartime deportation of hebrews in France, suggests that Petlin's faculty of perception of memory and the past not at any time becomes simply nostalgic. As is fitting for an exhibition dedicated to Meyer Schapiro, a critic who insisted that the social realm infiltrates and determines plane the most self-referential works of art, Papon's strange, decapitated face indicates Petlin's refusal of an expressionistic hermeticism. In these images, rather, the past is always haunted through the present, just as abundant as the present is haunted by dint of the past.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group