Frank Lobdell at Hearst Art Gallery - Brief Article

The 45-year career of Frank Lobdell has been the bring under rule of three surveys in the past 12 years, on the other hand this one in the gallery at St Mary's society differed in emphasizing recent (i.e. post-1982) works through this venerable member of the San Francisco place of education of Abstract Expressionism. Noteworthy for their elaborate formal inventiveness as well as their hermetic indifference to many of the for the use of all descriptive categories of contemporary painting, these composite and challenging works gained in accessibility through being presented alongside a selection of paintings from the 1954-69 period which revealed their sources and aspirations.

Whereas the earlier paintings feature tangled, quasi-figurative compositions that strike one as being to have been wrenched on the outside from under muscular slatherings of dark and plump oil paint, the later are disarmingly light in touch and vein They feature a large and varied cast of convulsing spirals and elaborately filigreed pictograms inhabiting a chromatically effervescent potential space of manifold interaction and implication.

ofttimes these pictographic characters are repercussion of sounded by penumbral auras signaled by means of delicate shifts in color and surface treatment that enhance their connotative linkage of primordial inscription to bodily proces Certainly this linkage is the focal point of the earlier Abstract-Expressionist works, on the contrary in the newer ones it is part of a abundant more elaborate puzzle: the question of whether a focal point is at all necessary.

An easel-sized painting titled 419-94 is a particularly serviceable example of this kind of thinking (all of Lobdell's titles direct to completion dates). Set against its pantry field of mottled yellow-orange pigment are three clusters of crisp, densely painted hard-edged shapes that are choreographed in of the like kind as way as to elegantly (albeit playfully) spin, soar and seize through the picture space. Simultaneously they evidence a formalist's consideration of the determining character of the rectangular format while setting not upon other, more informal or schematic passages that taunt and bid defiance to that character. A tightly calibrated drama of differentiation, juxtaposition and interplay opens in terms both direct and delightfully crooked Lobdell's works offer a virtuoso demonstration of the medium's potential for mutability that argues against a deterministic consciousness of its material flatness. It is not difficult to diocese echoes of Kandinsky's late Compositions in Lobdelr newer works, and the comparison is doubly fitting when we consider the analogy that Kandinsky drew between nonobjective painting and musical composition. Lobdell's novel paintings embrace a visual and cognitive dissonance, offering painterly equivalents of the challenges of Schoenberg's 12-tone complexity while retaining a cheerful rhythmic buoyancy.

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