David Klamen at Richard Gray - Brief Article

sum of two units or three years ago, Chicago-based painter David Klamen was puzzling viewers with low-contrast, oil-on-linen interiors featuring strange, egg-or pitcher-shaped facts and unidentifiable metallic-looking appurtenances. Architectural backgrounds were for a like reason dark you almost had to have night-vision roll the eyess to see them.

In his novel show at Richard Gray's fresh York space, one of the sum of two units kinds of paintings on view featured ink-and-watercolor images that are similarly hard to make on the outside These works are based upon those bar codes found today upon everything from a paperback of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (render here in Op-art striations of black ink against golden watercolor) to a box of Sudafed tablets (painted black upon pumpkiny orange). Other works are cryptic art-historical images encod within the black-and-color-striped bar format. Chief among these was Learning Knowing (Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas), a 1998 vertical variation upon a relatively little-known bit of Baroque. Another work is a send-up of de Kooning's Women in which images are doubly frenzied as the Action painting source works itself on the outside within a horizontal prison of shifting bars.

The literature upon this show made a great deal of the fact that Klamen is now, as at any time thoroughly involved with the epistemology and semiotics of art--perhaps, single might quibble, to the exclusion of art itself. on the contrary Klamen saved the day with the other emblem of work featured in this exhibition: clusters of small and smaller watercolor-and-ink paintings, more [i]or[/i] less no bigger than postage stamps. They gaze like tiny landscapes (trees, water, horizons) on the other hand upon inspection, reveal themselves as rectangles washed with bluish color and articulated with a small amount of black ink. clumped together, they form loose geometric patterns; they also refer to an explosion in a late-19th-century French salon.

Critics and Klamen himself beautiful much disown the overtly lyrical, evanescently romantic nature of the works. He insists that his work is about "the deliberate disclosure of images." This is real true, of course, of the dark paintings and of the Op-art-type bar-code works. In the mini-landscapes, allowing Klamen has bitten off more of the sublime than he can chew up as theory. It is the viewer's ecstasy that it's so.

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