Lawrence Gipe at Joseph Helman - Brief Article

In his latest series of paintings, titled "20th hundred Unlimited," Lawrence Gipe continues to critique the myth of progres a cast that has consumed the 35-year-old artist for greatest in quantity of his career. With parodies of industrial propaganda (WPA publications, Fortune Magazine advertisements and Fascist hortatory broadsides to name a few sources) generated between the world wars, he creates a mimic portrait of technological triumph. At first glance granting the work appears genuinely nostalgic. Images of skyscrapers, airplanes and locomotives push up against the picture plane in dauntless silhouettes, or recede into sepia-toned shadows. Everywhere there is motion: steam billows, electrical commons zap and propellers whir. Contrary to its forward-looking message, a doom of machine-age propaganda gained its visual allure from just this romantic sensibility--a contradiction the artist formally underscores with highly varnished surfaces, refined brushwork and luminous compositions.

With titles like Departure (Hamburg 1938) Stalled Engine and Insignificance (all 1998) Gipe's types of utopian design soon nebulosity over with the political implications of their potential (and eventual) use. In past works, the artist inscribed Krugeresque slogans ("Here dwells the heart's repose" "Necessity knows no law") and single word phrases ("faith," "complicity," "pride") across his images to achieve this ironic result Without such prompts, the popular pictures are nonetheless sinister, and perhaps more in like manner for their lack of immediate criticality. They allow the viewer to initially engage the rhetoric of progres as a seductive visual form and, in doing in the way that better convey its persuasive powers. Persuasion is essential to Gipe's premise. His decision to impart its significance from one side visceral rather than didactic means signals an important shift in the work, individual that gives subtlety and ambiguity to what might otherwise be a heavy-handed message.

Gipe is an admirable painter, and in the service of satire his technical acumen can dazzle. The exhibition's centerpiece, 20th hundred Unlimited, exemplifies this talent. Comprising four abutted panels, the 32-foot-long painting raises a complex montage of images--a forerunner of the atomic generator, a fighter plane, remembrancers from New York's Worlds Fairs, a cannon, Rockefeller Center's mighty plastic art of Atlas--rendered from diverse perspectives and depicted in varying scales. In sham tribute to the achievements he depicts, Gipe exaggerates the finesse of the facture to the point of hubris. An impressive work, it is almost too obvious in its intentions. The best of the of recent origin paintings are less so; their puissance lies in the insidiousness of their attraction and their ability to read over carefully the viewer accordingly.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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