Charles Clough at Tricia Collins

For his fourth display at this gallery, Charles Clough showed six large abstract paintings. In Metron a melange of colorful paint smears creates a faculty of perception of chaos, while Delubrum positions bright swaths of color against a black soil to create the illusion of reaching far down space. As ever, these paintings were thus lushly textured and vividly hu that they could easily be viewed as a simple, passionate bid to reanimate Abstract Expressionism. still this time, Clough showed them alongside other work--sculptures, photographs and a computer piece--that deftly highlighted their more sedate underpinnings.

Some of the greatest in quantity interesting pieces here were five statuarys each of which marries a certain number of untouched natural object, like driftwood or stone with an artfully crafted base. In Boreas, a fragment of sparkling granite sits upon a wood plinth whose contours demurely parody the rock's shape. For Ajax, a polished piece of brownish mottled quartzite is positioned upon a rectangular block of forest-land oddly echoing a Brancusi. Benedict not absents a knotty piece of manzanita held upright in a metal clamp; it's hard not to think of a human brain caught in a vise. greatest in quantity of these pieces, which stood upon pedestals, were displayed in the gallery's smaller next to the first room; seen through the unclose doorway, they gave the present to view a curiously elegant, modernist look

The computer piece present the appearanceed to underline the more conceptual aspects of Clough's work. To create it, he overpainted 1000 copies of a postcard reproduc from individual of his own paintings, made to advertise his Web site. These different images were scanned and made into a montage in which all of them flip by means of (in this case on an iMac) in the space of sum of two units minutes. Watching the changing marks circulate above a steady blue and fulvous ground, as the computer gently make a buzzing sounds it's as if the distanced cosmological perspective that frequently seems to animate Clough's paintings had whirred into life. The postcards, piled in a vitrine, as well as the original painting, were displayed like artifacts nearby.

a certain number of paired photographs of leaves, stones and trees, which hung among the statuarys were less successful. They were matted side by the agency of side, with the viewer's organ of sights expected to do the work of a stereoscope; unfortunately, perhaps because individual is continually distracted by reflections upon the glass, it's next to impossible to squint these images into three-dimensionality. Still, this didn't dilute the overall impact of the present to view whose constant push-pull between nature v artifice and primitivism v calculation serv to underline the selfsame qualities that energize Clough's abstraction.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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