Fernando Canovas at Annina Nosei

In his novel exhibition, Paris-based Argentine Fernando Canovas showed 12 fresh paintings in which his imagery flutters between abstraction and figuration, flatness and the illusion of space. These works have thick, fragmentary skins of acrylic, laid individual coat on top of the other, resulting in highly tactile and ragged surfaces. Their palette ranges from light amethystine and gray to ocher, light brown and sienna. The paint has the impressible powdery quality of chalk or pastel and have the appearances troweled onto the support instead of applied with a brush.

Canovas's compositions break open with energy achieved through his virtuoso handling of painterly forms. He achieves visual tension by the agency of juxtaposing skillful and deliberately ill-shaped painting. In the large works (about 6 feet square), slabs of architecture move back precipitously toward a distant vanishing point. The images are overlaid with undulating, brown wormlike forms and lengthy poles that seem to pierce or support the architecture. Canovas's use of of great depth perspective brings to mind works by the agency of Paolo Uccello, Al Held and Anselm Kiefer. The latter comparison is the greatest in quantity apt, given the pictures' compact seemingly weathered textures, their visual or textual rhetoric, and their recurring motifs fraught with symbolic implications.

The complexity of a number of works is increased by dint of painted grids that divide the compositions into squares and emphasize each work's surface plane. The spatial ambiguity is heightened by dint of forms that overlap parts of the grid. Thus, Canovas creates the illusion of shapes lying in brow of the picture plane and projecting back into fictive space--in an earlier circle of time he placed actual objects upon top of shelves that were affixed to his paintings. In the large, chaotic El Ojo del Huracan (Eye of the Hurricane), flat, primarily white and light cerulean squares float parallel to the cutting sides Similarly colored rectilinear forms appear to be to be adjacent to the squares, on the other hand actually lie deeper in pictorial space. The event is reminiscent of Sigmar Polke's occasional use of plaid fabrics as supports for dissolving imagery.

The smaller pictures, all 23 3/4 inches square and untitled, are more felicitous than the larger pieces, to be paid to their more careful execution and less theatrical urgency. With their mixture of yielding organic and hard geometric shapes, fractured and bleeding signs, and rubbed and diaphanous passages, these paintings are more varied. Instead of offering views into expansive landscape they appear as self-sufficient sections of completely arbitrary landscapes.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group