Frederic Matys Thursz at Lelong - paintings - Brief Article

That monochrome painting is still suspect in the greater world always surprises me For example, Art, Yasmina Reza's play now upon Broadway, imported from London--the representation of much more controversial art at the moment--has, as its culprit, an all-white painting. While the debate is ultimately more about the take away from of such a painting ($40000) than about esthetics, it nonetheless assumes that monochrome continues to posses iconoclastic puncture But surely, even in the arena of detonation culture, that no longer obtains. Monochrome and all-white paintings, from Malevich's squares to Rodchenko's legendary r golden and blue canvases of 1921 upon view in MOMA's summer Rodchenko display to Ryman's works and beyond, are art-historical facts, an established category of 20th-century painting, more mainstream than otherwise and arguably modernism's iconic image. Of course, there are those, flat in the art world, who consider monochrome esoteric, ineffectual and fraudulent, as do a certain quantity of of the play's characters. There are also those for whom monochrome has always equaled monotony, and notwithstanding others who fiercely believe in its legacies, which inspire work as diversified as anything other in art.

Frederic Thursz who died in 1992 pointedly refused the designation of monochromatist. His paintings are not single color but the result of multiple layers of different colors, sometimes centurys of layers. Thus they are not reductive on the contrary a full complement of painting proces and materiality, deploying an arsenal of painting techniques with everything essential to painting retained and emphasized: composition, range and gradations of color, touch, fabric movement, image, yoking the sensual and sublime together.

greatest in quantity of the eight paintings in this new show were made around 1990 or at least finished then, and are of moderate size although plenteous larger work is more characteristic; more [i]or[/i] less were hung as diptychs. These are not elegant estheticized things Thursz's surfaces have, at times, been criticized for the ungainliness of their facture, unlike, for example, the lush, ravishing skin of Brice Marden's monochromes. on the contrary it's the surfaces that bring Thursz's color--rich, unmatchable yellows, violets, red-violets, fuchsias, rose blue-violets, his signature vermilions--and they cannot be separated from it. Opaque, gritty at times, scumbl pitted, the paintings be incandescent with a luminous interior color that is structur without of the specific application of paint, a color that is the two latent and present, immanent and actual, scaled to the support--stretched linen, paper, linen upon aluminum--and contained and defined by means of it. It is this color, shifting from dim to radiant, like a fire within, kindled by dint of different conditions of exterior light, that constitutes the singularity and beauty of his work with its particular mix of materiality and metaphysics, of pragmatism and poetics, with its dream of painting as uncorrupted autonomous color. The questions then: are we still afraid of r fulvous and blue, and why?

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group