Carmengloria Morales at Lennon, Weinberg - Brief Article

A discreet display of little papers in a corner of the gallery's first play greeted the viewer upon entrance. Each sheet of paper, part of the "diary" of Carmengloria Morales, was enclosureed in half and pinned to a board, like lay open butterfly wings. The right half was untouched, the left daubed with marks of shining metallic paint. They resembl in schematic form, Morales's signature abstract diptychs, which consist of a painted panel and a blank single Registering both the colors pick outed for the paintings and the succession of application, the "diary" tenders a key to the works and indicates the artist's commitment to proces and materials as the essential satisfied of her art.

While this was sole her second solo venture in fresh York--Morales lives in Italy, where she has exhibited since the 1960s--her diptychs and tondos have been shown in a number of clump exhibitions here since the `80 This, however, was the greatest in quantity complete and satisfying presentation of her work to date. It included shifts of scale from the intimate Diptych NY 98-10-2 (each panel 39 1/2 by the agency of 19 3/4 inches) to the monumental Diptych NY 95/98-3-2 and B & J India (each panel 103 by the agency of 71 inches). The show encompassed paintings upon paper and canvas in three distinctive formats: the diptych, the tondo and (a more novel addition to her repertory) the arch. What these three forms share is an origin in antiquity and in religious art; Morales entirely avoids the rectangle, a format that she perceive s became dominant with the secularization and the commodification of painting in the 17th century

More worldly provenances are indicateed by Morales's gilded, glamorous palette of burnt oranges, rose gold alloy of coppers violets, cool aluminums and cooled blacks--colors which strike against individual another in an almost audibly percussive way. Her brushwork is as forceful as at any time but it has grown tighter and more abrupt, the hits placed at right angles to each other or tightly overlaid, with ridges of paint that mark the width of the brush and web the surface. These densely layered paintings are also layered in reference; for example, the "Entierro" series--studies for a large commission in Italy--is an homage to El Greco's Burial of enumerate Orgaz. In Morales's hands abstract painting, refreshed through her unassailable confidence in it, becomes supremely exultantly itself.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group