NEW YORK: Mark Sheinkman at Thomas Healy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Mark Sheinkman's exhibition consisted of five medium-to-large abstract works complet in the week preceding the opening of the exhibit All are oil (occasionally with alkyd) upon canvas stretched around and between wood-land or cardboard cylinders.

Sheinkman, a young of recent origin York artist who has shown regularly above the past five years, first applies a slick coat of silver, aluminum, light gray or white paint above the entire length of his unstretched canvas, and above large parts of its verso as well. He adds widely spaced darker gray or black diagonal bands, and then drags a wet brush horizontally across the two sides of the canvas at regular intervals, pulling the dark bands onto the lighter soil and introducing sudden and dramatic changes in tone. Cezannesque passage, the squeegee exercises of Soulages and the gray pictures and "slippage" of Richter advance to mind. The way Sheinkman winds his canvas around the cylinders call forths scroll painting.

The best works in the display were the two monumental horizontal pieces and the single vertical individual 3.4.98 is a particularly powerful work, with individual thick cylinder placed dead center sum of two units narrower ones at either side and thinner colonnette which vary in width, in between. A metallic tint reinforces the sculptural quality of this relief-painting. The visually weighty cylinders, with oily bands of black paint rolling diagonally above and under them and optically breaking into sections in the process, make single think of rolls of paper upon great slippery printing presses. This composition has its fair share of machismo. Its regular arrangement and quasi-industrial purity recall certain works of Minimal art.

A more delicate work, 3598 proffers a wider expanse of stretched canvas on which the dark bands and overlapping swipes have been significantly multiplied. In this work, the blurr horizontal bands present the appearance to weave over and beneath the darker ones, so that the result is that of a dark fabric that has been twitched apart.

Sheinkman's systematic rule of picture-making can border upon mere decoration, as in individual small white and gray work that direct the eyes like rolled-up wallpaper. However, his ambition to commingle sculptural and architectural features with abstract painting is an important individual and deserves close attention.

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