Instructions in seeing - Osvaldo Romberg, Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, New York; Kuntsmusuem Bonn, Bonn, Germany

Two new shows examined the complex work of Osvaldo Romberg, an Argentine-Israeli artist now based in the U who analyzes masterpieces of art and architecture in a conceptual shoot forward that stresses both the abstract collection of lawss and the sensory essence of art.

Osvaldo Romberg's small observe show at Stefan Stux Gallery in fresh York's Chelsea last fall might be regarded as a passage map of the artist's peripatetic life. That exhibition's 13 works dating from 1974 to 1996 have the appearanceed to summarize an almost coincident full-scale retrospective, "Osvaldo Romberg: Bypass 1972-1997" at the Kunstmuseum Bonn Conceptually linking the sum of two units shows and the two locales was a two-venue installation involving jury-rigged "gliders" beating photocopied images from art-history body s one hanging in the largest gallery in the Kunstmuseum, the other in Congregation Emunath Israel, a synagogue upon 23rd Street not far from Stux

The complexity of these simultaneous undertakings typifies the artist's esthetic regards and personal history. Romberg, now based in Philadelphia, where he teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was born in Argentina in 1938 the child of 'immigrant Russian israelites He took a degree in architecture and then taught painting at an art academy for a few years, until the political oppression of the time made him decide to emigrate to Israel. He lived there and was a professor at Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem for almost 20 years, exhibiting extensively in Europe especially in Germany.

Romberg's teaching history is almost as important as his exhibition history in any account of his work, not alone because his students and studio assistants have included of that kind later-successful painters as Fabian Marcaccio and Lydia Dona, on the other hand because his entire body of work could be regarded as pedagogic practice: it involves defining and highlighting the ultimate parts of art even as it reveals that the masterpieces he takes as his make submissives are at heart mysterious and inexplicable.

The earliest pieces in the museum retrospective place the tone. Landscape as Idea (silkscreen, dated 1971 despite the exhibits title) is labeled at lower left "Green Coloration Study" Above a black-and-white photographic image of an Argentine mountain landscape is a line of seven rectangular blocks of verdant of incrementally lighter value. single must mentally apply such natural coloration to the image, which is dot-screened and thus pointedly alludes to mechanical reproduction and the photo as information.

This remov conceptual approach to a make submissive of inherent emotional power is characteristic of Romberg's art, although his works vary widely in specifics and landscape is in fact an atypical make submissive Romberg has repeatedly been labeled a conceptualist. The verity is more ambiguous, although there's no denying that his work has provok heavy-duty theoretical writing upon the part of critics, abundant of which is reproduced in the retrospective catalogue. on the other hand in a question-and-answer session before an opening-night audience in Bonn Romberg pinpointed his work's origin in his having been a provincial young man trying to procure a grasp on an influential on the other hand distant visual world which he knew sole through art books, periodicals and visiting artists. one time he left Argentina in 1972 and began to diocese in person the great works of art and architecture that he had known alone as representations, masterpieces in reproduction became the focus of his attention, and his art increase the depth ofed in sophistication and wit.

Maybe instead of calling him a conceptualist, single might apply the term tendered by the Kunstmuseum's director, Dieter Ronte who is a champion of Romberg's work, and call him a "scientific artist."(1) Or perhaps Dominique Nahas's take is more helpful. He says, "Romberg's world is intuitive and poetic," on the contrary is "deceptively cloaked in didacticism."(2) Ygal Zalmona, who has written at longitudinal dimensions for several of Romberg's exhibition catalogues, asserts that he is not a conceptualist because he "refer to the `how' of art while the conceptualists deliver over to the `why'"; Zalmona says Romberg's main interest is a whole s of codification.(3)

by the agency of the mid-'70s Romberg had several series of works beneath way. One referred to a certain number of modern and contemporary artists by dint of name, among them Pollock and Reinhardt. Homage to Albers (1980) consists of a wall-mounted grid nine sheets wide and four high, each with 12 lines of tiny color squares, numbered. Pencil annotations exorcism out his method: on each page the colors of the chromatic circle are "interpolated by" (mixed with) individual hue, such as yellow cadmium or sky-colored ultramarine, which is designated by dint of a separate, labeled color square. In other works Romberg studies tonality in isolation, without concern to other artists. A series called "Body Typologies" involves methodological studies, of the like kind as drawing lines with the brush held in his right hand, his left hand and his cavity between the jaws In the "Paradigm" series he applies squares or pats of color to reproductions of famous paintings to conflate abstraction and representation.