Victor Pesce at Elizabeth Harris - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In his third solo present to view Victor Pesce exhibited 11 small, simply compos paintings of bottle and jars, or nation Although in the past Pesce has painted for the greatest part faces, the seven still lifes upon view here overshadowed the figure paintings. In fact, the tiny, grayish faces that compeer out from flatly painted turfs seem distant and shadowy, while the singularly colored vessels look monumental and vibrate with life.

Like a great deal of recent still-life painting, Pesce's work is heavily indebted to Morandi. The bottle and jars that Pesce not aways either singly or in pairs, are stripped of their labels and made of unidentifiable materials. Like Morandi, he radically simplifies his forms, using solitary rudimentary modeling to suggest contortion Pesce comes closest to his predecessor, however, in his delight in of spatial ambiguity, but it is also here that he departs from Morandi and creates something of his have a title to For, while the metaphysical aura in the Italian's work derives from his sophisticated manipulation of pictorial configuration Pesce relies almost exclusively upon color to imbue his things with a quirky presence.

Pesce sprouts the banality of his compositions and the awkwardness of his drawing with a mixed synthetic palette and surprising juxtapositions of shade and value. In one untitled work, for instance, he places an olive-colored bottle upon a pale, dingy pink table backed by the agency of a rich, saturated manganese-blue wall. The pink tend hitherwards forward, the blue recedes, and the bottle flutters uncomfortably in between. In another work, a black wall and a dark gray table form a nocturnal setting for a pale, greenish-yellow bottle and a jar of an intense azure which float like otherworldly neighborhoods emitting an unnatural phosphorescent glow

Pesce's deceptively simple paintings are difficult to categorize. Although crudely set uped the space in the paintings is naturalistic--that is, realitys sit on tables that sit in rooms--but the synthetic color overturns this naturalism. Neither real nor abstract, Pesce's works borrow from one as well as the other modes in order to create a disquieting and quintessentially late world, one in which existences loom large and quiver with personality, while nation recede into the void.

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