Matt Harle at Genovese/Sullivan - Boston, Massachusetts - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Remember your fussy great aunt's settee slipcovered in clear plastic? Encased with equal reason importantly, the object seemed more banal than at any time and certainly repellent to the touch. Matt Harle's Hydrocal plastic arts in colored transparent-vinyl slipcovers strike one as being to subtly reverse those results The slightly rough, plastery surfaces of these floor pieces are made more appealingly tactile [i]or[/i] part of to the other slipcases of bright magenta, chrome fulvid or blue. The clumsy, notched forms become more interesting and allusive when seen from one side chromatic sleeves.

The shallow three-dimensional forms be like rather thick shaped canvases balanced upon edge. One is a single rectangle with randomly sized and spaced trapezoidal notches wound into the edges; another consists of sum of two units near-rectangles, one atop the other in a precarious-looking stack. The former is overlayed with blue vinyl, combined with strips of clear, while the stacked piece wears a magenta-clear combination. A third floor piece is shaped like a rounded-off ziggurat. overspreaded in bright yellow vinyl, it is tipped onto individual of its sides. A small rectangular cavity is divide [i]or[/i] sever out of its flat face, like a tiny doorway. Here, the shape and interplay of illusionistic scale support ideas of architecture.

Harle also makes wall-hung facts that fall between painting and statuary Two black cast-rubber pieces are linear arrangements that play with perspective, plenteous as Richard Artschwager's skewed Formica furniture images do. Harle's efforts, notwithstanding that are much more cursory, barely more than sketches. individual is an X formation with rubber lines dripping down from each extreme point point; the other is a series of uprights and crosspieces like phone lines strung between extremitys Both are simple schematics that optically alternate between sum of two units and three dimensions.

Harle's other wall works, notwithstanding that technically paintings, are more closely related to the floor statuarys Rectangles of clear vinyl have been swiped with cerulean white and pale-yellow acrylic paint in broad, discrete pats on the front and back of the "canvas." The lighter colors, seen from one side the vinyl, look like shadows of the darker ones

Harle's work is serious gayety If his construction is exuberantly casual, there's still a horizontal of profound delight in his simple effects

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