Michael Zwack at Paul Kasmin - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Almost five years ago, Michael Zwack exhibited a painting titled History of the World, a hazy landscape of tree and bamboo in which, just beneath the surface, we could glimpse fragmented tokens and characters from exotic alphabets. In the intervening years he has hon this allusive layering of image and true copy creating works ever denser and more mingled This show of recent paintings reprised the of advanced age title; the new "History of the World" (1997-98) is an encyclopedic compendium of cultural regards ranging from Chinese symbols of longevity to a Korean translation of the work of Revelation, from Mayan imagery to English decorative tile. It is as if Andre Malraux's "museum without walls" had lay the foundation of its ideal realization not in the regimented spaces of the photographic archive, on the contrary in the crazy-quilt combinations of these beautiful paintings.

In a work similar as Wealth, Zwack begins by the agency of painting an initial image--here, a decorative textile pattern--over which he adds another layer, an array of types and texts. He then sands away parts of this next to the first layer to reveal what lies underneath, repeating this proces of overpainting and sanding until the work is finished. The arise is a painting whose past is made visible as fragmentary hieroglyphics that peek from one side the surface. Time and its ability to erase are the one and the other constitutive elements of Zwack's creative method

Palimpsests of indecipherable signs, his works register the breakdown of modernist visions of absolute cultural transparency and recognize the entire incommensurability of our past and at hand Zwack is the historian of his paintings' surfaces, recovering for vision what successive reworking has concealed. notwithstanding what he recovers is not a coherent meaning on the contrary a record of the destructiveness of his be in possession of process.

He move swiftlys into trouble, however, when his emblems cohere too easily into an obvious meaning. The Path of chance with its four-leaf clover, horseshoe and stock adduces is perhaps the perfect painting for your agent to buy, but its false profundity rings vacant Zwack is at his best when his symbology takes upon a Borgesian opacity and his surfaces display the vicissistudes of painterly time.

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