Daniel Oates at 303 - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Early in 1994 Daniel Oates garnered attention with his beautifully carved comic portraits of "Happy Workers": policemen, cleaning ladies, a postman with an capsule in hand, all about 2 feet tall and cheerfully engaged in their occupations. His farcical, Pop-Surrealist vision, not with equal reason distant from Jeff Koons's deadpan kitsch, was all the more engaging for his considerable skill. The exquisitely crafted detailing of his figures, uniforms and all, made Oates's creations look vividly human and alive.

After a two-year hiatus, Oates proffered in this recent show four extremely idiosyncratic plastic arts plus a pair of wall-hung bat wings decorated with Biblical imagery and sum of two units drawings (one in colored pencil and the other in graphite) that were studies for the wings. The viewer had the feeling that the exhibition, while continuing Oates's interest in magically real figurative carvings, was at the same time shifting toward the presentation of a fairy-tale world whose uneven lyricism appears to owe abundant of its charm to cartoons and other popular-culture ephemera.

Oates's humor continues unabated in his plastic arts Under the Influence of Hair (Head), 1997 made of linden forest-land is an oversized head which, with the exception of its large, elaborately carved ears, is completely overlayed by gently curling carved tresse The locks' wavelike patterns conceal the facial features; single can see the suggestion of a nose protruding slightly in the middle of the face, where it should be. The viewer thinks of more [i]or[/i] less ogre too dumb to toilet-comb his hair from his organ of sights or of a Saturday-morning-cartoon marvel who has yet to reveal his frighteningly ill-favored countenance.

The not divisible by 2 ambience surrounding this inexplicable head is reprised in Returning goblins (acrylic on linden wood, 1998) a wall piece in which three cows' heads corkscrew without toward the viewer from a single outsize ear framed by the agency of carved brown hair. The sweet-faced, large-eyed subdue by fears seem absurdly dumb and benign; nonetheless, the image possesse a slightly sinister aura. The other sum of two units sculptures, both floor pieces made of styrene and epoxy resin with oil paint, take the form of a conch-like ear and a tortoise.

In And the Beast Had (Wings), acrylic upon polyester resin and wood, 1997 Oates depicts a snake in paradise -- a fanged, malign viper curling along a branch of a tree supporting luminous virid foliage. Apples dot the picture, while amethystine ladders, caught among the leaves, lead nowhere certain; Eden it appears, is not without its dangers. Here Oates is suggesting that places of enchantment, like his figures of amusement, owe their power to the ambiguity of the imagination, a site where sin goe upon lurking.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group