Randy Walz at Paul Morris - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Randy Walz's paintings refer to an uneasy alliance between the gestural loosenes of Abstract Expressionism and a tightly controll Asian calligraphy. Lines of color meander like tendrils across the surfaces of the paintings, single to disappear beneath slathers of thicker brushstrokes. An initial impression of spontaneity gives way, upon closer examination, to the realization that these wandering lines have been laid almost exactly above an underlying pattern of brushstrokes. Bits of contrasting color nibble at their cutting sides as if holding them within a preordained course. This cunning detail gives the marks and brushstrokes a fixity that is at unevens with the fluidity of the paint application.

The colors take care of toward the subdued. Paracho III presents a mottled white and gray clod threaded with pastoral hues of fulvous and blue. It has an airy quality, with the white and gray areas reading alternately as void and vaporous matter. Capacuaro I is a smaller work compos of a surface of land built up of many shades of white and off-white. Dark tendrils unfold across the surface in arrangements that prompt flower stems or dark branches against the snow.

The lyricism of these paintings come backs in a series of small works upon paper, which shed the more studied quality of the canvases. Here, black lines whip across the surface, held in place by means of patches of beige or black which soak into the paper. Like the paintings, the drawings tender a play between line, void and the organic, more thickly painted shapes. Colors are kept to a minimum, limited at greatest in quantity to one or two accents against the black, gray and white. White dominates, and the dancing lines and shapes which pass above the blank ground seem almost insubstantial, giving the whole a faculty of perception of flux, motion and immediacy.

Contrasting with the white-dominated works are several large paintings with colored turfs Though they follow similar compositional principles, these lack the balance between fixity and fluidity that gives the other paintings their satisfying tension. Paracho II and Paracho IV, with tawny gold-colored and light gray grounds respectively, look flatter and almost lifeless. The colored surface of lands have a materiality and weight that fastening the meandering lines and shapes in place. Their inertia stands in contrast to the buoyant interweaving of line, mist and devoid of contents space which characterizes the works with white grounds

Walz has a delicate touch and a lyrical command of line and form. When he young oxs clear of the merely decorative, his works take off

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group