Matthew Antezzo at Basilico Fine Arts - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Imagine a black-and-white photograph of Frank Stella taken in 1959: we diocese him in the studio, working upon his classic painting The Marriage of Reason and Squalor. He is squatting with his back to us as he methodically applies stripes to a carefully rul canvas in forehead of him. This picture captures the twinkling of an eye of a sea change in art, when the emotional theatrics of Abstract Expressionism gave way to an altogether cooler approach. Now imagine a young artist today creating a grisaille painting of this photo of Stella, flat appending on an adjoining panel the caption from the German museum catalogue in which he place the image. What would of the like kind a painting mean?

Matthew Antezzo does precisely this in his Frank Stella, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1988-89 p 23 (1998) individual of an ongoing series of paintings based upon well-known photographs of contemporary artists that was not awayed in this show. If I were a certain mark of critic, this would be the place to allude sagely to Walter Benjamin and to characterize Antezzo as an ultra-cool ironist who reveals the insuperable distance separating our "post-modern" point of time from that of previous avant-gardes. I could compare his deadpan copies of various documentary photos with Sherrie Levine's "forgeries" of present masterpieces. (Levine, not coincidentally, is a make submissive of one of Antezzo's canvases.)

While this has been the general critical rejoinder to his work, the visual experience of these paintings provides a radically different answer to the question of their possible meaning. Think of the artists whom Antezzo pick outs for these paintings: Stella, Levine, Robert Ryman, Lawrence Weiner. From Stella's stripes to Levine's copies, all are associated with "endgame strategies" in their art-making, with managements that rehearse the anticipated death of painting. at the same time Antezzo's work is anything on the other hand mechanical; each of the paintings in this present to view displays a sensitive handling, a sensually gestural brushstroke which belies its putative make submissive matter.

Antezzo get backs to painting, a field that these artists had claimed to shut off, opening it up for further exploration. The Frank Stella work is emblematic in this regard. The actual stripe paintings of this artist, in their insistent flatness, push illusory space without of the canvas, forbidding the organ of vision its customary pleasures of pictorial exploration. Antezzo, however, carefully pick outs a photograph of Stella which exhibits one of these severe paintings at an angle, in the way that that its stripes appear to move back into depth. The play of flatness and illusion is restored, and our organ of visions (as well as our minds) are reminded that what you diocese is not always, after all, what you see

Dialogue receptacle Bomb (1998), a two-panel work that hung upon the gallery's back wall, is an apt summary of Antezzo's shoot forward On the left it depicts a computer icon signaling a catastrophic failure of the hard drive -- a literal "endgame" for the digital age. The right-hand panel, however, offers a hopeful dialogue box asking us to "restart." Antezzo has accepted the tender in the process restoring the contingency emptied on the outside of the creative act by the agency of those critical practices which had prematurely announced painting's death.

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