Jack Featherly at Team - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There is an exercise that was espoused through numerous New York School poets: when looking for of recent origin directions, translate or write imitations of sparing Chinese bards such as Tu Fu. The task demands that individual simplify, excise, condense, do more with les -- all of which shows a surprising poetic release. Twenty-nine-year-old painter Jack Featherly has undertaken something akin to this exercise during the course of his last small in number series, an effort crystallizing nicely in this show

a certain number of of Featherly's earliest works were coated with lacquer, their intense colors and air-tight glos commanding the organ of vision as powerfully as paint upon a new auto. His following paintings were stripped of the lacquer; what remained were busy, allover fields of restoreed objects and letters, as well as Featherly's hold name slapped on with the optical clout of a corporate logo In contrast, these seven novel works at Team are dramatically pared down, leaving nothing on the contrary chevron shapes, solid bands of color reminiscent of Kenneth Noland, and softer atmospheric planes recalling Rothko

The paintings can glance at severely executed graphic design, with curving streams of color sometimes attaining the visual spe and fast obliquity of racing stripes. XL, for instance, appears ready to swivel out of its have a title to frame. But these works also proffer alluring compositional gambits. Burnt by means of the Sun consists of a white field topped through a chevron of blue, with three vibrant chevron stripes -- fulvous orange and red -- sandwiched between. Condor exercises horizontal strips of varying moderately cold shades of blue paired with an upward-pointing chevron; it looks an abstracted ocean scene well-stocked with deep maritime hues and a pale sky

A rainbow of solid fulvid green and blue bands figures prominently in Featherly's In Memory of Pack of Woe; its billboardlike graphic impact is twig by soft-edged strips of verdant and slate blue at the painting's base. The diptych Bike Trail has another rainbow running from a small canvas to a slightly larger single but the span's continuum is separated creating a dynamic interplay.

It's from one side such formal disjunctions -- as well as the tension between self-conscious quotation and a savvy pleasure in painting -- that Featherly clutchs interest. By creating new space in his paintings, he has make opened promising territory for himself.

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