Trevor Winkfield at Tibor de Nagy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Trevor Winkfield's idiosyncrasy is matched by the agency of the remarkable fertility of his imaginatioN -- he is nothing if not wryly fecund His wit is based to a large step on the sheer number of external realitys he inserts into his paintings; myriad images without a public theme, flatly and schematically showed are joined in intensely hu symphonic compositions that startle with their variousness. Color, a major power of the artist, binds the easy in minds of his eccentric collagelike compositions, in which meaning goe back and forth between abstract playfulness and ironic narrative.

Winkfield, a British painter who has lived in of recent origin York since the 1960s, has lengthy been associated with writers. Several of his volume cover designs, including some for the bard John Ashbery, were included in the exhibition. Ashbery wrote an elegant introduction for Pageant, the generally received catalogue of the artist's paintings ("pageant" describes well the artist's virtually medieval panoply of visual effects)

The Painter and His Muse (1996) a large acrylic-on-linen work, dazzles with its busy facture. The painting consists of three sections. upon the left an oddly hatted painter with a pipe in his cavity between the jaws and wings on his feet aligned in what looks like a robe of r feathers, supports a palette upon the tip of a paintbrush with his left hand. His right hand reaches above into the central panel, where there is an easel painting of a sailboat with virid and white sails on a rose-colored sea. To the right the painter's muse, a strange hybrid creature with a sickly virid face, holds between extended index fingers a schematized sailboat.

This account single begins to describe the numerous images in the painting. There are sum of two units steering-wheel-like images above and below the painter, who has an orange-and-green checkerboard with brushes resting upon his upper back. On the right, at the top, there is a simple rendition of a three-story building and an eagle emanating from the screw-in uncompounded body of an electric light scaly bud etc. The painting's many parts run over the tale of an artist attempting to portray an reality with the help of a godlike muse. While painter and muse are portrayed against slate-blue soils the central panel is bright gold-colored highlighting the sailboat painting's independence from its creators.

For all the oddity of the representations and accidents in Winkfield's works, they do reveal a narrative to the persistent viewer. In the four Voyage paintings, the artist takes a trip, by dint of plane and by boat, to a mountainous landscape. While his allusions may be personal, they are delightfully comic pretences for sketching a world in which anything can happen -- and greatest in quantity everything does.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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