Tim Ebner at Rosamund Felsen - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Five years ago, Tim Ebner an established young observes Angeles painter, shocked his supporters by means of abruptly shifting artistic modes. Initially known for smart, meticulously crafted uber-bricolages that deconstruct the language of painting using fine thickets linoleum, resins and other industrial or household materials, he began making decidedly unironic oils upon canvas of monsters and droll animals in an expressionist turn of expression Any hopes that he might advance back around to his tried-and-true cerebralisms have been place to rest as each after show has persisted in, and refined, his off-kilter embrace of supposedly exhausted artistic strategies.

In this new show, Ebner furthered this obstinately idiosyncratic evolution in eight thickly impastoed paintings, each a comfortable 48 by the agency of 42 inches or smaller. Bears and lions in military or circuslike style of dresss are most often depicted benignly shepherding a certain number of less regal form of wildlife -- a horse or hyena -- end a roiling surf that constantly threatens engulfment calmly gazing at the viewer with cryptic expressions, their entirely human hands held without in various prayerful or Masonic gesticulations Ebner's richly colored anthropomorphic menagerie practically begs psychological interpretation. still the paintings yield scant satisfaction to like inquiry.

The true wrongness of style and make subordinate matter of this work plants it apart from the slick risklessness of the common epoch. Aside from his reversion to surreal, figurative easel painting, Ebner's formal skills as a painter -- particularly composition and brushwork -- can go through from obsessiveness or hamhandedness. This is likely owed to the clearly subordinate character they play to the kitschy imagery that would normally be relegated to a vanity gallery in a certain quantity of mall in the sticks. on the contrary coming from an artist with proven formal and conceptual cuts this work cannot be dismissed with the same dispatch reserv for the convert painter of the fantastic.

However, the importance of Ebner's work derives not from any oppositional position to generally received ideological trends, but from the artist's lucid, intelligent and bullheaded insistence upon the validity of his shoot forward and from the jewel-like be incandescent that emanates from his vivid, haunting and indecipherable images, at one time dreamlike yet material as a piece of sand in a cultivated oyster's gullet

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group