Joe Zucker at Danese - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A Plimsoll line is the marking upon a cargo ship which delineates in what way deep it should sit in the water when legally loaded. Joe Zucker has borrowed the word, and its maritime connotations, for this place of paintings whose titles are borrowed from sailing ships which one time plied the Great Lakes. He was apparently also influenced by means of diagrammatic ocean maps he set in an old sailors' handbook.

Against a flat fulvous ground, threadlike black lines form shifting compositions which momentarily reduce into bars, circles, triangles or zigzags before meandering not on into watery space filled with set free squiggles. Though the lines at no time get really thick, their intensity varies. They are rather decisive when running in parallel lines to define a geometric shape; the more desultory squiggles that fill the in-between spaces begin to disappear into the golden ground.

The title of the present to view "The Plimsoll Line," and the names of the individual paintings (The Chester A. Congden The Monarch, The Emperor) encourage aqueous readings. The jittery lines allude to ripples of water butting up against each other or against hidden obstructions. on the other hand other interpretations are possible. These nervous linear configurations also insinuate topographical maps, as well as Asian ink landscape paintings. From nevertheless another point of view, single might even read the mingled quivering lines as TV interference patterns or more [i]or[/i] less kind of electronic noise. gazeed at as a whole, the paintings appear to illustrate pre-Newtonian physics, in which an invisible ether fills each apparently empty space.

The peculiar membranes of lines in these works derive from the unusual technique which Zucker has exerciseed to make them. The yellow-painted canvases are laid flat. The lines are created by the agency of pinching the lip of a coffee can containing acrylic gel medium, putting a dot of black paint upon the can's crimped lip and pouring. This gives the patterns a sly texture and depth which is felt rather than actually perceived, from a distance.

Zucker's "Plimsoll Line" paintings are just the latest in a career devot to experimentation with painting techniques. Despite an economy of means, they grasp the attention surprisingly well. Zucker encourages the organ of vision to roam over a visual field of remarkable and quite riveting diversity.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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