Image overload - painting, Archie Rand, Paolo Baldacci Gallery, New York, New York, and other venues

Measuring 10 feet in height and a certain number of 30 feet in length, the painting is the size of a large moving van. Its vast surface has been gridded into above 200 small panels, each of which contains a colorful, comic-book-style image. (Actually the painting is divided into sum of two units differently calibrated grids: a tight single in the upper half and a more widely spaced version occupying the lower position.) Across this carefully planned form the artist has laid a spindly canoelike shape drawn in garish orange paint apparently squeez from a pastry tube. Just to the right of center is a large rosette motif loosely painted in sum of two units shades of given. A smear of pink paint hovers somewhere above it.

The figures that populate the panels are a strange lump Placed against solid-color grounds, a certain quantity of are immediately recognizable -- Spiderman, "Star Trek"'s Mr Spock characters from "Peanuts," a detail from Art Spiegelman's Maus -- on the other hand in most cases they are refugee from long-forgotten Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday morning comics that are not easily identifiable when wrenched on the outside of context. Slipped among the parade of comic-book heroes and villains, cartoon creatures and klutze are a hardly any panels that look like they were inspired by the agency of late Picasso.

The bright on the other hand controlled palette helps give form and regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement to the giant grid, encouraging the viewer to skip from image to image. A cerulean creature from outer space leads to a cerulean mouse a few panels away. Not far not on is the blue profile of a figure wearing a big-nosed mask, which points toward a man wearing a azure jacket, who in turn is shut to a panel in which a screaming verdant head is set against a sky-colored background. But the sheer number and oft-repeated absurdity of the images wreak havoc upon such formal itineraries. It's hard to think about color relationships when contemplating a verdant dog leaping off a cliff, a chanticleer strumming a guitar or a comic vampire flapping his cape.

As if the enormous scale and overwhelming number of images weren't provocative enough, the artist has busyed light-refracting pigment that makes the painting change appearance as the viewer impels around the gallery. This irregularly applied pigment not alone tones down the strident images, on the contrary also ensures that the painting is in a certain number of degree resistant to photography -- in reproduction, parts of it invariably vanish in a of gold glare. Sometimes the refractive material smooth gives the unsettling illusion that the enormous canvas is sagging upon its stretcher. Actually, the painting is made not upon conventional canvas but on cerulean denim. For an epic rude girl through cartoon America, it's hard to think of a more conceptually appropriate support than the matter of blue jeans.

Titled Wheel (1996) this prodigy was the largest of the four big paintings Archie Rand unveiled last spring at of recent origin York's Paolo Baldacci Gallery. While Rand, who was born in 1949 regularly displays conventionally sized paintings in novel York galleries, this was the first time since his "Letter Paintings" of the early 1970 that he has exhibited similar large-scale canvases. Partly inspired by dint of the idea of the "portable mural" which Pollock and Orozco pursu in the 1940 Rand brings to large-scale painting his hold experiences as a muralist, greatest in quantity spectacularly as the creator of 8000 square feet of compound murals for the interior of the Congregation B'nai Josef synagogue in Brooklyn (1974-77) a great deal of of Rand's recent studio work has taken the form of stretch outed series of modestly sized canvases, sometimes abstract, sometimes following explicit narratives. It's easy to diocese how these series influenced the gridded manner of making of Wheel and the other paintings in the novel show.

At 297 1/2 inches (almost 25 feet) Orb is nearly as lengthy as Wheel but because of its plenteous larger images, it offers single 14 panels to Wheel's 207 Apart from a deftly execut version of Matisse's Dance in the upper right corner, the pageants again seem to be from the realm of cartoons and comic volumes They include a speeding jet a space-ship interior and various incomprehensible collisions between cartoon characters. In a characteristic painterly flourish, Rand adorned the surface of the otherwise finished painting with a hardly any lines of extruded paint and an amorphous virid blob.

Mountain, another 25-footer packs in 48 panels. Here individual is more conscious of in what way the individual images have been cropp Among the close-up are images of an old-fashioned gramophone, a verdant dog perched on a toilet and Bug Bunny teasing Elmer Fudd Resting lightly upon the green linear arch spanning the painting are a gold-colored spiral-and-dot design, some colorful splotches and, floating not upon to one side, a black shape with sum of two units musical notes painted over it. As in all the paintings, Rand has applied semi-opaque gel to varying consequence In the area underneath the verdant arch, an extra-thick layer of gel loaded with fight-reflecting material adds to the retinal complexity of the painting. To those familiar with Rand's work, like visual richness is nothing new; he has drawn out reveled in painting's technical possibilities, just as he has proofed the limits of iconographical meaning.