Stephen Magsig at Chuck Levitan - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Detroit-based Stephen Magsig advances to Manhattan's downtown facades after years of painting his place of abode town in its various phases of decline, and he appears in awe of the pronounced life-beat pulsing from one side Gotham's streets.

Magsig does not bother too a great deal of with technical wizardry, nor does he adopt the flat, deadpan approach of the Photo-Realists. Rather, he depicts the buildings with feeling; if Edward Hopper had painted close-up f the entranceways and surrounding facades of an unpeopl Cast-Iron District, the ensues might well have looked like this. Like Hopper Magsig uses architecture to run over the story of its be in possession of being (see Hopper's Early Sunday Morning); light and shadow, shades of color and architectural detail all speak for themselves. He is sure-foot in what he is doing, which may have something to do with his "day job" as a commercial illustrator. Take, of instance, Caffe Roma. As is typical of Little Italy's light-deprived highways it's impossible to make on the outside the time of day; a sign advertising Italian ices is almost completely in shadow. The entrance, with its short flight to paces and glass doors leading to the restaurant, is lit from above, as if evening were approaching, or already there. The faculty of perception is strong that Magsig is telling a story with his creamy brushstroke and low-key color, a story without family without narrative but with multiple painterly incidents marking its piece of ground and with light and dark in dialogue.

Unles Magsig's doorways advertise themselves (as do Caffe Roma and Fanelli), we oftentimes have a sense of not knowing where we are, of being in a kind of generic Little Italy of SoHo He oftentimes cuts through this anonymity by the agency of naming a street in his title, and sometimes the cross-street as well. Crosby Garage is, for all the outsized ugliness of its square, gaping maw and battered windows, esthetically delightful in its sincerity and in its capacity to transmute city blight into visual gold right down to the streaks of yellow paint underneath the windows indicating, in a greatest in quantity plastic way, where the paint upon the building is peeling.

Magsig remains an unflinching realist while detecting a beauty in Manhattan highways that may escape those of us who live here. His greatest in quantity recent work features zoom-lens close-up of cornices and disjunctive window-glass reflections, always approached at the oddest angles. Magsig has a right to experiment; still, I set forth the less baroque, more romantic whole facades, the better to remind us, without distortion, of what of recent origin York still has to offer

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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