Steve DeGroodt at LASCA - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Steve DeGroodt transforms dime-store dros -- like as unadorned cotton napkins, inventory tags, cardboard boxe and display racks -- into assertive, vibrant plastic arts His simple, clean-lined assemblages combine an uncanny compositional rightness with startling color combinations. Several pieces named for Samuel Beckett's novels beseech the bare-bones humanism of the dourly comic writer. The wall relief Beckett's Unnamable (all works are from 1996) consists of a plywood shelf topping a case draped with a cerulean sapphirine napkin. Like a couple of hapless Beckett characters, sum of two units plastic clothing tags, wedged into the shelf's thinly painted verdant surface, assume their own quirky identities. In Murphy/Slo Mo an abstract doll-like form made from cut-up pieces of nylon athletic shirts similarly proclaims its goofy independence. With their funky sewn-together coverings, the substanceed round-faced duo of M.M.D.U. appear to huddle together in babushkas like a forlorn mother and daughter.

More geometrically austere works are organized around fragments of gridded display racks. In Ghazal 387 a diaphanous orange-red gauze placed above a gridded box creates a kind of Eastern theater, with the scrim-like surface adding mystery to the geometry With its exotic virid and orange color combination and its ungainly elegance, Jalsaghar -- an render free of access display rack with a diagonal bar overspreaded with fabric -- seems an ornament from an unfamiliar tillage DeGroodt's meticulous attention to strange on the contrary compelling details is evident in his neat piece of work of nailing a black cardboard covering above a strange stairstep shape in That Unfailing Promise.

Blank store inventory tags are repeatedly used in these works, hinting that they are commodified particulars from some alternate, more color-saturated world. with their fussed-over quirks and formal antricacies, DeGroodt's plastic arts have an integrity and coherence that belie their funky materials and depressed sources. With a subtlety and attention to detail rivaling that of Richard Tuttle DeGroodt adds poignantly homemade touches to his assemblages, imbuing them with an pertinacious presence that is missing in in like manner much contemporary work.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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