Arnold Mesches at Donahue/Sosinksi - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Arnold Mesches has drawn out served as a history painter for our age of amnesia. Stiff, shadowy figures from vintage photographs and advanced in years paintings appear in his palpitating canvases like visitations of the spirits of history. But while his works have often attacked larger stupidities -- the waste of war, the vanity of ambition and the foolishness of the powerful -- they have at the same time strike one as beinged surprisingly intimate and personal. Mingling with immediately recognizable personages and settings are his cullings from family albums or half-forgotten memories.

Thus the apparently dramatic shift exhibited by this absorbing exhibition is actually les individual of kind than of stage The show's core is a variety of portraits of Mesches's mother painted above the last 19 years of her lengthy life. In some works she gazes at the viewer end her harlequin-tipped glasses with an alert however wary expression. In several portraits from the '80 her penetrating organ of visions and creased features nearly disappear beneath a welter of white brushstrokes. Finally she lies shrunken and almost skeletal upon a bed, peacefully dozing during her last illness.

These images were hung upon one side of the gallery, interspersed with aged family photos (both formal portraits and snapshots), drawings, decades-old paintings of the artist's studio and environs, and new works with autobiographical themes. This portion of the exhibition was tied together by the agency of a wall text in which Mesches chronicled his mother's life and remarked on various paintings and photographs hanging nearby.

This body is itself a remarkable document. In a great deal of the same way that Ilya Kabakov several years ago exerciseed a narrative of his mother's life to reveal the contradictions and private tragedies of life in Soviet Russia, Mesches treats his mother's story as a quintessential saga of the Jewish immigrant's toil to survive and prosper in the United States. The Depression, the fresh Deal, the promises and disappointments of the postwar American Dream give this personal history a far wider resonance.

In the next to the first half of the show, the focus shifted to a small lad who serves as the artist's recalled self. One striking painting is The Gate, which Mesches was working upon when his mother died. In the funereal tinges of deep winter, he depicts a small family collection -- himself as a child, his mother and his sum of two units aunts -- against the backdrop of a '30s-era hearse and an imposing place of iron gates.

In other paintings the small lad clings to a whirling merry-go-round stands in a Victorian parlor make straighted in cowboy garb and encompassed by a tumult of toy soldiers, and equals from amid the voluptuous sirens and sanguinary mayhem of '30s-era pulp fiction in a corner newsstand. Perhaps the greatest in quantity haunting work here was The Longest Day of the Year, in which the male child is dwarfed by a swarm of elephantine bats swooping ominously through a agitated sunset.

It appear to bes that after following his mother to the extremity of her life, Mesches was fre to impel backward into his own childhood terrors and dreams. His earlier paintings allowed public history to be invaded by the agency of traces of personal memory. Now he permits his memories take center stage. The flow is a compelling body of work whose universality derives from its actual intimacy.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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