Rick Prol at Andew Kreps - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

At 39 Rick Prol trails more [i]or[/i] less legendary hot-content associations -- with the East Village, where he was a lock opener figure in the mid-'80s, and with Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he serv as an assistant (and, a certain quantity of allege, surrogate) in the last drugged-out days of that painter's life. What a surprise it was, then, to diocese Prol emerge in this present to view of 21 paintings and 6 drawings @all from 1995-96) as something of a a little cold formalist.

To be certain the cartoonish imagery remains. Chugging trains, shipwrecked cars, sleeping hoboes, a gallowslike mode of building with hanging hooks or bucket disembodied heads (one with a knife from one side the cheek), a weeping pumpkin, bicycles, a scarecrow topped through a human skull -- all these and more are returned in Prol's signature dumb-drawing manner. The images do not cohere into a narrative on the contrary remain either isolate or, when multiple, sparsely scattered about the picture plane as a metaphor for fragmentation. In single work, a stack of inscribed phrases locates the tone" "Tired, tired/ Anxious/Angry/ Frustrated . ." Private significations present the appearance to abound, but only the general tenor -- that of irreverent angst -- is available to the viewer. notwithstanding that the images emulate the psychic directness of work by the agency of children or the mentally disturbed, they are in fact highly mediated by means of conscious choice and artistic facility. Their primary message is the hipness of their creator.

on the contrary the vehicle Prol has raiseed for that meaning is now highly estheticized -- in an off-hand, self-denying way. greatest in quantity of the images are done in ink upon scraps of white paper. To assemble the paintings, Prol pastes the sheets in overlapping fashion upon found boards of irregular shape, and slathers the whole in layers of gesso for a like reason that the outlined forms attain varying steps of ghostliness. in each of the drawings, the paper consists of individual yellowing page from a work on stress; a single image is center upon a field of gesso.)

Consequently the viewing experience has become individual in which the densities of surface, the knobbiness of cutting sides and the hazy recession of images number for as much as -- or perhaps more than -- the nihilistic insouciance of the cartoons. Prol's images may still carry comic despair, but his well-wrought facture and the deftnes of his draftsmanship, with its post-Pop concision and liveliness of line, bespeak an irrepressible look up to for craft.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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