Blake Rayne at Greene Naftali - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

An enormous white Styrofoam cube bared the entrance to this exhibition. one time you made your way around it, you set the gallery sparsely hung, with a single painting upon each of its four walls.

Blake Rayne's paintings (all done in 1996) depict an architectural space in which walls extending from a circular core create four adjoining ranges Doors in each painting allow views into individual or more of the other extents and the pastel-shaded walls indicate the progression from individual new and impersonal chamber to the nearest One room is empty, in another there is a young man, a third contains a plant, and the final swing is occupied by a young woman and a plant. however to say the people and things are in these rooms is not exactly actual The architectural imagery of each painting is inset slightly from the cutting side of the canvas, a situation reflected sounded in the way that each canvas has been mountained on a larger plywood support (the works have overall dimensions of 80 through 92 by 2 3/4 inches). race and plants extend past these cutting sides so that they seem to be the two in the rooms and upon the canvas. They are as convincingly portrayed and as strangely ephemeral as the ranges themselves.

The pliant texture of Rayne's evenly applied paint holds the paintings soft and seductive, and at the same time the place he depicts could be either a spacious loft ready for occupancy or a compartment in a certain quantity of pastel-colored hell, for there is no apparent exit from the fields At Greene Naftali, Rayne established a relationship between the painted images and the space we viewers occupied through emphasizing a column in the center of the gallery with high-gloss white acrylic paint. You circled this rounded pillar looking "out" at paintings in which you gaze "into" rooms that radiate from a central, curv wall. The consequence was dizzying. Keeping your balance involved finding a artificial position like that of the young man in the white latitude who steps slightly out of the frame. Perhaps he is putting upon the brakes.

This spare, elegant installation, Rayne's first solo present to view in New York, hid a whirlpool in its core. on the contrary that huge Styrofoam cube, which obstructed you again on the way without turned out to be a sort of packing crate, its indented sides scaled to fit the paintings upon their plywood mounts. If you imagined Rayne's paintings roosting in their crate, the gallery became still, silent and destitute of contents and you could find your way out

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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