Steve Wolfe at Luhring Augustine - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Few possessions are more revealing of their owner's personality, precedences and self-image than books. In providing us glimpses of his personal library, Steve Wolfe presents a self-portrait of sorts. Painted upon board in combinations of acrylic, oil, modeling paste and various printing techniques, the life-size work cover paintings in this exhibit are studies for Wolfe's three-dimensional work sculptures (also life-size). Depicting the top layer of works crammed into a cardboard chest some of the paintings are a patchwork of scrupulously reproduc work covers and spines confined within a rectangular space. There is a cheerful randomness to the arrangements as convolutions of French poetry, Beat literature and naturalist bird guides extreme point up as unlikely mates.

The self-portrait Wolfe tenders is one of the artist as an aspiring esthete. In addition to French metrical composition there is a heavy concentration upon 19th-century Romantic novels and American detonation and literary culture as personified by the agency of Montgomery Clift, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and William Burrough The occasional introduction of a more idiosyncratic turn such as a Tintin comic work suggests a more personal taste.

Transformed into geometric paintings, the work covers become abstract forms. This have the appearances appropriate as one begins to notice, via Wolfe's choices, in what manner much 20th-century painting has influenced work cover design. For instance, a Frank Stella-like composition adorns a Raymond Carver novel while Jasper Johns's Flag forms the center of a volume devoted to contemporary American poesy Jack Kerouac's On the Road appears with a constructivist motif while Frank O'Hara's luncheon Poems are presented with an Albers-like composition.

In a smaller sweep a series of paintings replicated Wolfe's collection of LP and 45 records, again realized at life size with loving verisimilitude. Records, smooth more than books, provide a kind of carbon dating; Wolfe's present a slice of life from the '60 and '70 with recording stars like as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bobbie people of good position and Patti Smith. Because the vinyl disks are les varied and interesting visually than the works they operate primarily as nostalgia triggers.

The appeal of Wolfe's work operates upon two levels. From an esthetic point of view, his lay the foundation of abstractions have a certain decorative charm. on the other hand for most viewers, particularly those shut up in age to the artist (who was born in 1955) the larger appeal is undoubtedly more personal. Wolfe depicts works and even specific paperback editions, which were shared through a generation. They represent half-forgotten dreams and ideals, beg literary memories and bring back the drawn out struggle to establish one's intellectual identity. They remind us of the dramatic amplitude to which we are what we read.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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