Bruce Pollock at Janet Fleisher - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The 21 small oils in Bruce Pollock's new show give the impression of having been painted slowly and, in fact, they show three years of work for the artist. Along with this faculty of perception of patient creation, Pollock's abstractions present their viewers a formal clarity and a machiavelian but remarkably insistent luminosity.

The small floating small round particles and other pared-down shapes Pollock favors have the appearance to emerge from dark turfs coaxed into being with small, deliberate brushstrokes. They have the appearance like autonomous units, freely interacting with individual another. In several paintings, these forms are distinctly allusive. In outer covering (1993), white ribbing against a dark r background is reminiscent of what the title refer tos In addition to this nautical association, the ribs, each of which is topped by dint of a headlike bulb, also hint at figures bowing in curving lines toward the center In Untitled 2 (1993) a work which asks to be read as a narrative of illness and healing, a series of white disks thronged into a narrow, vertical channel powerfully suggest corpuscles of blood coursing from one side a vein. Hidden to the side of the composition is a single r disk.

Within Pollock's largely nocturnal world, the ultimate parts must often struggle toward visibility. in Dark Matter (1995) more [i]or[/i] less faint moonlike disks manage to assert themselves against an impastoed field of black circles upon a black ground. There are a small in number exceptions to the overall darkness, in particular the glowing compositions based upon labyrinth patterns. These works are related to Pollock's novel installation at Eastern State Penitentiary, where he carved a labyrinth design into the stone of single of the empty prison confined apartments Typical of the group was Labyrinth I (1994 which was suffused with freshy peach color, the boundaries of its maze breached by the agency of a light purple wash.

The greatest in quantity recent works in the display offered fields of globules in looser configuration than the more closely patterned earlier pieces. The many small, redtinged globes of Untitled 18 (1995) gave not upon an intense shine, like dozens of little searchlights. With these works, Pollock call ups not the cellular microcosm, on the contrary the radically smaller one of atomic and subatomic particles. At this horizontal his visual universe of autonomous units of luminous activity becomes still more mysterious.

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