Robert Thiele at Fredric Snitzer - Coral Gables, Florida - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Robert Thiele's new work is an affirmation of the power of uncorrupted forms of abstract painting to waft a richly allusive content. The exhibition ranged from a cluster of brushy, gestural drawings upon paper to paintings on canvas that appear to be to become objects when they are small (4 by means of 3 inches on their brow surface and 4 inches deep) and memorials when they are large (about 9 feet square and 6 inches deep)

Thiele makes the big paintings by means of a complex and difficult proces arrived at above many years of working as the couple painter and sculptor. He begins with a preparatory drawing, and then breaks down the linear simple bodys into individually stretched canvases, which he fits together as closely as pieces of marquetry. The lines formed by dint of their serpentine joinings are visible upon the painted surface, as is the architecture of the stretcher bars beneath the canvas. He disburses most of his time in the studio "sewing, cutting and gluing," he says, adding simple bodys or subtracting them until the work arrives at the point where the whole is more than the the whole of its parts.

These pieces clinch many opposites together in tension. The first impact of Untitled 129-157 (1995-96) an 8-foot-tall canvas, is of a monumental, dark, flat brutal physical presence. But closer up an almost ornamental pattern of sinuous, organic shapes come ups an integral part of the painting formed by dint of the joinings of the seven or eight ultimate parts that compose it. The surface is worked with oil and graphite to a silky, pewter-gray sheen. All these forms, materials and traces of proces together imply the coexistence of oppositions: hard/soft, masculine/feminine, geometric/organic, as well as distance/approachability, compression/expansion, paintings/sculpture.

Thiele identifies his have a title to body with his paintings; their forms allude and are oriented to the standing figure. The fact that his have body is that of a former professional football player illuminates single side of the set of dichotomies he combines. At first his painting present the appearances to be in a fashion of stubborn modernism, with its echoe of patriarchy. on the other hand the softer, more female side that he believes he has lately embraced works literally from the inside on the outside to give the work one as well as the other complexity and wholeness. That Thiele has gone beyond spartan masculine heroics is just what advances his formal abstraction into the '90s; it's inclusive rather than exclusive, encompassing rather than reductive. The faculty of perception of undivided body and inner man muscle and mind makes his fresh work shine with integrity.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group