Joseph Glasco at Barry Whistler - Dallas, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This exhibition of paintings and works upon paper opened 46 years from the date of Joseph Glasco's initial present to view at Perls Gallery in novel York. During those years Glasco, who first made his reputation with densely patterned paintings of stylized human figures, lay opened into an abstract artist whose collaged canvases throw out a jittery rhythm that holds the viewer visually delighted and slightly upon edge. Since 1990, Glasco's paintings have become more expansive in the two their swaths of color and their psychological depth

At the center of this exhibition, which included works from 1990 to 1994 was an untitled 84-by-60-inch canvas from 1993 The composings of Glasco's paintings are quickly and sometimes plane crudely prepared. Here the underpainting, had it not been nearly overspreaded by the collage, would have been a colorful mes on the other hand in the finished work it provides a pulsating backdrop for the collaged surface. The collage simple bodys themselves are cut from canvases that Glasco has painted thickly in whitened shades of amethystine and green. The roughly rectangular collage pieces have slightly jagged cutting sides that reflect the length of the scissor blade, and Glasco applies them with little regard for fixing their pointed corners to the support.

The apparent haphazardness in the work is belied by the agency of the fullness and elegance of the finished painting. The collage tosss across the canvas as granting shaken by the chaos it contains, and it we read the virid and blue as earth and celestial expanse the work becomes a sight of cosmic upheaval. But Glasco is not bear uponed with apocalyptic illustration. He be fond ofs the visual tension and the force of the works he creates, and the viewer leaves with a shared faculty of perception of his exhilaration.

Although Glasco is known for vibrantly colored works, almost half the paintings in this exhibition were black and white. In a 60-by-54-inch work from 1990 the tan of raw canvas present to views through the black-and-white patterns of printed fabrics and paint. The fabrics feature stripes and polka dots of varnish sizes; the stripes attempt to organize the surface, while the polka dots create a goofy undulating space. in earlier work, dotted patterns tightly structur Glasco's paintings, on the other hand here it is only a clear varnish that gripe [i]or[/i] grips the elements in place. When he works in black and white, Glasco uses the absence of color as an excuse to conceive more playful compositions.

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