Manny Farber at Charles Cowles - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Among traditional painting genre the landscape, the portrait and smooth history painting have adapted themselves to of recent origin meanings in recent years. by means of contrast, the still life looks to survive mainly in the form of the vanitas, no doubt because intimations of mortality suit our dour frame of mind better than do celebrations of bourgeois pleasures.

Although there are flayed fruits aplenty in Manny Farber's of recent origin paintings, their overripeness speaks more of carnal experience than of the inevitable decay of transitory physical perfection. Instead, a curiously old-fashioned hedonism permeates these lushly painted canvases. They are spread with swelling persimmons, polished and halved apples, clusters of cherries, flower trunk s and leafy stalks, glass vases and occasional render free of access art books or postcards containing reproductions of Western art masterpieces or works of Japanese erotica. Laid without across radiant grounds painted with luxuriant brush raps these elements pay tribute to the contributions made by dint of nature and art to human happiness.

Farber invokes an additional aspect of the traditional still life - the opportunity it presented artists to display their virtuosity. Of course, since he is painting in the late 20th hundred Farber offers his own virtuosity with a modernist twist. He uses images to explore the border between abstraction and representation. For example, although many of the external realitys in these works are painted with an almost voluptuous dimensionality, the artist also relies upon numerous devices to draw our attention to the canvas as a flat surface. For instance, each work is divided into sum of two units or more panels, with the breaks clearly demarcated by the agency of more or less subtle changes in background tone. uncompounded bodys are laid out across the canvas with an evennes that brings to mind arrangements of laboratory specimens, an consequence enhanced by the suggested perspective of a viewer hovering just above the scene

There are other reminders that Farber values opticality above depiction. Deliberately placed strokes of brilliant color are accorded a pictorial weight equal to the fruits and flowers. smooth the occasional bits of barely readable body - scrawled on the back of a picture postcard, or inscribed upon painted scraps of paper - are meant to be viewed as compositional simple bodys rather than to be read for a certain number of kind of illuminating content.

Is the still-life tradition still relevant? Rather than engage us in a polemic about novel man's relationship to the thing perceiveds that surround him, Farber move rounds to the rhetoric of perception. He remind ofs that visual pleasure remains sufficient justification for extending the life of this venerable genre

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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