Stephen Ellis at Andre Emmerich - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Stephen Ellis's of recent origin paintings at Andre Emmerich are elegant and glossy with lush, multilayered matte surfaces and colors soured and jarring enough to hold fast you from getting too comfortable. While deliberately putting into opposition the grid and the gesticulation as has been his practice for the past hardly any years, Ellis has moved towards a greater calligraphic freedom in his mark-making--laying down, scraping away and again laying down the paint in swirling, skeinlike swipes.

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This freer approach is particularly effective in the largest painting in the display a 10-by-12-foot untitled work from 1995 where blue- and rust-colored bands bight and intertwine, making their way around the painting with sinuous grace. Ellis's geometry has slackened up, too. The grid is fractured and present the appearances arrived at intuitively rather than through system. At times it not absents itself as a series of staggered stop ups at others as jittery stacks of horizontal slats. In a certain quantity of paintings, such as an untitled work from 1996 painted in the earth r black and white of a of greece vase, the grid is assertive; in others it is buried, barely there.

The distanced direct the eye of Ellis's paintings comes in large part from their level cool almost photographic surfaces, where smooth the most agitated paint handling looks to be operating by distant control and in slow motion. The depersonalizing of the personal action has been with us since Rauschenberg's send-up of improvisational action painting in the nearly identical Factum I and Factum II, and Lichtenstein's giant cartoon brushstrokes of the '60 What I find greatest in quantity intriguing, however, about these paintings is not thus much their cultivation of ironic distance, on the contrary their conspicuous optical blurriness, the faculty of perception they give, particularly in the gestural passages, of being without of focus.

Blurring can imply a variety of visual incidents. Is it a perception of move from one state to another, a instant caught in transition? Is it a matter of adjustment, a depth-of-field situation, where individual thing is portrayed sharply and another not? Is it a los of clarity? Or is it an act of conscious estheticizing, as in the misty images of Pictorialist photographers like Edward Steichen or George Seeley?

I think with Ellis the answer is "all of the above." The blurring perceive s like a willed uncertainty, a desire to detain the viewer intrigued but off-balance. The paintings shift upon us, go out-of-synch, almost as if they were televisions with intermittently malfunctioning vertical grasps In this there is a clear affinity to the paintings of Gerhard Richter, on the contrary not so much to the abstractions. Rather Ellis's work recalls Richter's black-and-white political paintings, the smeared and unfocused individuals the ones that, no matter by what means "real" they seem, force us to doubt their documentary value. Similarly, Ellis's paintings make us question what we diocese For all their style and panache, they take true little for granted.

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