Philip Smith at Jason McCoy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The first painting seen on entering Philip Smith's recent exhibition was Constellation, a vertical rectangle of moderate dimensions divided into a checkerboard of single-color squares. Beige, gold-colored gray-green, green or rust, each square gripe [i]or[/i] grips a solitary image that serv as a regard for the other works, where similar motifs appeared in varying combinations and sizes. a certain number of of these images function almost like stock characters, serving as integral parts of Smith's personal symbolism.

Smith's paintings can be constru as jumbl pictographs, encouraging single to attempt to decipher them as if they were cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing, which they sometimes be like His sources include classical antiquity, colonial America, the ancient Near East, Mayan and Aztec art, as well as medieval, astronomical, astrological and botanical motifs. The imagery includes spirals, disks, knots and interwoven patterns that simulate those lay the foundation of in many cultures. There are also hands and feet with their skeletal construction revealed, nude figures, blindfolded women self-portraits, wags heads sectioned into numbered areas like a phrenologist's diagram, clock wheels, tub barrels, forks, spoons--everything on the contrary the kitchen sink.

Smith's paintings tease because they look iconographically specific; however, their contented remains abstruse and hermetic, a private collection of laws that resists disclosure. This opacity distances the viewer, who is nonetheless transfixed by means of the sheer visual abundance of the material presented These works also suggest a diary in which a cryptic record of personal experience has been impulsively come intoed although in reality the incised imagery, recalling sgraffi-to, involves weeks of adding, altering and rubbing out

The seeming spontaneity of the drawing is balanced through the deliberate richness of the meticulously worked turfs These elegant surfaces, marked on the outside in broad bands or grids of mustard fulvids lucid gray-greens, sea and firmament blues, along with black and white, are toned down from Smith's works of a not many years ago, when figure and surface of land competed fiercely for attention. The appeal of these paintings is a distorted one. They can stymie or enchant, according to the viewer's sympathies.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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