Bill Scanga and Roy Kortick at TZ'Art - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Scanga put togethered a model suburban community, siting eight miniature houses around the gallery. The houses are really incubators, and each was in the proces of hatching a quail ovum amid a diminutive recreation of the kind of suburban tidiness and regimentation that Scanga apparently associates with his have upbringing. Each house is impressively detailed painted in bright shades of virid white and yellow, with gabled covers dormers and other scaled-down architectural details. Scanga flat provided landscaping, placing tiny bushs and trees among the cables that snaked between the houses and across the gallery floor. Each model/incubator has a glass cover panel to provide a God's-eye-view into each little household. Nestl inside were transformers and fans as well as water, victuals little knitted nests, rugs, wallpaper and hardwood floors. It's a snug domestic environment, but utterly controll in each way--which seems to be his point.

In these works the 4-H cudgel goes conceptual. Scanga combines a disarming frivolity with a serious interest in the intersection of the natural world and its wholly unnatural counterpart shaped and inhabited by the agency of humans. Other works--four pickled frog in swimming boles in glass containers photos of tree branches wrapped in what direct the eye like discarded legwarmers from the early 1980s; branches filled with cute knitted nests--crosspollinate an earnest Boys' Life engagement with nature, a distorted ecological concern, social satire and a loopy biologically allusive wit.

Scanga's plastic arts shared the gallery with paintings by dint of Roy Kortick. Kortick uses animal forms altered by the agency of a phantasmagorical imagination and a cartoonist's graphic sensibility. He paints comical/fantastic creatures and nation in complex pictorial scenarios. The works brim with childlike merriment Kortick is an effective colorist and his primitivist figure drawing organizes the canvas around basic figure/ground relations, relying upon absurdist development of form, as in Teddy Bear with Sandwich. In K and Sammy in the Park, a composition of dog, elephant and more [i]or[/i] less other beast furnishes a pictorial plane for further figurative incidents graphic changes and painterly color transformations. Kortick's work has a whimsical complexity that is immediately appealing in ways that more insistently cerebral art is not.

Scanga and Kortick one as well as the other traffic in a pervasive visual congeniality. Scanga's goofy ironies and pristine forms cheerful and superficial, discourage extended contemplation. The dense painterly symbolism of Kortick's larger works coerces extended viewing, but offers (at least for this viewer) no deeper rewards. The paintings' sweet fantasies provide a striking on the other hand momentary visual delight.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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