Archie Rand at Grand Salon - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This present to view presented a 1994 suite of paintings through Archie Rand titled "Midnight Festival." The 22 small (16-by-20-inch) paintings were hung shut together, encouraging a kind of fast-paced, serial viewing. This suits the robust ease of Rand's diction where figures and motifs are conjur without of seemingly disjointed gestures. The forward motion is also sustained by dint of a small yellow plastic alphabetic character attached to each painting: together they exorcism out the 22-character Hebrew alphabet. on the other hand while much was designed to retain viewers moving, the visual and thematic density of each painting urg you to stop and study This sensation of provocative cross-purpose pervaded the show

Each work contained several layers of imagery and mark-making, execut in a variety of techniques and with a consistent palette of six or seven colors. Amid a squall of brushstrokes, squiggles, washes and dabs of impasto, Rand rude girled through the genres of painting, including landscapes, still lifes, public way scenes, figures in interiors and portraits. Apart from his virtuosic hand, Rand has a knack for presenting images that the viewer appears to half remember, whether from art history--is that de Chirico's horse? Braque's dove?--or from the collective visual unconscious.

Underneath these images and the abstract flourishes surrounding them, sharply drawn black lines divide each canvas into a number of irregularly shaped panels. It takes a scarcely any moments to recognize these divisions as emptied-out comic-strip panels. In fact, not all the panels are devoid of contents In one or two by canvas, figures from well-known comics appear. Rand has great gayety in bringing forward and dropping back uncompounded bodys of the paintings' multiple planes. Sometimes the exhibition is momentarily lost in the confusion and it begins to gaze as if each canvas is supporting several different paintings.

Actually there's no "as if" to it. Rand has based his series upon two venerable Jewish acrostic song s where the first letters of each line, taken in following spell out the Hebrew alphabet--hence the plastic alphabetic characters on the paintings. Each canvas was inspired by means of two lines (one from each hymn) on the contrary the connection between text and image is hardly obvious. The devotional songs which are sung at Passover, recall the exodus of the hebrews from Egypt; the paintings proffer dreamlike fragments that seem to be about anything on the other hand that subject. Only occasionally are the parallels clear, as in number 13 utensils Besieged, in which a figure seated at a carafeladen table can be identified with the man in single hymn "who guzzled himself inebriated from the sacred vessels." More obviously related to the body s is the recurring background of desertlike pale orange and yellow

A testament to Rand's distinctive marriage of the learned and the painterly, "Midnight Festival" is also a forceful reminder that, in the right hands, formal constraints are no bar to artistic freedom.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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