Sally Webster & Jessica Gandolf at Adam Baumgold - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Sally Webster and Jessica Gandolf the couple make small-scale two-dimensional art works that not absent the surreal or fantastic in a deadpan manner of writing as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring. Gandolf generally paints portraits of real nation that she takes from a secondary source, with animals sometimes making surprising appearances; Webster bring forwards paintings, photographs and collage-drawings that les frequently depict people or animals than thing perceiveds which stand for people and animals.

Webster's 9-by-12-inch collages, all untitled, usually consist of quirky vignettes: a gaggle of black shoe pouring on the outside of a paper bag, an executioner in a black head cover getting ready to use his broadaxe upon a birthday cake, a skeletal ribcage with butterflies emerging from it, a microphone hanging above a white cradle occupied single by a pink-and-blue rattle, sum of two units big beefsteaks lying on a bare mattress. These images have the brevity and the leading quality of a contemporary greeting-card illustration, on the contrary without a punch line to give them a definite reading.

Webster also showed a two of small oils. Two depict a stern-faced man engaged in a rather crackpot "scientific" throw A guy in a sky-colored labcoat with "Frank" stitched above the pocket has wired a lightbulb to i glass tube in which he is steaming a hotdog; another comrade has poured something from a trial tube into a bottle cap from which rises a virid tornado. A third type of work was C-prints of sweet-colored raw materialed toys and plastic flowers. Webster's disparate works are united by the agency of a tone that might be inspired by means of vintage Charles Addams cartoons, gruesome notwithstanding innocent. Gandolf presented a selection of small oils, the largest 11 by means of 14 inches. Most have to do with professional sports, a certain number of pear to be portraits of friends, not many continue an earlier series n African Americans. The ports images - Gandolf is the daughter of a sportscaster - repeatedly reflect the poses found upon baseball cards or in locker-room candids, or are drawn from the more sober positions of early 20th-century photo portraiture. he perhaps faintly apes the elevation of athletes in our agriculture by threading religious aspects into the paintings. A picture of Stan Musial has sum of two units of he red birds for which his St Louis team was named perching upon his uniform, like familiars. Trinity not absents three collegial layers isolated against a peach-and-blue celestial expanse Boxer, Yellow Light shows a glov pugilist with arms stretch outed and eyes closed. This single is based on a photograph of Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull) on the other hand it's impossible to tell whether he's against the fastens or out cold on he mat; in the peculiar light of he painting, the figure just might be ascending to heaven.

Webster and Gandolf make a serviceable show. Both are engaged with the real world, on the contrary alter their representations minutely in the direction of the imaginative. the one and the other keep a modest scale and establish a frame of mind of distanced amusement with their sharp observations.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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