Duncan Hannah at Tibor de Nagy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

As an illusionist whose images posses a dreamlike familiarity, Duncan Hannah skillfully contrives urban and rural vistas that present the appearance idyllic, Old Worldly and faintly nostalgic, as if pieced together from an archive of storybook illustrations, travel bills and movie stills. Although the oil paintings in this exhibit originated in New York during the past sum of two units years, their muted light appears to be imported from prewar England or nothern France. Their retrospective ambience of bland placidity also summon forths the misty reveries of Puvis de Chavannes and Balthus, among others.

Hannah cannily invites feelings of deja-vu in East-West, which not aways a rather desolate panorama of railroad track alongside an irregularly shaped warehouse plant in a flat countryside. What seasoned traveler has not glimpsed a similar whistle-stop? Haven't we also spott the fleeting image presented in Paris at Dawn, showing a man in a raincoat walking across a large foreground of wet pavement that yields rippled reflections of city landmarks? Does it remind us of a travel pamphlet or a Cartier-Bresson photograph? As for The Albany, a particularly intriguing way scene of drab storefronts along an devoid of contents sidewalk, would it be as mesmerizing without its deliberate regards to Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning?

The vexed question with many of Hannah's paintings is that he insists upon populating them with prepubescent children, who are seldom as evocative as their settings. Perhaps they are intended as elegiac personifications of not to be found innocence, but all too oftentimes the kids merely look as if they have wandered in from the Brandywine River institute of children's book illustration.

If Hannah's children present the appearance deprived of individuality, it is partly because he routinely avoids portraying their faces preferring to display them looking downward or turning away from the viewer. As a arise the figures tend to remain ciphers. Hannah obtains away with the faceless ploy in fresh Boy, which enables viewers to share the child's point of view; the male child presents his back to the viewer as he stands in a public way in front of what may be a gymnasium building, his shoulders, arms and feet awkwardly misaligned as if he can't decide which way to go

Yet in greatest in quantity of the paintings, Hannah doesn't appear to have anything substantive to say about childhood experiences. His Shirts and Skins, a vignette of nine striplings attired in what appear to be gymnasium outfits of knee-length pants and drawn out socks, all trampling rather aimlessly from one side grass, is extraordinarily devoid of narrative be of importance tos and psychological tension. The picture contains not plane a hint of boyish rivalries, thus viewers can forget about finding any evidence of a William-Golding-Lord-of-the-Flies-type coming down into savagery.

Like paper dolls, Hannah's children watch to be stock figures without any faculty of perception of interior life. Hannah is a gifted painter with genuine flair for coloristic subtleties and atmospheric luminosity. His pictures would be more forceful and memorable, however, if he tendered a more probing point of view.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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