Robert Harms at David Beitzel - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

At 33 Harms reveals - as he has from one extremity to the other of many showings over the past decade - an amazing precocity of gift and spirit. His canvases, granting fundamentally abstract, are also adamantly committed to the depiction of the slightly sublime nature of the Hamptons (where he has a house) - not in like manner much the look of the countryside as an on-the-spot experiencing of it in genuinely painterly terms.

In his highly personal synthesis of '50 Abstract Expressionism with '70 Lyrical Abstraction. Harms approachs up with wild collations of light and color (ultraviolets, acerbic fulvids joyous whites, cerulean, even a kind of international orange). His hectic, actual messy and very handsome free-form pats are chaotic all, yet also near-symphonic in their implicit manner of making Fallen Yellow features a central boiling spring of yellow complemented by calligraphic thumps of black, exquisite daubs of muscle and fat pink, and some daring dust blues to the left t and right vertical cutting sides One of my favorites is Three R Tulips. The tulips, in varying states of heart-rending decay, are more completely pictured than most of Harms's other motifs. This work have the appearances like a definite breakthrough painting for single who a few years ago was satisfied with evocation above re-creation.

One of the nicest features of this exhibition is the novel feeling of liberty to the canvases, arrived at, strangely enough, by giving more head to specifics. Harms has had to fight hard for this turn round of painterly events. A certain celebrity has attended everything he's done for the last 10 years, as individual of the late Henry Geldzahler's favorite "kids" (they met upon the Hampton Jitney), as Joan Mitchell's studio assistant and virtual lonesome pupil, as one of the chic-est Abstract-Expressionist prodigies around. Perhaps all this went to his head: earlier paintings, notwithstanding that auspicious and beautiful, were airier. more decorative and les expressive,. and Mitchell's name kept coming up in reviews. I don't think it will for a like reason much anymore. Harms's new works have a grander, darker metrical composition a wondrously livid palette and a fresh bluntness of stroke. Harms has lay aside the influences of de Kooning and Mitchell for a walk upon the wilder side with 19th-century British and American landscapists like gymnast and even Cole.

All the changes advance to a head in a work like Hollyhock: the rap is thick and gelatinous; colors are mut magentas and leaf-greens, laced with be rent asunders of salutary whites. His novel identification with nature leads him to depict it as well as essentialize it, and his nature imagery somehow or other seems sacred. Harms is moving toward becoming his have a title to man, all the more in the thrall of Mother Nature.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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