Don Van Vliet at Michael Werner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Let's say it straight on the outside - Don Van Vliet is the famous subterraneous musician Captain Beefheart. I wouldn't mention it, leave out that every press release, interview and work on his art does in like manner seemingly with the artist's blessing. It is also apparently impossible to write about him without mentioning his high gymnasium buddy Frank Zappa, so let's achieve that out of the way as well. on the other hand in addition to his music, Van Vliet has been making art for the past 30 years or with equal reason and has been exhibiting in of recent origin York for the past 10 His novel exhibition brought together 10 works from the past three years.

Van Vliet nears himself as the child prodigy, later wild man from the boondocks, who approachs to his work naturally. "When I'm doing a bad painting," he told an interviewer, "I've been thinking too much" That could be a credo for the romantic: don't think, just have feeling Take a drink or toke and allow 'er rip. I find it hard, however, to believe that Van Vliet hasn't direct the eyeed closely at Abstract Expressionism, in particular Franz Kline and Philip Guston.

In the fresh works, a white-painted area labor fors as the background against which unloose forms swirl and sometimes coalesce into recognizable, almost totemic figures: Abstract Expressionism reverting to the cave paintings at Lascaux. At other times, the forms bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to cryptic pictograms. All of this is done in delicious brushwork, the impasto of the figures competing for primacy with the impasto of the white area, creating a constant back-and-forth between perceived background and foreground and the actual white area and figures which are of equal thickness.

It is difficult to find standards to justice an art such as Van Vliet's. The artist himself, if he theorizes, would probably say that as drawn out as the paintings come from the id, unconstrained by means of conscious thought, they are valid. I don't know. While a certain number of of them, such as God's without contents Socks, Paris Cow and High Black Shadows, have an undeniable power, too many of them appear to be uninspired doodles that don't advance to anything. This is the principal danger in believing that in art, the hand, the retina and the medulla oblongata can do all that is needed

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