Gerry Bergstein at Howard Yezerski - Boston, Massachusetts - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

BOSTON

Gerry Bergstein's paintings of the late '70 to mid-'80s frequently had dark backgrounds punctuated through floating, faintly Guston-like drawings of cigarettes, telephone televisions, beds, etc His late '80 to early '90 works were fierce depictions of decaying bring into view with ironic, somewhat defensive-sounding titles that transmited his sentiments about natural- and art-world entropy In his latest works, he has uncloseed up his claustrophobic layerings of fruits and vegetables to depict of great depth heavenly space.

The tone is put by the paintings' exaggerated shapes (mostly lengthy skinny verticals and horizontals), generally nonheroic scale and tentatively positive titles. Now trompe-l'oeil images of pencil and paintbrushes are sprinkled about. These existences are either tethered by strings reaching across the vast reaches of the backdrop universe (Metamorphosis), tangled up with decomposing vegetable matter against that same awesome space (Signifying Something), or sculpt into surprising three-dimensional forms perched upon the top edge of the canvas. Surrealistic, cartoonish stand-ins for the artist himself, the implements are welcome alternatives to the self-conscious melodrama of his former baroque stylings. These of recent origin works show Bergstein to have regained a feeling for the absurd.

The breathtaking Reconstruction, at 72 by means of 108 inches the largest painting in the exhibit contains the broadest, most elaborate metaphor. Its condensed imagery is a literal package of bits and pieces: drawings of simple existences on trompe l'oeil scraps of paper are overlaid with more elaborate images of fruits and vegetables restoreed as painted upon decaying bits of canvas. more [i]or[/i] less of these scraps refer to specific earlier works, of that kind as Bergstein's U.S. map painting. All this appears barely held together with exactingly realistic renderings of criss-crossed strings, the extreme points of which are often depicted as being knotted around pencils and paintbrushes. on the other hand if the brushes tether the draw as by a ropes what holds the brushes in place? This mind-bending mass of untie layers gives way at the cutting sides to a background of vast, black space. Bergstein cleverly mixes the real different scales of the parts by means of painting rounded, pitted shapes that sometimes depict fruit and sometimes planets. These breakthrough works profitably get back to his original sources of uncertainty and to his earlier invigorating cartoonishness.

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