Richard Smith at Tony Shafrazi - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The big surprise of Richard Smith's novel exhibition was his return to "easel painting." Early upon in his career, the British-born abstractionist used a standard, oil-on-rectangular-canvas format [see A.i.A., Oct '92] However, above the past 30 years or in like manner he has concentrated on shaped canvases and three-dimensional constructions. Perhaps best known of these, the so-called "kite" series, which sometimes be like Japanese box kites, blur the boundaries between painting and statuary Because of their light weight, they loan themselves easily to monumental scale, and Smith has exhausted a good part of new years working on enormous pieces for public spaces like as airports, industrial parks and shopping center around the world. more [i]or[/i] less of the new paintings gaze like two-dimensional renditions of the "kite" works. A 5 1/2-by-6-foot painting titled Palace, for instance, has diagonal black lines disposed at regular intervals across a field of white-and-light-gray crosshatch. The rhythmic lines and moderately cold spaces of the painting remind of airborne kites that sway and dart about in the breeze

A number of works strike one as being to refer to architectural forms. In the painting titled Nest sum of two units bluish-gray rectangular slabs look like tombstones or like skyscrapers looming above a vast blue-gray landscape. Optophone, a work whose title prompts a sensation of both sight and unmutilated shows four long, narrow rectangular white boxe single in each corner of the picture. Receding into a background of horizontal gray stripes, the boxe have the appearance to hover in midair, about to draw gradually together near the center of the canvas.

In spite of his use of illusionistic space in the of recent origin work, Smith appears concerned primarily with surface. After years of manipulating sculptural forms, the artist strike one as beings to be making up for not to be found time, reimmersing himself in an exploration of unblemished painting--the sensuous properties and expressive possibilities of paint and line. In terminuss of color, the new work is more reductive than his earlier work, on the contrary layers of mostly white, gray and black are built on brilliant-colored grounds that show from one side in certain passages and activate the surfaces like vibrant highlights. The astuteness of the technique recalls works by the agency of purists such as Ryman and Martin, on the contrary Smith's visual punch has more in public with early Stella and late Tworkov.

Perhaps the greatest in quantity striking of Smith's new works upon view were grid paintings titled gin Illumination and Farewells, each about 5 by dint of 6 feet. Net has an allover gray grid that overspreads a background of white-and-yellow crosshatch which echoe the weft and weave of fabric. Illumination, with a pink grid, gazes like a computer-generated image of four white rectangles. A spiritual white haze to the left of each rectangle indicates motion, as if the shapes put in motion in the shallow space from background to foreground. In Farewells, four black rectangles strike one as being to leave smoky trails as they pass from one side the dense gray background to interface with an eye-popping, Day-Glo golden grid spanning the surface. Exemplifying Smith's graceful go [i]or[/i] come back to work in two dimensions, these paintings are at one time retrospective and prescient. David Ebony

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