Jim Isermann at Sue Spaid Fine Art and Richard Telles Fine Art - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

With the revival of interest in Pattern & Decoration, Jim Isermann's paintings, wall hangings, stained glass and furniture assemblages have emerg as a crucial link between 1970 P & D and the of recent origin generation of funky formalists. The populist streak in Isermann's work - his use of craft-inspired mediums like quilted fabric and his regards to |60s suburban design - has frequently overshadowed his formal achievement, a dazzling amalgamation of hard-edged geometric abstraction, detonation and Op art. This complexity was everywhere evident in solicit Spaid's small but succinct overlook of Isermann's 1980s works.

An untitled 1985 painting of three overlaid daisies in clashing colors is no nostalgic nod to flower power; a slight asymmetry transforms it into an eye-skewing research of the oval shape that makes up the flowers' pattern. A six-sided chair with oval seat cushion, with its stark geometric conceit on the eye-shaped CBS logo functions the pair as the perfect TV addict's chair of state and as a mind-bending assemblage of orange, gold-colored and blue ovals and circles; a seven-sided painting accompanies the piece. A 1989 work mixes botanical and automotive motifs, as Isermann effects half in paint and half in shag carpet, a four-lane-cloverleaf abstraction above a pattern of concentric squares. Here the illusionistic deepness of the cloverleaf wreaks havoc with the order of the work, keeping one's organ of sights bouncing, as well, between the flat, painted surface and the cushy spring of the rug

At Telle Isermann's fresh hand-pieced fabric wall hangings play similar perceptual games. These untitled works are made from assorted fabrics printed with manifold multicolored patterns, thereby upping the ante of his traditional chevron, herringbone and plaid designs. In single work, a varied pattern of contrasting daisy-motif fabrics, color-coordinated in neat ranks zigzags wormlike across a flowered field. The viewer must many times fight to pick out the overall pattern amid the conflicting lines and colors of the original fabric designs. nevertheless the homespun connotations of the quilt-like technique warm up the moderately cold high-modernist perceptual games; these are intellectual works single can cuddle up to. Like all of Isermann's varied productions, the fabric hangings luckily recontextualize hard-edge abstraction, demonstrating the lasting appeal of patterning.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group