Jan Frank at Salvatore Ala - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Jan Frank's novel oil, ink and alkyd paintings upon plywood are hard to pin down. They are large (8 feet square and 6 inches thick) on the contrary still intimate and drawinglike. They are elegant and clunky deliberate and casual, abstract and referential, lush and dried up-to-date and old-fashioned. He begins by means of constructing the support: two sheets of plywood point aimed ated together, aligned vertically and attached to a 6-inch-deep chest Frank sometimes paints this loam a thin white, but more repeatedly he leaves it as is. His energetic black, linear marks thoroughly soak into the raw thicket and yet, unlike paint stained into unprimed canvas, the pigment not at any time becomes one with the surface. This feeling of disjunction is owed in part, to the plywood's insistent wood-grain pattern. on the contrary something else is going on

Frank present the appearances to be operating with a knowing disregard for the niceties of traditional pictorial cohesiveness. It's not that he doesn't paint well. There is dooms of classically good abstract mark-making here, and enough overpainting and erasure to assure the viewer that the artist is carefully feeling his way end each picture. But there's also a take-it-as-it-comes spirit, an appealing raffishness that's throw backed in the titles of the paintings, all named for racehorses.

In a work like happy Eight, for example, there is a line of sprayed purple paint upon the left-hand panel - something quite noticeable in a painting that is, for all intents and designs black and white. Frank did not spray it himself; the line was upon the sheet of plywood when it came from the lumberyard. It stayed in the painting, on the other hand not as a fortuitous accident, something to be worked and kneaded into the composition. It remained, according to the artist, because it didn't matter, because he didn't really diocese it. Plywood, honest and workman-like, the staple of construction work, functions as a precondition of Frank's paintings. The factory marks and stamps are left unaltered, and while visible and important, like the woodgrain pattern, they operate upon a different perceptual level than the images.

The same disjointedness characterizes Frank's art-historical regards In a painting like Spikes Heel, with its calligraphic twists and jabs of black, there are real deliberate allusions to Pollock, de Kooning, Guston, Mondrian, level van Gogh. But the respects seem oblique, both formally and emotionally. You have feeling them more than see them. While these paintings might in more [i]or[/i] less ways be close in spirit to those recent masters, in many other ways they are different. They are more lay open to ambivalence and discontinuity, to clashes of materials and techniques. It is that provisional quality, explored by means of other abstract painters of his generation, that propels Frank's paintings away from his sources and makes them true much of this time.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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