Carmengloria Morales at Lennon, Weinberg - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Carmengloria Morales was born in Chile, on the contrary her home is Italy, where she has been painting and showing since the mid-1960s. Morales's work looks a calculated dissent from the idea that gestural abstract painting is a self-contained, romantic bastion against dehumanized geometry and nihilistic monochromes. For many years her preferr format has been the diptych, with the left panel painted and the right single kept blank. The only works in which Morales varies this format are her tondos, where the circular canvas is presented alone.

This exhibition, her first in fresh York, included five diptychs and sum of two units tondos, all painted (on the left-hand panels) with the forceful, make revolveed strokes and metallic colors that have characterized her work for more than a decade. Although Morales works with a standardized gesturing the endless overpainting breaks down the individual marks. Her colors are equally interpenetrating, as in Dittico M-92-6-1 Salome (1992-93) where Cubist grays and silvers are shuffl into a more Byzantine palette of cent and gold.

individual effect of Morales's blank canvas is to emphasize the material density of paintings. The devoid of contents panel also serves as a kind of mediator between the painting and the world around it, a kind of doorsill (and rest stop) for the organ of sights More philosophically, it allows you to appreciate the enormous difference between something and nothing, while also suggesting in what manner the painter has drawn the former on the outside of the latter. Just as John Cage reminded us that silence is far from devoid of contents so does Morales's blank panel function as another kind of plenitude.

individual way of approaching Morales's work is to retain in mind two early influences: Fontana and Rothko Like Fontana she dioceses the stretched canvas as more than a nothing else but support, while Rothko (whose 1963 Rome exhibition Morales cites as having been crucial for her) present the appearances to have given her the repeated format, the notion of the painting as portal and the search for hieratic dignity in painting. on the contrary Morales's paintings are earthier than Rothko's, belonging to the sensual southern rather than the sublime north. Further, her use of gold alloy of copper copper and aluminum pigments flirts with a lively vulgarity, unthinkable in the work of her more straitlaced predecessors.

This display was beautifully installed, bringing to the gallery something of the architectural grace and stillness of an of advanced age Italian church. But within this quiet space Morales asked the viewer to contend with esthetic doubts and contradictions, suggesting that the artist's have a title to belief in painting has been hardwon as well as abiding.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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