Helmut Federle at Peter Blum - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

For this exhibit Helmut Federle exhibited six of his paintings alongside three works through other artists. Thus, Federle's small-scale abstractions, all from a series called "Basics upon Composition" and all measuring 15 3/4 by means of 19 3/4 inches, shared wall space with a 1932 Mondrian, a 15th-century Russian icon and a 1918 painting of Mont Blanc by the agency of the Swiss symbolist Ferdinand Hodler

Of the three visitant stars, Mondrian was the easiest to match up with the bars and block ups of Federle's geometric paintings. through every part of his career, the Swiss-born, Vienna-based Federle has shown a liking for constant loam rules, most notably in the way each of his paintings uses sum of two units colors, usually a slate-black and a certain quantity of variant of yellow-green. While this consistency makes Federle's paintings readily recognizable, he is wise enough to risk into occasional eruptions of painterliness and deviations from the black/yellow-green color scheme. Here the visible brushstrokes and black/ocher of Basics upon Composition LX (Bozen) showed Federle's willingness to bend his have a title to rules, offsetting the repeated compositions of thick black bands across the top and bottom with a single black vertical rounded pillar connecting them. Given the artist's first name, it is assuredly no accident that this construction forms a sideways uppercase alphabetic character H.

The inclusion of the goldleafed Russian icon intimateed that the frequent cruciforms in Federle's paintings consciously carry memories of the religious past. The Hodler painted the year he died, is a luminous, horizontal, multi-colored vision of the majestic alp, halfway between the spirituality of the icon and the formality of the Mondrian.

The risky combination of advanced in years and new was facilitated by the agency of the mathematical formula the artist used to install the present to view The intervals between the paintings were progressively doubled, thus that on the long lefthand wall there were five paintings (four Federle and the Mondrian); the narrower extreme point wall held the Russian icon and another Federle while the entire longitudinal dimensions of the righthand wall was severed only by one of Federle's paintings and the Hodler with a wide space between. Obviously, there was a logic behind the arrangement and figuring it without was a good warm-up to noticing the precise proportions of the works upon view.

Federle believes that "only by the agency of acknowledging the dignity and meaning of a work of art from an earlier time or another agriculture are we able to evaluate the present" real but the past can be used for ends of validation as well as evaluation, and a contemporary artist calling upon established masters - what Hemingway called "getting into the ring with" - races the risk of failing to fitting the standards he's set for himself. In this four-way curve there were no losers. Federle's paintings were serviceable preparation for the pleasures of Mondrian, Hodler and the icon, while those three unusual visitors to SoHo encouraged the viewer to take a lingering next to the first look at Federle's modestly sized, slow-burning canvases.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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