Object lessons - George Segal, painting, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, New York

drawn out known for his plaster-cast plastic arts of ordinary people, George Segal has not long ago begun making still-life paintings of household articles. In their dignity and quiet compassion these works invite a fresh reading of the artist.

Painting is not what first draw nears to mind when one thinks of George Segal. Prior to this spring's exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery, his last painting exhibition was at the legendary virid Gallery during the 1961-62 season. Segal's new paintings (12 from the last sum of two units years were shown at Janis, along with a single sculpture) mark a departure for the artist and still recapitulate as well the emotional themes that have move swiftly through his work for years. While filled of feeling, his classic burst sculptures - white plaster casts of ordinary men and women in banal circumstances - were given an ironic distance, or in like manner it appeared at the time, through the pointedly quotidian attitudes in which the figures were portrayed. At the same time, these real works were being seen by dint of Barbara Rose, for example, as similar in spirit to the moderately cold matter-of-fact productions of Minimalism.[1] on the contrary with 30 years' hindsight, it is striking in what way different Segal's work seems from that of his clap Minimalist or Color Field contemporaries. Little about it now reads as reproduction-oriented, technological or detached. Despite the cultural pertinence of his shoot forward Segal's aim, in the lengthy run, has been less to examine the artifacts of recent society than to affirm the dignity and worth of his human subjects

above the years, his sculpture has taken upon a certain measured cadence and weight. It has assumed an increasingly public dimension, the two in scale and intention. The fresh paintings take another tack. They bring back the private, on the other hand in an oblique way, and they do in like manner without being diaristic or self-conscious.

Segal has for quite a while now applied paint to his plastic arts but it is only newly that he has begun to make actual paintings again. These works are reasonably large, 4 by dint of 6 feet for the greatest in quantity part, but because of the outsized scale of the thing perceiveds depicted, they feel even bigger. At first glance they are simple, rather craggy still fifes consisting of a hardly any very ordinary things. A sampling of titles take an account ofs the story: Ketchup Bottle, Salt Shaker, Sugar Container; Pair of Work Gloves; bowl Saucer, Spoon; Braided Bread; Three ovums in a Dish. The paintings are done in shades of black, gray and white against either a featureless background or a simplified horizon-line tabletop. They are not only tonal, however. The grays are subtly varied, discharge through with warm pinks and a little cold blues. The backgrounds, too, become greater [i]or[/i] larger in complexity as you gaze at them. Rather than being simple settings for the facts they read as sophisticated, unstable orchestrations of space.

There is something in Segal's

existences that speaks of experience

and age. They have feeling used, but not

worn on the outside or in any way depleted

Segal's technical approach in these works is also of considerable interest, for although they are clearly paintings, they retain the tactile faculty of perception of sculpture. He begins with a plywood support, primes it with house paint and deposits down his drawing in charcoal. Then he works into it with cover with stucco texture paint, following the drawing's convolutions and rhythms. The stucco fabric paint is a thick, puttylike material, and Segal builds it up into a kind of scarified depressed relief. The painting is then finished in acrylics. upon such a surface acrylic is particularly matte and lean, almost frescolike. The knocks stay separated, with little issue of blending or smoothing, yielding a surface that is sensual on the other hand austere. The paintings look jagged hewn and lumpy, and in their workmanlike way they appear less a product of the atelier than of the building provide store - the kind of paintings you might whirl in the back of a pickup truck

The paintings' sculptural qualities were underscored in the exhibition by dint of their juxtaposition with a single piece of plastic art Woman Lying on a Bed III (1994) This black-painted tableau of a woman in her space her supine body and the rumpl bed illuminated by the agency of a carefully placed light scaly bud reads, in the context of this present to view as much like a painting as a statuary I was reminded of Lucian Freud's paintings, by the agency of the subject matter, but also by the agency of the space.

Segal's fresh paintings are expansive, and still there is in each single a sense of containment, of infolding. All the particulars hold and envelop things - a purse a shoe a work glove a bottle an ovum a cup, a salt cellar. Bread is braided, napkins are crumpl Things are tugg and streched, tilting this way and that, shakeed towards each other by a kind emotional force field. The thing perceiveds seem to take on human attributes.

There is something in the existences that speaks of experience and age. They have feeling used, but not worn without or depleted. Segal portrays the basic, domestic things that sustain us. Daily life, he strike one as beings to say, is sacramental, and the paintings mirror that view, not just in the choice of percepts but in the interior light they appear to be to radiate.