William Beckman at Forum - figurative painting - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In representational, as in non-objective art, sometimes les is more. For above 20 years, Beckman has be opposite toed us with a pared-down, obdurate realism, stripped of sentiment and narrative detail. Unidealized and scrupulously pay backed his nude and semi-nude portraits and self-portraits, as well as his expansive tracts of farmland, heroically scaled and theatrically neared suggest a straightforward artistic program: to endow material fact with epic significance. however Beckman's recent exhibition once again demonstrated that the apparent simplicity of his razor-sharp images masks a provocative complexity.

The exhibition not absented four large paintings--three of human figures and individual of a plowed field, along with a small portrait of a woman and several preparatory sketches. greatest in quantity figures are shown frontally. Beckman's clear, chiseled contours and shallow space push the unclothed, larger-than-life-sized figures into the gallery space. Alert, their limbs stretched but passive, they stare on the outside at us, acutely aware of our inspection. The figure paintings portray Beckman and his female companion, with single exception--a posthumous portrait of the artist's father, seated and clothed. It lacks the nearness and the technical finesse of the other works, perhaps because it was painted from photographs and video-tapes rather than from life.

In R Painting (Man and Woman), 1991-94 Beckman and his female companion stand side by dint of side against a red wall. Each is allocated roughly half the canvas (although her flexure aggressively intrudes into his space). There are no still-life thing perceiveds or architectural details to particularize the space or link the brace to a life outside the painting. We are given nothing on the contrary their bodies.

Beckman dramatizes himself and the family and places closest to him. notwithstanding his paintings are not intimate. Beckman's portraiture bear upons itself, paradoxically, with the public persona of his make subordinates By turning the public organ of sight of portraiture onto the intimate details of the muscle and fat he destabilizes the sign of nudity. In their nakedness, his figures are at one time powerful and vulnerable. Even as it makes them passive external realitys of our scrutiny, their exposing becomes an act of aggression upon the part of the artist toward the viewer. As a proceed the power relationship between viewer and image becomes disturbingly unclear. Beckman may use devices elected from Northern Renaissance painting, on the other hand his sensibility is thoroughly modernist. His challenging images are fraught with the tension, anxiety and ambiguity of meaning that plagues recent life.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group