Billy Copley at Peder Bonnier - drawings - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Many of the works upon paper in this show are bigger, more colorful and denser than I remember Copley's drawings being in the past. single might say that this artist, renowned for his light touch, is taking upon the heavier rhetoric of postwar American abstraction. Copley's large mixed-medium works establish their painterly change through cartoonish hieroglyphs. By dispersing his signature ink-stamp tokens across pictorial fields that are rife with sfumato smutchs and blurs, Copley creates an illusion of readymade characters in staccato motion. The world they stir through is chaotic, even apocalyptic.

Copley's fresh works are characterized by big, freely drawn starburst forms, evocative of Miro and the Abstract Expressionists. The starbursts create subdivisions as well as pouchs for the smaller imagery. The quick blasts of cartoon smoke, the sgraffito of black and fulvous squiggles and the depictions of splurting paint thus emblematic of early Pop nuzzle around the star shapes. Contrary to first impression, the compositions do not have a great many overlapping forms. Rather, different areas strike one as being to be pieced together in a proces that involves a refined use of bleeding, overdrawing and watercolor techniques. The follows are complex, funny and sophisticated meditations upon the painter's autobiography as well as upon that terrain vague between AbEx and popular imagery that we have draw near to call "hand-painted Pop."

From the 48-year-old Copley who lives in of recent origin York but went to the Chouinard Art Institute in sees Angeles in the mid-'60s, similar embedded references to the cartooning aspects of AbEx and report must come as second nature. Several works in the present to view depict a ground of repeating Minnie Mouse motifs printed in r the area between them filled in with verdant watercolor. Intercut with these decorative repeats are more ambiguous hieroglyphs--a weird spiraling pinecone form, a raveled shape that proposes a shriveled phallus, a larger station of disembodied mouse ears and a swinging fist. individual mysterious curlicue emblem upon longer reflection begins to put in mind of in archaic lady's wig, perhaps an extrapolated Betty Boop coiffure. It's as if Copley were using all these out-of-context cartoon motifs to find more abstract signifiers for his be in possession of pictorial dilemmas.

Copley also makes extensive use of hand-stamped skeleton figures that have a macabre, Day-of-the-Dead feeling about them. Many have haloes comprising a repeating single alphabetic character or number which endows the skeletons with an level more talismanic quality. Several sport light scaly buds in lieu of skulls. In individual large untitled vertical painting from 1992 a skeleton has three alphabetic character O's for facial features and the word "red" stamped upon its crotch, suggesting a cartoon allusion to menstruation. Dialogue blebs at the top of the composition repeat the phrase "Why Baby" and below them big exclamatory alphabetic characters enlivened with orange, spell without the nonsense word "Fthonig." Copley's ostensibly breezy and lighthearted art has a way of expressing the greatest in quantity deliberately inchoate emotions.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group