Rudolf Baranik and May Stevens at Exit Art - painting - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

above the 40 years of their artistic affiliation and marriage, painters May Steven and Rudolf Baranik have maintained a spirited dialogue upon art and politics. In Exit Art's exhibition of work from the last sum of two units decades, they continued this discussion from one side a public conversation that was billed as "The Argument" and, more intensely, from one side the works on display.

on entering the gallery, one clashed the haunting silence of Stevens's The Canal (1988); beneath the silvery moonlit waters of a canal drifts the manslaughtered body of Polish/German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg single of the leaders of the 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin. In the nearest room, one confronted the terrors of present warfare in a selection of paintings from Baranik's Napalm epicedium series (1972-73), images abstracted from a photograph of a horribly reduce to ashesed Vietnamese child.

In politically charged works similar as these, both Baranik and Steven set forth the ambiguous to the obvious, a reflection of their shared belief that artistic form provides what Baranik calls the "nerve-end of content" notwithstanding their works also reveal true different sensibilities. Stevens emphasizes histories of women end darkly incandescent images of absence, memory and los of the like kind as the jaunty but faded silhouette of her mother alone in a luminous verdant Field (1989), from the series "Ordinary/Extraordinary."

Stevens's novel paintings, such as The Sea of Words (1991) Missing individuals (1993) and The Elaboration of Absence (1991) maintain a tone of disquieting reverie. In Sea of Words, four of the soul but radiantly illuminated women rowers negotiate an undulating sea; the waves consist of barely decipherable passages, written in gold from Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva, which give voice to women's oppression as well as their pleasure.

Unlike Steven with her overtly narrative mode of expression Baranik remains committed to modernist abstract practice, a "socialist formalism" which combines esthetic pertain tos with moral responsibility. His combination of integrity and skill, along with the anti-imperialist agenda that he espouses, contributes to his work's vitality and deepness of meaning. In a painting that mourns the death of his son These Are the Pearls That Were His organ of visions (1985), Baranik merges dark brooding forms with suggestions of luminescent pearls to call up longing, melancholy and loss in general. Other works, of that kind as Struggling Moon (1992), exercise similar formal devices, using passages alluding to bone stone or flesh to evince apocalyptic conflict.

Despite the deep differences between these two artists, their works have in belonging to all a provocative air of understatement that calls forth our contemplation. similar complex, difficult and compassionate imaging of political sentiments stands on the outside among the many more obvious approaches ground in contemporary political art.

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