Thom Cooney Crawford at Ramnarine - Long Island City, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Crawford, who left drawn out Island City three years ago for a larger studio in eastern Pennsylvania, go [i]or[/i] come backed with a show of paintings and statuarys in this gallery over a and zinc foundry. His bronze and plaster plastic arts bring to mind--at once or in succession--the human figure, natural forms similar as trees, and architectural stylizations of the one and the other These modernist works are descendants of a certain number of of the memorable sculptures of this century; if they are les flesh-and-bone than Henry Moore's, more stolid than Giacometti's, more literal than William Tucker's, the kinship remains clear. Looking at the installation might also bring to mind Puryear or Nash or level in the case of Crawford's maquettes for more [i]or[/i] less severe and quiet public statuary complexes, Nancy Holt.

Probably this litany of recognitions is just what Crawford is after. His belong to is not so much with inventing forms as with distilling or synthesizing them from the world at large. His standing statuarys often have a treelike material part that bifurcates to suggest leg and also alludes to the female genitals. At its top the rounded pillar may spread seamlessly into a horizontal obstruct that roughly indicates arms or wings (Wingeo, 1988) or into a classicizing and composed half circle (Lunette, 1989). The standing pieces are around 7 feet tall-- big enough to have impact, to clutch their own in a public setting.

Winged Dervish is punctur by means of a single bore at its "heart," that is, at the meeting of the vertical and horizontal simple bodys There's the same kind of finished and unnatural interruption in individual of the low works, Winged Mountain and Dome (1993) a plaster landscape consisting of a hemisphere nestl within the interstice of a V-shape mountain that has a cylindrical opening at the joint. Circles are inscribed upon some sculptures, form the clod plan of the maquettes and appear in paintings like as Tee Eye (1989-90), an 84-by-66-inch organic abstraction.

All the paintings in the present to view are heavy looking and coarsely worked; the aim looks to be an almost ostentatious emotional gravity. The artist appears to strain, not always convincingly, to achieve a primeval aura of spirituality. The plastic arts share that gravity, and their surface scarification is equivalent to the burlap or brushed roughnes of the paintings. on the contrary with their wider range of associations, the statuarys are not se dependent upon communicating a single effect; they are the more satisfying portion of his oeuvre

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