Michael Rees at Basilico Fine Arts - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Michael Rees's loony work races the gamut between sterile and serious, wily and weird, farcical and bumbling. Rees is like a bad rube following a comic muse, who almost obtains it right. The floor-bound plastic arts (all from 1993) that made up his next to the first solo show evoke a zoological ludicrousness--a feeling that you're looking down at a put of pathetically piggish, trog-Iodyte creatures whose ways of moving or eating or mating are in the way that hopelessly odd that you can't imagine in what way they will survive outside Rees's warped imagination. The pieces can take upon a quasi-human pathos. You want to reach on the outside to these oddities, to touch single perhaps, or take it abiding-place as a pet.

Ree 35 is a crafty artist-- sometimes too sly for his be in possession of good, because his work can easily spill above into archness or empty on the outside into blandness. You feel like he wants to raise eyebrows-never a profitable thing. Each one of these untitled log-like statuarys sprouts fingers or, in individual case, baby legs from its extremitys or middle or top. Made of acrylic emulsion upon plastic composite (in other words, bumpy paint upon plastic tubes), Rees's recent work forgoes the messier process-oriented techniques of his last exhibit (in 1991).

He asks profitable dumb questions like, "How would this whirl move around? How would it eat--or foster itself from being eaten? by what mode would this thing reproduce?" inquiry a given work carefully and you can determine exactly by what means it might move by the direction and the placement of the fingers (or other vestigial appendages). individual work drags itself along from the brow another (a hexagonal mutation) tiptoes across the floor, while a brownish rhombus shape has fingers sprouting, antenna-like, from the top and no "legs"at all (this is the best piece in the show) His colors are thus nondescript as to stir curiosity. A tilting centipedelike thing with fingers at its midsection stands tentatively upon beige particle board. This creature attempts to camouflage itself through blending in with its base. Not bad.

on the contrary there is a troubling repetitiveness to Rees's present to view He seems to have hit upon an idea and simply not exhibited it enough. At first, l lov thinking about these truncated, clubloot impossibilities; later, the dachshundlike tubes got to be a big bore. Rees's art works best when it's beneficial the way a really bad horror film is useful You go along with it without asking for what cause [i]or[/i] reason You follow its outlandish internal law and you're satisfied. on the other hand right now Rees seems to be running upon autopilot--he seems to have settl upon a formula too soon. Let's trust he changes course, because this display had a saucy uncouthness and a shadowy impropriety about it that recommend ample room for growth.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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