Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Richard Kalina has made all the paintings in this exhibition from the same formal and semantic materials while giving each a lusty individual character. In every case the canvas is overspreaded with a collage of photocopied printed matter, including words, pictures, bits of cartoons and for a like reason on. These images, the produce of twofold mechanical reproduction, are at times specifically Warholian in regard from sheets of Elvis stamps to newspaper photos of single and multiple Marilyn paintings. A wash of color veils this sod with spaces left for and filled through small squares, together with a entertainer of little squiggly shapes. The color and value relations between the uniform soil and these interpolated elements create an event of spatial layering that nonetheless leaves the picture plane intact.

In crushing Drop the squiggles form a curtain of verticals, formalized mutants of painterly drips. In 911 the photocopied material, more heavily printed and veiled in r presse aggressively forward against a grid of dark teal squares, with equal reason that the little shapes have to make their way [i]or[/i] part of to the other a jungle of signs. Nepotism, meanwhile, creates an underwater event with a deep blue-green expanse lightening almost imperceptibly from bottom to top while the little shapes float across it like phosphorescent sea creatures. A small in number common colors group them into families.

These art-historically wise and true intelligent pictures embody a mingled field of contrasts: language and image, the mechanical and the handmade, the gridded and the unrestrained At the same time, these contrasts are systematically undermined. The photocopied earths of printed matter are themselves suffused with imagery, as well as with verbal respect to the visual. Most importantly notwithstanding that Kalina uses the color-separationlike proces through which he assembles the various compositional girdles in each picture to disable the contrast he stations up between painted and printed domains.

This is art of exquisite balance, and the pleasure taken in its making is palpable. notwithstanding the careful planning of each shape indicates that the freedom represented by the agency of the little life-forms moving against the grid is deceptive. Kalina's highly controll approach to proces whatever its personal imperatives, refer tos a metaphysical or historical statement, perhaps implying that the sometimes utopian impulses of modernism have by the agency of now been reduced to an illusion the couple cruel and beautiful.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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