Alfred DeCredico at Scott Alan - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Alfred DeCredico's art is individual of heroic gesture. His exhibition, titled "The extremity of the Hunter," is precipitoused in romanticism and has a hairy-chested, two-listed quality about it. The large works are mixed mediums upon canvas-- about as mixed as you can acquire including oil, fur, synthetic fabrics, animal bone or horns, a crutch and a neon light, to name sole the most prominent.

This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink esthetic inevitably calls to mind Julian Schnabel's work and also that of Robert Rauschenberg. Is the difference single of intent? Rauschenberg's work is moderately cold never giving away much, plane when seemingly autobiographical. Schnabel, for all his impassioned gesturings always throws a knowing glance at the audience. DeCredico appears to take his mythologizing seriously.

In a statement accompanying the exhibit DeCredico laments the confusion of recent times, as well as the los of the traditional male part as hunter and provider and the female part as "mysterious locus." He attempts to symbolically recapture the power of these characters through art. Dichotomies abound in the work: male/female, life/death, art/life, sex/death, positive/negative. A standard practice is to juxtapose a light-colored and fairly monochromatic third of the canvas with a brightly colored area of semiabstract figuration. Penis and vulva imagery are apparent through every part of The fur and animal parts affixed to the paintings function as reminders of the natural world outside the painting and as collage ultimate parts There are constant references to fluids: oil, the fluid that facilitates art, and material substance fluids, carriers of life and, in our time, carriers of the virus of death.

The Stories Men enumerate is typical. On the left "male" side an animal horn subserves as a visual pun for the place upright penis, while the right, "female" side center upon an oval shape representing the vulva. The horn is emphasized by the agency of the relative starkness of its surroundings, while the vulva shape is obscur by dint of the cryptic, elemental forms that swirl around it, reminiscent of shapes in the '40 paintings of Gorky, Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists. I suspect that DeCredico, like those earlier artists, dioceses the forms as arising from a Jungian collective unconscious.

The puzzle is DeCredico's insistence on linking his art to larger belong tos In his exhibition statement, he says that the title The Stories Men enumerate is about men's tales of their sexual prowess. He adds that the exaggerated penis and vulva move an animal lust and erotic fixation. on the other hand on the part of whom? It is unconvincing to prove and make the painting a critique of contemporary sexual mores. DeCredico's overblown rhetoric is unavoidable, plane for viewers who do not read his statement. A woman who desires to be something other than a "mysterious locus" may take offense at a painting titled Julietta's Ovaries Are What Make Her a Bitch, and the hopelessly muddl explication that accompanies the work is no help.

DeCredico is at his best in drawings where a single word floats upon inchoate forms and is played not upon against a particular image--for example, when the word 'venom" is juxtaposed with an unfolded condom. These works lack the rhetoric of the grand machines, and the lack of shouting is a relief.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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