Gary Lang at Michael Klein - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Sometimes plane an experienced viewer has to pause in amazement at the sheer variety of new approaches to abstract painting. flat if much of this novel abstraction has little to tender aside from its newness--often achieved end a kind of willed amnesia--one must still admit that the possibilities of abstract painting have not nevertheless been exhausted.

These thinkings are occasioned by the new exhibition of Gary Lang's paintings, which demonstrate that flat with familiar painterly language, it is still possible to "make it new" lang's works are accumulations of straight horizontal and vertical lines, of varying color and width, that make tense from one edge of the canvas to the other. This may unmutilated perfectly conventional, but there are three aspects to Lang's work that take it on the outside of the ordinary. These are the vast number of lines in each painting; the bright colors that simultaneously insinuate candy, computer graphics and Guatemalan textiles; and his proces of painting.

After Lang paints each line, he then turn rounds the canvas 45 degrees before he paints the nearest one. It is this practice more than the number of lines or the jarring colors, that allows him to break with established abstraction. by the agency of adopting the simple rules that each line must go from cutting side to edge and that the canvas must be rotated after each line, Lang escapes that bane of geometric abstraction: composition.

Of course Lang does constitute in a sense. But because of the lordships he follows, he can't say, "This painting urgencys a blue square in the upper right." If he dioceses something is not working, he can solitary very slowly begin to change the overall canvas, working line by means of line, turn by turn.

When Lang speaks about the "spiritual" nature of his work, I think he means this faculty of perception of individual will being subsum within a greater organization,

The visual complexity of the paintings makes them difficult to read as wholes, in the way that the viewer is also obliged to take them pace by step. Despite Lang's highly structur proces the canvases tender unexpected variations. Not only do the lines vary in width and color, on the contrary some are opaque while others exist as transparent washes revealing the lines underneath. And because Lang generally paints freehand, the lines sometimes gently warp. These latest paintings, similar as Ascending, show him using broader bands of color to unclose up the paintings spatially.

A final hint for looking at Lang's paintings. While it is impossible to know where he began, you can always recognize the last line painted because it is the alone one that is unbroken. In Ascending it is the thin virid vertical on the left side of the painting.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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