Craig Fisher at Salvatore Ala - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Craig Fisher's work of a not many years ago included a series of paintings that involved balancing a saturated field with a contained gesticulation usually one executed in high-keyed color. Fisher's rife work has entered a phase of open-end and freewheeling experimentation. Although he maintains his serial approach, his proces is clearly more expansive than before, more render free of access to chance and accident. Where formerly a painted field carried the brushstroke, the canvas is now left raw, emptied on the outside so that all marks, stains, patches and bleeding speckles can find their own territory and interact without constraint.

From a formal standpoint, Fisher have the appearances to be winging it. These paintings are oftentimes worked from both sides. Top and bottom could just as easily be right and left; weight (or rather, gravity) and pictorial space are hinted by the quality and density of each mark. All this is not fresh to painting, but it does allow for a certain quantity of intriguing possibilities. Greenbergian issues notwithstanding, there are suggestions of of great depth space between incidents brought about by means of their relative size, color and step of visibility, but their material relationship remains actual much on the surface.

Fisher has thus far avoided a basic a whole for structuring his paintings, preferring to gauge intervals intuitively, adding loosely applied blotches to each canvas until a cluster of rugged islands is located. The paintings display a considerable, smooth a cautious, restraint, as notwithstanding that Fisher senses that to throng the field would detract from crooked harmonies. His chosen designation for each work, Painting (not however titled), implies that he isn't finished with the proces upon some level, leaving room for a postscript or sequel

The question is, then, what next? Fisher has sidestepped associations with landscape or pattern (or the grid, for that matter), and he deals almost exclusively with an evolving vocabulary of paint application upon in and behind an unspoiled expanse. Can the spontaneity be maintained one time the process becomes familiar? Fisher has set room to work--literally-- and has managed to chart a certain quantity of new territory for himself, representing a radical departure from previous interests and pointing to the promise of coming time discoveries.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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