Hunt Slonem at Helander - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

pursue Slonem's most frequent subject for the past several years has been tropical birds in cages. Slonem uses background fields to densely compact space, sometimes revealing dimensionality, other times not. upon top of the painted image, Slonem scratches in the wires of the cage with the edgeless end of a paintbrush. There is an obsessiveness to these cage lines, about half an inch apart, covering the entire canvas, However, it is not necessarily as simple a case of civilization encroaching upon nature as one might expect

In his greatest in quantity recent show, the scratch marks repeatedly largely obliterate the underlying image; this is especially evident in the small paintings, usually les than sum of two units feet square. In the larger paintings, Slonem gives himself compass to make a cohesive statement. Haitian fasten is an intentionally dense confusion of space. The painting becomes a ritualistic display proffered to a higher power. Tropical birds and strands of vegetation sit calmly in this offering, along with the ringlets of rope that make shell-like spirals. The transparency of the orange-yellow field is in striking opposition to the thickness of other Slonem fields and gives the work a shimmering lightness.

cerulean Picul and Blue Moon proffer a revealing contrast. The former is heavily blott by the agency of the frontal, rectilinear crosshatching. The bright colors behind-- oranges, goldens tans--are rendered obscure. It is practically impossible to hazard a gues as to what the forms signify. The single clear object is a white moonlike globe hovering in the midst of the turgid impasto. An not divisible by 2 barrage of tonalities-gold, flat grayish azure dull orange--is mashed together through the hatching, which remains the clear bring under rule In Blue Moon, by contrast, the crisscrossing cage bars disappear into the rich amethystine and blue-green space of the painting's overcast depths Maroon curls are visible at the top, and the hubcap satellite is but one identifiable control in the darkness. A luminous toucan, verdant parrots and large bird-of-paradise leaves are clearly defined. The shocking gold-colored of one bird also stands out

In Cockatoos, behind the usual cage bars, against a dark, shut firmlyed space, two splendid white birds take flight or alight, their wings' motions echoing each other and contrasting to a seated pair of facing lovebirds and another solitary specimen. The elongated infinity sign dividing the canvas into halves appear to bes natural. The cage, finally, signifies not just man's encroachment upon nature (though this is a long-standing implication in Slonem's work), on the contrary the confines that nature places upon any life.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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