Elliott Puckette at Paul Kasmin - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In her first solo display Elliott Puckette paints a filigree world of undulating curlicues and corkscrewing, tendril-like lines that dance across her uninflected black soils like fireflies swimming in inky darkness. Each individual of the six paintings upon plywood (the largest is 48 by dint of 60 inches, the smallest 24 inches square) included in this exhibit is a decorative variation upon the theme of allover painting.

Puckette 26 brings to her work the labor-intensive attention to detail of the lace-maker and the loving devotion of an illuminated-manuscript painter. Actually these nooses and spirals aren't painted at all. Rather they've been etched--scratched away with a razor blade--from the black surfaces single tiny patch at a time. You realize these things take a drawn out time to make. Her proces is simple level if her results are not. Kindergartners make drawings this way. First you color a piece of paper, then you overlay the entire sheet with black crayon, then you scrape away the black to reveal the colors beneath. Paul Klee had occasion to exercise this technique. It's magical and frolic and it can eliminate self-criticism. The question remains, however, as to in what manner beneficial the elimination of superego strength is to Puckette's art.

Puckette's work is childish in a very strange way, but it's also quite adult--it makes you have feeling more than you would in brow of a child's drawing. she paints a pale white loam occasionally flecked with subtle colors, then coats the surface with ink. She maps on the outside a drawing (you can sometimes make without part of its ghostly image), then sits down to scrape it away. the works have garbled, foreign-sounding titles: Prysmieno, Malec, Kazunk or Wong Wong These move round out to be the nicknames Buster Keaton is knows by the agency of around the world. (Do we have a nickname for Keaton? We should.) The titles help to hold fast the work buoyant, too.

Puckette is not trying to come by at anything profound. Her work is unpretentious and guileless. she is able to call up an ethereal space that ranges from medium-deep to shallow. And there is a visual music to her paintings-- something 18th hundred in character. But the work doesn't full escape its narrowness of technique. It lacks inventiveness, settling instead for device. It's a beguiling beginning, on the contrary in order for the work to attain a distinguished faculty of perception of wit or formal virtuosity, another simple body needs to be added to the mix.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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