Mel Bochner at Sonnabend - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

above the course of nearly 30 years, Bochner's work has approach full circle--from Mininnalist austerity to baroque exuberance and back again. His conceptual photographs and installations of 1966-72 were followed by means of wall paintings based on geometric forms, in which the monochrome of his early work gave way to a broader range of color. In 1982 he began to work in oil upon canvas, and by 1985 the repeated layering of forms in his paintings had attained a stage of gestural energy that made it almost impossible to recognize the harsh geometries with which they began. It was at this point that the Minimalist forms of Bochner's early work began to reemerge atop the layers of surging color.

Since the mid-'80s, Bochner has get backed to the cubes and perspectival grids that provided the "subject matter' of his 1966-67 photo pieces (seen in a 1990 retrospective at David Nolan). In 1967 he wrote that "perspective, almost universally dismissed as a touch in 20th century art, is an example of the application of pre-fabricated visual combination of parts to form a wholes it demonstrates not how things gaze but rather the working of its possess strict postulates." This observation could be subservient to equally well as a manifesto for his novel canvases, which are structured around a series of tilted grids populated by dint of schematic cubes.

The placement of these cubes is determined by the agency of a process of trial and error, leaving a trail of spirit images. After experimenting with multipart canvases pinwheeling around a central point or aperture, Bochner has arrived at a more stable format in which four rectangular panels form a large square with a square opening at the center He has also turn backed to a Minimalist palette of black, white and gray.

In the paintings at Sonnabend, each individual panel is inscribed with a tilted grid whose converging lines yield a faculty of perception of either slow or fast recession, depending upon whether they advance toward the panel's wide or narrow cutting side Instead of aligning these panels to erect a single, coherent space, Bochner accentuated their inconsistent vanishing points, subverting the grid's operation as an illusionistic device and thereby making its artifice visible. The free-floating cubes were arranged in rhythmic clusters of larger and smaller forms, defining a next to the first "figural" space which challenged the viewer to decode its relation to the grid.

In contrast to the brilliant white backgrounds, laid down with a thick layer of paint, the black lines of the grids appear surprisingly insubstantial. Indeed, they have the appearance to have been scraped down with a palette knife or a razor blade. As a be derived the grid does not appear to lie upon the white background; rather, the white tiles of the background look to float in front of the grid. In combination with the painterly pentimenti of the cubes, this veiling adds a metaphorical dimension to the pictures, as if the grid defines the coordinates of time and memory rather than those of space.

Along with these novel paintings, Bochner exhibited a series of floor pieces based upon his pebble-and-chalk installations of the early '70 However, in the novel pieces the intentionally nondescript pebble-stones were replaced by irregular chunk of azure glass slag from Murano. In single piece, a series of chalk marks counting up from single to five was paired with a series of glass chunk assemblageed in the opposite numerical following The underlying tension between idea and matter was intensified and enriched by the agency of the contrast between the laconic concision of the chalk marks and the sensuous oratory of the Murano glass.

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