David Driskell at Midtown Payson - paintings - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

In this exhibition Driskell, a distinguished professor and scholar of African-American art history at the University of Maryland, neared a handsome group of paintings that throw back his concern with both the African-American cultural legacy and the visual demands of painterly abstraction. retiring in scale, the works range from around 5 by means of 7 inches up to around 22 by means of 30 inches. Most often they combine water-color, mixed mediums and encaustic upon paper and collage. Although the paintings are primarily abstract, Driskell dabbles with figurative uncompounded bodys that sometimes suggest the Africanesque linear renderings of Picasso as well as the explicitly black American interpretation of the African artistic heritage place in the work of Romare Bearden.

In Banners, Candomble (1993) we rencounter a formal device frequently used through Driskell: strips of paper raggedly torn and arranged in bars across the picture plane. The paper strips flutter in an ambiguous red-orange space as if in suspension. abundant like Bearden, Driskell is a striking colorist, and his pictures oftentimes delight the viewer with lush, saturated tints gestural brushstrokes and eyecatching spatial modulations. His abstract shapes also remind of his attraction to the natural world, which looks to have played a herculean role in shaping his conception of color and form.

X is More (1992) is another color-saturated miniature, although the application of paint is more aggressive. Here the paper strips are linked together in an X form. This primitivist glyph put in mind ofs some past cultural link and also exploits a popular regard to African-American mass culture and black political sensibilities.

a certain number of of the more figurative works are slightly larger than the abstractions. In the collage and encaustic Ancestral Icon (1992) a central human form divides the painting, and sum of two units rectangular shapes are set unevenly at the figure's shoulder horizontal Flat linear hand-shapes force their way into the frame as the figure come downs into the dark hues and heavily worked floral forms lower in the picture.

Driskell's paintings are unpretending somewhat decorative works. While their scale and handling can be repetitive, they reveal an artist equally committed to folk traditions and the traditions of modernist abstract painting. Sober rather than exclamatory in vein assiduously composed, they are unobtrusively rich in painterly application and graphic detail.

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