Michael David at Knoedler - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

For more than a decade, David's overriding relate to has been to infuse richly painted abstract compositions with multiple layers of meaning by the agency of embedding in them simple, suggestive shapes and types Early on, the worked up extremely thick paint-and-wax surfaces on thick, shaped canvases. Later he unraveled similar surfaces on multipart, multilevel rectangular canvases. More newly he began to open up windows in the compositions and paint clearly recognizable objects

In his fresh "Wolfen Series," David has synthesized all of these disclosures in subtle, elegant paintings that exhibit a harmonious relationship between image, earth execution and meaning, where no individual part dominates the others. Generally, each painting consists of a single rectangle of copse bordered on all sides by the agency of meticulously joined boards that work for as both frame and extension of the composition. The anonymous construction of the support is firmly denied by means of a deep, dense tapestry of paint and wax.

At the heart of each painting is an area reserv for a simple image, of the like kind as a target or a Star of David, inscribed in a near-monochrome field of wax. It is the image that refer tos more verbal, literal meanings. In The Silver Cane (for RM) a black bull's-eye discharge through with white and r can be read as a chart of the solar a whole with the planetary orbits outlined in the reaching far down blackness of space. Yet when restoreed in white, in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, this image assumes a clear kinship to Jasper Johns's white target paintings, a respect vastly different in character and have feeling Although David exercises much economy in his range of motifs, he exploits the multiple meanings each carries end the ways he presents them.

The paint surface of the nonfigurative parts of these pieces increase the depth ofs the poetry of the work. David results a wordless beauty that meshes consummately with the more specific allusions of the motifs. For example, surrounding the central image in The Silver Cane is a broad expanse of layer on layer of vigorously brushed paint, scraped and rubbed away in places to reveal underlying strata. The deepness of these passages of undefiled painting encourages sustained scrutiny upon the part of the viewer. The visual richness of these passages can impart of the like kind a feeling of age and history that you imagine that you glimpse bits of the past as you scan the surface. This almost archeological faculty of perception is often enhanced by David's choice of ancient imagery, of the like kind as the Star of David in The clash Headed Peter or the fragments of medieval-style lettering in alphabetic character to my Father (II).

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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