Willy Lenski at O'Hara - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

In a 1991 catalogue statement, Willy Lenski located the antecedents of his work in "Symbolism's traditional realm of the dream, the hallucination and the epiphany." Certainly the 18 small paintings in this present to view all executed in 1992 or '93 take us into a border state between naturalism and fantasy, evoking a timeless region (some figures would be at place of abode in the late 19th hundred some in the America of the 1950s) where the controlling sensibility balances precariously between sentimentality and dread. Gone for the greatest in quantity part, are the all-black encircles that once left Lenski's figures spotlit at the dead center of each composition. Now the "natural" world of field and grove envelops them in moderate detail, admitting with something other than natural effect

What exactly are they up to, these enigmatic, oftentimes pubescent characters who linger amid dimness in, literally and figuratively, the middle ground? It is ofttimes hard to say, but discovery and transition--often in the form of indirect sexual learning--are belonging to all themes throughout. The flat, almost cartoonishly returned children of Remnant, for example, might be unbearably saccharine did we not presently notice a visual pun: the young stripling standing next to a phallic shovel is suggestively offering a rubber ball to the girl who leans back against a knoll and raises her short dres exposing her panties. Levitating for Apples, in which a bug-ey young woman and an apple float weirdly above the loam is really no odder in its treatment of galvanizing knowledge than is the Edenic myth with which it resonates. In the voyeuristic Girl Watching, we secret agent upon a pretty adolescent who in turn round gazes raptly on three younger girls luxuriating in their nascent sensuality at a woodland mere Courting Lovers with Putti not absents us with the show's greatest in quantity explicitly carnal image--the bare, voluptuously circulared ass of a woman who bends above and hikes up her skirt for a still-clothed paramour. Elsewhere we diocese the traditional price of all this emergent eroticism: shows of dreary labor inflicted upon people who lug pails or push cumbersome wheelbarrows.

Paralleling this thematic emphasis upon aleatory revelation, Lenski employs an artistic proces of "discovering" figures in the irregularities of the singletone washes, usually gold or r that dominate each of his paintings. on the contrary one suspects that the practice is not all that random and unconscious, flat in inception. Witness the highly calculated Seeing Memory, where sum of two units girls on the margin between a copses and meadow half-turn to gaze back at a mysterious figure hovering among the branches. Seated in air, this visionary personage (who gazes wrapped or embalmed) may be a remembered parent or ancestor, teacher or preacher. infallibly it embodies a no longer authoritative past, for the girls in short skirts, allowing presumably chastened, are only briefly interrupted in their journey outward--toward the render free of access field, the circle of sunlight, and the adult world where the viewer awaits them.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group