Alan Uglow at Stark - painting, New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

a certain quantity of of the slowest art in town has been upon view at Stark recently, and Uglow's exhibition was no exception. This English artist's first one-person exhibit in New York since 1990 consisted of four 7-by-6-foot paintings and single large floor piece. Meticulously placed, three of the paintings were propp upon small wooden blocks against the walls of the gallery's main space, while the last painting was hung in an adjacent range paired with the floor piece. Recalling the spare formalism of early Jo Baer and John McLaughlin, Uglow's signature mode of speech of simple geometric forms, flawless surfaces, restricted palette and controll presentation remains in force.

The acrylic-on-cotton paintings are all titled Standard, referring to standard issue instead of standards to lift on high A hard-edged narrow single-color band (dark verdant bright green-blue, deep red-brown, clean red) borders the four sides of each painting's seemingly uninflected white surface. A horizontal band divides each painting in half, with the exception of the red-bordered work, which has three divisions. These colored bands continue around the couple vertical edges--also white--so as to bisect them. At first glace, the format of the paintings present the appearances to be the same. upon closer inspection, though, horizontal gray or cream-colored stripes appear, subtly differentiating a surface made up of white and off-white fields that are extremely shut in value. White has always been essential to Uglow and was no les important in this grouping, linking the paintings with each other and the wall, creating ambiguous and shifting relationships between the canvases and the white walls of the gallery.

The overriding theme of the paintings is the way the colored border subserves as a framing device, as the pair mediator and barrier. The format of the borders is based upon the outline of a soccer field, grounding the abstract--colloquially, as it were--in the world. beneath scrutiny, a few additional images emerge: small, slightly raised rectangles (in individual instance matched to the frame color, the quiet pale gray or off-white), symmetrically poised near the corners of the various divisions and anchored to the cutting side adding a quickened beat to the paintings' periodical emphasis These froms resemble paper fasteners or tabs, a nod to Ryman, perhaps, and his fascination with the hardware of art-making.

The elongated, truncated, pyramidal shape of the 15-foot floor piece at first recalled that of a Toblerone candy bar. The work is in fact patterned after the ad-bearing barriers ground around the edges of soccer fields. The faces of the 5-foot sections are variously overspreaded with galvanized metal or gray or pale gold-colored lacquer; one face of the middle section is left lay open to reveal the frame mode of building reiterating the notion of the frame. While the piece is handsome and provides a point of comparison for the paintings, Uglow has used other juxtapositions in the past to better effect

Finely and dispassionately crafted, utterly logical, these smooth pieces yield an ensemble of stunning clarity. Taut, exquisitely pitched, testing our perceptions, these works are not for those in a hurry; time, as it happens, is upon their side.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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