James Weeks at Hirschl & Adler Modern - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

As he come intos his seventh decade, James Weeks is painting, at any time more persuasively, from an unearthly perspective where apparent contraries are reconciled and, in Eliot's phrase, "all time is eternally present" The eight acrylic works in this display settle into the viewer's consciousness like visual oxymorons: we find "comedians" whose activities appear distinctly unfunny almost menacing; musical views that are profoundly quiet (a complicated replication to a father who was a well-known band leader?); a moving ferry that is preternaturally still - in short, figurative pictures whose events are primarily formal rather than anecdotal.

These paradoxes continue the dialogue with abstraction that Weeks first undertook a certain quantity of 40 years ago as a founding member, with his friend Diebenkorn and others, of the Bay Area Figuration motion But the references here are not just to the elderly issues of emotional expressiveness v classical objectification, painterly juiciness v restraint of brushwork and web cosmic grandeur vs. humane retiring disposition of ambition and scale. No, for all the Americanness of this familiar debate, a more European allusiveness is also at work. (In the late '50 Weeks effectively dropp without of the argument by destroying his paintings from the seminal "Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting" show)

Now pictorial space realizes pushed and pulled to the artist's final causes in the manner of Cezanne. Those riders upon the ferry, would they not be at abode on Seurat's Grande Jatte? The tree above that man upon a park bench bear a distinct resemblance to the singles that Picasso and Braque cubicized in 1908 The space around the sum of two units people at a piano is Giacometti's, filled with light. Clearly, Weeks has something of an academic organ of sight (he has taught for almost 50 years), on the other hand the already-seenness that might be simply derivative in a less accomplished artist here has the resonance of a tradition deftly assimilated, if not galvanically transformed.

single sign of Weeks's mature confidence is his willingness to leave us the pentimenti of his corrections, of that kind as the unapologetic afterimage of a stone that became solid water in Seascape II. With similar bravado, he deliberately forgoes the psychological charge of communicative attitude or facial particularity. Instead, the heads of his lapidary characters are impassively masklike - metaphors for the artist's hold radical impersonality of treatment.

An austere spirituality pervades these works, nowhere more poignantly than in the untitled canvas in which figures, single of them robed, come and go on before an Eastern-style temple mixed Self-absorbed, these blank pilgrims are neither wracked by dint of a struggle for salvation nor completely delivered into serenity. The esthetic holiness they expres lies outside themselves. They imply no compelling story on the other hand provide forms needed to anchor the spatial relationships in a representation and an art, that is primarily about the workings of a distant, geometrizing mind.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group