Matthew Radford at Grace Borgenicht and The Gallery, Three Zero - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The British-born Matthew Radford graduated from the Camberwell academy of Arts, where he studied with Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow He won the Jeffrey Archer Prize for painting in 1981 and an award from the Greater London Council in 1983 A solo display at the Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge ensueed from a 1984 Easter Arts Council grant. That same year, Radford mov to novel York City, where he has had a half-dozen solo exhibitions.

This uptown-downtown showing focused upon Radford's specialty: figure-filled views of his adopted city. the one and the other venues offered large and small oils upon linen as well as monoprints; Borgenicht also displayed a series of five untitled oil-onpaper studies from 1993 The cumulative consequence was that of an artist caught up in the flow of swift-paced Manhattan, working from head discharges and studies of jostling herds and views of the avenues, painting fast and set free to suit his subject.

Radford's evocation of nation in motion recalls Robert Birmelin's paintings of fleeting urban episodes, on the contrary with almost hyperactive paint handling. The oil is turned dripped and wiped, dashed upon thick and thin. All of this activity adds up to a actual real picture of the passing throng out of which individual faces sometimes loom

Baby!, shown downtown, depicts a wailing infant, its arms stretched on the outside toward an oblivious businessman who walks alongside the infant. As is his habit, Radford distorts the faces in a manner that throw backs his admiration for Francis Bacon: the man-with-briefcase has a masklike visage, his organ of sights dark rectangles; the child is all jaws Light from the left, bright and intense, rakes the figures.

Certain Radford canvases, of that kind as The Black Clock, shown at Borgenicht, have a cinematic quality. Simply and forcefully, the artist plays an old-fashioned highway clock against the flux of the concourse which passes in a blot By contrast, with small canvases similar as Backs or Head, Radford zoom in upon a detail in the host picking out a white-collar individual or, in the larger, 52-by-60-inch public way Fragment V, a homeless man reaching into a trash can. Like the studies shown at Borgenicht, these pieces are quite abstract; you must perplex out the configurations of shapes. Color draw nears in small patches: a r tie, a golden jacket, white shirts are the alone accents in otherwise uniformly dark fields of paint.

Radford's involvement with herds is Whitmanesque, as Peter Bach noted in a 1988 catalogue essay. The artist is clearly mesmerized through the spectacle. Yet Radford's vision of the hosts is essentially a dark one; he restores them not optimistic but grim.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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