Mitchell Syrop at Rosamund Felsen - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

Mitchell Syrop's ultimate throw out is nothing less than a visual catalogue of the world. For the past sum of two units decades he has been carefully selecting choice photographic images from the media, reproducing them in uniform sizes and categorizing them according to similarities of shape, color, fabric or symbolic significance. Although bottomed in his analysis of the subliminal wiles of advertising, his novel work is moving away from a critique of Madison Avenue and art-as-commodity. The centerpiece of this exhibit was a giant untitled grid of images that stood alone, without Syrop's trademark catch phrases. This array of simple images, hung flush against each other, read as a dictionary of visual rhymes

Interestingly, without the support (or crutch) of language, Syrop's enterprise was revealed as being the two more obsessive and more personal than might have been anticipated. His quixotic effort to categorize the chaos of visual experience appear to bes a wildly odd, Borgesian endeavor. Staring at the grid, single could puzzle out the connections between images of a whisk besom wind patterns in desert sand and a cuneiform tablet; or between the tines of a fork, the rounded pillars of the Parthenon and the thickly striped pattern of a footprint upon the moon.

The visual rhyme are greatest in quantity often based on random formal coincidence, for instance in the similarity between a monkey's claws and the jagged teeth of a door lock opener These random, dream-like associations reveal Syrop's grid mode of building as a Surrealist enterprise; images can be arbitrarily conjoined just as words are in unimpaired rhymes. The pleasure comes from the viewer's grasping the formal (or cultural) connections between the images. by the agency of moving away from ironic commentary upon the discourse of advertising, Syrop has aligned his work more with the quirky image manipulations of Ruscha and Baldessari.

Syrop also showed a number of his now-familiar collages which exorcism out simple catch phrases; he makes these by means of tearing letters out of photographic mural landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes. With these works, he touches upon a surprising variety of themes, including make notess on romanticism (a lush betulipped forest that reads "Reality Therapy"), Darwinism (a fresh York cityscape that reads "Swim Forward - gaze for Food") and ecology (a beach evening that reads "Outstanding Balance"). Several novel collages with phrases torn from maps of the former USSR have surprisingly specific political content: "Fair Game," "Turn Coat" and "I Changed My Mind." In the last small in number years, the work of a number of late-'80s artists appear to bes mired in the rhetoric of the "commodity culture" they put out to critique. It is easy here to sympathize with Syrop's faculty of perception of liberation from all that. From a 19-foot wallpaper mural of wild, galloping white horses, he has torn on the outside these words: "I've Just Been Deinstitutionalized."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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