Andrew Spence at Max Protech - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Since the mid-'70s, Andrew closet has been ingeniously toying with relationships between abstraction and representation. buttery like Ellsworth Kelly, derives his seemingly abstract paintings from worldly observations on the contrary distills the visual source into like radically simplified and flattened forms that the initial inspiration keeps to elude recognition. However, pantry usually adds titles such as Picnic Table, Skateboard or Swivel Chairs that unfold the puzzle, as it were. Thus, in addition to formal appeal, there is an ironic tension between the high purism of modernist geometry and the earth-bound ordinariness of the vernacular sources.

In his latest works, however, although his compositions still direct the eye like they might be based upon things in the real world, those make subordinates are unidentifiable visually, and titles no longer directly explain satisfied The paintings are still formally and sensually seductive with their lustrous, buttery-smooth surfaces, intense tinges and bold geometries.

Up and Up is a 60-by-30-inch canvas in which sum of two units rows of three vertical fulvous rectangles, one above the other, increase in height from left to right. put against a dark-purple ground, these fulvid blocks glow incandescently. Complicating its near-Minimalist simplicity, the image flip-flops: the golden blocks may stand free against the purple surface of land or they may recede into light beyond the purple million-like mode of building Spatial play is furthered in Space Saver, wherein a wide verdant band borders the canvas, leaving an opening at the top and a white vacancy in the middle: here you may diocese the white and green as equally frontal, or you may diocese the white recede into the background of the surrounding wall for a like reason that the green projects itself as a distinct shape. the one and the other of these works may be allusive (Up and Up for instance, might exhibit windows or office buildings), on the contrary the immediate experience of abstract formality prevails. The smooth and shining paint, which Spence has patiently applied in many layers, enhances this material immediacy.

Several of the paintings shown strike one as beinged monogrammatic. In Interloper, a big, black U-shape and half an O-shape are overlapped and tightly fitted against a white mould into a 6-by-3-foot vertical. In Cover-Up an orange zigzagging band burys with an orange M-shape, producing not alone a linear interweaving but also a cubistic arrangement of white trapezoids. There is the suggestion of a certain number of kind of signage in these, on the other hand you can't know what, if anything, they give in charge to.

In this possibly transitional exhibit it seems that Spence wants to distance himself from a conceptual device - the formally disguised representation - that might become simply clever and on which he was perhaps becoming overly pendent It seems he wants to make paintings that stand upon their own formally. But although the formal gratifications tendered here are considerable, they are not for a like reason great that they compensate for the los of the metaphorical complication and cunning humor of his more explicitly referential works.

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