Peter Nadin at Brooke Alexander - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Peter Nadin's formal art training began in his native England and included his in all senses to a portion of Kurt Schwitters's third Merzbau. That collaged and painted tighten of stone wall, in its material catholicity, haunts everything he has produc since coming to fresh York in 1976: early-abstract paintings, late-'70s Conceptual casts with Jenny Holzer and other artists, and new canvases that combine a variety of figurative and formal affects Through it all, Nadin has resisted the compressing to identify his works with a single "author" or to restore the complexity of his being to a single, consistent self In 1978 his major work consisted of "Peter Nadin," a studio equipped with peephole from one side which viewers could observe his labors in proces and where other artists successively added their have a title to contributions.

In 1982 feeling that Conceptualism had become a dead extreme point Nadin suffered an emotional collapse that squeeze outed itself in baby-talk writings and uncooked almost infantile images. As he reclaimed aided by extensive readings of Blake, the artist began to disclose a coolly inclusive vocabulary of painterly phraseologys - expressionistic, hardedged, Color Fieldish and more. These distinctive visual manners have served both to communicate and restrain his frequently impassioned content, much as the mechanics of versification obey to condition and define rhyme Nadin is himself a author of poems who sometimes matches his stich to his pictures and/or inscribes written passages among the compacted images of his canvases. His real might however, lies not so plenteous with the word as with the poetics of visual space. Incongruous figures, seen from inconsistent perspectives, are brought together in magically commodious profunditys and fused with a consonance of emotional tone. like works are, he says, erected as visual poems.

The seven paintings and three drawings in this exhibit embrace the widest possibilities of figurative art - psychological, social and genuinely formal. Hooton's Lightning (The Child Wills the Accident to Happen in the way that the Rescue May Begin) guiltily summons a childhood incident: the four-year-old Nadin, seeing a Lightning jet from the vicinity of Hooton village hover low over his bosun-chair swing, fantasized its fiery crash and his hold heroic rescue of the injured pilot. The Apostate's Cros contrasts the painterly lushness of swimming lake and sky, and the gladnesss of wine, art and children, with the grimness of a black-attired vicar and a crucified Christ. Ruefully the framing script laments the "cruel joke" end which we begin life in fervor alone to "Quickly fade and cool/ To the devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat comfort of/ A cold earth." In Thread, a needle and filament are the reach outed arm of a humanoid figure that overlies and stitches together the disparate ultimate parts of woodland, a stone arch and a male child on horseback.

It would be futile, and inappropriate, to search for too systematic an order in these composite exhibitions Nadin infuses his works with oppositions which, he maintains, loan themselves not to harmony on the other hand to a tenuous equilibrium - "the condition in which we find ourselves, between life and death."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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