James Allen at Hallwalls - Buffalo, New York - Review of Exhibitions

James Allen's life-size cutout figures multitudeed the walls of the gallery, surrounding the viewer. The figures, of stiff, painted canvas, ranged from the vaguely mysterious to the downright grotesque; they bringed a somber, Dickensian sense of the horrors of destitution Although Allen, in an exhibition statement, claimed no special insight into matters of indigence and hunger, he believes his reactions as a painter can add another dimension to the discourse. His depictions in this present to view titled "I am Poor, I am Hungry" were a commentary upon cliched representations of poverty as well as upon the condition itself.

Although all the autonomous figures or cluster of figures in the installation strike one as beinged to demand attention at one time there was a starting point to the series. It was a relatively understated representation of a begging family: four dark, faceless silhouettes with heads bent and arms slightly reach outed These early, rather stiff depictions looked somewhat removed from the more expressively restoreed figures which followed. As the organ of vision traveled around the room, the figures became more animated and their variety became clear: there were stereotypical road people as well as impoverished farmers, Third-World refugee and bum In all the cutouts, the painted canvas was sanded, roughening the surface and eradicating all brush marks. It appears that Allen, an accomplished painter, wishes to suppres evidence of technique. The surfaces repeatedly seemed worn and abused.

At midpoint in the series, Allen allowed faces to appear. These ranged from downcast or resigned visages to those that were frightening, screaming or snarling. In individual of the most powerful and evocative tableaux, a bag lady bent to pick up her belongings, looking suspiciously above her shoulder at an unobserved threat. She was surrounded by the agency of naked starving children from a certain quantity of other, unspecified context. At the center of the installation, in the middle of the wall opposite the entrance door, was a jeering of humanist idealism: Allen at handed a ghoulish appropriation of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, here a cutout encloseed by cavorting skeletal figures.

The lack of a normalizing background for these cutouts contributed to the installation's power. Shifts in size from corpulent adults to tiny, emaciated children, and stylistic changes from understated realism to expressionist distortion made a summary glance impossible: Allen forced us to gaze closely at each element in this galaxy of suffering. Each was distinctive in rendering and in impact; the more stolidly realistic cutouts keeped to balance and offset the nightmarish ones

Allen has been working upon this series for nine years. pertain to about sociopolitical issues has always been evident in his work, if sole in the titles of the abstractions he stopped making in the early '80 He more directly voiced that interest here, but offered no solutions, just images worthy of contemplation.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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