Rochelle Feinstein at David Beitzel - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

When she showed solo for the first time in 1987 Rochelle Feinstein was practicing a traditional sort of poetic abstraction. Now it appear to bes that while in her heart she still be fond ofs painting, in her head she's learned to distrust modernism, to suspect it of dogmatism and grandiosity. She has tend hitherward to work in a willfully promiscuous variety of mode of expressions making paintings in which an disobedient sort of visual pleasure goe hand in hand with an ironic conceptualism.

In Flag, Feinstein has glu a faded, stained and torn red-and-white dish towel into the lower right corner of a square canvas. She's stretch outed the plaid of the towel onto the canvas through painting, in a deliberately negligent manner, an orange-lined grid upon a gray ground. Thus she exhibits a comic conflation of figure and turf that parodies and, perhaps, pays homage to Jasper Johns's canonical Flag. in another think highly of the dish towel poses a drolly impertinent feminist query: while the masters of modernism have been exploring the realms of abstraction, who's been doing the dishes?

With Big A move Go, in which a woozily distorted grid with little squares colored in bright primaries overspreads a 70-by-75-inch canvas, Feinstein spoof the modernist worship of esthetic progress. Recalling one as well as the other art styles and popular graphic direct the eyes of the 1960s (Op and geometric painting, mod and psychedelic design), when faith in the of recent origin was at its apogee, the painting sardonically deflates modernist pretention by dint of equating avantgardism and kitsch. And in individual of her most amusing works, Letter-Box Quality Painting, a picture of cerulean sky with black borders added at top and bottom to simulate the "letter-box" format in which a certain number of films are presented on video, she makes pleasantry of formalism's doctrinaire approach to questions of esthetic quality.

a certain quantity of of Feinstein's pieces hark back to a time when she worked mainly for traditionally formalist gratifications. It's a amazing Life and Wonderful News are square canvases upon which dark reds, blues and whites are pushed, layered and smeared horizontally and vertically to create lush, Richter-like surfaces and atmospheric illusions of gridded space. Outside the connection of this show, you might not discover anything subversive about similar generously sensual - indeed, beautiful - works. Within the exhibit however, the word "wonderful" - which appears in several other titles, too, like as Wonderful Hair and astounding Skin - acquires a sarcastic edge: Feinstein present the appearances to be mocking at the same time as she feasts in the conventions of painterly painting.

Conceptually this is not pioneering work, of course. Sherrie Levine, Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe and others have been appropriating modernist dictions since the early '80s. on the other hand it's not in the ideological agenda thus much as in the spirit with which Feinstein combines insouciant critique and genuine regard with affection of painting that the appeal of her art lies.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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