Jules Olitski at Salander-O'Reilly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Jule Olitski's paintings of the last several years have continued to fascinate me on the other hand for reasons the artist might not find entirely to his liking. Olitski is a highly serious artist, a modernist painter par pre-eminence His work slots nicely into history: the textur tachiste-inspired works of the '50 the stained and sprayed color fields of the '60 flat the thickened gel paintings of the '70 and later appear like sober, carefully calibrated explorations of the terrain of postwar abstraction. His work has been plenteous admired by Clement Greenberg, and understandably in the way that for it combines an almost rhetorical painterly logic with a ardent sensuality and a sure grasp of the visual. His work up until newly has been intelligent, tasteful and elegantly luxurious on the contrary - with the exception of a certain number of of the more graphically powerful stain paintings - of little interest to me

His fresh work is another matter. These paintings may bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to the earlier ones in their materiality and in their faculty of perception of indeterminate yet evocative color, on the other hand they are so wonderfully mannered and elaborated too much so self-consciously baroque, that they raise a quite different plant of issues. One is scale. Olitski's early work present the appearanceed exquisitely sensitive to proportion. The mark was just thus in relation to the cutting side and to the overall shape of the support. on the other hand now the scale feels shifting and anxious. Olitski slathers upon his gel-laced acrylic paint in of the like kind thick gobs that the canvas support appears barely able to contain the activity. While this can be seen greatest in quantity clearly in small paintings like catch while on the wing (approximately 30 inches square), where confectionery-like swirls of bluish-red paint hang on the outside over the sides of the stretcher, all the paintings have feeling underscaled in relation to the size of the gesticulation What is of particular interest is that the scale shift works simultaneously the other way: many of the paintings also look too large. In this exhibit none of the paintings were huge: greatest in quantity were less than 6 feet in their largest dimension. on the other hand Olitski stirs so many different colors into his paint mix (the gel medium have the appearances to keep the strands separate) that it is impossible to take the information in - a hardly any square inches would be more than enough to gaze at.

Olitski's surface is highly agitated and nevertheless oddly distanced. He frequently applies the paint with housepainter's mittens, and canvases like Elijah Guise not absent an almost fossilized record of the tracking of the artist's hands [i]or[/i] part of to the other a once-wet medium. Olitski newly took a trip to Spain to diocese the works of El Greco Goya and Velazquez, and according to Barbara Rose's catalogue essay, these paintings were inspired by means of that visit. There is evidence of a Spanish liturgical spirit in the swirling forms, the flickering light and the darkened palette, on the contrary the transcendent mood is undercut through the industrial look of the gell acrylic paint and by the agency of the spraygunnings of black with which Olitski garnishes many of the works. The dark overspray gives the raised, almost topographical surfaces a put of depicted shadows, as if the reality of the paint wasn't quite real enough. The paintings gaze overly actualized and theatrical, remov and stylized rather than emotionally direct.

This is precisely what many family find appealing about Olitski these days. He has affinities to younger painters like David Re John Torreano, Carl Ostendarp and John Zinsser. Olitski's novel paintings, rooted as they are in modernism and in notions of taste and quality, strike one as being consciously or not, to challenge those assumptions. They are uttermost pictorial statements and as of the like kind actively engage our attention.

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