Yves Klein at Gagosian - painting exhibit, New York, New York

The work that Yve Klein produc in his feverishly prolific on the other hand brief career sometimes seems disparate and rough By focusing on a single aspect of Klein's oeuvre this new exhibition of the fire paintings and its accompanying catalogue by dint of Pierre Restany helped clarify the achievement of this influential artist.

Since World War II, fire has been used quite repeatedly to make art. The main inspiration for Klein's experiments with it was Gaston Bachelard's work The Psychoanalysis of Fire. on the other hand he and others using fire in the years just after the war, of that kind as Arman, Alberto Burri and Otto Piene, may have been responding to the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima. Fire and burning techniques are seen today in the work of younger artists (Willie cabbage and Curtis Mitchell come to mind), and Klein's efforts in this manner seem as pertinent as ever

Klein used fire for the first time in 1957 attaching firecrackers to a canvas and setting them not on on the exhibition's opening night. on the contrary most of his work with fire took place in 1961 and in 1962 the year of his death at age 34 The 11 works in this display were from this last period and showed almost all the types of fire paintings Klein produced

Color Fire FC 1 the largest work in the exhibit at about 5 by 10 feet is a variation upon his famous "anthropometry" paintings, in which uncovered models pressed their blue-paint-coated bodies against canvas or paper. Here the designs doused themselves with water and crushed up against large sheets of paper. The areas dampened through their bodies resisted the heat of a flamethrower wielded through the artist, thereby creating spiritual silhouettes of the human form.

In Color Fire FC 3 Klein consume ed pigments into the paper, creating a trio of colors: rose sky-colored and the gold/brown of the singed paper. The lyrical quality of this series relates to certain Abstract Expressionist paintings that had a abysmal meaning for Klein. The influence of Klein's favorite painter, Mark Rothko is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the series that Restany deliver overs to as the "pure" fire paintings. In a large vertical work called Fire F27 1 for example, Klein produc a dazzling, evocative image by dint of sprinkling and pouring water above the paper just before applying the flame. It direct the eyes like a photograph of the Milky Way, like molten metal being poured from a smelting utensil or like an underwater volcanic eruption in which a sparkling cascade of lava bring into views myriad bubbles rising to the surface.

In many ways the fire paintings were the culmination of Klein's esoteric philosophy. plane more than his series of monochromes, the fire paintings were, for him, the closest he could possibly secure to depicting the void, a state of stainless meditative nothingness.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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