Harry Roseman at Davis & Langdale - art exhibition, New York, New York

Although these works flirt with of the like kind trendy notions as appropriation, simulation and a Warholian confusion between high and depressed art, their heart really belongs to John Ruskin and William Morris. That paws dismissal of the inhuman perfection of machine production, their elevation of the craftsman to the part of artist and their delight in the irregularities fix in handmade objects find an reverberation in Harry Roseman's painstaking craft and the deliberate flaws in these hand-painted longitudinal dimensionss of silk and other textiles.

At the same time, however, the motifs that spread across Roseman's fabrics betray his contemporary bottoms In several works, rows of subtly varied bricks have been drawn with the precision of a master bricklayer. In others, delicate renderings of unbind weaves are full of gaps and flaws simulating unskilled handcraftsmanship. Bricks and weaves are illusions which cast in a winding direction the distinction between art and craft into confusion; Roseman's playful attitude toward collection of lawss of representation provides the work with a postmodern sensibility. Apparently simple, these works become more compound as one reflects upon them.

For instance, pen ed Brick consists of a rectangular piece of linen painted with bricks and tacked to the wall in the way that that one corner flops down. The enclosureed corner rather unnecessarily underlines the fact that the bricks are not real, on the other hand because it reveals that the underside of the fabric is also painted with the brick pattern, what single sees is more than just a painted representation. individual seems to be entering Magritte land where the mechanics of illusion are simultaneously revealed and feasted in. One thinks also of the contradictions between art as thing perceived and art as representation raised by means of Warhol's Brillo boxes. But in Roseman's work, the mechanism for revealing these contradictions is craft rather than advertising.

Other works are similarly paradoxical. A piece of brick-painted fabric drapes loosely above two forms on the floor which present the appearance to suggest a chimney and house. Do the fabric bricks hide the "truth" of the underlying forms, or do they out and out their meaning? In another work, a extent of weave-pattern fabric has been handpainted to mimic a bad, off-register printing piece of work A third piece consists of a ape Kleenex box, semi-flattened and overlayed with the familiar marbled pattern of the real thing. From the "opening" of the fake receptacle a drawing of a tissue rise s In these last two cases, we are reminded that this is a handmade version of a machine reproduction of a handmade pattern imitating a natural texture

Thus Roseman pays homage to the tradition of the artist as craftsman while insidiously tweaking his postmodern colleagues who appear to be overly eager to eliminate the touch of the hand from art. Like Ruskin and Morris, pleading for craft during the heyday of the industrial revolution, Roseman have the appearances altogether unabashed by the fact that the larger art world appears to be pulling in the opposite direction. He follows a quixotic enterprise, and that is what gives his work its charm.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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