Andrew Forge at Robert Morrison - painting exhibition, New York, New York

From the trice one confronts the pointillist paintings of Andrew Forge, the abstract notion of the simple dot dissolves before the become firm [i]or[/i] solid complexities of the actual marks of which the paintings are made. actual quickly the notion of the dot becomes inadequate, level misleading.

Winter Solstice II is a quivering mass of tiny r amethystine and gray marks, no sum of two units alike, each of which has a distinct physical vicinity at the same time that it participates in a shimmering and elusive whole. Optically the surface is forever shifting and tentative. In consequence the visual experience is les individual of tangible surface than shallow ambiguous space. A single, thin sapphirine line of variegated tones divides the small canvas into sum of two units vertical units. This line looks embedded in the surrounding interstice of marks, all the more throwing into relief the remarkable qualities of the layered areas upon each side of it.

Another small canvas, titled Forest, made up for the most part of slightly larger brown and fulvous marks, conveys this special surface quality to an plane more dramatic degree. The points of color appear to be to hover as if they were a swarm of living creatures that for an instant have paused, suspended in midair. There is a feeling that single could penetrate them if individual dared.

What separates Forge's pointillist enterprise from that of his predecessors a hundred ago is its degree of abstraction. While in several paintings he does indulge in a real tentative figuration--in West Cornwall, for instance, there are perhaps vague evocations of trees--he at no time lets the image dominate. In the best of his works the "dot" is unencumbered through the need to render naturalistic form. It is permitted to discover its have a title to inherent nature and to place forth its own variety of experience. Seurat captured the dot and made it subserve (gloriously) naturalistic ends. While Forge has taken upon the same scale and played with the same notes, he has compos an entirely different kind of music.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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