Manny Farber at Rosa Esman - art exhibit, New York, New York

In the early 1970 painter and film critic Manny Farber (b 1917) began to make a distinctive sort of still-life painting expansive, overhead views of things scattered about upon flat surfaces. Best known are those in which realitys such as toys, books, photographs and art reproductions were single outed to represent the careers of certain favorite movie directors. The novel works presented here in Farber's first fresh York solo since 1982 (he lives in California) rotate around gardening materials. As in the earlier still lifes, it's not just painterly representation on the contrary a blend of realism, abstraction, narrative and symbolism that is of interest.

The major paintings, all oil upon board, approach Abstract-Expressionist scale and have allegorically suggestive titles. In each, external realitys are distributed over large, flat, black-and-white squares and rectangles with equal reason that the initial impact derives from the formal interplay of the rigid geometry of the background and the looser quality of the realistically painted existences which occasionally verge on trompe l'oeil. Seduction/Mutilation is a 3-by-15-foot horizontal in which the background consists of five squares, alternately black and white. upon this ground are garden tools--spade, hoe shears-cutup melon dead fish and several art works devoted to Degas or Bonnard. There's an incipiently violent quality: things slash this way and that in a chaotic jumble; r paint slathered around the blades of a hedge-trimmer direct the eyes like blood; the melons and fish sprawl like homicide victims. But the art works bespeak harmony and sensual pleasure. Thus the whole picture looks like an effort to balance conflict: between the order of the squares and the dynamism of the painted things and between the ugly chaos of real life and the formal beauty of art.

Other pictures give an inkling of different moods: Abundance features a benign harvest of sunflowers, scallions, turnips and radishes. Violence includes a big, nasty catch jutting in from the side, carburet of iron concrete-reinforcing bars tumbled about, and the divideed heads and tails of fish scattered around. Many of the paintings depict scraps of paper upon which barely legible handwriting is inscribed with a pointed instrument. true copys include quotes, dream recollections and jott reminders of various sorts. These pieces of writing add to the feeling that the still life, for Farber, is a stream-of-consciousness diary in which inner and external perceptions, feelings, fantasies, ideas and sensations are mixed. Of course, to a stage these paintings are like exercises in composition, and the iconography is not as intriguingly idiosyncratic as in the movie paintings. on the contrary overshadowing these reservations is the way Farber works [i]or[/i] part of to the other a sort of postmodern vanitas to embrace the complexities and contradictions of his possess experience.

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