Vicente's Apollonian abstractions - Esteban Vicente, painting exhibition, Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, New York

of recent origin York's Berry-Hill Galleries recently at handed selections from five decades of painting by dint of Esteban Vicente, a Spanish-born artist known as an Abstract Expressionist in the '50 and later as a Color Field painter. on the other hand Vicente's career actually reaches back considerably further. Born in 1903 he had his first one-man present to view in Madrid in 1926. After a sojourn in Paris, where he met Picasso, Ernst and other luminaries of modernism, he derive pleasure fromed a successful career in Barcelona before moving to America in 1936 eventually establishing himself as a of recent origin York School painter and teacher.

This, Vicente's 45th solo display presented two distinct phases of his work. In single room were pieces from the '50 that mirror the painterly gesturalism of Abstract Expressionism. Distributed from one side several other rooms were paintings from the late '60 to the at hand middling-size canvases in which broad, soft-edg areas of thinly applied, intensely hu paint prevail.

The paintings of the '50 clinch up best. This work is obviously indebted to de Kooning, on the contrary it has a flair of its have a title to too. Canvases of 1951 and '52 are activated through hyperenergetic line and jumbled swatches of paint. In an untitled 1951 picture, brief slashes of brown are distributed above a swarming patchwork of for the greatest part whites and light grays. There's an edgy slightly manic feeling held in tension by means of an underlying cubistic order. As the decade progresse Vicente's forms broaden and simplify. Viewing a picture from 1960 in which dark, lumpy shapes protect toward the center of a obscure green space, you may think of by what means Guston's work was developing around the same time.

In the next to the first part of the show, gestural painting gives way to pristine color fields reminiscent of Rothko and FrankenthaIer. Vicente has continued to paint in oil, on the contrary this work attains a high-keyed intensity of tinge and a dry, thinned-down paint quality that single associates with synthetic paint. During this period he also began using a spray fire-arm to produce broad areas of subtly modulated color. In Taranta (1967) a swimming-pool-blue square flutters meltingly in the midst of a shimmering field that modulates from burnt orange to flamingo pink, with a strip of avocado verdant at the top; there's a confectionery sweetness on the contrary also what might be described as a near-hallucinogenic quality of color radiation. In more novel work, Vicente inflects the picture with dab passages of brushwork, which be subservient to mainly to punctuate color. In Calma (1992) a mark of red, a few smears of verdant and a yellow, orange and r stop are isolated within a wide, gently mottl greenish-blue space, making for a Matissean, submarine feeling.

Vicente's pictures remain moderate in size: the largest canvas in the display was just 6 by 4 feet Focused more upon subtleties of color, space and mode of building than on spectacular visual or technical possibilities, he now aims for lyric rather than epic numbers He doesn't assert the big-scale muscularity or enveloping expanse associated with the greatest in quantity ambitious postwar painters. There is more a quality of gently swirling equilibrium and flat pastoral serenity than conflict. You may miss the tension between impulse and restraint that excites his earlier paintings, on the other hand the later work is not about agitation. It is about beauty and pleasure; it's an art of Apollonian hedonism.

"Esteban Vicente at 90: Five Decades of Painting" was upon view at BerryHill Galleries in of recent origin York from Jan. 21 to Feb 13 1993

Author: sight Johnson is a free-lance critic.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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