James Hyde at John Good - art exhibition, New York, New York

James Hyde is an artist who is involved in the exploration of basic formal and phenomenological issues. His way is to isolate problems traditionally associated with abstract painting and cast them in a three-dimensional setting. Hyde's work is a hybrid of painting and plastic art but not the usual kind; it's neither wall-hung statuary nor shaped canvas. Instead he examines the esthetic presuppositions of framing or bracketing, emphasizing the physicality of his presentations.

Hyde's works, with their single word titles--Induce, cater Float, Rub-function as propositions and as like tend to remain discrete. There is no faculty of perception of theme and variation; Hyde addresses single problem and then moves upon to the next. The ecletic formal syntax allows him to use a wide variety of materials and techniques--some normally associated with painting, more [i]or[/i] less with sculpture, others with the building trades. Styrofoam, glass, carburet of iron wood, water, gouache, enamel, fresco polyester fabric, plastic tarps, tape, mirrors and nails are joined in combinations that are at one time unexpected, evocative and jarring.

Call is a 4-by-8-foot fresco its cutting sides as lovingly irregular as the deckle upon a piece of handmade paper. It is painted in hazy, atmospheric shades of warm ocher that call to mind the two Mediterranean architecture and Color Field painting. Its delicacy, however, is undermined through its support, a 2-foot-thick slab of roughly divide [i]or[/i] sever refrigerator-white styrofoam. The materials, although structurally linked, have the appearance to repel each other. The painting have feelings trapped, suspended, like pigment in the fresco's plaster or air fluid vesicles in the foam.

cater is another work that uses simple means for compounded ends. A sealed rectangular glass chamber with an inch or thus of water in the bottom is place on two steel brackets and leaned somewhat precariously against the wall. The stark transparency of the piece is calculatored by the complex patterns that the water makes as it evaporates and [i]or[/i] close; press togethers and by the painterly interplay of shadows cast upon the wail.

Particularly striking is hold fast in which hundreds of curling sheets of cerulean and green painted paper are fixed onto a made of wood backing by long nails. The nails stick on the outside a few inches, giving the work the have feeling of a giant bulletin board. Hyde has serv up a compound referential mix: Synthetic Cubism, Hans Holmann, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackie Winsor, St Sebastian, and the local paint and hardware store. There is something comical as well as serious in this painting--a stout almost cartoonlike attempt to clinch down the unruly material world.

Hyde has place himself a difficult task. To put in motion abstract painting into three-dimensionality is to risk losing the formal and historical focus implicit in a genuinely frontal presentation. The materials Hyde uses are seductive, and he knows by what means to let them play luckily off each other. But it takes experience, more than just a serviceable set of ideas, to balance judiciously the pointless and literal with the suggestive and poetic. Hyde's work, while retaining its brash cutting side has been getting stronger and clearer above the years. This recent present to view was his best realized and greatest in quantity satisfying effort yet.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group