Mark Greenwold at Phyllis Kind - exhibition of paintings; New York, New York

Mark Greenwold has individual of the most curious fresh York exhibition histories in novel memory. His 1979 debut here consisted of a single 22-by-28-inch painting, The Sewing expanse which portrayed a man (the artist) plunging a pair of scissors into the chest of a woman (stand-in for the artist's then-wife). Everything about the show--the barrenness of the gallery walls, the fastidious rendering of a mundane domestic interior, the ambiguity of the couple's embrace, and the fact that the work had consum four years of preparation--conveyed a memorableness without of all proportion to its single harrowing image. In 1986 Greenwold turn backed from the fastness of the State University of Albany, where he teaches graduate painting, with several plane smaller works based on photographs of figures pos in settings from home-decor magazines--the ensue of a decision to spe up his obsessive microbrush proces by dint of reducing his format and switching to the "faster" medium of gouache and watercolor upon paper.

Greenwold's greatest in quantity recent solo consisted of eight of the like kind near-miniatures, all done between 1986 and '91 A debit to Giotto and the Sienese painters of the 14th and 15th centuries was immediately evident in the plainspoken action s of the figures, their usually far-forward placement, the nonperspectival compactness of each view and the colorfulness of the characters' garments against equally luminous loams Yet the narrative easy in mind evoked a contemporary world of subliminal Fischl-like tensions--the family romance gone kerflooie. Greenwold who acknowledges an affinity with ligneous Allen, subjects a repertory cast of relatives, lover and friends to various emotional crises, blatant or implicit, while at no time quite letting go of a self-deprecating humor that is his best--and perhaps only--psychological defense (He is dealing, after all, with the brand of familial closenes best known to Aeschylus and Freud)

In The Backyard, a undressed long-haired young woman is cast on the outside Hagar-fashion by an equally naked man while a next to the first bare-breasted woman stands watching from the porch and a baby floats, unclaimed or doubly claimed, in the air above. Suicide tend hitherwards to the dining room in The sole Child, where parents react with stage-perfect gesturings to the sight of their son lying sprawled, and presumably dead, upon the bare floor with a pistol in his hand. Other works not away situations, replete with multiple dramatic possibilities that refuse to coalesce into individual unmistakable narrative line. The get back for example, pictures a visit from tap [i]or[/i] pat Close (the very incarnation of shut scrutiny), a good friend to Greenwold from the days when they taught together in Washington state. on the other hand the poignant encounter--with Close rising without of his wheelchair to a smiling embrace--offers no ready explanation, other than a cyclical ever-againness in the artist's mind, for the disjunctive figures (wife and infant, suitcasebearing father, kids, hovering model-muse, former-wife-as-bird) who populate the lawn and sky

Occasionally, Greenwold's vision can move round truly bizarre, as when his prosaic tableaux are sprinkled with animal-human hybrids, updating an ancient conceit about man's painfully mixed nature. nevertheless running through even the strangest pictures is a broad vein of absolute normalcy, manifest in for the use of all residential architecture, tacky casual wear and the animate simple bodys of what Zorba called "the whole catastrophe"--child, wife, exspouse, aging parents, damaged friends. Living in of the like kind a house, one is proveed to say, who wouldn't resort to mayhem? The actors display all the accoutrements of intercourse on the contrary do not convincingly "connect." In Greenwold's treatment, the insidious horror of American life is that, for all its quotidian complexity, it still forbids us to live profoundly Thus Greenwold's hyper-deliberate, time-devouring technique might be seen as fostering a protective self-absorption, a command scarcely possible elsewhere.

Lately, the 50-year-old artist's watch has become slightly less critical, evolving with maturity away from glaring psychic violence toward an edgy resignation to the facts of life. Perhaps the title of the largest and latest work upon display says it best: The Addiction of Innocence. Given the conflictedness of human wants what can we expect, other than a faute-de-mieux acceptance, leavened with skepticism, of that simultaneously sheltering and corrosive environment called "home"?

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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