James Nares at Paul Kasmin - exhibition of paintings; New York, New York

James Nares's fresh paintings speak to contemporary abstraction's continuing fascination with the isolation and depersonalization of the autographic gesticulation The golden age of Abstract Expressionism is lengthy gone, but that doesn't intercept the gestural from making its claim. For many artists, action is no longer embedded in the same pictorial and referential manner of makings from which it drew its original authority. Rather than being the basis for a dynamic compositional a whole or a clearly labeled marker of the psyche, it has become increasingly autonomous.

Nares's work is inherently contradictory: it is distanced and calculated in its conception and allusive result but in its execution it is emphatically direct and visceral. Nares takes a fine muslin canvas, staples it to the floor and overspreads it with a smooth, virtually frictionless priming turf He then takes thinned-out black oil paint, and with a true large flexible brush of his possess making lays down in single shot an oversized, bold calligraphic mark or series of marks. This is done without conscious reflection and very quickly--frequently in beneath a second. The spontaneous effort is then judg by means of the artist, and most frequently it is found unacceptable. Something is off: his balance was inequitable his attention flagged, the mark in a certain quantity of subtle way fell short. It this was the case then the paint is immediately squeege not on and the action repeated for as many times as it takes until he wins it right. The springs vary in form from the largely vertical single pat of Prescript III to the drawn out diagonal sweep of Prescript VI to the smaller severed marks of Prescript I.

The false starts do not disappear completely Although wiped away, the warmly toned black paint stays in the weave and creates a kind of brownish gray atmosphere. The sepia tonalities and the even surface give the paintings a able-bodied photographic feeling--they have the gaze of platinum prints or photogravure. The association with photography be under the orders ofs to distance the gesture (are we looking at an original phenomenon or at a mechanical reproduction?), and it also gives the painting more [i]or[/i] less of the authority we accord photography as a trustworthy recorder of the real world. It should be noted as well that Nares's gestural proces takes not abundant longer to accomplish than a photograph takes to be exposed

Nares's work call forths a range of earlier art: from the torque and chiaroscuro of the Baroque, to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, up end Surrealism and the painterly choreographies of Jackson Pollock I find the Surrealist thread of particular interest. The faculty of perception of a mysterious and somewhat ominous particular floating in space, combined with the strokes' disembodied quality (they have the appearance like shocks of hair) gives the paintings an uncanniness and a smothered erotic charge, a welcome cutting side of humor and wariness. Nares's paintings are clearly flamboyant efforts, on the other hand they go beyond a simple display of physical and emotional fine tuning. They address, in a nicely oblique way, a certain number of of the pressing concerns of abstract painting today.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group